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A new study shows that no matter how strongly a woman’s pastor may rail, a woman will make up her own mind when her pregnancy goes awry or is unplanned. So here’s the common ground: make sure she has the best medical care.

The conflation of Geronimo with bin Laden once again illustrates the failure of the U.S. to consider its own history in fighting insurgent wars.

The decision of Episcopal churches like St. Luke’s to convert en masse to Roman Catholicism while retaining a quasi-medieval Anglican liturgy is not, however, a decision to move into this ever-emerging ecclesial reality. It is a solemn retreat into an imagined past where a priest’s sacramental office itself, his back turned to the congregation, protects him from the conflicted desires and diverse stirrings of the wider church.

If Anders Behring Breivik isn’t a Christian terrorist, then the same can be said of Osama bin Laden and many other Islamist activists—whose writings show that they were much more interested in Islamic history than theology or scripture and imagined themselves as re-creating glorious moments in Islamic history in their own imagined wars.

Grayling’s New College of the Humanities “is not an atheist institution,” he and other spokespeople for the university have stated repeatedly. But it’s hard to imagine Richard Dawkins soft-pedaling on the topic of religion. Grayling insists that he’s not as vehement as his colleague. “I’m the velvet version,” he likes to say.

On August 16, city inspectors closed down William Camacho’s barbershop on Pleasant Street in New Bedford, Massachusetts after they discovered three chickens, two pigeons, and four roosters in the basement. Votive candles and saint statues surrounded the birds, one of which was dead and placed neatly in a box. When is religious ritual a way to honor the positive powers of good, and when is it “devil-worshipping, occult, black magic”? Why is transubstantiation of a cracker less wacky than the wringing of a chicken’s neck that was bound for a dinner plate already?

Whether we like it or not, Islam has become an indelible part of the culture and consciousness of 9/11. Ironically, the questions I regularly encounter have not actually changed much over the last ten years: Who was Muhammad, was he violent? What is Jihad? Why the scarves?

The cliché that 9/11 “changed everything” is nowhere less true than in the post-9/11 impulse to declare war immediately. War was a choice as well as an echo: a choice Americans made, and an echo of how Americans have made decisions in times of previous conflict.

Is it appropriate that Catholic health care institutions want to be full participants in the U.S. health care system, while retaining the right not to provide contraception—a part of health care that nearly all sexually active adults use? The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops say yes, in a recent statement calling for the rescission of the “contraceptive mandate” provision in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. And in this recent piece at First Things, Christopher T. Haley likewise warns that the religious exemption is too narrow to accommodate faithful Catholic health care. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, he says, would create a “Catholic ghetto.”

Assuming religious politics will play a significant role in the new government after the elections, will it be radical, moderate, or just the familiar gridlock experienced by most democracies?