Religion News Service

Signs of the Times: There has been a lot of clerical hand-wringing of late about Catholics who don’t believe what the church teaches about Christ's presence in the bread and wine of the Eucharist. 

A truck attempted to barrel through a group of Jewish protesters who were demonstrating outside a detention center in Rhode Island.

Police in Wyoming are recommending sex abuse charges against two unnamed Catholic leaders in the state.

In no state in the U.S. does even one-quarter of the population say abortion should be illegal in all cases, a new survey shows.

A new social statement from the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America labels patriarchy and sexism as sins and acknowledges the church’s complicity in them.

Our age of nonstop communication has brought an array of resources, online and off, for those who wrestle with suffering and loss, and people are employing new ways to support each other when tragedy arrives.

Background checks may give churches a false sense of security, experts say — whether that's due to incomplete sex offender registries, or questions about whether registries really do prevent crimes.

A Chaldean Christian immigrant who was deported from Michigan to Iraq has reportedly died because he was unable to obtain insulin to treat his diabetes.

The Kings Bay Plowshares 7 activists are charged with three felonies and a misdemeanor and face up to 25 years in prison each for trespassing on a U.S. Navy base in Georgia.

Members of Evangelical Lutheran Church in America taped 9.5 theses to the door of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement building in Milwaukee as part of their churchwide assembly.

Invoking God and Christian love, Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Cory Booker railed against gun violence and racism in a speech on Aug. 7 at the site of a 2015 church shooting that left nine African American worshippers dead.

Immigration and gun violence are among the topics for discussion as leaders of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America gather this week in Milwaukee.

"At a time when we are facing the 'highest levels of displacement on record,' according to the United Nations Refugee Agency, we urge you to increase the refugee resettlement cap and to admit as many refugees as possible within that cap," the letter reads in part. 

With an executive order from Gov. Roy Cooper, North Carolina makes it 18 states plus the District of Columbia that have laws that ban conversion therapy of minors by licensed health care providers.

Signs of the Times: I am afraid that others may soon respond to mass shootings that same way I do, the same way we do to other gun violence — ignore it and move on. No matter how horrible something is, if it is repeated time and time again, we get accustomed to it.

The change marked a 180-degree turn for a ministry founded on fundamentalist Protestantism ministry founded on fundamentalist Protestantism that has separated Catholics and Protestants in this region of the South for generations.

As the nation marks the 400th anniversary of the forced arrival of Africans in Virginia — and Alabama has its bicentennial — a walk through Montgomery's streets reveals the legacy of slavery in America.

A who's who of black history figures worshiped and spoke at Mother African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church — including abolitionists Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth — when it was at earlier locations after its founding in 1796 or at its current neo-Gothic site on 137th Street in Harlem.

Signs of the Times: American Catholics are almost evenly divided between Republicans and Democrats, which means the church can either self-destruct or bridge the partisan divide.

In 2013, the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Chicago held the single largest giving campaign in its history, bringing in pledges totaling $427 million.