A decade ago, New York City officials were so reluctant to give out food stamps, they made people register one day and return the next just to get an application. The welfare commissioner said the program caused dependency and the poor were "better off" without it. Now the city urges the needy to seek aid (in languages from Albanian to Yiddish).

A new study on the faith of Catholic college students produced a Rorschach moment in today's church that was neatly typified by contrasting headlines in the Catholic media: "Catholic colleges weakening students' faith, new study finds," declared the conservative-leaning Catholic World News. "Study: Catholics at Catholic colleges less likely to stray from church," went the headline from Catholic News Service, the media outlet of the American bishops.

Faith leaders ranging from evangelical to Jewish came together Wednesday to launch a nationwide mobilization of people of faith to call for immigration reform that does not tear families apart. Already the "Together, Not Torn: Families Can't Wait for Immigration Reform" campaign has collected over 100,000 pro-reform postcards that will be delivered to members of Congress next week. Organizers anticipate they will collect more than a million postcards within the next month.

Last month, a week before the Senate seat of the liberal icon Edward M. Kennedy fell into Republican hands, his legacy suffered another blow that was perhaps just as damaging, if less noticed. It happened during what has become an annual spectacle in the culture wars. Over two days, more than a hundred people -- Christians, Jews, housewives, naval officers, professors; people outfitted in everything from business suits to military fatigues to turbans to baseball caps -- streamed through the halls of the William B. Travis Building in Austin, Tex., waiting for a chance to stand before the semicircle of 15 high-backed chairs whose occupants made up the Texas State Board of Education. Each petitioner had three minutes to say his or her piece.

The Catholic Church has a positive vision of human life, marriage and family which must not be presented as a list of things the church opposes, Pope Benedict XVI told the bishops of Scotland. The Church's "positive and inspiring vision of human life, the beauty of marriage and the joy of parenthood" are "rooted in God's infinite, transforming and ennobling love for all of us, which opens our eyes to recognize and love his image in our neighbor," the pope said.

In launching its needle-exchange program last week, the Catholic Diocese of Albany, N.Y., said the decision came down to choosing the lesser evil. Illegal drug use is bad, but the spread of deadly diseases is worse. The medical evidence is clear, the diocese argued on Feb. 1, when it began "Project Safe Point" in two Upstate New York locations through its local branch of Catholic Charities. Public health studies document that exchanging used syringes for new ones can effectively stanch the spread of blood-borne diseases such as AIDS, and even lead drug abusers to treatment and recovery.

Three big companies quit an influential lobbying group that had focused on shaping climate-change legislation, in the latest sign that support for an ambitious bill is melting away. Oil giants BP PLC and ConocoPhillips and heavy-equipment maker Caterpillar Inc. said Tuesday they won't renew their membership in the three-year-old U.S. Climate Action Partnership, a broad business-environmental coalition that had been instrumental in building support in Washington for capping emissions of greenhouse gases.

A Vatican official has floated the idea of a shared "ecumenical catechism" as one of the potential fruits of 40 years of dialogue among Catholics, Anglicans, Lutherans, Methodists and members of the Reformed churches. "We have affirmed our common foundation in Jesus Christ and the Holy Trinity as expressed in our common creed and in the doctrine of the first ecumenical councils," Cardinal Walter Kasper, president of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, told representatives of the churches.

President Obama urged Democrats and Republicans to not question one another's motives and to make an effort to move beyond the cynicism and skepticism that has weighed down the politics of Washington, saying: "Civility is not a sign of weakness." In an appearance today at the National Prayer Breakfast, Mr. Obama conceded that policy differences would often separate the political parties. But he challenged lawmakers and religious leaders to step beyond their comfort zones and unify on at least some daily challenges, not only when a calamity like the Haiti earthquake strikes.

Franciscan Sr. Kathie Uhler has for months been working on a series of panel presentations to the United Nations that will show the damage exploitative mining has had on the indigenous populations of countries like Peru, Papua New Guinea and Indonesia. As Uhler has learned in her research, inhabitants of an area are often unaware of mining-for gems, coal, or oil-that is taking place a short distance from their homes, perhaps on a mountaintop, until natural resources have already been polluted.