Leo Shane III wrote an article in Stars and Stripes, a military newspaper, about a coalition of atheists and agnostics. This group wants to change military procedures to stop religious discrimination against the areligious.

Ross Douthat comments.

Michelle Goldberg, in a piece posted today at Religion Dispatches.

By now it's old news that the Mormon Church has faced serious backlash from gay rights activists for its support of California's Proposition 8. But two weeks after the election, commentary on the issue continues.

Father Roy Bourgeois recently participated in a ceremony to ordain a woman as a priest, and may be excommunicated as a result. He has written a response to the Catholic Church, which Michael Paulson reproduced at his blog Articles of Faith.

Archaeologists have found evidence that the body and soul were considered separate as early at the eighth century B.C., John Noble Wilford reports in the New York Times.

The Forward, a Jewish daily newspaper, has named their top 50 most influential American Jews of 2008.

Robert F. Worth writes a very insightful article in the New York Times about youth programs in Lebanon run by Hezbollah. Similar to the Boy Scouts, the Mahdi Scouts organize programing from primary school through college.

Brian Britt, Professor of Religious Studies at Virginia Tech, comments on the popular phrase thirty years after Jonestown.

Despite an agreement in 1995 in which the Mormon church agreed to stop baptizing Holocaust victims, large numbers of Jews killed in concentration camps have been added to the lists of those baptized posthumously, Haaretz reports.