Priests are fielding more requests than ever for help with demonic possession, and a centuries-old practice is finding new footing in the modern world.

Pope Benedict XVI’s post-retirement presence in the Vatican has set the stage for a conflict that threatens to split the Catholic Church into two.

Cardinal Bernard Law knew as early as 1984 John Geoghan was molesting children. The priest would not be defrocked for 14 years.

Millions of American children were placed in the Catholic orphanage system. Some didn’t make it out alive.

Aum Shinrikyo was founded in 1984 as a yoga and meditation class, initially known as Oumu Shinsen no Kai (オウム神仙の会 "Aum Mountain Hermits’ Society"), by pharmacist Chizuo Matsumoto.

Later, Matsumoto changed his name to Shoko Asahara and masterminded the most deadly terrorist attack in Japanese history. Asahara was executed by hanging on July 6, 2018, at the Tokyo Detention House, 23 years after the sarin gas attack, along with six other cult members.

How the Christian film industry works.

How Christian TV became Trump’s most reliable media mouthpiece.

How Jerry Falwell Jr. transformed Liberty University, one of the religious right’s most powerful institutions, into a wildly lucrative online empire.

North Carolina’s Alexander County is a Southern Baptist stronghold. It’s also home to Mitchell Gold, an outspoken gay rights activist and the CEO of one of the region’s largest employers.

Baba Ramdev renounced the material world twenty-three years ago to become a Hindu ascetic. Now he’s on TV selling toothpaste, instant noodles, and toilet cleaners and the company he is believed to control is poised to become the biggest consumer goods seller in India.

A bitter legal row over a mosque in an affluent New Jersey town shows the new face of Islamophobia in the age of Trump.

“We are better than the stories about us.”

Why did Yousef Muslet face life in prison for an everyday gesture?

“Meir Kay is a bar mitzvah party motivator.”

On the Old Regular Baptists and the joyful sound.

A former schoolyard bully finds a new identity through Buddhism. A classmate wonders why he changed—and if he remembers the pain he caused.

During the 90s, David Bazan was Christian indie-rock’s first big crossover star. Then he stopped believing.

The Nxivm initiation was supposed to open up a secret sisterhood. After giving up compromising photographs to the recruiter “master,” each woman was expecting a tattoo. Instead they received 2-inch brands that seemed to suggest the initials of the cults founder, Keith Raniere.

Students come from around the world to struggling Redding, California, where the Bethel School of Supernatural Ministry promises to teach them to perform miracles.

Inside the campaign to canonize the fire department chaplain who died on September 11.

Cody Coots is pastor at the same church where his father died during a service three years ago.

Abraham never fit in. Hisham finally felt at home. Then their worlds collided in western Arkansas.

A travelogue through the contradiction-rich and predominantly Muslim Southern Thailand.

“I underwent, during the summer that I became fourteen, a prolonged religious crisis. I use “religious” in the common, and arbitrary, sense, meaning that I then discovered God, His saints and angels, and His blazing Hell. And since I had been born in a Christian nation, I accepted this Deity as the only one. I supposed Him to exist only within the walls of a church—in fact, of our church—and I also supposed that God and safety were synonymous.”