Hope everyone had a nice Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Speaking of King, a Defense Department official raised some eyebrows by claiming that the famed civil rights activist would support the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

As he did last year, President Obama spent the Sunday before MLK day in a historically black church in Washington; the pastor openly appealed for the first family to join the parish. Obama also issued a proclamation declaring last Sunday to be Religious Freedom Day, which is celebrated every year to mark Virginia’s 1786 Statute for Religious Freedom. The NYT reports on the Senate’s failure to approve Obama’s nominee for ambassador-at-large for religious freedom.

The Obama administration filed its appellate brief defending DOMA in a Massachusetts federal court, even though Obama supports the law’s repeal.

The French Catholic nun who credits the late Pope John Paul II with curing her Parkinson’s disease says the recovery came just as she was about to quit working, Reuters reports. A vial containing blood drawn from John Paul shortly before he died will be installed as a relic in a Polish church soon after his beatification in May.

A newly revealed 1997 letter from the Vatican warns Ireland’s Catholic bishops not to report all suspected child abuse cases to police because that would violate the church’s canon laws, the AP reports. The first group of erstwhile Anglicans converted to Roman Catholicism on Saturday through the Vatican’s new ordinariate.

Sarah Palin took to Fox to defend her use of the fraught term “blood libel.” “Blood libel obviously means being falsely accused of having blood on your hands and in this case that’s exactly what was going on.”

Tensions between co-founders of the proposed Islamic center and mosque near Ground Zero has led to a reduced role for the imam who had become the project’s public face, the NYT reports.

A Michigan district court rejected a Marine veteran’s claim that the government violated the Constitution by allowing public funds from AIG’s $40 billion bailout to be used to fund its Islamic insurance businesses.

More than 100 people were killed when a stampede broke out among 100,000 pilgrims walking to an Indian Hindu shrine. A Christian couple who refused a room in their B&B to a gay couple broke British equality law, a judge ruled Tuesday. Mark Twain had some nasty things to say about Christianity in his recently released autobiography.