Lisa Miller

BeliefWatch: GodTube

By

What would Jesus download? One of the hottest sites on the Internet is GodTube.com, the Christian answer to YouTube. It’s a goofy, fascinating window into the world of Christian youth. There’s a clip of Ray Comfort, the popular evangelical preacher, demonstrating the perfection of God’s creation with an actual banana. It’s hard

BeliefWatch: Tree Hugger

By

What has Rich Cizik done to make Jim Dobson so mad? Cizik has, for 26 years, been the Washington-based lobbyist for the National Association of Evangelicals, a job one would hardly call high profile. Over the past year, though, he has become something of a celebrity: the evangelical leader who speaks for the cause of […]

The Gospel of Prothero

By

Steve Prothero is the kind of professor who makes you want to go back to college. During an hour lecture of his Boston University course “Death and Immortality,” 200 students sat rapt last week as his train of thought led him from the Docetics (early Christians who believed that Jesus was all-God, not flesh), to […]

Raiders of the Lost Tomb

By

In Jerusalem, that ancient and holy city, people’s houses are built on bones. For thousands of years, hundreds of generations of Jews, Muslims and Christians have been laid to rest in its rocky soil. Tova Bracha has always known that the tiny, rose-bordered concrete plot next to her apartment building covers an ancient Jewish burial […]

BeliefWatch: Reporter

By

In the aftermath of 9/11, when the offices of The Wall Street Journal were temporarily moved from Ground Zero to SoHo, a young journalist sat at his desk and edited one story after another about the Muslim world abroad. Jihad this, fatwah that, Sunni, Shia, how do you spell hijab? “It occurred to me that […]

Slave Trade

By

Once there was a Christian, a man from a wealthy family. He had conservative values, and he crusaded his whole life for social justice. In the end, he changed history. His name was William Wilberforce, and in 1807 he finally succeeded in abolishing the British slave trade.

Beliefwatch: Surf’s Up!

By

There is at least one moment in every religious person’s life where commitment to faith collides, inconveniently, with desire. For Zeena Altalib, that moment occurred last year at the local swimming pool. An American Muslim of Iraqi descent, Altalib wanted to take her baby son, Yusif, for a swim. But what to do about the […]