“If I know your image of God, I can tell all kinds of things about you.” That profoundly accurate statement was made by Professor Paul Froese of Baylor University, and he was speaking of “American Piety in the 21st Century,” a major new study released Monday.

Steve Salerno is a reporter with wide experience. As a freelance feature writer, Salerno has written for magazines including Harper’s, Esquire, Sports Illustrated, and many others. He has contributed articles to the Los Angeles Times and The Wall Street Journal. Many of his articles have focused upon “money stories,” that deal with financial scandals and controversies in the business world. Now, he is ready to report on the biggest scandal he has ever encountered–America’s self-help movement.

Writing in 1927, French observer Andre Siegfried described Protestantism as America’s “only national religion.” To miss this, Siegfried advised, is “to view the country from a false angle.” Now, less than a century later, a major research report provides proof that Protestantism no longer represents a clear majority of Americans. Researchers Tom W. Smith and Seokho Kim of the National Opinion Research Center [NORC] at the University of Chicago have released “The Vanishing Protestant Majority,” a report documenting the declining membership of Protestant churches in the nation.

Did a squad of U.S. Marines kill 24 Iraqi civilians in Haditha? The charge is among the most serious that can be leveled in a time of war. Just war principles require that combatants protect non-combatants in so far as this is possible. The principle of discrimination holds that civilians are to be protected — even if this means additional risk to combatants.

Philip Marchand argues that the generation born between between the G.I. Generation and the Baby Boomers set the stage for the rebellions of the 1960s and the great social transformations of the 1970s. Writing in The Toronto Sun, Marchand argues that the “In-Between Generation” — born in the 1930s and early 1940s — prepared the way for the Baby Boomers:

No one will agree with everything Professor Bruce Kuklick of the University of Pennsylvania argues in this opinion piece published Sunday in The Los Angeles Times, but it demands to be read anyway. In “Bright and Wrong,” he argues that intellectuals often follow ideologies and fads rather than common sense — especially when it comes to advising U.S. presidents on foreign policy.

Jane Jacobs, the most influential critic of urban planning of our times, died April 25 in Toronto. Her most notable book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, written in 1961, changed the debate over cities in America — even if many of her ideas were rejected by political leaders.

The Guardian [London] is one of the most liberal of Britain’s major daily newspapers, and it is often one of the most interesting. On Good Friday, the paper unleashed an attack upon orthodox believers that breaks new ground in secular intolerance disguised as tolerance.

Abdul Rahman, the Afghan man on trial for converting to Christianity, still faces the prospect of being executed for his faith if convicted by the Afghan court. [See extensive coverage below.]