The Christian Century

November 10 (ENInews)--Britain's Home Secretary, Theresa May, announced on 10 November that an extremist Islamist group called Muslims Against Crusades will be banned, starting at midnight (GMT). The parliamentary order, handed down in London, will make membership in the group a criminal offense.

The failure of the "personhood" initiative in Mississippi in November intensified what appears to be a growing divide in the antiabortion movement.

c. 2011 Religion News Service

SALEM, Mass. (RNS) For centuries, scholars have wondered how a farming village in 1692 could have become so hysterically anxious that magistrates would order 20 executions for crimes of witchcraft.

Now a new documentary film about the infamous Salem Witch Trials is stirring fresh debate by heaping blame on the local minister, the Rev. Samuel Parris.

c. 2011 USA Today

SERTHAR, China (RNS) Breathless but beaming, Sheng Zisu sounds confident after five months in a maze-like Buddhist encampment high on the eastern Tibetan plateau, nearly 400 miles from the nearest city.

Read the sidebar article.

Late one night over pizza, Univer­sity of Dayton students Branden King and Nick Haynes discovered neither of them believed in God. Surely, they thought, they couldn't be the only nonbelievers at the Roman Catholic college.

c. 2011 Religion News Service

(RNS) A policy adviser to the U.S. Catholic bishops' anti-gay-marriage initiative resigned on Friday (Nov. 4), a week after writing a column that blamed Satan for homosexuality.

Daniel Avila had been an on-staff adviser to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops' Subcommittee for the Promotion and Defense of Marriage since June.