By TERRY MATTINGLY, Scripps Howard News Service

The political endorsement was clear, although the words were carefully chosen.

New Hampshire Bishop V. Gene Robinson, the Episcopal Church's first openly gay bishop, clearly wanted to inspire his supporters, even his own priests, to back Barack Obama for president. Still, he stressed that his endorsement was personal, not corporate.

At the last church she attended before dropping out, Julia Duin was not impressed with the service opportunities available to her as a single woman.

The punch line rocketed around the World Wide Web, inspiring smiles in pews friendly to Sen. Barack Obama, the Democratic presidential nominee.

It's an election year, which means the folks in evangelical Protestant pews know exactly what will happen if they choose to talk to a political pollster.

Anyone who has lived in a minister's house knows that middle-of-the-night telephone calls often bring bad news.

But for many pastors there is one kind of call that is uniquely painful.

There are times when the shock of death is easier to handle than questions about eternal life.

For many years, Marc Newman used a simple test when asking college students if they thought some actions were always right and others were always wrong -- slavery.

Then something strange happened in his philosophy of communication classes. Students began arguing that slavery might be acceptable in certain cultures and under certain conditions. Besides, who were they to judge others?

For a dozen years, they hunted Europe's most notorious war criminal.

Investigators knew exactly where they thought they would find former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, the man accused of masterminding the 1995 massacre of 8,000 Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica.

Ask Southern Baptists to name their religion and most of them will simply say, "I'm a Baptist."

Ask Roman Catholics the same question and most will say, "I'm Catholic."

Odds are good that most Lutherans, Episcopalians, Presbyterians and occupants of other name-brand pews will take the same approach.

The alleged crime took place at the corner of Alum Rock and Ellesmere roads in Birmingham, England, where an officer spotted two missionaries distributing "God's Bridge to Eternal Life" tracts.

No doubt about it, Tony Blair's press secretary delivered a memorable sound bite when a pushy journalist kept asking about faith, politics and the prime minister.

"We don't do God," said Alastair Campbell.