With 2.18 billion adherents, Christianity has become a truly global religion over the past century as rapid growth in developing nations offset declines in Christianity's traditional strongholds, according to a report released Monday.

Billed as the most comprehensive and reliable study to date, the Pew Research Center's "Global Christianity" reports on self-identified Christian populations based on more than 2,400 sources of information, especially census and survey data.

 

The immigration and retention of Jews is now and always has been a major priority for Israel. But a recent government campaign in the US targeting Israeli expatriates infuriated a broad swath of American Jews.

By some estimates, 2 million Israelis live in the United States, and the Immigration Ministry apparently decided to do something about it.

Hebrew billboards in at least five US cities warned Israelis to come home before they lose their identity, and a series of slickly produced videos drove the point home.

Catholics in the English-speaking world spent Sunday morning needing to being alert in more ways than one. For the first time in more than 40 years, they had a new translation of the liturgy from a revised Roman Missal that hews more closely to the church's original Latin.

The transition was bumpy for some.

"I don't think I said it the right way once," said Matthew Hoover, who attends St. Ann Catholic Church in Clayton, N.C., "I kept forgetting, and saying the old words."

The young man in the video pulls in close to his computer camera with the trappings of a typical college dorm room — a loft bed and the clutter of cast-off clothes — piled behind him.

Alex Fiorentini isn’t talking about girls, beer or football. Instead, it’s a coming-out moment of sorts.

“Is it acceptable to the majority of the population to be an atheist?” he asks the camera. “Nope. Are all of your friends going to accept you as an atheist? Probably not all of them. And yeah, those things are gonna suck. But the real question is, ‘Is it OK to be me?’ That is the real question if you are an atheist.”

For Fiorentini, a student at the University of Illinois, the answer is yes. He and scores of other atheists, young and old, have made similar videos for a new campaign designed to build community and support among nontheists around the world.

Mississippi voters Tuesday defeated a ballot initiative that would've declared life begins at conception, a proposal that supporters sought in the Bible Belt state as a way to prompt a legal challenge to abortion rights nationwide.

The so-called "personhood" initiative was rejected by more than 55 percent of voters, falling far short of the threshold needed for it to be enacted. If it had passed, it was virtually assured of drawing legal challenges because it conflicts with the Supreme Court's 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that established a legal right to abortion. Supporters of the initiative wanted to provoke a lawsuit to challenge the landmark ruling.