Cathy Lynn Grossman

Offering Communion outside, says Stephen Blackmer, an Episcopal priest, "helps us remember that the physical and spiritual worlds are completely bound up together. It becomes easy to see how everything grows, lives, dies and is returned into the earth where it takes on a new form. Its spark of life is transformed."

If there ever was a "war on Christmas" in America, Santa may have won.

As nearly 10,000 scholars of religion and the Bible shuttled among 300 sessions at a conference here last weekend, Donald Trump dominated the agenda.