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By John Stoehr On Monday the Senate Democrats the subject of religion. During the first day of Appellate Judge Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation hearings, they focused on health care and how Donald Trump’s third nominee might rule after the U.S. Supreme Court hears oral arguments next month on the Affordable Care Act. Avoiding religion was …

By Daniel Burke Parker Neff was scrolling through conservative posts on Facebook when he saw an unfamiliar hashtag: #WWG1WGA. Recently retired after serving as a Southern Baptist pastor for more than 20 years, his time was free and curiosity piqued. “I started looking into it online,” Neff said. “Doing some research.” And with that, the …

By Kate Blanchard Even in the most evangelical phase of my life, when I was a college student who occasionally engaged in raising my hands while singing praise songs, I was horrified to know that there were some Christians in the world who thought it was a good idea to handle venomous snakes for the Lord. …

By Bob Smietana Christian musician Sean Feucht brought his worship protest tour to Nashville on Sunday (Oct. 11). Feucht played before a mostly maskless crowd gathered on a public square in front of the Nashville Metropolitan Courthouse. Video of the event shows thousands of tightly packed people jumping and raising their hands as Feucht and his band …

By Gregory A. Smith President Donald Trump continues to be White Christians’ preferred candidate for the November election, but support among voters in three major traditions – White Catholics, White Protestants who are not evangelical and even White evangelical Protestants – has slipped since August, according to a new Pew Research Center poll. Democratic candidate …

By Jon Cohen This year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been awarded to two scientists who transformed an obscure bacterial immune mechanism, commonly called CRISPR, into a tool that can simply and cheaply edit the genomes of everything from wheat to mosquitoes to humans. The award went jointly to Emmanuelle Charpentier of the Max Planck Unit …

By Michelle Starr From the heart of a galaxy 215 million light-years away, a brilliant flash of light flared into the void of space – the last scream of light from a dying star as it veered too close and was pulled apart by a supermassive black hole. It’s the closest such death of a …

By AFP An Algerian court on Thursday handed a key member of the Hirak anti-government protest movement a 10-year prison sentence for “inciting atheism”, a rights group said. Yacine Mebarki was also found guilty of “offending Islam” and fined 10 million dinars ($77,400), Said Salhi, vice president of the Algerian Human Rights League. Salhi said …

By Michelle R. Smith Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett’s affiliation with the Christian community People of Praise is drawing scrutiny because of what former members and observers describe as its ultraconservative views on women. Her defenders say scrutinizing her beliefs and relationship to the mostly Catholic organization is akin to anti-religious bigotry. But in interviews with …

By Alec Snyder, Kristina Sgueglia, Brynn Gingras and Susannah Cullinane Outspoken protester Harold “Heshy” Tischler was taken into custody Sunday evening in connection with an alleged assault during protests against new anti-coronavirus restrictions in an Orthodox Jewish area of Brooklyn, New York police say. Some members of the Orthodox Jewish community protested in the Borough Park neighborhood …

By Hilton Lewis Standing in my office 25 years ago was an unknown, newly minted astronomer with a half-smile on her face. She had come with an outrageous request—really a demand—that my team modify our exhaustively tested software to make one of our most important and in-demand scientific instruments do something it had never been …

By Elizabeth Kim A group of Jewish organizations and the Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn are separately suing Governor Andrew Cuomo to stop the state from enforcing attendance limits on house of worship in parts of New York that have been designated for new restrictions due to rising coronavirus cases. The lawsuits mark an expected and …