Prickly social critic James Howard Kunstler once said “suburbs are the embodiment of existential evil.” Critics regularly condemn them as wastelands of cookie-cutter construction, social conformity, anomie, and racial segregation—and yet that’s where 55 percent of Americans live.

The Colorado Attorney General’s Office last week announced the end of a six-year legal battle to force bakery owner Jack Phillips to design cakes that violate his religious convictions. The Colorado Civil Rights Commission voted unanimously to dismiss an administrative action against Phillips and his Lakewood, Colo., bakery, Masterpiece Cakeshop, for refusing to make a custom cake for a gender transition celebration.

In Bossier City, La., school board meetings regularly begin with prayer, yet school employees can’t quietly pray or read a Bible within sight of students.

That’s because a settlement agreed to last week restricts religious expression in public schools in the Bossier Parish area outside Shreveport. In the agreement, filed Jan. 23, the parties agreed some of the school district’s policies or practices violated the U.S. Constitution’s ban on the establishment of religion by endorsing or promoting Christianity. A federal court is expected to approve the settlement.

“Our long collective nightmare is finally over.”

That’s how critic Stuart Heritage of The Guardian celebrated the announcement by CBS that the current and 12th season of The Big Bang Theory would be its last. Yet the 15-20 million viewers who watch the half-hour sitcom each week likely feel otherwise.

A private Christian school in Ohio has taken its eight-year battle for a new campus to the U.S. Supreme Court. Last week, Tree of Life Christian Schools in Upper Arlington, Ohio, petitioned the justices to review a lower court ruling upholding the city’s denial of zoning approval.

The Senate on Wednesday passed a resolution condemning the anti-religious questioning of a judicial nominee by two Democratic members of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Sara Beth Geoghegan is painting walls, spreading wallpaper, and arranging furniture, moving from her tiny Nashville apartment into her first house. New and more spacious surroundings serve as an apt metaphor for where she finds herself at this time in life-moving from a claustrophobic depression set into motion by the heartache of a broken engagement to a new place of hope.