Clergy members and churches would not face legal consequences for refusing to perform same-sex marriages, under a state bill being pushed by supporters of gay marriage.

From: faithinpubliclife.org. By Adelle M. Banks- RNS. As Capitol Hill appears politically paralyzed over health care reform, the prescription from many faith leaders is firm: don’t abandon ship.  “The faith community has worked for decades for comprehensive health care reform and this last year … many of them have put aside other policy priorities to take this over the finish line,” said the Rev. Linda Walling, executive director of Faithful Reform in Health Care, an interfaith coalition of more than 70 groups.

WELLINGTON, New Zealand — A billboard at a New Zealand church depicting a downcast Joseph lying beside Mary in bed and the heading “God is a hard act to follow” provoked more than the intended reconsideration of the meaning of Christmas.

Hoping to ask the American ambassador for help in reaching the Gaza Strip, riot police surrounded 41 US citizens and one Egyptian on Tuesday and blocked their progress.

Media audiences across the world took notice as Copenhagen police arrested hundreds of activists at the peak of the United Nations climate conference that ended last Saturday.

December 17, 2009?. Attempting to revive climate negotiations that appear dangerously close to flat-lining, the Obama administration announced today that it would join allies in raising $100 billion by 2020 to help the world’s poorest countries adapt to climate change.

Dan Elliott (AP, December 16, 2009).  Air Force Academy, USA – The Air Force Academy says religious tolerance has improved dramatically since allegations five years ago that evangelical Christians harassed cadets who didn’t share their faith. Even the school’s most vocal critic agrees.

BBC. Sirsa, India – More than 1,000 followers of a multi-religious sect in northern India have pledged to marry female sex workers who want to escape exploitation

WASHINGTON — As an evangelical Christian living in Texas, climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe found that many conservatives had questions about climate change based on things they’d heard on talk radio.  The book is a look at the scientific consensus that heat-trapping gases, mostly from the use of fossil fuels, are causing an increase in the Earth’s average temperature. It explains how scientists reach their conclusions and why they rule out other possible explanations, such as the sun, volcanoes and natural cycles.

by Eugene Kiely, USA Today Reps. Diana DeGette, D-Colo., and Louise Slaughter, D-N.Y., co-chairs of the Congressional Pro-Choice Caucus, today released the text of a letter to Speaker Nancy Pelosi that they are circulating on the abortion provision in the health care bill.  USA TODAY’s John Fritze says the House bill would prohibit people who receive government subsidies from getting insurance coverage for an abortion procedure even through a private health insurance plan. It also would prohibit the government-run insurance plan from offering abortions.

Reuters  by John Whitesides.  WASHINGTON – After a landmark win in the House of Representatives, President Barack Obama’s push for healthcare reform faces a difficult path in the Senate amid divisions in his own Democratic Party on how to proceed.  On a 220-215 vote, including the support of one Republican and opposition from 39 Democrats, the House backed a bill late on Saturday that would expand coverage to nearly all Americans and bar insurance practices such as refusing to cover people with pre-existing medical conditions.

BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: As Congress assembles a health care reform package, a longtime expert on medical ethics writes in a recent issue of Commonweal magazine that there has been an important idea missing from the debate–the concept of the common good. The expert is Daniel Callahan, founder and now president emeritus of the Hastings Center. His new book is Taming the Beloved Beast. He joins us from New York.

By Bob Chaundy (BBC, October 30, 2009) London, UK – Witches remain a significant cultural presence centuries after thousands of women, and men, accused of sorcery were burned at the stake. But what caused the craze for burning witches, and why did it stop?

Berlin, Germany – Germany’s Lutheran Church has elected a woman to lead the nation’s Protestants for the first time in its history.

By Abby Goodnough,  The New York Times.  Less than a week before Maine voters decide whether to repeal the state’s new same-sex marriage law, donations and volunteers are pouring in to sway what both sides call a nationally significant fight.  Supporters of the marriage law, which the Legislature approved in May, have far more money and ground troops than opponents, who have been led by the Roman Catholic Church. Yet most polls show the two sides neck and neck, suggesting that gay couples here, as in California last year, could lose the right to marry just six months after they gained it.

New Orleans – President Barack Obama jetted to this hurricane battered city Thursday to deliver a fiery call to action, vowing to rebuild to the Gulf Coast area as a boisterous crowd chanted “yes we can!”

ROME (Reuters) – An Italian scientist says he has reproduced the Shroud of Turin, a feat that he says proves definitively that the linen some Christians revere as Jesus Christ’s burial cloth is a medieval fake.

Reuters.com  The first ever comparative surveys of U.S. conservative and progressive (or liberal) religious activists has just been published by the Bliss Institute of Applied Politics at the University of Akron and Public Religion Research.