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WASHINGTON — Not long after 9/11, Wall Street Journal reporter Asra Nomani was working in Pakistan when her friend and housemate, Daniel Pearl, was abducted and killed by Islamic extremists. His death — and the version of Islam that seemed to sanction it — has haunted her ever since. When she returned to her native…

(RNS) The Rev. Thomas Berry, a Passionist monk who made it his life’s work to explore the connection between humans and the earth, died at a retirement community in his native Greensboro, N.C., on Monday (June 1). He was 94. The self-described “geologian” was on the forefront of eco-theological thinking, trying to link religious institutions…

(RNS) Germany saw the ordination of its own Orthodox rabbis on Tuesday (June 2), a first in the more than six decades since the Nazi Holocaust and World War II. Broadcast live on German television, the historic ordination of Zsolt Balla, 30, and Avraham Radbill, 25, signals a slowly reviving German Jewry, which once faced…

Dr. George Tiller’s murder on Sunday (May 31) morning in the lobby of his Lutheran church counters the secular image of a late-term abortion provider, pinning him more as a churchgoing “martyr” than a godless murderer. Shot and killed while passing out bulletins in the lobby of his Wichita, Kan., church as his wife sat…

Holland, Mich. – For the first time in 390 years, the Reformed Church in America has a confession to make. The Belhar Confession, a declaration of human unity, justice and reconciliation that was drafted in 1982 by Reformed churches in apartheid-era South Africa, will be up for approval at the RCA’s June 4-9 General Synod…

Religion writers for The New York Times and the Waterbury (Conn.) Republican-American are among the top winners of the American Academy of Religion’s prizes for in-depth religion reporting. Laurie Goodstein of the Times won the 2009 contest for journalists at news outlets with circulations of more than 100,000 or on the Web. She was honored…

(UNDATED) With the murder Sunday (May 31) of Dr. George Tiller, one of the nation’s few late-term abortion doctors, supporters of abortion rights are questioning whether there is a connection between his death and the rhetoric of the anti-abortion movement. More to the point, would Tiller have been a victim if anti-abortion groups had not…

NEW YORK – If Judge Sonia Sotomayor is confirmed to the U.S. Supreme Court, she will be the sixth Roman Catholic of the nine justices. But far from forming any unified bloc, the justices would represent the vast diversity of American Catholics, from weekly churchgoers to the occasional attendee. Sotomayor, a parochial school graduate, has…

(RNS) Wikipedia, the user-edited Internet encyclopedia, has banned the Church of Scientology from editing entries about the controversial religion. Internet addresses known to be “owned or operated by the Church of Scientology and its associates, broadly interpreted, are to be blocked,” according to the decision. While the ban applies to all Wikipedia entries, exceptions could…

Religion News Service VATICAN CITY — When Pope Benedict XVI told a crowd in St. Peter’s Square in April that the Virgin Mary “silently followed her son Jesus to Calvary, taking part with great suffering in his sacrifice, thus cooperating in the mystery of redemption and becoming mother of all believers,” most listeners probably heard…
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