Dear Religion Clause Readers:
Happy New Year! As we enter 2012, I want to again thank all of you who read Religion Clause-- both long time followers (some of you have been with me since the beginning), as well as those who have discovered the blog more recently. And thanks to all of you who send me leads to new developments or who alert me to needed corrections or to your concerns about coverage of particular developments. Your input is important in maintaining completeness and accuracy. I read all of your e-mails and appreciate receiving them, even though time constraints often prevent me from replying individually. Normally when I blog on a story sent to me by a reader, I mention the sender. If you do not want mentioned, I will be happy to honor that request if you let me know when sending me information.
It has been a good year for Religion Clause blog. It was nominated by the American Bar Association as one of the top 100 legal blogs in 2011—the fourth time in five years it has made the list. The site meter shows that the blog has attracted over 1,143,000 visits since I created it in 2005. Approximately 226,000 of these visits were registered in 2011. This is a decrease of a bit over 7% compared to 2010. That decline in visits appears to stem from changes that Google made to its Blog Search page, which no longer includes for everyone visiting it featured postings from popular blogs. When Google included that in its design, Religion Clause often benefitted from the algorithm it used to select stories that would be featured.
Interested readers continue to have several ways to access Religion Clause—by directly connecting to the home page, connecting through a mobile device to a version formatted for Smart phones, subscribing to the RSS feed through any of the popular RSS readers, through e-mail subscriptions, on Kindle, through Twitter, through Facebook and on Newstex sources such as Lexis. The Religion Clause sidebar has further information on these alternatives.
Religion Clause's established format of neutrality, broad coverage and links to extensive primary source material has made it a widely-recognized authoritative source for keeping up on church-state and religious liberty developments around the world. I am pleased that my regular readers span the political and religious spectrum and include a large number of individuals working professionally dealing with church-state relations and religious liberty concerns. I was approached twice this year by well-respected portals that wanted me to move Religion Clause to their sites. Ultimately I decided against doing so in order to maintain Religion Clause’s unique identity.
I continue to be amazed that there is never a day when I am lacking for developments to report. I try to keep the mix interesting and relevant. I urge you to continue to recommend Religion Clause to your friends and colleagues, and to share posts you like on Facebook and on other social media sites. This can be done easily by opening the relevant post and clicking on the “Share” button at the bottom of the post. If you have any general comments or suggestions for Religion Clause's upcoming year, feel free to e-mail me at religionclause@gmail.com.
Best wishes for 2012!
Howard M. Friedman
