Dear Religion Clause Readers:
Happy New Year! As we enter 2013, I want to again thank all of you who read Religion Clause-- both long time followers and those who have discovered the blog more recently. And thanks to all of you who send me leads or corrections. Your input is important in maintaining completeness and accuracy. I read all of your e-mails and comments 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.
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. Often Religion Clause carries a story well before mainstream media feature it. 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, as well as journalists and those who teach in this area of law.
I am of course always considering whether any changes in format or coverage would make the blog more useful. I welcome any suggestions you have. Feel free to post them as a comment to this blog entry, or to e-mail them to me at religionclause@gmail.com. The Sitemeter shows that Religion Clause has attracted over 1,337,500 visits since I created it in 2005. Around 194,700 of these visits came in 2012. That however is somewhat fewer visits than in 2011. So I encourage you to recommend Religion Clause to others who might find it of interest, or to link to specific posts and share them on social media.
This year I reopened the Comment feature on Religion Clause, though it has not been widely used by readers so far. 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. I also remind you that the sidebar contains links to a wealth of resources.
Best wishes for 2013!
Howard M. Friedman
