The Southern Baptists try to broaden their appeal, the Catholic Bishops maintain their sex abuse policy, and the White House defends the US military mission in Libya.

Sixteen years after a mostly peaceful transition and elections that brought Nelson Mandela to power, the verdict on South Africa is decidedly mixed.

We’re segregated in housing. The job market is segregated, and we end up going to churches with people who look like us. Experts say US churches are ten times less diverse than the neighborhoods they sit in.

Read more of Lucky Severson’s interview about interracial churches with Rice University sociology professor Michael Emerson.

When was the last time Pennsylvania Avenue and Times Square and countless other locations across the country were packed with crowds at 1:00 in the morning following a presidential election? The same nation that elected George Bush by the hanging chads of 2000 has just given the presidency to someone who was relatively unknown at that time.

We have a story today about two young men who grew up together best friends -- one white, one black -- and then took different religious paths. One became an Orthodox Jewish rabbi, the other a Muslim.

April 4, 2008 is the 40th anniversary of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He was in Memphis to help striking sanitation workers get recognition for their union. We look at some of the very different ways African-American ministers today are trying to carry on the King legacy.

All over Western Europe, not least in Britain, the traditional majority is struggling to assimilate a fast-growing Muslim minority. Some of the Muslims, especially some of the younger ones, are said to be alienated and militant and, as Saul Gonzales reports from London, that is testing the tolerance of the majority.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — the Mormons — barred African-Americans from full membership until 1978. Since then, the church has increased its outreach to African-American communities, but has yet to repudiate its old teachings that blacks were cursed by God as descendents of Cain or Ham.

Read the funeral tribute to Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta by Methodist theologian L. Harold DeWolf.