The cover of the August 12 edition of Time magazine is meant to be provocative. A trim young man and a matching woman — possibly in their late 20s to early 30s — lie alone on a beach, arms linked, wearing bathing suits, shades, and no visible wedding rings. But the controversial part is the accompanying text: “The Childfree Life: When having it all means not having children.” “The birthrate in the U.S. is the lowest in recorded American history,” reports Lauren Sandler of Time.

Regardless of their views about the legality of abortion, most Americans think that having an abortion is a moral issue. By contrast, the public is much less likely to see other issues involving human embryos – such as stem cell research or in vitro fertilization – as a matter of morality.

Barna Group’s most recent survey compares Americans’ descriptions of themselves from the early 2000s until now, illuminating how much American life has changed in the past decade, and how Americans see themselves moving forward into the future.

Reza Aslan’s best-selling book, “Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth,” belongs to that genre of works devoted to unearthing the “real historical Jesus.” In Aslan’s retelling, Jesus made no claims to divinity, nor did he interpret his life and death as the crowning act of God’s redemptive mission on earth. Rather, he writes, Jesus was “a zealous revolutionary, swept up, as all Jews of the era were, in the religious and political turmoil of first-century Palestine.”

Internet pornography is probably the number one pastoral problem in the world today. The Christian church is currently mesmerized by developments relative to sexuality, not least because these development are couched in the rhetoric of civil rights and have serious legal implications. I wonder if a more serious and lethal internal issue for the church will actually turn out to be pornography.

There is, at present, no method of slowing the aging process and extending average life expectancies to 120 years or more. But research aimed at unlocking the secrets of aging is under way at universities and corporate labs, and religious leaders, bioethicists and philosophers have begun to think about the morality of radical life extension, according to two accompanying reports released by the Pew Research Center’s Religion & Public Life Project in conjunction with the new survey.

A society that devalues human life and then airbrushes God out of public view is brewing a toxic mix.

Since Roe vs. Wade, the U.S. Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion 40 years ago, anti-abortion activists have successfully passed legislation regulating and restricting the right to an abortion, and they have been successful at moving public opinion in their direction. On the marriage issue, though, public opinion has moved in recent years toward allowing the redefinition of marriage to include same-sex couples. Given that the pro-life and pro-marriage causes are two of the core issues of the Christian Right social movement, why is the former winning and the latter losing?

Common secular sentiment often encourages young people to ease into a marriage by living together first. According to a recent study by RAND sociologists Michael Pollard and Kathleen Mullan Harris, the strategy often fails.

Angela Merkel recently revealed that as a young woman she was once approached by the infamous and much-feared Stasi ,the state security service of East Germany, which tried to recruit her to work for them. She refused. When President Obama visited Berlin earlier this month, the Stasi was in the news again. Chancellor Merkel publicly scolded the American president in light of the NSA revelations.