Setting up “front pages” for different sections

I’m wanting to set my blog up so that I have a main index that is a place for the most recent posts and general information – stuff like that. I would then like to have different sections (say politics, religion and music for example,) and have each section have a “front page” where there would be blog rolls, widgets and other sidebar goodies related to that specific topics.

Ideally, I’d like to have it work so that all of the political pages have the same sidebar set-up as the politics front page, and the religion pages have the same sidebar set-up as the religion front page and so on.

I’m planning to use categories and sub-categories for setting up the basic structure, but I don’t know how to set it up so that each of the sections can have its own, distinct set of links/widgets and so on.

Any suggestions?

Thanks!!