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WASHINGTON (RNS) On the big screen of the movies, God has been played by everyone from George Burns ("Oh, God!") to Alanis Morissette ("Dogma") to Morgan Freeman ("Bruce Almighty.") On the small screen of people’s imaginations, God frequently looks like an old man in the clouds, like something out of “The Simpsons.” Or Kenny Rogers. Or more ambiguous terms like creator, energy, love or nature. That’s how some Americans described their image of God in a small independent documentary entitled “God in the Box.”

Today as members of St. Andrew Lutheran Church wave palm fronds to commemorate how Jesus was welcomed to Jerusalem, they will do so believing that Jesus would approve of how their palms were harvested.The Shadyside church uses Eco-Palms, which are harvested by workers who earn fair wages and practice preservation of tropical forests."They’re more expensive than other palms, just as the coffee we serve here is more expensive because it is fair trade. But it’s a statement of social justice that we’re glad to make," said the Rev. Janet Grill, pastor of St. Andrew, a congregation of the Evangelical Lutheran…

In Pablo Picasso’s painting "Guernica," a woman’s pained face is turned upward as she wails over a dead child in her lap. Various other faces appear scattered over the canvas, each one clearly in some kind of suffering. The work was an expressive reaction by Picasso after the bombing of the Basque city of Guernica in 1937 during the Spanish Civil War. But to Francisco Ayala, acclaimed evolutionary geneticist and molecular biologist, and the winner of the 2010 Templeton Prize, the painting is also an example of how science and religion do not contradict each other. The shapes, size, dimensions…

HOUSTON (BP)–Scott Drew, Baylor University’s arm-waving, ever-smiling, ever-positive head basketball coach, has led his Bears to heights unimaginable, but he says he isn’t able to do the miraculous or the mundane without his faith in Jesus Christ.

(RNS) To the untrained eye, the graceful lilies that arrive on church altars each year on Easter Sunday are a familiar symbol of resurrection and renewal. Like poinsettias on Christmas, it just wouldn’t be Easter without them. But for the people who get them there—on a date that shifts from year to year—getting the trumpet-shaped flowers to bloom on cue takes months of just-right gardening, mathematical deduction and extreme diligence.

MADISON — Since 1909, St. Paul University Catholic Center has been a home for the thousands of Catholic students attending the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In particular, the undergraduate ministry has seen tremendous growth in the past 10 years as the vision and programs have undergone a major transformation.St. Paul’s exists primarily to serve the students at UW– Madison, offering a wide array of programming to reach a student population of over 42,000, of which over 10,000 were raised Catholic. With an expanding pastoral staff and continued investment in outreach and programming, St. Paul’s is better equipped to reach out to…

That is arguably one of the best parts of March Madness—the exciting possibility of a small-college program beating a nationally ranked team. Who can forget Princeton’s upset win over UCLA in the mid-’90s or, more recently, Davidson College’s triumphs over Gonzaga, Wisconsin and Georgetown in the 2008 season? Many wonder if this will be the miracle year that the 16th seed finally topples a No. 1 seed. The biblical imagery of triumph against the odds would have greatly appealed to the game’s founder, Dr. James Naismith.

Can text messaging and Twitter enhance worship or just interrupt it?One would be hard-pressed to go an entire day without bumping into someone (sometimes literally) with their phone out and their thumbs punching buttons. It used to be limited to teenagers at the mall, but now text messaging is commonplace, as is its sister technology, Twitter. And for many churches, this is great news because these technologies provide opportunities to foster community—even during worship.

If God, as C.S. Lewis wrote, "shouts in our pains," then in the past year he has nearly deafened Cindy Winters and her two daughters.About 8:30 a.m. on Sunday, March 8, a man stormed into First Baptist Church of Maryville (IL), approached the pulpit where Cindy’s husband, the Rev. Fred Winters, was giving his sermon, and began shooting. The man was armed with 30 rounds of ammunition, but his .45-caliber semiautomatic Glock jammed after four shots.The fatal bullet went straight through Winters’ heart. Another hit his Bible, exploding its pages into confetti.

Just before he stepped down as a member of President Obama’s Council on Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, Richard Stearns threw down a gauntlet. It came in the form of a press release chastising those who would say faith-based organizations that hire on the basis of religion should not receive federal funds. "The President has said he wants his faith-based initiative to be legal and constitutional, and it already is," said Mr. Stearns, president of World Vision, the Seattle-based international Christian humanitarian organization. "The only people trying to change the law and ‘fix’ what ‘isn’t broken’ are those who have always…