Let’s get right to the point, shall we? About halfway through Mel Gibson’s movie “Apocalypto,” which opens this week, viewers are treated to a stomach-turning scene of human sacrifice, set in a Mayan city around 1500. It’s not revealing too much to say that the movie’s hero is captured by a gang of marauders, bound, […]

Noah’s Ark is the perfect children’s tale. You have animals, a big boat, bad weather, a happy ending (good luck, though, answering the question: why did God kill all those people?). It’s not difficult to find a charming, well-written, nicely illustrated Noah’s-ark book for children; even Lucy Cousins, the brains behind Maisy the mouse, has […]

he biggest surprise to come out of the U.S. Catholic Bishops’ conference in Baltimore was not the bishops’ statements on birth control (against it) or homosexuality (sympathetic, but against it). The biggest surprise last week was a dry, 36-page document, titled “Strategic Plan,” which the bishops approved and which amounts to the biggest overhaul of […]

In the beginning, God told the Jews what not to eat: the camel, the coney, the rabbit and the pig; the eagle, the vulture and “all creatures in the seas … that do not have fins and scales” (Lev. 11). Most famously, God said: “Do not cook a young goat in its mother’s milk” (Deut. […]

What does it mean to speak in tongues? And who has the right, or the privilege, to do so? These questions, largely theological, have lingered at the fringes of American Protestantism. Now, as charismatic Christianity sweeps the country and the world, speaking in tongues has become as divisive as it is popular. Earlier this fall, […]

At lunch with Sam Harris, one is struck by how personable, how familiar he seems–a soft-spoken, thoughtful man with pleasant manners, a man who wrote two best-selling books while pursuing a degree in neuroscience. He is, in other words, an unlikely infidel.

Time was, not so long ago, that no one ever said a bad word about Pastor Rick Warren. He was the genius grower of churches, the California whiz who found a magic formula for marketing Christianity to the masses, who hit the jackpot with his book “The Purpose Driven Life,” by some accounts the best-selling […]

During the third century, in Egypt and throughout the Middle East, men and women fled the cities into the desert, following the example of St. Anthony. They wore simple clothes, ate simple food. They turned their backs on the temptations of urban life, on commerce and innovation

In the days leading up to the High Holidays, the holiest time of the year in Judaism, a senator running for re-election and a potential Republican candidate for president, announced that, yes, his mother was born Jewish. Here’s what Sen. George Allen said: “I embrace and take great pride in every aspect of my diverse […]