(ANALYSIS) Has there been a noticeable decline in the share of 18–22-year-olds who identify as transgender over the last couple of years? The answer is unequivocal: Yes.
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(ANALYSIS) Employees at large retail chains were instructed to avoid “Merry Christmas,” a greeting now deemed too specific and too religious. What emerged was designed to include everyone by addressing no one, to give a greeting that was universal because it had been smoothed of meaning. “Happy Holidays,” once an innocuous phrase, became a symbol in a newly branded American cultural war.
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(ANALYSIS) They drank more, slept more and had more than six weeks of celebrations.
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Oregon was the first state to approve physician-assisted suicide in 1997. In addition to Washington D.C. and Illinois, the practice is legal for adults in California, Colorado, Delaware, Hawaii, Maine, Montana, New Jersey, New Mexico, Vermont and Washington state.
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It’s the best of the Godbeat, 2025 version. Many of the nation’s top religion journalists pick their top piece of the year.
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(ANALYSIS) In a move that underscores the priorities of the Catholic Church in the U.S., Pope Leo XIV replaced Cardinal Timothy Dolan as Archbishop of New York, appointing Bishop Ronald Hicks to lead the nation’s second-largest diocese. The announcement represents both a generational and ideological shift at the helm of a historically influential U.S. archdiocese.
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(ANALYSIS) There are moments in our national life when a legal controversy reveals something deeper than a dispute over statutes or precedent. It exposes a fracture in our shared moral imagination — a failure to recognize what is sacred to communities whose ways of life do not mirror our own. The struggle for Oak Flat in Arizona's Tonto National Forest is one of those moments.
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(ANALYSIS) Let us strive to spend more time caring for others in the truest sense and less time feeding the devil’s divisiveness, chastising those we think we disagree with.
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(REVIEW) What does it mean when we finds moral clarity from not just punishing criminals, but making it a spectacle? When the most reviled offenders are exposed and humiliated in public view, few feel compelled to object. After all, who would defend a child sex predator? All this is examined in a new must-see Paramount+ documentary.
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Nigerian Christian leaders verified that Christians there are persecuted for their faith, refuting a growing international narrative that violence in the deadliest country for Christians is not religion-based.
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(ANALYSIS) Steve Bannon is both brilliant and brutal in equal measure. A man of fierce intellect and darker instincts, he’s a practicing Catholic who talks about the culture wars and outside threats to the West. For him, politics isn’t about policy alone. It’s about purpose — a battleground where soul and state collide.
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(REVIEW) A new book traces the footsteps of Christian pilgrims to Jerusalem for nearly a millennium before the Crusades, and the path differs significantly from the path tour guides take travelers on today. “But do the walk as you wish, and commemorate each station however you choose. From revisiting the material to simply enjoying the walk.”
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A new report released on Monday revealed that majority of Americans continue to identify with the religion in which they were raised — but more than one-third have departed from their childhood faith. The findings — put together by the Pew Research Center — draw on two major surveys.
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(ANALYSIS) Ask yourself this question: Based on the mainstream news coverage you have seen in the past decade of two, which is the bigger news story — growing churches or dying churches?
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The question is not whether Trump is relevant in many of these stories. This is, after all, an age in which faith, culture and religious doctrines are frequently linked to debates about hot-button political issues. The question is whether Trump is placed front and center in every story, warping discussions of issues that were important long before he entered American politics.
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In the afterlife, your wife of 65 years must choose between you and her first husband — a war hero who’s waited 67 years to see her again. That’s the intriguing plot of “Eternity,” a new romantic comedy starring Miles Teller, Elizabeth Olsen and Callum Turner.
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Despite cannabis's central role in Rastafarian worship, adherents face persistent criminalization and face a minimum 10-year prison term for simple possession. Police raids on tabernacles remain routine across Kenya, with officers confiscating plants, destroying drums and sometimes forcibly cutting dreadlocks. Now, adherents are trying to legalize it.
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(ANALYSIS) Obituaries preserve what families most want remembered about the people they cherish most. Across time, they also reveal the values each era chose to honor. In a study published in the journal “Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,” we analyzed 38 million obituaries of Americans published from 1998 to 2024.
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(ANALYSIS) Late in the movie “Shadowlands,” the C.S. Lewis character describes the role that books can play in real life. The famous Oxford don and author, played by Anthony Hopkins, notes, “We read books to know that we are not alone.” But Lewis never wrote those memorable words.
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(ANALYSIS) On his recent visit to Turkey and Lebanon, Pope Leo XIV met with political and religious leaders, celebrated Mass and visited historical sites. The trip also marked the 1,700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea, which resolved core doctrinal differences, with the aim of advancing Christian unity at the time.
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