We hear so often about Muslims as victims of abuse in the West and combatants in the Arab Spring fight against tyranny. But, in fact, a wholly different kind of war is underway, an unrecognized battle costing thousands of lives. Christians are being killed in the Islamic world because of their religion. It is a rising genocide that ought to provoke global alarm.

The portrayal of Muslims as victims or heroes is at best partially accurate. In recent years the violent oppression of Christian minorities has become the norm in Muslim-majority nations stretching from West Africa and the Middle East to South Asia and Oceania. In some countries it is governments and their agents that have burned churches and imprisoned parishioners. In others, rebel groups and vigilantes have taken matters into their own hands, murdering Christians and driving them from regions where their roots go back centuries.

In cultures that permit men to take multiple wives, the intra-sexual competition that occurs causes greater levels of crime, violence, poverty and gender inequality than in societies that institutionalize and practice monogamous marriage.

That is a key finding of a new University of British Columbia-led study that explores the global rise of monogamous marriage as a dominant cultural institution. The study suggests that institutionalized monogamous marriage is rapidly replacing polygamy because it has lower levels of inherent social problems.

During church services on Sunday, Catholics around the country were read a blistering letter assailing the Obama administration for an "assault on religious liberty" in the form of a coming requirement that most church-linked organizations - among them hospitals, schools and universities - offer birth control coverage as part of their health care plans.

Sometime in the next few weeks, Rabbi Kliel Rose of West End Synagogue in Nashville hopes to pick up a copy of the New Testament and learn a little more about Jesus.

Rose, like many Jews, has viewed the Christian scriptures with some suspicion in the past. The New Testament is not always flattering to Jews, plus it's been used in unwelcome attempts at conversion.

He hopes the new Jewish Annotated New Testament will make his task a bit more enjoyable.

It?s a big step for evolution, going from a single cell focused solely on its own survival to a multicellular organism where cells coordinate and work together. Creationists often cite this jump as evidence of God?s influence, because it seems impossible that creatures could make such a brazen leap unaided. But scientists have shown that multicellularity can arise in the lab, given strong enough selective pressure.