During church services on Sunday, Catholics around the country were read a blistering letter assailing the Obama administration for an "assault on religious liberty" in the form of a coming requirement that most church-linked organizations - among them hospitals, schools and universities - offer birth control coverage as part of their health care plans.

Sometime in the next few weeks, Rabbi Kliel Rose of West End Synagogue in Nashville hopes to pick up a copy of the New Testament and learn a little more about Jesus.

Rose, like many Jews, has viewed the Christian scriptures with some suspicion in the past. The New Testament is not always flattering to Jews, plus it's been used in unwelcome attempts at conversion.

He hopes the new Jewish Annotated New Testament will make his task a bit more enjoyable.

It’s a big step for evolution, going from a single cell focused solely on its own survival to a multicellular organism where cells coordinate and work together. Creationists often cite this jump as evidence of God’s influence, because it seems impossible that creatures could make such a brazen leap unaided. But scientists have shown that multicellularity can arise in the lab, given strong enough selective pressure.

Are those damned Yankees trying to claim a Canadian saint for their own?

With the impending canonization of Kateri Tekakwitha, the 17-century Mohawk woman will be among the 12 Americans who have ascended to sainthood.

At least if you ask some south of the border.

Here, we know Tekakwitha as the soon-to-be first Canadian aboriginal saint, who tended to the sick and elderly at Jesuit missions outside Montreal.

At The New York Times:

Christopher Hitchens, a slashing polemicist in the tradition of Thomas Paine and George Orwell who trained his sights on targets as various as Henry Kissinger, the British monarchy and Mother Teresa, wrote a best-seller attacking religious belief, and dismayed his former comrades on the left by enthusiastically supporting the American-led war in Iraq, died on Thursday in Houston. He was 62.