In Germany, several of the concrete slabs at Berlin's memorial to the Holocaust were defaced by vandals. In spite of anti-semitic incidents and other difficulties, the number of Jews moving to Germany has been going up dramatically. Also growing are the accompanying efforts to help them recover a ...

Part four of a four-part series on faith and family: a growing number of families are not the traditional married mother and father with children — single mothers, cohabiting men and women, gay couples, and the divorced have become more common. How are churches and other religious groups ...

Amid the slow recovery from Hurricane Katrina, Christ Church, the Episcopal Cathedral of New Orleans, turned 200 years old. It honored its birthday and the city with a formal concert and the street music of a jazz funeral — mourning what was lost but confident of rebirth.

Evolution, the theory that all organisms descended from a common ancestor, is widely accepted as a cornerstone of biology. Kansas will now also permit other ideas, including intelligent design. No designer is mentioned, but critics say intelligent design is disguised creationism, a religious view.

Top Anglican Church leaders from Africa and Asia came to the U.S. this week and issued a joint pledge of support for conservatives in the U.S. Episcopal Church. The international leaders met in Pittsburgh with more than 2,100 Americans who are at odds with the Episcopal Church over the consecration ...

Part three of a four-part series on faith and family: poor black families endure huge problems — high rates of divorce, single parents, and out-of-wedlock births. Why are so many poor African-American families in trouble, and what are their churches doing to help?

Part two of a four-part series on faith and family: three quarters of all Americans say they believe it’s likely their children will grow up to be of the same religious faith as their parents, but more than half say they worry about that.

As the U.S. Senate prepared for hearings on President George W. Bush’s nomination of Judge Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court, the court heard arguments on a major religious freedom case. At issue is whether the União do Vegetal Church should be able to import a hallucinogenic tea it ...

Part one of a four-part series on faith and family: a poll commissioned by RELIGION & ETHICS NEWSWEEKLY shows that Americans both idealize the traditional family, and at the same time are more and more accepting of families that are nontraditional.

Historically, in most religious traditions, suicide has been considered a sin. In light of this, many survivors have felt religiously stranded. How can their faith help them heal when that same faith may fault their loved one for the act of suicide?

The numbers on how family structures have changed are dramatic. Counting parents with children at home, as recently as 1970, traditional families -- mother and father with children under 18 -- made up 40 percent of all households. But by 2000, that had fallen to just a quarter of all households.

During the month of Ramadan, Muslims fast from sunrise to sunset. "Fasting, for me, is a constant prayer that you're engaged in throughout the day. For 12 hours or more, you're praying," says Zuleqa Husain, a young American Muslim.

A growing movement within American Judaism that recalls the tendency in most faiths for worshippers over the years to move back and forth between the head and the heart -- theology and doctrine on one side, spiritual fervor on the other.

For members of St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church, which was totally demolished on 9/11, this anniversary serves as a reminder of how long it's taking to rebuild.

The fate of St. Charles Avenue Baptist Church in New Orleans is uncertain. Its pastor was evacuated to Baton Rouge, while members of the church have spread across the nation. Amy Butler, the church’s former associate pastor, is trying to minister to members online from Washington, D.C. Also, ...

Although authorities have mostly focused on evactuating New Orleans residents, there were also a few people who had fled the city who were allowed back in. One of them was the Episcopal Bishop of Louisiana, Charles Jenkins, and correspondent Deborah Potter went with him.

As the Gulf Coast reels from the devastation of Hurricane Katrina and the federal government tries to speed up its much-criticized response to the crisis, especially in New Orleans, religious groups are playing a key role in emergency relief efforts.

Terminally ill patients exercise their "right to die" when they want their suffering to end, but what about those who want to live? A British court ruled that a doctor can decide when to terminate a patient's life. Leslie Burke suffers from cerebral ataxia and will eventually lose his ability to ...

"The ancestors passed these songs to us. These are songs that are gifts to us today. So even though these songs were created 150 years ago, we can still use them today," says Dr. Arthur Jones, a psychologist at the University of Denver.

"We know that we are rooted in Africa, but our sensibilities, our cultural and moral sensibilities, tend not to drive us to appeal for their liberation the same way that we have been driven to appeal for our own," says Rev. Sean McMillan.