With more than 1,000 dead in the wake of Nigeria's religious riots between Christians and Muslims, an uneasy calm has returned. The country, led by a Christian but with several states adopting Islamic shari'a law, is "under threat of another civil war," reports the (UK) Independent. Meanwhile, Nigeria's most populated state, Kano, is going ahead and adopting shari'a law despite the violence.

"Religious authority has never been a easy thing to exercise in Vermont," writes Brooks Egerton of The Dallas Morning News. Still, he looks at the religious dimension of the state's clash over gay marriages, and Operation Rescue founder Randall Terry is a main character.

Christians don't have a monopoly on fasting, says The Los Angeles Times. In fact, evangelical Protestants have been slow to accept the practice. But there's a growing movement. Some do it to change the moral direction of the country, others "yearn for a more tactile and traditional expression of an inward search for holiness." Kevin W. Mannoia, the new president of the National Association of Evangelicals, tells the paper, "The virtue of going without food or other things somehow moves God to do something extraordinary."

"The entry of evangelical students and faculty into the ivied halls of mainstream higher education is slowly changing both communities, as the interaction between two once-estranged groups leads each to a more nuanced view of the other," reports The Boston Globe. The article reads as a who's who of the well-known evangelical intellectuals.

"In the ecclesiastical fashion stakes, the divide between clerics ...