-
Is Your Rabbi Hot or Not?
Last spring, NEWSWEEK published a list of the 50 most influential rabbis in America, created and compiled by three nice (and rich and powerful) Jewish media big shots who, it seemed, didn’t have quite enough to do. The aforementioned big shots (or machers, if you will) were Gary Ginsberg, an executive at NewsCorp.; Michael Lynton,
-
How Would Jesus Choose?
Adam Hamilton does not call himself “pro-choice.” He prefers “pro-life with a heavy heart.” What that means, as he explains in his new book “Seeing Gray in a World of Black and White,” is that he believes abortion should be available and legal, that there are instances in which it might be necessary and that
-
✴︎ Religion
A Good Book in Camouflage
The little book, with the camouflage cover, is everywhere. There are more than 50,000 copies with the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. It’s on military bases across America. It’s in the homes of military families, who are praying their dear ones come home. It’s circulating at the Pentagon. Even the president has allegedly read it.
-
Trying Times for Trinity
(Editor’s note: Barack Obama resigned his membership from Trinity United Church of Christ on May 31, 2008. This story, published in March, profiles the church and some of the problems it presented for presidential candidate Obama.)
-
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 to her husband Abraham so at least he could father children. When Abraham brought Sarah
-
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 is older and formally dressed. Many of the women wear fur coats, stockings and heels;
-
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
-
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 the mechanic and ask him to fix my car.” How about when something terrible and
-
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 reformer. Colson was Nixon’s special counsel, a man so ruthless that, according to legend, he
-
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 the other. Each side is already saying say that the data prove at long last