I’m going back to examine an interesting January article that got lost in the Get Religion shuffle.

When the late Richard John Neuhaus argued for greater participation in civic life by people of faith in his classic 1984 book, his title was metaphorical. The Naked Public Square warned about the crisis of faith confronting a democracy that legislates religious faith to the periphery of cultural life.

It’s been a while since we’ve heard from Richard Cizik, who ably served as the National Association of Evangelicals’ liaison to Washington, D.C. for decades.

In “The Jihadist Next Door,” Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Andrea Elliott’s Sunday cover story in The New York Times Magazine, Elliott turns her laser focus on the journey of one American youngster who decides to join a Somali terrorist group linked to Al Qaeda.

Gayle Haggard, the loyal wife of fallen evangelical mega-pastor Ted Haggard, was all over the mainstream media world (Oprah, “Today,” etc.) last week promoting her new book: “Why I Stayed: The Choices I Made in My Darkest Hour.”

Let’s gather ’round the TV as we celebrate one of America’s biggest holidays, Super Bowl Sunday. And if the game’s a dud we can laugh at the commercials, many of which feature beer and babes.

On December 1, 2009, CBA (which was formerly called the Christian Booksellers Association, back when Christian bookstores sold more books than gifts and other merchandise) asked the Department of Justice to investigate alleged predatory pricing by big-box stores and online retailers that threatens the very existence of the nation’s dwindling number of Christian retailing outlets.

In my last post I wrote about how people read a film like “Avatar,” seeing what they want to see (or what they most fear). Now, a new research paper seeks to prove that the same thing happens in other areas of life.

Not when it comes to how people view movies. The bigger the movie, and the more people who see it, the more interpretations that arise. At least that’s what Dave Itzkoff of The New York Times describes in: “You Saw What in ‘Avatar’? Pass Those Glasses!”

You can learn a lot about a family by observing how it handles fights. And Laurie Goodstein’s Sunday New York Times story shows that as the breach between James Dobson and Focus on the Family grows, all parties are keeping quiet and pretending everything is OK.

I’m always curious to see how the Vatican will take on pop culture, as it did in its recent comments celebrating the 20th anniversary of TV’s “The Simpsons.”