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How to Make Sarah Laugh
The biblical matriarch Sarah is perhaps history’s most famous infertile woman. As a member of a tribe that valued family above almost anything else, she must have tried every ancient remedy; as a last resort, she gave her maid Hagar […]
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The Church of Contradictions
When you walk into Trinity United Church of Christ on the South Side of Chicago, the first thing you see on a Sunday morning are the people crowding the lobby, hugging and kissing, asking after each other’s children. The congregation […]
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It’s Not Her. It’s That Marriage.
I tried to watch John McCain as he made his victory speech last week, but really, I couldn’t take my eyes off his wife. So thin, so blond, so beautiful in her swept-up hairdo
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Stop Your Sobbing
Will Bowen takes “uncomplaining” to an extreme. Bowen doesn’t gripe about anything, ever. A reporter asks, “How are you doing?” “Great!” he answers. “Can’t complain.” Really? You can’t complain? What do you do when your car breaks down? “I call […]
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A Reformer Who Keeps ‘The Faith’
Recent popular books by atheist authors have spawned a new generation of Christian apologists. The latest rebuttal is “The Faith: What Christians Believe, Why They Believe It and Why It Matters,” by Chuck Colson, the convicted Watergate felon turned prison […]
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Changeable Creeds
It was only a matter of hours before the data in the new Pew study on American religion found its way into the political bloodstream, to be bandied about by Christian conservatives on the one hand and secular liberals on […]
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In Defense of Secularism
In the public school I went to in the 1970s, “secular” was A neutral, descriptive word. Our social-studies teacher taught us that ours was a “secular” government, by which she meant that we lived free of any religion established by […]
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✴︎ Religion
The Smart Shepherd
Place: New York City. Time: 9 o’clock on a Sunday morning. It’s fair to say that many, if not most, of the inhabitants of Manhattan
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4 Sale: Bones of the Saints
There’s always strange stuff for sale on eBay
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Romney and Religion
On paper, Mitt Romney was an excellent candidate for the Republican nomination for president. Handsome, professionally successful, personally wealthy, happily married and with a blemish-free past, Romney looked like a pretty good bet. He was pitching himself as a conservative’s […]