Weekly religious attendance could add years to your life, according to a medical study carried out in the US.
The effects of exercise, religious attendance and anti-cholesterol drugs on life expectancy were examined.

All three were found to be beneficial, with religious attendance adding two to three years to your life.

An Italian judge heard arguments Friday on whether a small-town parish priest should stand trial for asserting that Jesus Christ existed.

The priest’s atheist accuser, Luigi Cascioli, says the Roman Catholic Church has been deceiving people for 2,000 years with a fable that Christ existed, and that the Rev. Enrico Righi violated two Italian laws by reasserting the claim.

LONDON � It may be the word of God, but that hasn’t spared it from regular man-made tinkering. From 15th-century printers to 20th-century modernists, every age has sought to adapt the Bible.

So now, for the era of restless consumers and fickle attention spans, a British publication distills the original into a form you could read at one sitting. Instead of 780,000 words and 1,200 chapters, there are just 20,000 words in fewer than 60 pages.

Not surprisingly, the “100-Minute Bible” is generating robust debate in Britain, where even Shakespeare is no longer immune to a culture of abbreviation.

Proponents say it is a gateway to the classic, a crash course in Christianity that will provide a useful tool to reach out to the curious, the lapsed, and the ignorant.

But opponents fulminate against such pithiness, muttering about the callous disregard for Biblical virtues such as perseverance, dedication, and deferred gratification. There is, after all, no beatitude that reads: “Blessed are the editors, for they shall make stuff shorter to read.”