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VATICAN CITY (RNS) Pope Benedict XVI will make his second papal trip to Africa on Friday (Nov....

BALTIMORE (RNS) The standoff between the White House and the nation's Catholic bishops over gay marriage and other hot-button issues may be easing after a quiet Oval Office meeting between Presiden...

Ron Rash writes stories that have as much impact as any I've read; those in this collection often left me feeling as if I'd been kicked. Rash lives in and writes...

New today from the Century.

It’s scary. Sometimes, we Scrappers have to swallow our pride in order to start working with the institution that turned us away. Often, Scrappers develop autonomy and a certain voice that we fear we'll lose if we move into partnership with an established organization. We worry that the structure will steal our ideas and they'll have the money and power to pull them off—without us. 

Church leaders can appreciate the challenges that St. Paul's has faced. Yet there is something profoundly right about a moral protest in a cathedral courtyard.

(RNS) Gay and Muslim groups say they are relieved after a Michigan lawmaker agreed to drop a provision in an anti-bullying bill that would have carved out an exemption for religious or moral belief...

The gospel begins and ends with God. Jesus makes God's action good news. But the word "Jesus" alone doesn't help me; such Jesus is a nice guy, but I need Jesus Christ, God's anointed.

New today from the Century.

Rarely do I compare biblical passages with television, let alone reality TV. But in preparing this week's Century lectionary column, somehow I started thinking about the show Undercover Boss, in which a high-level executive joins his or her own company's working ranks incognito. I couldn't let it go.

Lars von Trier has been churning out grim tales of human frailty and moral depravity for almost 20 years. His latest is a disturbing tale of personal pain juxtaposed with an eerie end-of-the-world story.

Stretches of emptiness are not unusual in life, nor in the life of faith.

But not everyone will grow and change.

I was watching one of those competitive cooking shows the other night with my six year old daughter Emma. The challenge in that particular episode involved taking the chefs out to (as they called it) “the middle of nowhere” and having them butcher a pig and cook it over a fire they built from wood they gathered.

About the same time the National Council of Churches' governing board, meeting in Chicago, announced with sadness November 9 that it will lose general secretary Michael Kinnamon for medical reasons...

November 10 (ENInews)--Britain's Home Secretary, Theresa May, announced on 10 November that an extremist Islamist group called Muslims Against Crusades will be banned, starting at midnight (GMT)....

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(RNS) Penn State coaching legend Joe Paterno is out in the university's burgeoning sex abuse scandal, and comparisons to the Roman Catholic Church's own abuse scandals are in....

"Terrorism is not nearly as widespread as many people feared it would be after 9/11," says Charles Kurzman.

Despite this year's vote by South Sudan for independence, churches in Sudan and South Sudan have decided to remain united, mainly to help denominations in Muslim-majority Sudan....