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What I started out writing, churlishly and petulantly, is that I could only surmise that the market for books like this consists mainly of somewhat innocent readers; of people who whose only previous conception of Christ’s atoning work is of the standard, unreconstructed, washed-in-the-blood variety. For them, discovering what Jones is writing about would come as manna in the wilderness, and in that regard Jones has performed a mitzvah by publishing this book.

Campuses are pluralistic places with students and faculty who represent a diversity of religious traditions, races, ethnicities, and sexual expressions. “So, in regard to the Church’s teaching on homosexuality, the Catholic university should be a natural place to ask, ‘what are the lived implications of the Church’s teachings? How do you, in a reality-based way, negotiate the Church’s teachings with human lives?’”

Late last month, after federal authorities arrested a Tennessee pastor on charges of aiding and abetting an international parental kidnapping, students at Liberty University Law School saw one of their exam questions come to life.

A report from the principally Catholic anti-contraception rally in Maryland reveals a constituency whose calls for religious freedom appear to be at the cost of freedom for all others.

A political, not theological, co-belligerence.

In 2002, Catholic theologian Christine Gudorf predicted that “within a generation or two,” Catholic hierarchical teaching will change to encourage contraception in marriage and to allow some abortions.

Macho, blind, dishonest, kidnapped by aliens. In recent years, detractors have spat plenty of venomous words at Beatriz Paredes, former national director of Mexico’s Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). “I abort you, Beatriz,” one editor even wrote in his takedown. A known feminist, Paredes stood by while her PRI colleagues in various states approved constitutional reforms declaring life as the moment of conception and penalizing the practice of abortion, leading to more investigations and arrests of women. While abortion was illegal before, it was practiced clandestinely without prosecutions in most places. Since 2008, 19 states have passed similar measures— most recently in Baja and San Luis Potosi just last month.

In the wake of the Obama administration’s decision to require that insurance plans cover some non-abortion related reproductive health care, the bishops have launched a political campaign. Will US Catholics follow?

I think I can safely assume that for most Americans, Camping and his miscalculated (and then re-calculated) doomsday predictions are of more curiosity than true salvific concern. Camping has been buried by subsequent news cycles and is the latest member of a cadre of religious leaders whom the Apocalypse passed by. But while May’s Apocalypse seems to have skipped over most of the world, it did land squarely on a hilltop in north-western Vietnam. It would behoove us to take notice of the complex and unexpected ways in which this spring’s apocalypticism rippled across the world…

This week, a pair of anti-abortion bills were fast-tracked for passage through the Ohio legislature, drawing attention to the surprising success of Ohio’s increasingly divided anti-choice movement.