It wasn't a firestorm, but British newspapers recently found a subject hot enough to compete with the Royal Family's sex life.

"Hell hath no fury any more," said the Observer, responding to a Church of England report that included modernized language on heaven, hell and damnation. Another London headline said, "We believe in Hell, says the Church (but without the flames)."

While "The Mystery of Salvation" does reject "universalism," the belief that everyone goes to heaven, it suggests that those who choose to reject God face eternal death, not eternal punishment. In other words, if hell exists, it's empty.

"In the past the imagery of hell-fire and eternal torment and punishment ... has been used to frighten men and women," says the report. "Christians have professed appalling theologies which made God into a sadistic monster. ... Hell is not eternal torment, but is the final and irrevocable choosing of that which is opposed to God so completely ... that the only end is total non-being."

Amid the tumult surrounding Super Bowl XXX, Americans will congregate to party, pray, swear, chant, eat, drink and bond.

They will wear symbolic clothes, attend public rites, recall heroic deeds, consult oracles, hand down traditions and spend – or risk – millions of dollars. It's easy to see why many researchers now consider Super Sunday a pseudo-religious holiday.

"The Super Bowl combines all the elements that America has always valued the most. It's a ritual that glorifies physical excellence, determination, religious fervor and a military style," said Robert Higgs, author of "God in the Stadium," which has been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. "All of this is focused on a quest for the dollar and success. ... It somehow seems symbolic and sad that it all takes place on a sacred day."

Hours before the funeral of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, an ABC News colleague brought Peter Jennings a copy of "The Jewish Mourners Book of Why."

"I found the explanation of Jewish burial so fascinating that I incorporated a good deal of it into my funeral commentary," said the veteran anchorman, in a recent address at Harvard University's Divinity School. "If my mail is a guide, the audience much appreciated it. Contrary to what many news executives have believed in the past, news of the soul is very much news."

It's been two years since Jennings raised eyebrows in major television newsrooms – including his own – by deciding that religion was worthy of full-time coverage by a journalist trained to handle this complex and powerful subject.

People still ask why he did it. The answer, obviously, begins with Jennings' work in the Middle East, Russia, Northern Ireland, Bosnia and in the American South during the civil rights era. And in 1992, he said ABC crews kept returning from trips to Middle America with "this gnawing feeling that we were missing something if we didn't talk to people about the effect that their religious beliefs might have on their presidential choice."

For the first half of the 1990s, Father Christopher Moore spent most of his Sunday mornings guest preaching in parishes across New Jersey.

Each week, he stood in another pulpit, gazing at another set of Episcopalians in another set of pews. He quickly spotted trends.

"I found an incredible similarity from church to church, even from service to service. It seemed like I kept seeing the same 20 people at 8 o'clock and the same 100 people at 10 o'clock," said Moore, who served as the Trenton-based Diocese of New Jersey's communications director. Today, he leads a parish in Pennsylvania.

Eventually, Moore made a master list of unspoken assumptions that governed life in these parishes, whether people knew it or not. His conclusions will disturb some leaders in the oldline Protestant churches that have struggled to reach new members and fulfill old missions in a changing culture.

Each passing season brings dispatches from the church-state front lines in America's public schools.

In New Jersey, students asked to list "Christmas characters" didn't receive credit if they named Jesus, Mary and Joseph. Out in Oregon, a public-school calendar for December listed Kwanzaa, Hanukkah and the Winter Solstice – but not Christmas.

And so it goes. Some students have been ridiculed for whispering prayers at lunch, disciplined for discussing faith or sent home for wearing religious t-shirts. Others have had papers rejected, or art projects trashed, because they focused on Christian themes. Students who create Christian publications or music may be silenced, while their secular counterparts thrive.

"Some educators keep saying that we make these cases up. But there have been so many that it's getting harder to say that with a straight face," said Mathew Staver, president of the conservative Liberty Counsel in Orlando, Fla.

But something different happened last fall outside Orlando.