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President Obama’s reelection campaign has tapped a 24-year-old executive assistant in the White House faith-based office to head up its outreach to religious communities....

I was drying dishes and absentmindedly singing the song that had been stuck in my head for days when my husband suddenly came barreling down the staircase and into the kitchen. Looking frantic, he asked me what had happened. We were both confused; he was convinced that I had cried out in pain, and he fully expected to walk in on a grisly cooking incident. We quickly realized the source of the miscommunication. The song I’d been singing was Lady Gaga’s “Judas,” and I sounded like a lady in distress as I belted out, “Judas, Juda-a-a.”

New today from the Century: Will Willimon on being bishop, John Buchanan on baseball, more.

Last week I joined the chorus of those who wished for a bit more from the president's endorsement of same-sex marriage. Among those who were more unambiguously enthusiastic, I found E. J. Graff's later post pretty compelling.

Utrecht, The Netherlands (ENInews)--There is public criticism in the Netherlands of the Mormon practice of baptism by proxy after a Dutch newspaper revealed May 9 that several members of the royal ...

c. 2012 Religion News Service (RNS) Here are two things that don't typically go together: Pope Benedict XVI and feminist culture....

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Is there an anti-birth control shift taking place among evangelicals? If so, do their arguments mirror Catholic thought?

Tom Sherrod, an ordained United Methodist minister, loathed to “declare” a couple man and wife....

Sue came into the church office in order to help with some paperwork and plans for Sunday morning worship. “What are we doing for Mother’s Day?” she asked. I paused. I had always benignly neglected Mother’s Day at our church. I thought of it as a Hallmark holiday, and not something that should fit on a liturgical calendar. I was taught in seminary that we should never mention it. Plus, there were personal reasons as well.

Last week was a momentous one for gay and lesbian issues. On Sunday Vice President Biden said on NBC’s Meet the Press that he is “absolutely comfortable with the fact that men [are] marrying men, women marrying women,” and he thinks they “are entitled to … all the civil rights” of heterosexual couples. On Tuesday the electorate in North Carolina voted overwhelmingly for a constitutional amendment that proscribes same-sex marriage and civil unions, despite the fact that the state already has a law against it. Most momentous of all, President Obama told ABC’s Robin Roberts on Wednesday “that for me personally it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same-sex couples should be able to get married.”

New today from the Century: Evangelicals and birth control, post-Mother's Day murmurings, more.

Lee Hirsch’s documentary Bully rings false from beginning to end. The film wants to sound alarm bells about the prevalence of bullying in public schools, which is certainly a very real problem. But like the recently completed trilogy of TV documentaries about the child murders at Robin Hood Hills and the young men who were evidently scapegoated for the crime, the movie has a tawdry, voyeuristic quality that keeps distracting you from its alleged agenda.

The first question to ask about a Paul McCartney standards album is why it took him so long....

The broken communion evident at any eucharistic service is an outward and visible sign of an inward and invisible state of affairs.

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As I kid, I was scared of monsters. Specifically, the Star Trek Salt-Vampire and Hans Christian Anderson’s Death, sitting on the Emperor’s chest. (I slept on my side for years after reading “The Nightingale.” Death couldn’t get you, I reasoned, if you declined him a seat.) But I was never afraid of the monsters in Where the Wild Things Are, the best-known book by Maurice Sendak, who died on Tuesday.

Sandra Steingraber, ecologist, activist and author, was in Joliet, Illinois, Wednesday to present a lecture on our era of “extreme energy extraction.” (See the Century interview with Steingraber.) According to Steingraber, we’re acting more and more foolishly as we hold on more and more tightly to our dependence on fossil fuels.

New today from the Century: The Protestant-Catholic impasse, goodbye to Maurice Sendak, more.

Americans seem to relish putting their fellow citizens behind bars. Lately, some conservatives have begun to see this as a problem.