Many businesses and retailers have discovered that discount coupons that may get people into stores does not always translate into repeat business if no discount or freebie is involved. Churches don't offer coupons or giveaways, but have the same problem: people who use their services but do not support their ministries financially.

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. — Olympic gold medal gymnast Peter Vidmar stepped down as chief of mission for the 2012 U.S. Olympic team Friday following a controversy over his opposition to gay marriage.

Vidmar said in a release that he’s dedicated his life to the Olympic movement and its ideals, and he did not want distractions caused by his religious beliefs to take away from the U.S. team at the London Games.

“I simply cannot have my presence become a detriment to the U.S. Olympic family,” Vidmar said in a statement released by the U.S. Olympic Committee. “I hope that by stepping aside, the athletes and their stories will rightly take center stage.”

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House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) says he will nominate the Rev. Patrick J. Conroy, a Catholic priest and a former chaplain at Georgetown University, as the next House chaplain.

Conroy, 60, who teaches theology at Jesuit High School in Portland, Ore., would succeed the Rev. Daniel Coughlin, who retired last month after 11 years and was the first Roman Catholic priest to serve as chaplain.

Conroy would be the 60th House chaplain. The duties include opening each session with a prayer, presiding over memorials and other ceremonies, and providing pastoral counseling.

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ORANGEBURG, S.C. — Colin Powell told graduates of South Carolina’s premier historically black university that they were graduating during a tumultuous time that saw a royal wedding, a pope’s beatification and a U.S. military assault that killed Osama bin Laden, “the worst person on earth.”

But the former secretary of state and Joint Chiefs chairman told South Carolina State University’s 400 graduates on Friday that he particularly enjoyed another recent event: “That was when President Obama took out his birth certificate and blew away Donald Trump and all the birthers!”

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"If The Stand-Ins was labeling vanities, then I Am Very Far is reflecting on them."

Pakistan's military paints a far different picture than the United States of Osama bin Laden's final days: not the terror mastermind still trying ...

Riazat Butt reports in more detail about the ABC's appointment of two new flying bishops for the Church of England to replace the two who fled to Rome.

Edward T. Marley, 90, who for 39 years was an aeronautical engineer with the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, died April 16 of respiratory failure at his home in Lewes, Del.

At the physics laboratory, Mr. Marley worked on the development of the Patriot anti-ballistic missile. He retired in 1991.

Edward Thomas Marley was a native of Newark, N.J. He was a 1949 engineering graduate of the University of Notre Dame. He received a master’s degree in aeronautical engineering from the University of Virginia in 1951.

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Josetta Maria Preller, 95, a member of the Sisters of the Holy Names of Jesus and Mary, a teaching order, who worked at Catholic schools and churches in the Washington region, died April 19 at Holy Cross Hospital in Silver Spring of peritonitis, an infection in the abdomen. She had been a Wheaton resident since 1999.

She was a Catholic school educator from the 1930s until 1974. She taught at St. Michael the Archangel Catholic Church in Silver Spring and St. Gabriel School in the District, where she was also principal from 1957 to 1963.

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T.D. Jakes tells Sally Quinn about how his preaching differs from his work in movies.

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The Olympic gold-medal gymnast Peter Vidmar is stepping down as chief of mission for the 2012 United States Olympic team after a controversy over his opposition to gay marriage.

For Mother’s Day, Nahid Sabet, an Iranian living in Texas, told her 13-year-old daughter about being persecuted in her homeland.

Two Muslim religious leaders say they were removed from a plane in Memphis on Friday and were told that the pilot refused to fly with them aboard.

Mr. Craig surged to international attention in the 1970s as the leader of the Ulster Vanguard, a right-wing umbrella group for Protestant partisans opposed to Irish nationalism.

A reader responds to a recent article.

The U.S. Department of Education sent a letter to districts around the country Friday, reminding them that all students legal or not are entitled ...

The search for bodies is still going on in parts of the tornado-ravaged South, but the country's worst natural disaster since Hurricane Katrina ...

Zionist leaders, Soviet Jewry, Black-Jewish relations and “Fifth Commandment Day” are among ten touching stories shared in this Mother’s Day link round-up.

The University of Colorado at Boulder has announced the establishment of a $2 million endowed chair in Jewish history.

Jamie Kirchick, who has published in Commentary, is not a "liberal", at least not in the tribal sense.

Israel’s Ben Gurion International Airport resumed flights Friday after jet fuel contamination halted all outgoing flights Thursday afternoon.

Andrew Sullivan, weighing in on the Tony Kushner-CUNY-Jeffrey Wiesenfeld controversy, makes claims today about Yitzhak Shamir, the former prime minister, that struck me as odd.

The Los Angeles-based Kabbalah Centre is under investigation by the Internal Revenue Service's criminal division.

The European Union approved an extra $124 million in emergency aid to the Palestinians to supplement tax moneys frozen by Israel.

A Spanish official has given what is being heralded as the country’s first formal apology for the Inquisition’s killing of Jews.

Jalandhar, Punjab: The US was convinced of the Congress government’s hand in the 1984 anti-Sikh riots and termed it as “opportunism” and “hatred” of the government against Sikhs. The US also believed that the BJP leadership didn’t have the courage to ask chief minister Narendra Modi to step down (following the 2002 Gujarat riots) even [...]

The Discovery Institute believes so, at least.

Events were held across the country Thursday (May 5) for the annual National Day of Prayer. Participants prayed for America on Capitol Hill where popular evangelical writer and speaker Joni Eareckson Tada gave the keynote address. Conservative Christian leader James Dobson and US Senate Chaplain Barry Black also spoke. As is the custom [...]

Faith-based relief groups continue to aid those affected by the deadly tornadoes that struck several southern states. Volunteers are delivering meals and helping to clear debris. Some churches are providing shelter. An estimated 350 people were killed and many remain missing. A Southern Baptist leader in Mississippi called for a day of prayer [...]

As Congress returned to Washington this week, Vice President Biden began meetings with a bi-partisan group of lawmakers to discuss the national debt and spending cuts. The talks are described as an effort to reach common ground between both sides. A coalition of religious leaders has objected to any cuts to anti-poverty programs. They [...]

There are new questions about the future of the Middle East peace process after the two rival Palestinian governments signed a reconciliation deal. The Palestinian Authority, based in the West Bank, agreed to share power with Hamas, the militant group that controls the Gaza strip. The two have governed separately since 2007. Observers [...]

As anti-government protests continued in Syria, human rights groups say thousands of people have been detained by the government there. The wide-spread crackdown follows 7-weeks of violent unrest. More than 500 people have been killed. In Turkey, the Red Crescent Society has put up temporary shelters for refugees along the Syrian border.

Crowds of Gaddafi supporters protested in Tripoli after a NATO airstrike killed one of Gaddafi’s sons and three of the leader’s young grandchildren. The Catholic bishop of Tripoli was among those allowed to view the bodies. He reiterated his call for a ceasefire, saying airstrikes are killing civilians. NATO leaders denied they are specifically targeting [...]

It’s been an emotional week since the dramatic US operation that killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan. On Thursday (May 5), President Obama laid a wreath at Ground Zero. He met with loved ones of some of those killed on 9-11 and told them he hoped bin Laden’s death brought them a small measure of [...]

Watch our discussion of ethical questions raised by the killing of Osama Bin Laden, as well as religious responses to his death and its impact on US relations with the Muslim world.

The Most Revd Dr Thabo C Makgoba has written a pastoral letter on climate change.

They have no clue that the stranger they meet on the road is Jesus. Which suggests that witnessing the empty tomb is not the same as witnessing the resurrection. The absence of death isn’t the same as the presence of life. Death isn’t an end in itself. The death of Jesus isn’t the end of the story. There is something else that needs to fill that empty space.

Well, this is disturbing. A new report shows that the number of medical students opting to go into nephrology — the specialty involving caring for kidneys — is dropping, even as the need for such physicians is on the rise.

A paper published last evening in the Clinical Journal of the American Society of Nephrology highlights a decline in the number of new doctors going into the field, and attributes it in part to the common perception that kidney doctors are overworked and underpaid. The paper features an illuminating selection of blog entries written by medical students; together they suggest that the lifestyle of a nephrologist holds little appeal to the new generation of doctors, who are represented as perhaps valuing a balanced lifestyle and sane work schedules more than their elders did.

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John McKenney’s a smart guy. An lawyer and tax expert, McKenney left Washington a few years ago and moved to Sarasota, Fla. He got a tan, took up yoga, started dating a well-heeled local woman. She brought McKenney into her well-heeled crowd.

Soon, all the heels in the group were buzzing about a new, can’t-miss foreign currency deal, paying 5 percent a month, 60 percent a year. The trader doing the deal, Beau Diamond, was young but well known around town. His father, Harvey, was a local health and fitness celebrity. Diamond said he possessed a secret, proprietary method for trading currency futures.

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WASHINGTON — House Speaker John Boehner says he will nominate the Rev. Patrick J. Conroy, a Catholic priest who now teaches at Jesuit High School in Portland, Ore., as the next House chaplain.

Conroy, a 60-year-old native of Washington state, will succeed Father Daniel Coughlin, who retired last month after 11 years in the position and was the first Roman Catholic priest to serve as chaplain.

Conroy would be the 60th House chaplain. The duties include opening each session with a prayer, presiding over memorials and other ceremonies and providing pastoral counseling to the House community.

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In 2007, Kalena Alston-Griffin’s life was just as she’d planned: She was married, living in New York City and pursuing a lucrative business career. Ebony Magazine even named her one of the country’s most promising young leaders.

But by 2008, things were coming undone: Her father died. Her marriage was fraying. Her mother had a serious heart attack and needed 31-year-old Alston-Griffin, the eldest of five children, to take in her two middle-school-aged brothers.

Amid the chaos, she was also planning a move to Washington to start a publishing business. “I have been known to be one of those people who doesn’t set limits, so to speak, in terms of how much I can handle. But this was definitely beyond my comprehension,” she remembers.

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Charisse Cabrera sat in the back pew of Holy Family Catholic Church in Mitchellville one spring Sunday, as a priest tried to comfort a congregation of Filipino teachers caught in a bureaucratic maze.

The Prince George’s County school system imported them by the hundreds in the past decade to comply with one federal law. Now, they are all at risk of being sent home because the system failed to comply with another.

The result could mean as many 957 foreign teachers, more than 10 percent of the county’s teaching corps, would lose their visas by 2014. Such an exodus would mark a significant reversal following years in which many American schools filled hard-to-staff positions with overseas instructors.

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When I walk at night alone

in the deep wadis of her sobs

or when I know that each time I drive fast

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There’s nothing I’m prouder of than being the mother of two children, now 17 and 25. Both were planned, both were very much wanted, and as Mother’s Day approaches, I reflect on how blessed I am to have each of them as part of my life.

But we know that all too often, and for too many women, this is not always the case. In the United States alone, half of all pregnancies are still unintended, despite widespread availability of contraception. In nations lacking access to family planning services, the situation is even more dramatic, with new analyses showing that unintended pregnancies around the world could drop by more than two thirds, from 75 million in 2008 to 22 million per year if universal family planning services were available.

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Lady Gaga's Judas music video is out, but few religious leaders seem to be rushing to condemn the artist's adoration for the man who turned Jesus over to soldiers with the mark of a kiss.

The Kabbalah Centre and one of its charities, Spirituality for Kids, received federal government subpoenas concerning tax-related issues, the center said in a statement.

The following is James Shaheen's "Editor's View" from the new issue of Tricycle:

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Religious leaders in Uganda have responded from conservative and liberal perspectives to the news that Kasha Jacqueline Nabagesera, a Ugandan gay rights activist, was given on 3 May the Martin Ennals Awards for Human Rights Defenders.

Dr. Randall Pannell, dean of Regent University School of Divinity, spoke to CBN News about how reliable the New King James translation is for today's world.