Highlights from a 2008 Harris Poll nation-wide survey of 2,126 U.S. adults:

• Americans who believe in God: 80 percent (unchanged since the last survey in 2005)
  
  
• Americans who believe Jesus is the Son of God: 71 percent
  
  
• Americans who believe in the resurrection of Jesus: 70 percent
  
  
• Americans who believe in the Virgin Birth: 61 percent
  
  
• Americans who believe in the survival of the soul after death: 68 percent
  
  

A new report released Monday, June 23, by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life demonstrates the myriad ways that faith in America is more variegated and nuanced than it may appear at first glance.

Researchers for Pew's U.S. Religious Landscape Survey analyzed the religious practices of more than 35,000 U.S. adults and found that they generally embrace their own faith while respecting—and sometimes ...

Sometimes the uniqueness of the revealed Word of God and the gospel of Jesus Christ is seen most clearly when contrasted with other spiritual beliefs.

Lauding the Dalai Lama as one of the world's 100 most influential leaders, author Deepak Chopra wrote in Time magazine:

The most inspiring thing [the Dalai Lama] ever told me was to ignore all organized faiths and keep to the road of higher consciousness. ...

In the film The Bucket List, Edward (Jack Nicholson) and Carter (Morgan Freeman) are both terminally ill. Doctors have given them about one year to live, so they make a list of things they always wanted to do before they "kicked the bucket"—and go about doing them, one by one. The list includes skydiving, racing vintage Mustangs, and seeing the wonders of the world. In this scene, Edward and ...

I believe in God. I believe in Jesus and Buddha and Mohammed and all those that were enlightened. I wouldn't say necessarily that I'm a strict Christian. I'm not sure I believe in heaven.

—Rock singer Sheryl Crow in an interview with the New York Postin September of 2005

The following is from a USA Today article detailing the decline of water baptism in many American churches:

There are now baptism-style ceremonies where God is never mentioned by parents seeking to initiate their children into a world of all faiths, says Ema Drouillard of San Francisco, who runs the website Ceremonyway.com.

She conducted such an event for Kirsten and Farnum _______ of Marin County, ...

How do people argue for the church to accept the practice of homosexuality? Here is how Chicago Tribune correspondent Charlie Madigan reasons:

One of the things I have never been able to understand about religion is its capacity for setting up barriers.

If belief is a pathway toward God, what should sexual orientation have to do with any of that? If you can sit in your apartment and pray to the very ...

Pluralists contend that no one religion can know the fullness of spiritual truth, and therefore all religions are valid. But while it is good to acknowledge our limitations, this statement is itself a strong assertion about the nature of spiritual truth.

A common analogy is cited—the blind men trying to describe an elephant. One feels the tail and reports that an elephant is thin and flexible. Another ...

Theologian Helmut Thielicke once visited the United States and toured the United Nations building in New York. When he was shown the "chapel" in the UN building, he was appalled. It was a room decorated by spotlights and little else. Thielicke commented:

The spotlights were ignorant of what they were illuminating, and the responsible men who were invited to come to this room were not shown to whom ...

Tolerance is one of today's most coveted virtues. But there are at least three different kinds of tolerance.

First, there is legal tolerance: fighting for the equal rights before the law of all ethnic and religious minorities. Christians should be in the forefront of this campaign.

Second, there is social tolerance, going out of our way to make friends with adherents of other faiths, since they are ...