Just this past June, at a national meeting of various Hindu organizations in India, a popular preacher, Sadhvi Saraswati, suggested that... Read More
Cardinal George Pell, a top adviser to Pope Francis, returned to his native Australia July 10 to face criminal charges related to sexual... Read More
Early Friday morning, Beyoncé set Instagram on fire when she posted a new image of her twins Sir and Rumi who were born in June.... Read More
The Rev. Elaine Ellis Thomas spent a recent Saturday singing, chanting and marching through the streets of Charlottesville, Virginia, with... Read More
Emily Paster's obsession with food preservation began the same way it did for many others: as an attempt to make her summer hauls from the... Read More
First, let's establish a few points. Muslims, like everyone else, take their ethical guidance from more than one source. The Quran, it's... Read More
This year marks the bicentenary of Jane Austen's death, at the age of 41. What sort of Christian was this imaginative and highly intelligent... Read More
Mark Kennedy grew up a Catholic, and a Harry Potter fanatic. Only one stuck.“I considered myself a non-spiritual person,” he... Read More
We're live Wednesday morning, talking about Millennials and Mormonism. Religion scholar Jana Riess has been studying what she calls... Read More
A reader tips me to this very good Emma Green piece on the crisis in Conservative Judaism over intermarriage. Unlike rabbis in Reform and... Read More
Squeezed among two dozen other evangelical supporters of the president, Southern Baptist Richard Land added his hand to the others reaching... Read More
I'm pleased to post this interview with Mark Lempke, who just published the terrific book My Brother's Keeper: George McGovern and... Read More
King was 5'7″. Graham was 6'2″.Both were Southerners. King, the son of a pastor, was born in Atlanta, Georgia; Graham was reared... Read More
Pope Francis's political, social, and economic thinking has created great consternation, but he has also roused tremendous interest of... Read More
Archaeologists say they have identified the remains of the cell of St Columba on the Scottish island of Iona.They have used radiocarbon... Read More
What happens when America's best-known dating show meets one of its most misunderstood religions?“The Bachelorette” brought Sikhs... Read More
On Saturday, November 18th, 1978, Jim Jones stood on a raised platform beneath the tin-roofed pavilion of Jonestown, microphone in hand, and... Read More
French oil giant Total SA recently sent its 96,000 employees an unusual corporate missive: a comprehensive guide to religion at work.Intended... Read More
This Uber driver puts his passengers on the highway to heaven.Ordained minister Kenneth Drayton has turned his 2009 Mercury Grand Marquis... Read More
On June 29, Williamstown city attorney Jeffrey Shipp sent a letter to the biblical amusement park Ark Encounter, rejecting its request to be... Read More
In the hallway just outside the sanctuary of the midsize Southern Baptist church I grew up in hung a small cork board for posting... Read More
In the introduction to his 1987 Cultural Literacy, E.D. Hirsch Jr. laments the loss of a shared American culture — a body of... Read More
Thanks to the work of three young American scholars, a new and invaluable primer is the latest tool helping to make sense of the country's... Read More
Many comedians imagine themselves as edgy boundary-pushers — cultural critics who can hold up a mirror to society in ways that... Read More
What the anti-abortion movement has thought through carefully is how to tell stories about abortion's impact. Early activists, who were... Read More
A recent New York Times article highlighted contrasts between Cardinals Timothy Dolan of New York and Joseph Tobin of Newark, and certainly... Read More
There is no more horrifying scenario for Israel, and perhaps the entire Middle East, than a serious attack on the Temple Mount, which to... Read More
This year marks the 500th anniversary of Martin Luther’s famous 95 Theses, which helped spark the founding of the Reformation and the division of Christianity into Protestantism and Catholicism. The 95 Theses critiqued the church’s sale of indulgences, which Luther regarded as a form of corruption. By Luther’s time, indulgences had evolved into payments that were said to... Read More
In most American weekly church services, offering plates were passed around to finance all of church activities. As giving became very public, one of the features of the weekly offering was, of course, that all gathered could see who was giving, if not how much. Once the age of plastic money arrived, all of this ritual and financial necessity in American churches was jeopardized. Read More
