Religion News Service staff

The United Methodist Church’s highest court has decided not to reconsider a case in which it permitted a Virginia pastor to prevent an openly gay man from joining his church.

The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) announced this month that 75 national staff jobs will be cut at its Louisville, Kentucky, headquarters, along with 55 positions in its overseas missionary force.

United Methodist Church membership and attendance are slightly down again in 2004, according to a new report.

A new analysis by the Gallup Organization finds that Churches of Christ members and Mormons are most likely to attend worship services often, according to questions asked of those members between 2...

A seminary is conducting an online self-defense course for United Church of Christ members besieged by conservative reactions to their denomination’s liberal social positions on gay rights and othe...

Welcoming news that the Vatican is considering approving condom use by those with HIV/AIDS, a South African Catholic bishop fighting the pandemic said April 25 that the church must look beyond its ...

It’s a profound, if unanswerable, question for many who ask God to heal the sick: Can prayer actually help another person recover from disease?

Britain’s High Court has ruled that author Dan Brown did not plagiarize and breach the copyright of an earlier book in writing his best-selling novel The Da Vinci Code, published by Random ...

A United Methodist seminary in Denver has named a new president, nearly two years after it became embroiled in charges of racism after its first-ever Hispanic president abruptly stepped down in 200...

The North American group Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT) says it will continue its work in Iraq despite the murder of one of four team members abducted months earlier.

Birmingham-Southern College has long prided itself on the actions of students who have gone all over the world—and as far away as Mother Teresa’s mission in Calcutta—to perform good deeds as part o...

Briton John Barrow, a University of Cambridge cosmologist and mathematician whose work explores the relationship between life and the universe, as well as the nature and limits of human understandi...

The leadership of the Orthodox Church in America has ignored calls for a special audit to determine if millions of church dollars were misspent in the 1990s, but has agreed to look over the books f...

President Bush has urged large corporations and foundations to join government agencies in offering grants to faith-based organizations, adding that the private entities should rewrite their rules ...

The top two officers at the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops faced new pressure to relinquish their national posts in light of allegations related to sexual misconduct.

A wide-ranging abortion ban recently passed by South Dakota is aimed ultimately at the U.S. Supreme Court....

In a case related to religious freedom, the U.S. Supreme Court has unanimously sided with members of a small New Mexico sect in their bid to use hallucinogenic tea in religious rituals.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has agreed to stop funding an abstinence program that included religious elements.

Birmingham’s Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, the site of a 1963 bombing that killed four girls, has become a national historic landmark. U.S....

Reviving a religious issue from the last presidential election, a coalition of 55 Catholic Democrats in the House of Representatives acknowledged the “moral leadership” of the Catholic Church but s...