For years, Nashville has sort of played for Southern Baptists the role that Rome plays for Roman Catholics.

The pastor of Nashville's 175-year-old First Baptist Church doesn't just lead a tall-steeple church -- he fills a symbolic role in America's largest non-Catholic flock. So it raised eyebrows at Nashville's "Baptist Vatican" when the news spread that the Rev. Dan Francis was leaving his 2,400-member church to start a mission.

"The senior pastor of a First Baptist church isn't supposed to go build a new church from scratch," he admitted.

That wasn't all. This suburban mission in booming Brentwood will be "seeker-friendly," using interactive media, pop music, film and drama. And while the mission committee hasn't chosen a name, it has decided that the sign out front will not say "Baptist."

"That was never an issue," said Francis. "We're just not going to put words like `Southern Baptist' in our name. We don't want to set up that kind of denominational barrier. That would only keep us from reaching unchurched people."

As the late Southern humorist Grady Nutt always said, you know you're in Baptist country when the preachers pronounce "dance" with four syllables -- as in "daaah-E-unce-uh!"

Nutt was a graduate of Baylor University, so he knew all about hot-button issues in the Bible Belt. It seems like every few years, journalists can count on the world's largest Southern Baptist university to make headlines linked to drinking, dancing, sex or all of the above.

Naturally, a recent chapel announcement that Baylor would begin holding on-campus dances was big news. The ban was mostly symbolic, since students have for years danced at university-approved "functions" elsewhere in Waco, Texas. Still, conservative critics cited the decision as new evidence of moral decay.

It's sad, even tragic, that these issues get so much ink, said philosopher David Solomon, a 1964 Baylor graduate who teaches at Notre Dame University. While some folks yelp about dancing, Baylor's leaders have for years been engaged in a high-stakes debate about a serious issue -- what it means to be a "Baptist," or even a "Christian," university. Similar arguments rage behind the scenes on hundreds of campuses.

The agenda for next week's Promise Keepers clergy conference ends with a tiny note saying the "schedule is subject to change."

That's interesting, since the agenda for the Atlanta gathering is sketchy to begin with. It opens with a Tuesday session on "Hope for the Church," ends with "Renewing Our Call" on Thursday and, in between, leaves organizers lots of room to maneuver. The program doesn't even nail down who speaks when.

Strangest of all, Wednesday night is wide open. This is not standard operating procedure when a group expects to draw more than 40,000 men into the expensive confines of the Georgia Dome.

Perhaps there will be a bonus session on a topic that emerges early in the conference, said the Rev. Dale Schlafer, who leads the surging movement's work with clergy. Then again, something more volatile may happen, something along the lines of the dusk-to-dawn marathons of confession and repentance that swept many college and seminary campuses last year.

"I'm not trying to evade the question, but we just don't know," he said. "We've been trying to picture what we could do with 40,000 guys in a dome. How can we let pastors say what they need to say? How can we handle this in a responsible way?"

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.

Moments after he pulled the trigger, Yigal Amir announced that God told him to gun down Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.

The former seminarian later defended himself by quoting chapter and verse from ancient Jewish writers, while authorities investigated whether he had received guidance from rabbis on the right fringe of Israel's powerful, and some say paranoid, Orthodox community. Now, Amir's lawyers are suggesting that it all may have been a mistake.

After shocks from Rabin's death will rattle Israel, the Middle East and American Jewish groups for months and years to come. And in its end-of-the-year poll, the Religion Newswriters Association of America has named the assassination as 1995's top story on the religion beat.

A majority of journalists voting in this year's poll could not agree on a religion newsmaker of the year -- with most of the votes divided between Pope John Paul II and Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan.