The CIA World Factbook contains data on Roman Catholic population percentages across the globe, as well as information about Vatican City.

Read this excerpt from the preface of Introducing Liberation Theology (Orbis Books, 1987) by Leonardo and Clodovis Boff.

Read the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith’s 1984 document, “Instruction on Certain Aspects of the Theology of Liberation,” signed by Cardinal Ratzinger.

Read this article published in The New York Times on May 8, 2005, two weeks after Pope Benedict XVI’s Papal Inauguration Mass.

Leonard Norman Primiano is Chair and Professor of Religious Studies at Cabrini College in Radnor, Pa. He contributed a chapter on the supernatural on television in God in the Details: American Religion in Popular Culture, edited by Eric Mazur (Routledge, 2000). A recent publication is “I Wanna Do Bad Things With You: Fantasia on Themes of American […]

William Dinges is a professor of religious studies at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., and an expert on American Catholicism. He says the growing divide between what is “religious” and what is “spiritual” has resulted in spirituality that lends itself easily to supernatural and paranormal phenomena. He is a co-author of Young Adult Catholics: […]

Read the transcript of a March 9, 2001, Religion & Ethics Newsweekly program on Celtic spirituality, which discusses the Celts’ sense of nature as “the theatre of divine presence.”

Brendan Freeman is a Cistercian monk and abbot of New Melleray Abbey, a community of about 30 monks in Peosta, Iowa. The monks hand-make wooden caskets and urns that they bill as a “soulful alternative” to more elaborate caskets.