John Smithbaker knows firsthand the devastating effects of fatherlessness on a young boy. He also understands today’s societal blight of millions of children growing up without fathers.

On Veterans Day, I remember. I remember Carl and his young teenage bride, Diane, and her pain.

“A Christmas Story” (driven by its popularity among post-Boomers) has become the quintessential American film for Christmas, replacing “It’s a Wonderful Life.” Dr. White argues that the great divide between “It’s a Wonderful Life” and “A Christmas Story” is more than just the radical individualism that marks our day as Time Magazine has suggested, but what has spawned such individualism.

Twitter, Facebook, eBooks, news feeds, mobile apps are all information sources that didn’t exist just a few years ago, and they are changing the way the modern consumer processes information. These digital mediums have introduced to reading and to information a whole new level of scrolling, skimming and synopsizing. Barna Group’s new study uncovers three of the trends that are redefining the information age.

They’re rarely at worship services and indifferent to doctrine. And they’re surprisingly fuzzy on Jesus. These are the Jewish Americans sketched in a new Pew Research Center survey, 62 percent of whom said Jewishness is largely about culture or ancestry and just 15 percent who said it’s about religious belief. But it’s not just Jews. It’s a phenomenon among U.S. Christians, too. Meet the “Nominals” — people who claim a religious identity but may live it in name only.

Virtually everyone agrees that Syria is a humanitarian and geopolitical mess. What’s open to debate is what, if anything, the United States should do about it.

The percentage of Americans who say they “seldom” or “never” attend religious services (aside from weddings and funerals) has risen modestly in the past decade. Of course, how often people say they usually attend services is not necessarily the same as how often they actually do attend.

The battle over gay marriage is heating up in the states, energizing religious groups that oppose same-sex relationships — but also dividing them.

The share of Americans who claim no particular religion doubled from 7% to 14% in the 1990s, as sociologists Michael Hout and Claude Fischer reported in an influential 2002 article based on the General Social Survey. A decade later, the Pew Research Center found that one-in-five U.S. adults (and fully a third of those ages 18-30) have no religious affiliation. On Aug. 8, 2013, the Pew Research Center brought together some of the leading experts in survey research on religion in the U.S. for a round-table discussion with journalists, scholars and other stakeholders on the rise of the religious “nones” and other important trends in American religion.

In His infinite grace, God gives us a glimpse of the end to put away our fears as we look toward the future.