Religion, Christians | featured news

Talk about hellfire! One of the nation's rock-star-popular young pastors, Rob Bell, 40, has stuck a pitchfork in how Christians talk about damnation. Bell's new book, Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived, has provoked weeks of fierce infighting among pastors, theologians and anyone else who scans the Christian blogosphere where critics rage that he's a hipster heretic.

The pope on Friday approved a miracle attributed to Pope John Paul II's intercession and set May 1 as the date for his beatification, an event that will be a major morale boost for a church reeling from a wave of violence against Christians and fallout from the clerical sexual abuse scandal.

Four people were killed in Indian Kashmir on Monday when police fired on Muslim protesters who set fire to a Christian missionary school to denounce reports that copies of the Koran had been damaged in the United States, officials said.

Jarretta Hamilton, a 39-year-old teacher from St. Cloud, Fla., was fired from Southland Christian School for becoming pregnant three weeks before she and her husband Sam were married. In a letter to her lawyer, the school said she "was asked not to return because of a moral issue that was disregarded, namely fornication."

Addressing more than 10,000 reverent, enthusiastic priests at the Vatican, Benedict compares celibacy to heterosexual marriage, which he calls the 'foundation of Christian culture.'

Standing before more than 10,000 Roman Catholic priests, Pope Benedict XVI on Thursday strongly reaffirmed the Vatican's commitment to priestly vows of celibacy, cutting off speculation that he might reconsider the issue in light of the church's sexual abuse scandal.

Arsonists in Malaysia struck at a convent school and a fifth church on Sunday amid rising tensions between majority Muslims and Christians over the use of the word "Allah" to describe the Christian God.

Israeli archaeologists said on Sunday they had discovered the largest underground quarry in the Holy Land, dating back to the time of Jesus and containing Christian symbols etched into the walls.

At a Mass to wrap up his weeklong pilgrimage to the Holy Land, Benedict XVI tells the Israeli city's residents to work for peaceful coexistence. Celebrating Mass for tens of thousands of pilgrims in Nazareth, Pope Benedict XVI today urged Christians and Muslims to reject the "hatred and prejudice" that have produced sporadic conflict in the predominantly Arab city.

Authorities are on the scene of a massive Easter fire that's damaged dozens of buildings on the grounds of a Christian center in New Hampshire.

America is a less Christian nation than it was 20 years ago, and Christianity is not losing out to other religions, but primarily to a rejection of religion altogether, a survey published Monday found.