BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: We look back today at what we think were the top religion stories of 2007. John Allen is the Vatican correspondent for National Catholic Reporter. Kim Lawton is a correspondent and the managing editor of RELIGION & ETHICS NEWSWEEKLY. And Kevin Eckstrom is the editor of Religion News Service. Welcome to you all.

Kevin, let's start with what's going on with the religious right. Is there a name for it? What do you call it?

KEVIN ECKSTROM (Editor, Religion News Service): I would call it a realignment more than anything, and I think what's significant about 2007 is there was no one big thing that happened, but there were a bunch of smaller things. When you put them all together, it sort of points to the idea that there's change in the air. You had a generation change in leadership: Jerry Falwell died; James Kennedy died in Florida. You have decisions by, like, the Christian Coalition to decide to sit out the presidential race. They've never done that before. The new head of the National Association of Evangelicals has said he'd rather conduct a funeral or a wedding rather than meet with a candidate, and you have this whole sort of new range of issues that people are interested in -- issues like the environment, global warming, and poverty -- that have not been the traditional vanguard issues of the religious right in the past. And so if you put all that together and kind of connect the dots, you see that there's not the cohesion among the religious right that we've seen in recent years, and that is evidenced by their inability to sort of get behind and coalesce behind a single candidate.

ABERNETHY: Possibly Huckabee?

Mr. ECKSTROM: Possibly Mike Huckabee, and he may be the candidate that everyone been waiting for. No one thought he had a chance. Whether that translates into electability in November is a completely different question that bears watching.

ABERNETHY: And Kim, you have a new blog on our Web site, "One Nation," and you've been covering this race. What's going on? Have they really -- have the evangelicals really found their candidate?

KIM LAWTON (Managing Editor, RELIGION & ETHICS NEWSWEEKLY): Well, you know, part of the reason why we started the blog was there's so much happening. We needed a way to keep up with it all. And I do think that there is some realigning maybe going on, but the religious right is not dead, and certainly there is still a very large, very important group of conservative voters that will be active in this election, and they're already sort of making their clout known. But you've also got, you've got a Mormon running for president -- Mitt Romney having to explain whether or not he's really a Christian. You've got a pro-choice, divorced Roman Catholic Republican, Rudy Giuliani, running. You've got Democrats Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama reaching out to religious communities -- not just black churches but reaching out to evangelicals. So there's a lot of God-talk, there's a lot of religion going on, and certainly Mike Huckabee, the former Southern Baptist minister, is another example of that.

ABERNETHY: John, welcome back from Rome.

JOHN ALLEN (Vatican Correspondent, National Catholic Reporter): Thanks, Bob.

ABERNETHY: You were here also when the U.S. Catholic bishops were debating how to word their guidelines this year as people think about how to vote, and it raises the question of the moral authority of the bishops. After the sex abuse scandal, to what extent did people really pay attention to what the bishops say?

Mr. ALLEN: Well, there's no question the scandal has hurt them, and this year saw a new wave, in a way, of the sex abuse litigation -- a $660 million settlement in Los Angeles bringing the total payout now to more than $2 billion. It's been an enormous blow, and not just in the court of public opinion, obviously, but also in terms of the internal life of the church. But at the same time, I mean, being a bishop is still a big, bully pulpit. You know, there are some 230 active Catholic bishops in the United States, and when they can get together and launch a message, as we saw in 2007 with their engagement on the immigration issue, we can still cut some teeth. Now with this document the bishops adopted this year, their so-called "Faithful Citizenship" voter's guide, I think they're tying to do two things. One is to inject themselves into the politics of '08 in trying to put the issues they care about -- including immigration but also of course the pro-life issues, abortion, euthanasia, heterosexual marriage and all of that -- trying to put that on the agenda. But they're also trying to do something else, which is get their own house in order by bringing the peace-and-justice constituency of the Catholic Church, and the pro-life constituency, which had been badly splintered in recent past, and we saw that clearly in '04 -- trying to put them back on the same page.

ABERNETHY: That's interesting. And taking you back to Rome now and to the pope, I'm thinking about the relationship between Christians and Muslims. A hundred and thirty eight, perhaps more, Muslim leaders sent a letter to the pope saying let's talk. Let's have a dialogue. How's that coming out?

Mr. ALLEN: Well, I think this is one of the really unappreciated stories of '07. You know, Bob, since 9/11 we've been asking, where are the centrist Muslims with whom we can have a dialogue? And it's been difficult, because the Muslim world doesn't have a Vatican. There's no central administrative structure, a door you can go to knock on. We've been waiting, in a way, to get organized, so the conversation can take place, and really, what we saw in '07 is the first outlines of such an ad-hoc structure taking shape in the form of this letter from 138 Muslim scholars and leaders and jurists, representing all of the major and even many of the minor branches of the Islamic world, addressed not just to the pope but also to 25 other Christian leaders, including the Archbishop of Constantinople and the Archbishop of Canterbury, saying that we can find common theological ground around the issues of love of God and love of neighbor, and let's have a conversation. I think that's an extraordinarily important development. The pope has now invited Prince Ghazi in Jordan to organize a meeting with some of these scholars with the pope in Rome to try to carry the conversation further. That's going to be a very interesting story to watch.

ABERNETHY: Some Protestants, a lot of Protestant leaders were quick to respond very enthusiastically to that proposal from the Muslims, too. Will they be any part of that meeting in Rome?

Mr. ALLEN: Well, it'll be interesting. The Vatican has just begun to try to put some flesh on this conversation. I think, in many ways, the ball is going to be in the court of Prince Ghazi in Jordan, as the organizing authorities, so to speak, to try to figure out how to make this happen. One of the wrinkles here is that the Vatican has been waiting for a number of years to try to open a theological conversation with the Islamic world. Now that the Islamic world seems prepared to do that, the Vatican is beginning to have some second thoughts about whether talking theology is really the best way to begin, or whether we really ought to be talking about diplomatic and political questions -- above all the question of religious freedom for Christian minorities in the Islamic world, which is not an altogether encouraging story these days.

ABERNETHY: Kim, you spent a lot of time with the Episcopal bishops this year. What's the state there? What's the state of play in the split in the Episcopal Church?

Ms. LAWTON: Well, it was a big year for that controversy, not just within the Episcopal Church but within the broader worldwide Anglican Communion. The year started with the top leaders of the Anglican Communion really putting the U.S. church on notice, giving what some called an ultimatum, saying we need to hear what you're going to do about gay bishops, same-sex blessings. At the end of September, the U.S. bishops, Episcopal bishops, said we're going to exercise restraint in consecrating any more gay bishops, and we're not going to, as a body, authorize same sex blessings. But they left the door open for those blessings to happen at the local level. That wasn't enough for some of the real conservatives, and indeed over the past year many have started to leave the denomination. Some are actually aligning with churches in Africa, and you saw Americans being consecrated as bishops of the Anglican Church of Nigeria, the Anglican Church of Kenya. So you've got these realignments again taking place here, and it's putting a lot of pressure on the worldwide church.

ABERNETHY: Yeah. And Kevin, a lot of the other American Protestant denominations are watching what's going on with the Episcopalians.

Mr. ECKSTROM: Right, and I think that's a big part of this story that sometimes doesn't -- that gets lost is it's not just, it doesn't matter just what happens to the Episcopalians. But you've got other groups -- the Lutherans, the Methodists, the Presbyterians -- all of the sort of the old mainline churches who are watching this very carefully to find out how this plays out. And we see in California where the first diocese has voted to basically secede from the Episcopal Church. Everyone's watching that to see how much does it cost, how long does it take in the courts, you know --

Ms. LAWTON: -- who gets the property --

Mr. ECKSTROM: Yeah. How ugly is it, and depending on how that comes out that may really impact how other churches choose to deal with this issue.

ABERNETHY: You were talking about the relations, Kim, between an American church and churches in the Third World, and John, that's part of a huge shift that's going on in Christianity, right?

Mr. ALLEN: Oh, I think this is one of the mega-trends in global Christianity today, which is the eruption of the global South -- Africa, Asia, Latin America, but perhaps especially Africa as a protagonist of the global Christian scene, which it really has not been since the fourth century, since the era of Augustine. Christianity in sub-Saharan Africa in the 20th century went from roughly eight million in 1,900 to about 140 million or more in the Catholic Church and 360 million in terms of the total Christian population. I mean, that's a growth rate of almost 7,000 percent. You know, it's absolutely phenomenal, and with those kinds of numbers and that kind of energy, Africa is making itself felt. And in that sense I think what's happening -- the crisis in the Anglican Communion -- is really a kind of canary in the coal mine for a much deeper phenomenon going on in Christianity, which is an eruption of the developing world.

Ms. LAWTON: And it's interesting watching some of the white, Western world deal with this and deal with these African leaders who say, hey, we need to be taken seriously here.

ABERNETHY: Kevin, one of the great stories of the year for me was seeing all of the Buddhist monks in Myanmar out in the streets protesting the government, indicating -- the crackdown was awful, but that they were there, out in the streets -- indicating what?

Mr. ECKSTROM: I think it does two things. One is that is sort of shows that the government in Myanmar has lost its moral authority when you've got these sort of peace-loving Buddhist monks saying that there's something wrong here and we're going to protest by the hundreds out in the streets to show it. I think the other thing, and maybe this is more important, is that it really put a human face on a faraway place for a lot of people. I mean, a lot of Americans, I would imagine, would be hard-pressed to find Myanmar on a map, and when you see, you know, the footage of this and you see the monks out there and protesting, it sort of says there's something going on here and maybe we should pay a little bit more attention. So I think it really sort of put a human face on the problem.

ABERNETHY: Kim, here at home there were some weeks there when the best-seller lists in the newspapers seem to be pretty heavy with books by atheists. What's going on?

Ms. LAWTON: Well, this was a trend that actually began last year as well. But I think you've seen atheist writers have really found an audience in the U.S., and they're doing very well with it. We should note though that along with some of these best-sellers like Christopher Hitchens' WHY GOD IS NOT GREAT and some of the others, there were still a lot of religiously-oriented books on the best-sellers list this year. Megachurch pastors T.D Jakes and Joel Osteen certainly are up there. So it's not that the atheists have taken over, but certainly they've found an audience.

ABERNETHY: But at the same time, John, that there seemed to be this anti-religious interest, there was going on a lot of interest in very traditional religious practice.

Mr. ALLEN: Yeah, that's been a fascinating thing to watch, I noticed that as well, is a kind of eruption of tradition and a kind of return to very traditional modes of devotion and spiritual practice, which tends to cut across denominational and religious boundaries. I mean, we see in the Jewish world, even in Reform congregations, a greater use of Hebrew and a deeper appreciation for traditional forms of prayer. In the Catholic world, obviously, the big-ticket symbol of all of this was Pope Benedict XVI's decision to widen permission for celebration of the old Latin mass, the Latin mass from before the Second Vatican Council called the Tridentine rite, and although there hasn't been a big mass-market explosion of interest, there certainly are increasing numbers, and I think all of this says something about the nature of a postmodern world in which change happens so fast -- we're all reinventing our lives everyday in a way -- but there's this hunger for connection to something that runs very deep.

ABERNETHY: Our time is almost up. Let me ask you each very quickly, was there something that happened in the year past that you think we kind of missed, we didn't give enough attention to? Kim?

Ms. LAWTON: Well, something we didn't even talk about here yet: Iraq. The Iraq war and some of the religious concerns, especially humanitarian concerns, about refugees, persecution of minorities like Christians in Iraq, the sort of ethical questions about exiting -- all of that didn't, the religious part of that didn't get a lot of attention.

ABERNETHY: Kevin?

Mr. ECKSTROM: A case that got some attention, but it's worth watching, is the court decision in Baltimore against Fred Phelps and his protesters -- the "God hates fags" people. There are really serious questions there about religious free speech in America that's worth watching.

ABERNETHY: John, very quickly?

Mr. ALLEN: The disappearance of the Christian population in the Middle East and what this means in terms of Christian-Muslim relations, and also what it means for the presence of Christianity in the place where it all began.

ABERNETHY: Thanks to Kevin Eckstrom of Religion News Service, Kim Lawton of this program, and John Allen of National Catholic Reporter.