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By Nina Totenberg The U.S. Supreme Court may be poised to side with Catholic Social Services in a battle that pits religious freedom against anti-discrimination laws in Philadelphia. At issue is a Catholic charity’s refusal to screen same-sex couples as foster care parents. While new Justice Amy Coney Barrett did not indicate which way she …

By Jack Jenkins Democrats agonizing over Joe Biden’s dramatic underperformance in Florida, a state that many wrongly projected would end up in the former vice president’s column, have begun looking at why Hispanic voters, a majority of the population of Miami-Dade County, went soft on Biden in the Sunshine State and elsewhere. One answer, said the Rev. …

Mr. Richard Dawkins, Let me begin by acknowledging that although this correspondence is addressed to Richard Dawkins, I have no delusions that he will ever read this, nor would I expect him to do so. Clearly, there are much more pressing matters to attend to rather than to hear another one of these stodgy tales, …

By Davide Castelvecchi Astronomers observed 39 cosmic events that released gravitational waves over a 6-month period in 2019 — a rate of more than one per week. The bounty, described in a series of papers published on 28 October, demonstrates how observatories that detect these ripples — usually created by the merging of two black …

By Jack Jenkins After more than a year of campaigning, the 2020 election is finally upon us, pitting Democrat Joe Biden against President Donald Trump. It has been an unusually faith-focused campaign season, with both candidates repeatedly appealing to religion and religious voters over the past few months — albeit often in very different ways. But as the …

By Kelsey Vlamis Maria Felix was on a mission trip, working alongside other Christians, when she first heard Donald Trump’s name. It was 2015, and she said the group of teens was joking about him, baffled at the idea that he was casting himself as a Christian in his campaign for the US presidency. Five …

By Denise Hruby and Loveday Morris Peering out a window at Vienna’s main synagogue compound on Monday evening, Rabbi Schlomo Hofmeister watched as a gunman opened fire on customers in the bars and restaurants of the city’s main nightlife district. The shots rang out — dozens of volleys, perhaps hundreds, he isn’t sure — sending …

By Clare Watson With an estimated 300 active volcanoes on Earth, the challenge is how to monitor them all to send out early warnings before they erupt. Measuring volcanic gas emissions is also no easy task. Now researchers have designed specially-adapted drones to help gather data from an active volcano in Papua New Guinea (PNG). …

By Michelle Boorstein Two members of President Trump’s evangelical advisory group are locked in a nasty legal dispute involving allegations of a multimillion-dollar Holocaust fundraising scam. Mike Evans, a Texas author and Christian Zionist activist, this summer filed a federal lawsuit against Jentezen Franklin, a Georgia megachurch pastor who has been featured at Trump campaign events. The two men …

By Yelena Dzhanova On the campaign trail Saturday night, Sen. Lindsey Graham said women are welcome anywhere in the country — provided that they’re anti-abortion. The Republican senator took the stage at a campaign event in Conway, South Carolina, his home state, and praised Amy Coney Barrett, the newly appointed Supreme Court justice. “You know what I …

By Maggie Severns, Brandon Ambrosino, and Michael Stratford When Jerry Falwell Jr. and his wife Becki strolled around the Lynchburg, Va., campus of Liberty University, the evangelical school which Falwell led as president, they would play a secret game called “Would you rather.” The middle-aged couple would point to students, men and women, and imagine …

By Steven Novella The evolution of dogs from wolves is a long and complex one. A recent study adds some further information to this tale – as long as 11,000 years ago there were already at least five different distinct breeds of dog. These different breeds partly tracked along with human populations, but not completely. But let’s …