The National Retail Federation (NRF) has urged the U.S. Senate to overhaul the nation’s fraud-prone credit and debit card system, saying banks’ insistence on cards that use a signature instead of a Personal Identification Number (PIN) puts merchants and their customers at risk.

Card companies have continued to promulgate the use of fraud-prone signature cards despite their own research—conducted almost 25 years ago—that showed that PIN-based cards provided more security for consumers, retailers and banks.

R. Albert Mohler Jr., best-selling author and president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky., presented his annual list of books for Preaching Magazine “that deserve any preacher's careful attention.”

“All of them represent a contribution worthy of our time and priority,” Mohler said of the 10 books he selected.

The votes will soon be counted in the 2014 Christian Retailing’s Best awards. Anyone involved in the Christian products industry can vote until the midnight deadline March 31 and help Christian Retailing name the top products of 2013.

Click here to vote. Companies have nominated what they think are their best products in categories covering books, Bibles, DVDs, children’s and gifts. See if you agree by casting your ballot today.

HarperCollins Christian Publishing has hired Eric Nystrom as its new vice president of Spanish International Sales. Starting with the company April 7, Nystrom will be based at the corporate office in Nashville.

Nystrom joins HarperCollins Christian Publishing with a strong background in international trade, consulting and sales and operations management. Nystrom’s portfolio includes working with various companies to establish or grow their international presence. He is credited with growing international revenue from less than 5% to over 35% of a company's total sales and an increase in global distribution and manufacturing from 12 to 55 countries in 15 years.

Dove Award-nominated Irish worship group Rend Collective released its fourth album, The Art of Celebration, globally from Integrity Music (Provident Distribution) on St. Patrick’s Day. The album immediately soared to the top of retail charts internationally, becoming the group’s biggest-selling debut and the No. 1 best-selling album of any genre at iTunes and Amazon.com worldwide.

With more than 18,000 albums sold, The Art of Celebration also hit No. 13 on the Top 200 and No. 1 on the Current Contemporary Christian Billboard retail charts, while simultaneously landing at No. 1 in the U.K. on the Christian/Gospel and No. 28 on the overall albums charts as reported by the U.K.’s Official Charts Company. Rend Collective also has three albums in the Top 10 on Billboard’s Praise & Worship chart this week, with The Art of Celebration at No. 1, Campfire at No. 7 and Homemade Worship by Handmade People (Integrity Music/Provident Distribution) at No. 10.

HarperCollins Publishers has released simultaneously the work of popular religion author Bart D. Ehrman and its counterpart, an evangelical rebuttal, in an unusual publishing experiment involving two of its imprints.

Written by a team of five evangelical scholars, How God Became Jesus: The Real Origins of Belief in Jesus’ Divine Nature (Zondervan Academic) is a response to Ehrman’s How Jesus Became God (HarperOne), but unlike many books aiming to debunk the claims of another, this pair of titles released on the same day (March 25) and resulted from a unique collaboration.

Best-selling author Tracie Peterson will be hosting a webcast in honor of the April 1 release of her 100th book, A Sensible Arrangement (Bethany House/Baker Publishing Group). During the April 29 live event, Peterson will introduce readers not only to her latest release, but also to her new “Lone Star Brides” series.

“A Sensible Arrangement is book 100 for me, and I stand absolutely amazed at what God has done with and through the books He's given me to write,” Peterson said. “This new series—‘Lone Star Brides’—ties together two former series (‘Striking A Match’ and ‘Land of the Lone Star’) by marrying characters Jake Wythe and Marty Dandridge together and following their lives and those of others the readers will recognize from the previous series. This was so much fun and came about because readers kept telling me they wanted to see more of Jake and Marty, so I thought, ‘Why not put them together?’ ”