Religion News Service

The beginning of the calendar year is a time for making resolutions, but in the Catholic liturgical year it is called "Ordinary Time" — a boring title for the part of the year that's not Advent, Christmas, Lent or Easter.

Confederate symbols in churches, especially Episcopal churches in Virginia and the National Cathedral in Washington, have followed a pattern of controversy parallel to, but distinct from, the civic battles over their removal from public spaces.

The Vatican was so concerned about the fallout from Chile's most notorious pedophile priest that it planned to ask three Chilean bishops accused of knowing about his decades-long crimes to resign and take a year's sabbatical.

For the 16th year in a row, North Korea tops the list of 50 countries ranked for the worst persecution of Christians in the world, according to OpenDoors USA.

Germany is rethinking its approach to combating anti-Semitism after a protest against President Trump's recognition of Jerusalem as Israel's capital turned the anti-Jewish prejudices of some Muslim immigrants into a national issue.

I feel guilty that I have not written a column on "Dreamers," those children who were brought illegally into the United States by their parents. The reason I find it difficult to write such a column is that for me the whole idea of deporting Dreamers is so mean and unjust that I find it incomprehensible that anyone would want to do it.

When President Donald Trump announced in December he would recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and call for the U.S. embassy to be moved there, some of his loudest cheerleaders were American evangelicals.

Attorneys for three men accused of plotting to bomb a mosque and apartment complex housing Somali refugees urged a federal judge to include prospective jurors from rural western Kansas.

After lawsuits and a Supreme Court decision, the Federal Emergency Management Agency has issued a new policy extending disaster relief to churches, synagogues and other congregations.

Conservative Catholic dissidents, who have been attacking Pope Francis, showed their true colors recently by attacking retired Pope Benedict, calling his writings "subversive" and "modernist." That's right, they think Benedict is a heretic.

What's coming for religion in the next 12 months? RNS asked some of the country's top faith leaders, scholars and activists to predict what changes the religious landscape will see.

At least 10 people, including eight Coptic Christians, were killed after unidentified gunmen opened fire outside a church in a south Cairo suburb, Egypt's Health Ministry spokesman said Friday. It was the latest attack targeting the mostly Muslim country's embattled minority.

An attorney for victims for clergy sex abuse said Thursday that a judge has ordered all sides back to mediation in the years-long bankruptcy case of the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis.

A brutal attack claimed by the Islamic State group devastated a two-story Shiite Muslim cultural center in the Afghan capital on Thursday, killing at least 41 people and wounding another 84.

Israel's transportation minister is pushing ahead with a plan to dig a railway tunnel under Jerusalem's Old City ending at the Western Wall with a station named after President Donald Trump.

President Trump’s embrace of evangelical politics, a shooting at a Texas church, a wedding cake that a Christian baker refused to make and the status of Jerusalem also grabbed headlines.

For the second year in a row, President Trump and his conservative evangelical supporters topped the list of the 10 most important religion news stories of the year.

Clergy abuse victims see strong similarities between recent allegations against powerful men for sexual misconduct and their own abuse by members of the clergy.

Beginning his priestly life as a journalist, Bernard Law rose quickly up the ecclesiastical ladder only to come crashing down in scandal and disgrace.

More than 140 evangelical Christian women from across the political and theological spectrums have signed onto a statement calling churches to end the silence around violence against women and the church's participation in it.