President Obama marked the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina on Sunday with a visit to the recovering city and a quote from the Book of Job.

“`There is hope for a tree if it be cut down that it will sprout again, and that its tender branch will not cease,’ ” Obama said, drawing from Job 14.

Fortunately, he stopped there, because the rest of the chapter, like a lot of Job, is pretty grim. For example, a following verse says that, unlike trees, “man dies and is laid low; he breathes his last and is no more.”

In his first comments on the polls that showed nearly 20 percent of Americans believe he is Muslim, Obama told NBC Nightly News, “the facts are the facts” and blamed the mistaken rumours on “a network of misinformation that in a new media era can get churned out there constantly.”

In a fiery Sunday sermon in Arkansas, Obama’s former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, said people who wrongly believe Obama is Muslim are catering to the president’s political foes.

Neither speeches are likely to please conservative commentator Glenn Beck, who sharply criticized (again) Obama’s religious beliefs in his “Restoring Honor” rally this weekend in Washington.

Beck’s own language was remarkably faith-fueled, a kind of civil religion on steroids, as he enlisted and exhorted his “black-robed regiment.” Does that mean he’s going to recruit Catholic priests? Southern Baptist political guru Richard Land says he was “stunned” by Beck’s missionary rhetoric, saying “he sounded like Billy Graham.”

Back to Katrina, the NYT looks at how churches in black neighborhoods still haven’t recovered from the storm, calling the Lower Ninth Ward “a desolated disgrace.” The AP writes about a Catholic priest still missing after five years.

In the wake of a wave of hate crimes against U.S. Muslims, a coalition of religious groups, including Baptists, Jews, Christians and Muslims are meeting with Department of Justice officials. The FBI is investigating a fire at a Tennessee mosque construction site that had drawn anti-Islamic protests. The Council on American-Islamic Relations also says a mock pig emblazoned with the message “No Mosque in NYC” was left in a California mosque’s mailbox.

The chairwoman of a NYC committee that approved the Islamic cultural center to be built blocks from Ground Zero says an interfaith center should be added to the blueprints. The imam spearheading the project, who is on a diplomatic tour of the Middle East, told an Abu-Dhabi newspaper that the “election season” has had an adverse impact on the debate about Park51. The AP says, “Whatever the outcome, the uproar over a planned Islamic center near the former World Trade Center site is shaping up as a signal event in the story of American Islam.”

A lay bishop at a Mormon church was fatally shot as he was was doing administrative paperwork on Sunday between services.

The former leader of the Roman Catholic Church in Belgium urged a victim of serial sexual abuse by a bishop to keep silent for a year, until the bishop – the victim’s own uncle – could retire, according to tapes made by the victim last April and published over the weekend in two Belgian newspapers.

Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, founder and now spiritual head of Israel’s ultra-orthodox Shas Party, declared that God should send a plague to strike down the Palestinians and their leader, Mahmoud Abbas. Shas is a member of the current Israeli governing coalition, whose leader, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, is about to enter into formal peace talks with Abbas.

Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi’s attempt to convert dozens of young women to Islam during a visit to Italy drew an angry reaction from Italian media. A motorist fired pepper spray Saturday at a group of demonstrators from Westboro Baptist Church outside a funeral for a U.S. Marine in Nebraska.

More than 1,000 documents, including some dating back to the beginning of the Nation of Islam, have been found in Detroit, the city where the movement started 80 years ago.

An Arizona federal district court dismissed a complaint by a Quaker that the use of his federal income tax payments for military spending substantially burdens his religious exercise. The Kentucky Supreme Court held that the Medi-Share Program operated by the American Evangelistic Association and the Christian Share Ministry is subject to regulation by the state.