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By Hemant Mehta You remember Pastor Tony Spell. The head of Louisiana’s Life Tabernacle Church was first arrested in April — remember April?! — for aggravated assault against a protester. But he became notorious for holding in-person church gatherings and putting countless people in harm’s way. Despite being under house arrest, he defied the law to preach at his …

By Annie Knox The Utah Supreme Court heard arguments Monday in a case alleging male leaders of a Jehovah’s Witnesses congregation in Roy forced a 15-year-old girl to listen to a recording of a man raping her in 2008. Lower courts found the church is not liable for the incident under protections of the First …

By Jack Jenkins President Donald Trump’s evangelical advisers are backing his challenges to the results of the 2020 election, though most stop short of joining the president’s effort to declare victory despite President-elect Joe Biden’s substantial leads in key swing states. Ralph Reed, head of the Faith and Freedom Coalition, echoed Senate Majority Leader Mitch …

By Aaron E. Carroll and Nicholas Bagley The announcement that Pfizer’s coronavirus vaccine is more than 90 percent effective at preventing Covid-19 infections — much better than many anticipated — is cause for celebration. With a vaccine of this efficacy, suppression of the disease is entirely realistic. Unfortunately, this development doesn’t mean we can all relax and …

By Ron Millar Humanists across the nation and around the world are joining in the celebration of Donald Trump’s defeat. We can now embrace hope for progress in a way that wasn’t possible these last four years. While we don’t wish to sink to his level of strident demonization, we do need to recognize that …

By the Pew Research Center In 2018, the global median level of government restrictions on religion – that is, laws, policies and actions by officials that impinge on religious beliefs and practices – continued to climb, reaching an all-time high since Pew Research Center began tracking these trends in 2007. The year-over-year increase from 2017 …

By Gabby Orr It wasn’t until Election Day, when returns showed counties across Michigan, Georgia and the industrial Midwest leaning toward Joe Biden due to a groundswell of religious support, that the Trump campaign realized it had a problem. For months, President Donald Trump’s top aides and religious allies dismissed his softening support with white …

By Mike Wall NASA will apparently be getting a new leader after president-elect Joe Biden is sworn in. NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine won’t remain in the agency’s lead role in the Biden administration even if asked, Aerospace Daily & Defense Report reported on Sunday (Nov. 8). “You need somebody who has a close relationship with the president of the U.S. … …

By Ryan Burge I’ve always been fond of the “Charlie Brown with the football” series from Peanuts. The premise is simple: Lucy is holding a football and she wants Charlie to kick it. Charlie is reluctant because he knows Lucy’s track record: she will yank the football away at the last minute. Still, every time …

By Drew Harwell and Craig Timberg President Trump’s election loss and the week-long silence of “Q,” the QAnon movement’s mysterious prophet, have wrenched some believers into a crisis of faith, with factions voicing unease about their future or rallying others to stay calm and “trust the plan.” The uncertainty has been compounded by the abrupt …

By Scott Neuman A new Vatican report on former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, who was defrocked last year amid allegations of sexual misconduct that spanned decades, shows that Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI were aware of the accusations against him. The Vatican on Tuesday made public a detailed 461-page report on an internal investigation revealing that …

By Dan Robitzski After years of orbiting and eventually touching down to gather samples from the asteroid Bennu, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft has made another surprising discovery. Bennu, a rapidly spinning space rock orbiting near the Earth, seems to be hollow, according to a press release. Not only that, but scientists at the University of Colorado, Boulder who analyzed new …