More Americans Tailoring Religion to Fit Their Needs

"Barna's new book on U.S. Christians, Futurecast, tracks changes from 1991 to 2011, in annual national surveys of 1,000 to 1,600 U.S. adults. All the major trend lines of religious belief and behavior he measured ran downward — except two. More people claim they have accepted Jesus as their savior and expect to go to heaven."

A Religious Revolution in China

A series of articles on religion in China

Muslims Face Growing Bias in the Workplace

"Claims of bias against Muslims in the workplace rose to 1,490 last year from 1,304 in 2008 and just 697 in 2004, according to EEOC figures. Last year's total was even higher than in the year after the 9/11 attacks, when bias claims hit 1,463."

Top 10 Religious Relics

"As millions travel to see the Shroud of Turin — the cloth that may have been used to wrap Christ's body after his crucifixion — TIME takes a look at the lore and whereabouts of other religious relics."

Louisiana Prison Gives Inmates Chance to Earn Ministry Degree

"Since starting the program at Angola, the Baptist seminary has begun similar ones in the Mississippi and Georgia prisons. Angola and seminary officials believe they are the only full-time, college-accredited programs for ministers in the nation's prisons."

Can Megachurches Bridge the Racial Divide?

"According to Michael Emerson, a specialist on race and faith at Rice University, the proportion of American churches with 20% or more minority participation has languished at about 7.5% for the past nine years. But among Evangelical churches with attendance of 1,000 people or more, the slice has more than quadrupled, from 6% in 1998 to 25% in 2007."

Church of Sweden to Conduct Gay Weddings

"The Lutheran Church of Sweden, of which 74 percent of Swedes are members, announced Thursday it will conduct wedding ceremonies for homosexuals."

More People Forgo Clergy-Led Funerals

"John Reed Sr., president of the National Funeral Directors Association, says 50% of Americans today say they don't belong to a church and don't see value in a religious funeral. But 'they still want ceremony and celebration at the end of life.' More than one in four U.S. adults (27%) say that when they die, they don't expect to have a religious service, according to a national survey of 6,000 people. It was part of the 2008 American Religious Identification conducted by researchers at Trinity College's Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture in Hartford, Conn."

Jesus From a Middle Eastern Perspective

"Most scholars recognize that a cultural gap exists between what we read in the gospels and what actually happened in Galilee some 2,000 years ago. Modern exegesis labors to extract meaning from these gospels using well-established methods of interpretation. Every student has to master the Greek text along with the nuances of its syntax and grammar, word choices, and idioms. The problem with this method is that, just as a gap exists between that Greek text and our modern English translations, so too a gap existed long ago between the original stories of Jesus told by Aramaic-speaking Jews and their final write-up in Greek by the evangelists, who understood Middle Eastern culture (though they were writing in Greek). . . ."