Sexual minorities in Africa have become 'collateral damage' in church conflicts as US conservative evangelicals and those opposing gay priests, ministers and bishops within mainline Protestant denominations woo Africans.

Lutheran leaders in the United States have joined other church chiefs in condemning the killing of abortion doctor George Tiller in the lobby of Reformation Lutheran Church in Wichita, Kansas, where he served and worshipped.

After hardline Catholics had sought to prevent Notre Dame University from inviting President Barack Obama to give a commencement address, his call for people of divergent convictions to find common ground in reason and faith was warmly received.

Hardline lobbyists in the USA have launched a campaign to try to stop one of the country's leading Catholic universities from having President Barack Obama as a campus speaker.

A key figure on the US religious right, which is anxious that its political grip on the large evangelical constituency in America is waning, has launched an attack on Senator Barack Obama and his Christian credentials.

Traditional categories of right and left don't always work when applied to faith, says Giles Fraser. Yet there is no comfort for the 'religious right' in the Christmas Gospel, which is about giving not consuming and love not power-mongering.

Despite intense lobbying from the religious right in the USA, the Democratic-led House of Representatives has defied a White House veto threat by voting to outlaw workplace discrimination based on sexual orientation.

The president of the National Council of Churches of Christ in the USA (NCCUSA) says the majority of the Christians in America do not share a religious right pundit's views on Jewish people.