The morning after Pastor Rick Warren interviewed both major presidential candidates at his evangelical church in Orange County, he delivered a Sunday sermon urging his congregation to judge Sens. Barack Obama and John McCain on how their characters would affect their decisions as leaders.

Faced with the spectacle of the cruelties perpetrated in the name of faith, Voltaire famously cried

Once a Lutheran altar boy, University of Minnesota biology professor Morris P.Z. Myers has fallen from grace -- at least in the eyes of some Catholics and the conservative Catholic League. One of the more prominent atheist voices in America, Myers wrote a blog post on the furor sparked by a Florida college student who smuggled a communion wafer out of mass and, once found out, received threats of harm and death. Catholics believe the bread, once blessed by a priest, has been transformed into the substance of Christ's body and blood. Myers doesn't buy it. He wrote that if readers of his blog send him a consecrated host, "I'll show you sacrilege, gladly, and with much fanfare."

Barack Obama talked to NEWSWEEK's Lisa Miller and Richard Wolffe about how faith plays into his everyday life.

Religion, or at least religious inquiry, is something that nearly all humans share in common. In all corners of the world and in all eras of history, people have wondered about the meaning of life, how to make the best of it, what happens afterwards, and if there is anyone or anything "out there."

According to a recent Pew survey, 21 percent of atheists in the United States believe in

In God's Profits: Faith, Fraud, and the Republican Crusade for Values Voters, Sarah Posner details the wild and woolly world of the "prosperity gospel" movement, also known as "Word of Faith". Or, as I came to think of it not too far into the book, Harry Potter Christianity.

There's a single book that I reread every year: "I Am That" by Nisargadatta Maharaj (1897-1981). The title is a quotation. In India the goal of enlightenment is to see reality as a whole. When all illusion has fallen away, one looks around and can say, with complete confidence, "I am That, you are That, and all this is That."

Paul Harrison, environmentalist and founder of the World Pantheist Movement, explains the basics of a belief system considered by some to be "sexed-up atheism."

What Baptist leaders have known for years is finally public: The Southern Baptist Convention is a denomination in decline. Half of the SBC's 43,000 churches will have shut their doors by 2030 if current trends continue.