Church & State

An acorn, the adage states, does not fall far from the tree. That's certainly the case with Jerry Falwell Jr. Co-heir to the fundamentalist empire in Lynchburg, Va., created by his late father, Falwell Jr. is turning out to be a clone of his dad--especially...

President Barack Obama has named a 45-year-old theology professor as the new U.S. ambassador to the Vatican. The post will be filled by Miguel H. Diaz, a professor at St. John's University and the College of St. Benedict, partnered schools that...

Public schools can require that students' graduation speeches remain religiously neutral, a federal appeals court has held. The 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled May 29 that a graduating senior in Colorado had no constitutional right to preach...

Americans United for Separation of Church and State has urged Louisiana education officials to revise proposed science guidelines to make it clear that religion cannot be taught in public schools. AU's comments came in a June 5 letter to Amy B....

For years, Religious Right organizations have claimed that if same-sex marriage is legalized, conservative churches will be forced to perform such unions or accommodate same-sex couples in other ways. That's certainly not the case in New Hampshire,...

U.S. Defense Department reports on the Iraq war sent to the White House in 2003 were frequently graced with biblical quotations, a magazine reported in May. GQ magazine reported that the daily briefings, called "Worldwide Intelligence Update," had...

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] When the Texas State Board of Education issued a list of proposed "experts" to sit on a social studies curriculum panel, one name immediately leaped out to defenders of church-state separation: David Barton. The panel is...

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] When President Barack Obama announced Sonia Sotomayor as his nominee to replace Justice David Souter on the U.S. Supreme Court, he sold his choice to Americans by telling her compelling life story. Rising from a childhood...