Bishops of the Church of England said Wednesday they will continue to refuse to perform same-sex marriages, reaffirming that “holy matrimony is between one man and one woman for life.”

The announcement comes after a six-year period of “listening, learning and discernment” on issues related to sexuality, relationships and marriage.

...Read more

SAN DIEGO — When a San Diego immigration judge told Olga Ponomareva that she would be allowed to stay in the United States, she wanted to leap in the air.

She and her 72-year-old mother had just won asylum because of the religious persecution they experienced as Jehovah’s Witnesses in their home country of Russia. She maintained her ...Read more

LOS ANGELES -- Minutes before KABC-TV’s nightly news show 330 went on the air, the Rev. Steven Pieters wasn’t in the studio chatting with the other panelists. He’d been exiled outside, to a dark alley next to the AIDS Project Los Angeles office in Hollywood.

It was 1986, and Pieters was scheduled to participate in a five-member panel to ...Read more

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court agreed Friday to rule on extending federal civil rights law to protect workers who seek to take time off for religious observance.

The justices voted to hear an appeal from a former U.S. postal worker and evangelical Christian who was disciplined and eventually quit because he refused to deliver packages on ...Read more

LOS ANGELES — The men's choir had just brought down the house with the gospel classic "Miracle Worker" when Thema Bryant danced up to the lectern at First AME Church in South L.A.

Rising to the full height of her slim, 5-foot-7 frame, the 49-year-old ordained minister and psychologist smiled wide at the congregation before launching into her ...Read more

Locked inside the Jehovah's Witnesses world headquarters are secret files detailing sexual abuse by members of the religious denomination. Some of those files are slowly coming to light thanks to a grand jury investigation by state Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro's office that was spurred by The Inquirer.

With Shapiro scheduled to be...Read more

LOS ANGELES — In his first column as publisher of the National Catholic Reporter, former television executive and journalist Joe Ferullo declared that the Roman Catholic Church is at a crossroads, pulled between two radically different visions for its future.

Writing in early December, Ferullo explained that a series of synods, or listening ...Read more

SAN DIEGO — Twice a week, Olga Ponomareva dresses in some of her nicest clothing to stand on a sidewalk in La Jolla Shores with a display of pamphlets about the Bible.

Most of the pamphlets are in Russian or Ukrainian. Ponomareva smiles and waits. She does not approach anyone but welcomes conversations from passersby.

For Ponomareva, these ...Read more

BALTIMORE — Legislation that would give childhood victims of sexual abuse a chance to sue their abusers, regardless of when it happened, has the support of a key Maryland state senator.

Sen. Will Smith, the Democratic chair of the Judicial Proceedings Committee, told The Baltimore Sun he would support what’s previously been known as the “...Read more

CHICAGO — The Catholic Archdiocese of Chicago reinstated influential Faith Community of St. Sabina leader Fr. Michael Pfleger on Saturday following an investigation into abuse allegations against the priest.

Pfleger was forced away from the church in mid-October after a man in his 40s alleged the priest sexually abused him in the late 1980s, ...Read more

ATLANTA -- The way the Rev. Will Dyer sees it, if pastors aren’t speaking out against Christian nationalism, then they’re making a huge mistake.

Dyer, senior pastor of First Baptist Church of Augusta, Georgia, has addressed the ideology in his sermons and in private conversations with members, cautioning against the philosophy that some say...Read more

BALTIMORE — For years, the three Roman Catholic dioceses operating parishes in Maryland have successfully lobbied lawmakers to keep sexual abuse survivors from filing lawsuits against the church, a review of lobbying records shows.

Over the past five years, the Maryland Catholic Conference, the church’s public policy arm for the three ...Read more

A lawyer the Catholic Church is paying to represent a group of people named in the Maryland attorney general’s report into clergy sexual abuse previously urged government investigators to look into the church’s past.

Gregg Bernstein, who was Baltimore state’s attorney from 2010 until 2014, met with a group of Catholic abuse victims in ...Read more

BALTIMORE — Women featured in “The Keepers,” a 2017 Netflix documentary series about clergy sexual abuse at a Baltimore-area Catholic girls school in the 1960s and ‘70s, expanded on their request Friday for the full public release of a report examining sexual misconduct by clergy throughout the Archdiocese of Baltimore.

Teresa Lancaster...Read more

BALTIMORE — Abuse survivors who were featured in “The Keepers,” a widely viewed 2017 Netflix documentary about clergy sexual misconduct at a Baltimore Catholic girls’ school in the 1960s and ’70s, have filed a court motion calling for the full release of a report by the Maryland attorney general on sexual abuse by clergy and other ...Read more

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — A late clergyman who served the Roman Catholic Diocese of Sacramento for four decades has been accused for the first time of sexually assaulting a child, joining dozens of Sacramento clergy previously implicated in the Catholic Church’s decades-old abuse scandal.

In a lawsuit filed in Alameda County Superior Court, a 60...Read more

BALTIMORE — After saying it would not oppose the release of a report detailing decades of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church in Maryland, the Archdiocese of Baltimore is helping to pay lawyers for an anonymous group that’s asked a city judge to keep secret arguments over whether to make the document public.

A spokesperson for the ...Read more

PHILADELPHIA — The Rev. Dr. Chauncey Pierre Harrison looked barely older than a teenager when he stepped into the pulpit at Zion Baptist Church for the first time as a guest preacher at age 26.

But Harrison, now 32, and in his fourth year as Zion’s senior pastor, has shown no fear about taking a position once held by the late Rev. Leon H. ...Read more