Pact is a national nonprofit that provides education and adoption service to children of color, their birth parents and their adoptive parents. Beth Hall is the founder and executive director.

The Child Welfare League of America in Arlington, Va., is a coalition of hundreds of private and public member agencies and a leader in the national child welfare movement, beginning with efforts to abolish orphanages in the 1920s and ’30s. The organization also is a center for information about cultural and racial diversity, including efforts […]

Read an April 6, 2011, story at CNBC.com on the current wave of apocalypticism.

Read an April 28, 2011, column at Religion Dispatches by Peter Laarman that compares religious and secular “end times” impulses.

Read a March 18, 2011, essay at First Things by Meghan Duke, in which she recounts the history of failed prophecies and critiques the tendency to believe in them.

Read a May 20, 2011, essay at the Science + Religion blog that explores the appeal of apocalyptic thinking for secular people.

Michael Shermer, author of The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies — How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths (2011), wrote a June 7, 2011, column in New Scientist explaining that for both religious and secular people, apocalyptic thinking is spurred by a desire to bring order to the randomness of events.

CEO, pastor and rap recording artist Del Lawrence, aka Mr. Del, was a member of a secular – and explicit – rap group, Three 6 Mafia, before he became a Christian in 2001. Since then, he says, he has been rapping for God. Lawrence leads City of Refuge Church in Memphis, Tenn.; records with EMI Gospel; […]

Read a column from The Nation, the liberal periodical where Hitchens wrote before he broke with that camp, in which Katha Pollitt tempers some of the praise with critical recollections of Hitchens’ drinking, writing and approach to women.