Were I to submit my cells to DNA tests, results would doubtless show that —barring any surprises—I am a Jew. I have four Jewish grandparents. Genetically speaking, I share a common ancestry with most Jews, no matter where they live, what they look like, or how they practice. Thanks to generations of insularity and historically

At Harvard, it’s sounding a lot like the ’70s again. Thanks to the provocations of True Love Revolution, the university’s three-year-old pro-abstinence club, brainy women are defending their right to have sex with whomever they want, whenever and however they want. “To say that a consensual sexual act is degrading to you is the complete

The novelist and literary critic Mary Gordon loves the story of the prodigal son, for she is a Catholic in her bones. The story, from the Gospels, is of a father’s extravagant love for his proud and dissolute boy, a child so moronic that he spends all his money and lives among swine. Finally returning

Fourteen minutes into the new film Collision, my fingers started to itch for the fast-forward button. I desperately scanned the movie’s press materials: “How long can this go on?” I wondered. (Answer: 90 minutes.) The documentary, which opens this week, shows the public intellectual Christopher Hitchens and an Idaho pastor named Douglas Wilson arguing in

Billy Graham had a rule. He was a powerful man, away from his wife and children more often than he was with them. Aware of the significance of his reputation and convinced of the moral value of the Gospel message, he took precautions to guard against his own human weakness. He gave his ministry colleagues