Emily McFarlan Miller

“I think there’s a moment of great creativity for women leaders in the religious sphere,” said the Rev. Katharine Rhodes Henderson, president of Auburn Theological Seminary, and author of God’s Troublemakers: How Women of Faith Are Changing the World.

“I think that we are seeing, in lots of areas of American life, that some of the traditional structures that served well for a long period of time are no longer doing so. … A time of change means there’s a possibility of new types of leadership and new people doing it.”

Republican vice presidential nominee Mike Pence urged forgiveness for Donald Trump Oct. 12 at Liberty University as evangelical outcry increased in volume over the weekend release of a 2005 video in which Trump is heard making lewd remarks.

“It’s not about condemning what is said and done. It’s about believing in grace and forgiveness,” Pence said at the Lynchburg, Va., school, headed by prominent Christian conservative and Trump backer Jerry Falwell, Jr.

Pence’s Convocation speech, in which he freely shared his testimony as an evangelical Christian, comes two days after Faith & Freedom Coalition leader Ralph Reed laid out the evangelical case for Trump at the largest weekly gathering of Christian students in North America.

The study comes in the same year that Larycia Hawkins — Wheaton College’s first black, female professor to receive tenure — parted ways with the evangelical flagship school after she posted on Facebook that both Christians and Muslims worship the “same God.” The controversy stirred fresh debate among evangelicals about whether all religions worship the same God, and whether God accepts the worship of all religions.

Thank God for the internet.

If you believe in God, that is. For a time, Mike McHargue did, and then he didn’t, and now he does again.

But it’s on the internet where McHargue — better known as “Science Mike” to listeners of “The Liturgists” and “ Ask Science Mike” podcasts — found community when he was questioning his Southern Baptist upbringing and then the atheism he had adopted. And it’s on the internet where he’s forged a community with others like him who can’t comfortably wear either label: Christian or atheist.

"The Reformation gave at least a segment of Christians access to the Bible in a way that hadn’t happened before. Most of our history has been a rather Bible-less Christianity that was dictated or defined mostly by the hierarchical church, not by people who read the Bible. … We gained the freedom to approach it, and then in the current age, we have ceded that exploration to media, to entertainment forms, to prepackaged interpretations that are delivered in video, audio and pulpit forms so that there’s a substitute Bible that isn’t the Bible, per se, at the same time that people aren’t reading."

The civil racketeering lawsuit against former Mars Hill Church pastor Mark Driscoll and former executive elder Sutton Turner has been dismissed before a judge had the chance to consider the case.

The reason: Neither Driscoll nor Turner ever was served with the suit, brought by four former members of the now-defunct Seattle church.

Most American churchgoers are hearing politics from the pulpits of their churches during this presidential election season, according to a new survey.

Nearly two-thirds of the respondents (64 percent) in the survey released Monday by the Pew Research Center say their clergy have spoken about at least one political or social issue in the spring and early summer.

The Focus on the Family founder released his endorsement on July 21, hours before Trump was set to take the stage to accept his party’s nomination on the last night of the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland.

Bishop Karen Oliveto felt called to ministry in the United Methodist Church when she was 11 years old.

But for years Oliveto refused to allow her name to be cast for the role of bishop because she “didn’t want to harm the church,” she said.