Here’s what he had to say yesterday by way apology. I am actually grateful for this first opportunity to publicly speak about my crimes, for which I am so deeply sorry and ashamed. As I engaged in my fraud, I knew what I was doing was wrong, indeed criminal. When I began the Ponzi scheme […]

(UNDATED) Several big-name researchers have recently released extensive studies of the state of American religion, and while they provide vivid snapshots of our diverse and fluid faith traditions, researchers could have saved a lot of time and money. How? By simply studying the two great maxims of New York Yankees Hall of Famer Yogi Berra: […]

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Pastordan, good UCC clergy that he is, laments the ARIS news on shrinking Mainline Protestantism. This is hardly new news, but there has been an acceleration in the shrinkage during this decade–down from 17.2 percent of the adult population in 2001 to 12.9 percent today. The good pastor stresses the importance of the Mainline maintaining […]

Michael Steele goes all “individual choice” and states rights on abortion. Not to mention “nature” not “choice” on homosexuality. In GQ. Update: …and the walk back.

(UNDATED) As President Obama signed his executive order on Monday (March 9) that allows federal dollars for embryonic stem cell research, he promised that “science,” not “ideology,” would rule the ethical debate. “In recent years, when it comes to stem cell research, rather than furthering discovery, our government has forced what I believe is a […]

Pope Benedict regrets: One mishap for me unforeseeable, was the fact that the Williamson case has superimposed itself on the remission of the excommunication. The discreet gesture of mercy towards the four bishops ordained validly but not legitimately, suddenly appeared as something entirely different: as a disavowal of the reconciliation between Christians and Jews, and […]

One of the challenges in achieving “common ground” on abortion is that pro-lifers have a very difficult time acknowledging that those who reject their views may have moral grounds for doing so. Case in point: Michael Gerson, former chief speechwriter for George W. Bush and someone who is regarded as susceptible to the common ground […]

The new ARIS strongly suggests that a kind of generic evangelicalism is fast becoming the normative form of non-Catholic Christianity in America. By far the fastest growing segment of American Christendom are the “non-denominationals,” who were only .1 percent of the adult population in 1990 and are 3.5 percent now. Combine them with those who […]

(UNDATED) As the bill comes due for the boom-time spending that we financed on credit, more is at stake than just family finances. So is social class — that is, our awareness of ourselves as belonging to a certain stratum of society whose members live a certain way, own certain things, hold certain jobs and […]

The Connecticut legislators who introduced a bill to give parishioners control of the finances and management of Catholic churches have decided to ask the state attorney general to rule on the constitutionality of the sucker before proceeding any further. I suspect there is indeed a problem here “respecting an establishment of religion.” Meanwhile, the Catholic […]

Even as President Obama was signing his revocation of the Bush rule on stem cell research, the Georgia state senate was getting set to vote on the Ethical Treatment of Human Embryos Act, which would define a living human embryo as a person and prohibit the destruction of an embryo for any reason, including embryonic […]

In a mano a mano between Franklin Graham and Desmond Tutu, I confess a strong rooting preference for Tutu. Nonetheless, last week’s dueling op-eds in the NYT has given me pause. Tutu argued strongly for African leaders to support the arrest warrant for Sudan’s President Omar Hassan al-Bashir about to be issued by the International […]

Is R. Allen Stanford to the Baptists what Bernie Madoff is to the Jews? Not exactly, but this is suggestive. Investing requires lots of trust, and what better way to build trust than via religious connections?

The new American Religious Identification Survey is out–for our overall take, see the press release after the jump. The summary report will be is up on its website shortly, but in the meantime, check out  and don’t miss USA Today‘s very cool graphics. Among the most significant news politically is that 18 percent of Catholics […]