In Tuesday’s RNS report Beau Black reports on how technology is reviving the Christian music industry: Technology, once decried as the executioner of the music business, is now seen by many as its salvation. Not long ago, illegal downloads flattened CD sales and sent the industry into a panic. But that seems forgotten now, or nearly so, as Christian labels and artists and their mainstream counterparts are looking to technology to revolutionize how they reach listeners. This new wave of technology enables artists to find fans and connect with them immediately. It’s also creating opportunities for Christian record companies-particularly battered by the downturn in the music industry-to target consumers. And it’s allowing artists who are Christians but make music for the masses to find a broader audience, freeing their music from what some call the Christian music ghetto.

Jeff Diamant reports on how door-to-door soliciting is paying off for some Orthodox Jews: They are part of the scenery every Sunday in Teaneck’s Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods-Israeli, Russian and Brooklyn Jews going house to house asking for money. In an uneven stream, poor widows, parents of ill children, men out of work, and emissaries for Israeli schools and charities descend on streets around this town’s dozen or so Orthodox synagogues. The trips are regularly fruitful. In just weeks of unannounced stops to Orthodox neighborhoods around New York, many “collectors,” as they are called, can receive several thousand dollars-often more than $10,000-from other Jews who try to follow their religion’s instructions on charity. This unusual model of giving, unfamiliar to those outside the neighborhoods-even to many Conservative and Reform Jews-is a fact of life in many Orthodox neighborhoods.