A new pope from Latin America known for ministering to the poor in his country’s slums is raising the hopes of advocates of liberation theology, whose leftist social activism had alarmed previous pontiffs.

With their distinctive, colourful turbans, their storied industry, and their expansive presence all over the world across a range of professions, Sikhs are easily India's most prominent ethnic community.

It looked like the backlash was starting even before the suspects in the Boston Marathon bombing were identified as Muslim.

President Obama spoke to nearly a thousand Planned Parenthood supporters Friday, telling them that moves to restrict abortion access across the country represented an effort “to turn back the clock to policies more suited to the 1950s than the 21st century.”

The number of U.S. states allowing gay marriage is set to enter double digits now that Rhode Island's state Senate has taken a landmark vote.

When the bombs at the Boston Marathon exploded a week ago Monday, a familiar chain of events and emotions unfolded for many in the American Muslim community: shock and grief, followed by an unspoken dread that the perpetrators could be Muslim; condemnation of the attack; fear of reprisals – and of being conflated with the acts of violence; and quietly, an inward examination of what went wrong.

After two vote delays and in the midst of an intense debate among lawmakers, who made use of legal and religious arguments, the Colombian Senate late Wednesday rejected a bill that would have legalized gay marriage.

The injured suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings has told interrogators that he and his brother were driven by hard-line Islamist views and anger over the U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq but had no ties to foreign militant groups, U.S. officials said Tuesday.

Host Jacki Lyden talks to Omid Safi, professor of religious studies at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Safi has blogged about the Tsarnaev brothers, the suspects in the Boston Marathon bombings, and what it means to the American Islamic community that the brothers are Muslim.

For 35 years, Michigan law has protected health care providers who refuse to perform an abortion on moral or religious grounds.

In the jarring aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombings, the Saudi Arabian embassy and consulate prepared for the worst.

No one seemed satisfied Friday when the Boy Scouts of America proposed a historic policy change to allow openly gay youths as Scouts while simultaneously maintaining a ban on gay adult volunteers and paid staff.

The state attorney general’s surprising lawsuit against a small florist in Eastern Washington has energized gay-marriage opponents who all but disappeared after failing to defeat same-sex marriage in Washington last fall.

A federal appeals court Wednesday grappled with whether a California ban on therapy to change a minor’s sexual orientation amounted to a restriction on free speech or mere regulation of a medical treatment.

After the Rev. Anthony Vincent, the city’s director of emergency services, delivered an opening prayer, the City Council took up some standard issues — maintenance of a traffic light, filling in a pot hole.

Through four weeks, prosecutors have laid out evidence against Dr. Kermit Gosnell, a Philadelphia abortion provider on trial on charges of killing seven viable fetuses by “snipping” their necks with scissors and of causing the death of a pregnant 41-year-old woman during a procedure.

In the pews of the First Baptist Church of Orlando, where thousands of evangelical Christians gather on Sundays to worship and sing, a change of heart is happening on the once toxic issue of immigration.

A proposal to allow nurses and midwives to perform some abortions is advancing in California's Democratic legislature, a move supporters hope will influence the national debate on abortion even as other states are tightening the rules.

Uruguayan lawmakers voted to legalize gay marriage, making the South American country the third in the Americas to do so.

A major new study that tracked more than 12,000 Canadians over a period of 14 years has found that regular attendance of religious service offers significant protection against depression.