The Christian Century

Mark A. Potok heads up the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project and is editor of Intelligence Report magazine. The SPLC, founded as a law firm specializing in protecting civil rights, is one of the chief monitors of race-based hate groups and other extremist activities.

With the stroke of a pen, President Obama expanded federal hate-crime laws to include sexual orientation and gender identity as protected categories, a goal for which gay-rights activists have been working for more than a decade.

In 1981, white supremacist James W. von Brunn tried to kidnap members of the Federal Reserve in Washington, D.C., in a bid to overthrow a financial system he believed was controlled by Jews.

Barbara Wheeler, one of the first women to head a theological school in the U.S., will be succeeded in July by another woman as president of New York City’s Auburn Theological Seminary, it was recently announced. Katharine Rhodes Henderson, currently the seminary’s executive vice president, will become president on July 1.

Hate crimes related to a person’s religion decreased in 2007, but hate crimes against gays and lesbians increased slightly, according to the FBI’s 2007 Hate Crimes Statistics.

In 2006, the FBI reported 1,597 hate crimes motivated by a religious bias. That figure dropped to 1,477 in 2007, according to the report.

Four students at George Fox University in Newberg, Oregon, confessed to hanging an effigy of Senator Barack Obama from a tree on campus and were suspended for up to a year, school officials announced September 30. The students’ names were not released.

Anti-Muslim discrimination reached an all-time high in 2007, according to a report released by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR).

The Southern Baptist Convention has rejected scientific claims that humans are to blame for global warming and dismissed governmental efforts to reverse it.

Key U.S. Catholic bishops told 55 Catholic Democrats in the House that there is no wiggle room in church teaching on abortion, and that they are duty-bound to work against “the destruction of unborn human life.” The statement March 10 by three top leaders of the U.S.