Wednesday was not a good day for superstitious Neapolitans. The blood of San Gennaro, the patron of Naples, failed to liquefy despite two rounds of praying by the faithful, which some in the southern Italian city see as an omen of bad things to come.

Joel Osteen’s Lakewood Church is among the large local congregations that received multi-million dollar loans as part of the federal government’s COVID-19 stimulus package. Lakewood received a $4.4 million loan through the Paycheck Protection Program, a part of the federal CARES Act that provided loans to pay employee wages or for other basic operational costs such as utilities.

The Jehovah’s Witnesses are in danger of losing their tax exempt status in Australia because they refuse to play their part in addressing allegations of child abuse.

As the pandemic raged in April, churchgoers in Ohio defied warnings not to congregate. Some argued that their religion conferred them immunity from COVID-19. In one memorable CNN clip, a woman insisted she would not catch the virus because she was “covered in Jesus’ blood”.

Religion is the “final frontier” of personal prejudice, with attitudes to faith driving negative perceptions more than ethnicity or nationality, a report to be published tomorrow will say. How We Get Along, a two-year study of diversity by the Woolf Institute, is due to conclude that most people are tolerant of those from different ethnic or national backgrounds, but many have negative attitudes based on religion.

After Skool illustrated this talk by Alan Watts on how easy it is to live in your own head and build a reality that is disconnected from the present moment.

Human rights groups are calling on Poland to drop charges against three women who face jail for sharing posters of the Virgin Mary with a rainbow-coloured halo. The three women, identified only as Elżbieta, Anna and Joanna, are on trial for “offending religious beliefs” and could face jail sentences of two years each if found guilty for their peaceful activism.

Catholicism’s increasingly powerful political right reflects fringe America, fueled by paranoia, conspiracy, racism, and the threat of apocalypse.

Archbishop Wilton Gregory has been appointed the first African-American Roman Catholic cardinal.

With the percentage of U.S. adults who do not identify with a religious group growing, we asked these people to explain, in their own words, why they left.

"I am a 40-something attorney and mother who lives in a quiet neighborhood with a yard and a garage full of scooters and soccer balls. I am not the type ...

Former Archbishop of Lipa Ramon Arguelles on Wednesday said there is no need to wear face masks and observe social distancing as long as there is faith and love for God. During his Sept. 23 homily, Arguelles told the faithful that “there is nothing to worry” if they keep spreading love for their neighbors and for God’s creation.

Some jokes reveal truths. Remember the quip that “no Christian wants to go to heaven right now”? Obviously, the hidden truth is that most Christians secretly doubt church promises of paradise.

Religion does not help us to explain nature. It did what it could in pre-scientific times, but that job was properly unseated by science. Most religious laypeople and even clergy agree: Pope John Paul II declared in 1996 that evolution is a fact and Catholics should get over it. No doubt some extreme anti-scientific thinking lives on in such places as Ken Ham’s Creation Museum in Kentucky, but it has become a fringe position. Most mainstream religious people accept a version of Galileo’s division of labour: ‘The intention of the Holy Ghost is to teach us how one goes to heaven, not how heaven goes.’

An American atheist watchdog organizations believes Christianity embedded in online student courses is being sneakily taught during pandemic.

Why serving up a diet of hard, rationalistic Christianity might be counterproductive.

Mother Teresa has been beatified by the Catholic Church, but she's no saint—in more ways than one.

A French woman seeking to become a US citizen, has filed a lawsuit to remove the phrase “So help me God” from the oath of citizenship because she is an atheist. Olga Paule Perrier-Bilbo, 48, a French national and green card holder, has been living in Scituate, Massachusetts, since 2000. She is determined to forego her French citizenship and instead became an American, but claims the oath she needs to swear violates the US constitution.

Bishop believes coronavirus is “a sign from God” and proof that “science is always precarious”, then dies of it. Faith has led many downplay the dangers pose by the novel coronavirus, the pandemic (COVID-19) is caused by a new strain of coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) that has not been previously identified in humans.

A median of 45% across 34 surveyed countries say it is necessary to believe in God to be moral and have good values. However, public opinion on this question, as well as the role of God, prayer and religion varies by country, region and economic development.