ReligionDispatches.org

For years, James Dobson has been the voice and face of Focus on the Family. Now, as he steps aside, his successor on FoF’s daily radio show, Jim Daly, will be bringing a softer voice, and a wider agenda, to the program and the organization:

For those still undecided about the relations between sports and religion, here are a few brief recaps from Superbowl XLIV. In no significant order:

The Texas Board of Education’s ongoing battle over rewriting its social studies curriculum has gotten its fair share of attention from the national media. But the religious right has been fairly quiet on the subject outside of the Lone Star State.

This weekend, Mike Huckabee will step into the fray, delivering national exposure to a conservative market. Mathew Staver of Liberty Counsel and dean of Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University law school, will be a guest on Fox News’ Huckabee show to discuss the curriculum revisions.

This post has been updated.

Today is the one-year anniversary of the creation of the Obama administration's Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, and its accompanying Advisory Council. While candidate Obama had promised to fix the constitutional problems with the Bush-era Faith-Based Initiative, President Obama backtracked on those promises.

Obama had made three pledges: to end the exemption allowing federal grantees to discriminate in hiring based on religion; to require houses of worship receiving federal grants to form separate non-profits so that federal funds would not be directed to sectarian organizations; and to put in place oversight and monitoring of proselytizing by federal grantees.

The failed attempt by a would-be Nigerian terrorist to bring down a Delta aircraft over Detroit on Christmas Day must surely rank as the loudest non-explosion whose reverberations have quite literally been heard around the world. International travel over the next week was an adventure, to put it mildly. In Athens, everyone traveling to the United States was patted down and all carry-on items were unpacked and closely examined, without exception; travelers were not permitted to purchase liquids of any kind, even in the duty-free shops. These developments may soon become standard operating procedure.