Last week the Public Religion Research Institute’s big survey on immigration showed, unsurprisingly, that white evangelicals are the ethno-religious group least supportive of a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants.

The White House let Melissa Rogers speak to the press on the record today, but to say that the new head of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships (OFANP) was on a short leash would strain the bounds of understatement.

Anyone who follows the hierarchy of the Catholic Church knows that Job One over the past few years has been something called The New Evangelization. Pope Benedict created a Pontifical Council to advance it. But Pope Francis has sent signals that he’s not entirely down with the program.

Pope Francis is taking the world by storm. Let us count the ways he’s appealing to me.

There is widespread agreement that dealing with the abuse scandal needs to be a top priority for Pope Francis. And so far as I can tell, Pope Francis has never done or said anything about a particular case or the situation in general that has received public notice.

Pope Francis meets the criterion of personal holiness that so many were looking for in the new pontiff–a “servant of the servants of God” in the spirit of his namesake, St. Francis of Assisi. A staunch advocate for the poor in an age of globalization, he seems like just the man to inspire the wavering [...]

It would be hard to imagine a better choice to head the White Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships than Melissa Rogers. Since her days as general counsel for the Baptist Joint Committee, Rogers has been one of Washington’s leading players in the church-state arena–a traditional Baptist separationist with a talent for forging consensus.

You’d never guess it from the media smoke swirling around St. Peter’s these past few weeks, but the consensus is pretty much yes.

That’s the proposition advanced by conservative pundit Mary Eberstadt in her contribution to the Wall Street Journal’s roundup of what-to look-for-in-a-new-pope essays. I have my doubts

I’ve been waiting for the GetReligionistas to chastise the MSM for overlooking the religious dimension of the Hugo Chavez story, but in vain. So I guess I better do it myself.