Observing a “fast” from Facebook and Twitter and even email is becoming a popular spiritual practice — at Lent, for example — as shown by this Star-Ledger story from March 2009.

Read a Feb. 1, 2013, column at the Patheos website about the tension between Christian dominance and religious freedom in America.

Read a Feb. 7, 2013, CNN story, “Religion, readability and the presidency: a historic combination,” on the presidential tradition, from Washington to Obama, of invoking faith and the national purpose.

Read a Feb. 7, 2013, column from the journal Sightings on presidents’ use of religious references in their inaugural addresses.

President Obama delivered an address at the National Prayer Breakfast on Feb. 7, 2013. Read his full statement here.

Felipe Mesa has just started a house church in Taneytown, Md.

Jared Looney is a church planter involved in house churches in the Bronx, N.Y. He is part of MetroSoul, a cooperative organization of church organizations and church planters working to plant simple churches throughout the New York metropolitan area. He blogs at Urban Ekklesia.

Robert Fitts is a church planter and author of The Church in the House: A Return to Simplicity (Preparing the Way Publishers, 2001). He lives in Kailua-Kona, Hawaii.

Frank Viola is the founder of Present Testimony Ministry and the author of several books on house churches. He lives in Gainesville, Fla.