A Jehovah’s Witness in Kansas is suing the state to pay for a “bloodless” liver transplant because JW’s won’t allow the blood transfusions involved in a state-funded Medicaid liver transplant.

USA Today says many U.S. Christians will be celebrating a “simple Easter” this year, many of them beyond the four walls of a church. The NYT follows a 58-year-old man in rural Florida who’s been playing the starring role in a Passion play for more than two decades. B16, at Maundy Thursday services, bemoaned the secularism of the West.

The Supreme Court ruled yesterday that inmates may not seek monetary damages from states in disputes over religious expression in prison.

NPR talks to American Muslim women who have decided to take off the hijab for good. The poorest place in America, apparently, is a heavily Orthodox Jewish enclave about 50 miles north of New York City. New York’s Museum of Jewish Heritage is collecting recipes that almost died in the Holocaust.

One of New York‘s most prominent black churches paid bail for a 17-year-old who had grown up in the church’s outreach programs, but told her she’d have to leave her gang life behind.

Officials in Dearborn, Mich., are trying to put the brakes on a planned mosque protest tomorrow by Florida’s most famous Quran burner, Terry Jones. Says Dearborn Mayor Jack O’Reilly: “if Dearborn practiced Sharia Law, would we have three adult entertainment bars and more alcohol licensed bars and restaurants per capita than most other cities?”

In royal wedding news:

–CNN goes inside Westminster Abbey, the site of next week’s royal wedding and the final resting place of many of Britain’s most notable figures.

— Two Irish cardinals will attend the wedding for the first time in the 400 years since the Protestant Reformation.

— British police have banned a radical Muslim group from holding a protest outside the festivities.

— Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, who will preside over the “I take thee, Catherine, as my lawfully wedded wife” bits, says Wills and Kate know exactly what they’re getting into (video here).

Spain’s Supreme Court ruled that a teacher in a Catholic school can’t be fired for marrying a divorced man, effectively ending the church’s control over the private lives of its employees.

NPR finds that Egyptians‘ prayers for better Christian-Muslim relations have gone more or less unanswered.

By Kevin Eckstrom