Abortion rights and health care are rarely far from the headlines, but they are especially hot topics given the furor over the decision — later rescinded — by the Susan G. Komen foundation to end most of its grants to Planned Parenthood.
Super Bowl Sunday is a holy day of sorts for the tens of millions of Americans who will watch the big game – at least as many as will attend actual religious services that day. ReligionLink has resources for reporters covering the links between worship on Sunday morning and the spectacle on Sunday evening.
A new survey by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life explores the views of American Mormons as opposed to the usual focus on how Americans view Mormons. This approach makes the findings especially valuable, and they are an important addition to ReligionLink’s resources on The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Faith has been central to American politics for years, but rarely more than it has in 2012 as a Republican primary field, featuring evangelical and Catholic and Mormon candidates, vies for voters who put a premium on religious values. That dynamic is not likely to change in the general election, whoever faces President Obama.
Christopher Hitchens, the famous writer and polemicist whose later years were known for his fierce arguments against religious belief, has died of cancer. His death is being mourned in the growing community of atheists, agnostics, humanists and freethinkers. ReligionLink has a comprehensive guide to groups and leaders in that community.
Sports, at the professional and amateur levels, are enormously popular, and yet athletics are also linked to scandal and controversy in today’s headlines. In the case of allegations of child abuse, the crisis in sports recalls the problem in organized religions, and also highlights the nexus between religion and sports.
After organized worship, athletic competition is perhaps the oldest communal impulse known to mankind, and today sports and religion mirror each other as never before, experts say. But that correlation has negative as well as positive aspects. This edition of ReligionLink provides a guide to these issues.
Mormons are at the center of the national conversation about religion in large part because of the Republican presidential primary campaign. Mitt Romney, a lifelong Mormon, is a top contender for the GOP nomination, but evangelical Christian concerns about Mormonism may impede his prospects and could recast this “Mormon moment” in American culture.
The legitimacy of the death penalty has emerged as a hot topic in the national conversation. Oregon’s governor declared a moratorium on executions, the execution of convicted murderer Troy Davis in September sparked controversy, and in October the Supreme Court heard a case whose outcome could affect the use of the death penalty.
In November, voters in Mississippi defeated a “personhood amendment” that would have defined a person as existing from the moment of the fertilization of an egg. If passed, Proposition 26 might have upended the debate over abortion. But the vote showed how the battle over abortion rights is increasingly taking place in the states.
The Rev. Billy Graham turns 93 on Nov. 7, but still manages to meet with major public figures on occasion and releases periodic reflections on his life and faith. Indeed, though Graham is infirm and in virtual seclusion in his mountaintop home in North Carolina, his stature and legacy seem to grow as he ages.
Faith-based activists still hoping to see Congress pass immigration reform are launching the DREAM Sabbath campaign to raise awareness about the issue in houses of worship across the United States during September and October.
Jesus is bigger than Justin Bieber? Christians would say that’s true, of course. But when a Facebook page on Jesus outranks the teen idol, then the wider culture begins to take notice.
The Sept. 11 terror attacks seemed to confirm suspicions of some that there is an inherent connection between religion and violence. The 9/11 plotters cited Islam as their inspiration – case closed. But that explanation was considered too simple then, and 10 years later the debate on this controversial topic continues.
The 10th anniversary of the terror attacks of Sept. 11 inevitably puts a spotlight on Islam and in particular on the growing Muslim community in the United States. That spotlight reveals both ongoing problems as well as significant progress, and ReligionLink provides a roundup of resources for covering these topics.
Theologians have pondered the nature of evil for centuries, but for Americans, the attacks of Sept. 11 brought the issue home as few other atrocities in recent times have.
While debates over gay marriage dominate the headlines, the iconic American family, composed of a husband, wife and children, is undergoing a profound transformation. For the first time, fewer than half of American households are headed by married couples. Yet today couples remain married longer, are more loyal and are less likely to divorce.
New York is now the sixth and largest state to allow gay marriage, and it may not be the last. Maryland will try to follow suit, and the fate of the Defense of Marriage Act and Proposition 8 hang in the balance – developments that herald complications for religious groups on both sides of the issue.
Even as public attention focuses on the legalization of gay marriage in New York and related battles across the country, religious communities are continuing to struggle with the role of homosexuals. Presbyterians voted in May to allow openly gay clergy, and in June a Methodist church court convicted a pastor for performing a same-sex union.
The State Department will release its annual report on human trafficking by the end of June, spotlighting the global trade in enforced labor and the selling or prostitution of people – as many as 27 million, mostly women and children – without their consent or benefit. The issue is increasingly mobilizing religious groups.
The nation’s Roman Catholic bishops met in June in Seattle to revise policies approved nearly a decade ago in response to the clergy sexual-abuse crisis. Many argue that recent developments show the bishops have even more work to do.
The death of Dr. Jack Kevorkian, a former pathologist who helped dozens of terminally ill people die with a suicide machine, has renewed a national debate on end-of-life issues that never went away completely, even after Kevorkian was sentenced to prison in 1999.
News that U.S. troops have killed Osama bin Laden, leader of Al Qaeda and mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, is a stunning development that is bound to spark a range of reactions — jubilation for many, anger for others, and for some believers, a debate over whether this was the moral and ethical course of action.
Natural disasters and man-made catastrophes, ongoing wars and a troubled economy – for many people, notably certain Christians, these are signs that the end of the world is at hand. One apocalyptic preacher has set the date of Christ’s return at May 21, 2011. Others scoff, but such beliefs persist, even when prophecies fail.
This year marks four centuries since the King James Version of the Bible was published, in May 1611, and throughout the year essays and sermons are celebrating what is considered the classic version of Scripture in the English language. Yet new translations still keep coming. Is the KJV the most popular Bible no one reads?
Plans to build or expand mosques have sparked controversy across the country in the past year, and news coverage has often focused on these disputes and cast them as symptomatic of a wider friction between Muslims and other Americans. But zoning issues are dogging efforts by all religious groups to build houses of worship.
Scientology always has a high profile owing to its many celebrity adherents, but recent headlines have not always been good news for the church. A lengthy New Yorker article profiled the defection of director and screenwriter Paul Haggis, for example, and revealed that the FBI is investigating Scientology on human trafficking allegations.
The penitential season of Lent begins on Ash Wednesday, March 9, and runs until Holy Week in April. This period is traditionally viewed as a time of personal spiritual reflection for Christians marked by an effort to repent for sins. But how do people forgive each other, and themselves? How do we deal with guilt?
Popular protests continue to roil the Middle East, spreading from Tunisia and Egypt to Bahrain and Libya and elsewhere. Speculation is rife about what could come next, but also about the role Islam could play in reconfigured Arab countries — and what role religion is playing in sparking the current revolts.
Americans are confronting challenges in bioethics every day and in every venue, from hospital rooms and research labs to Congress and the Supreme Court. Developments in genetics, debates over the beginning of life and the fate of embryos, and technologies that extend and even create life are raising complex questions in medical decisions and treatment.
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