Lisa Miller

(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.)

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

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;

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

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

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 the state. We were to be proud of this secular government, she told us; it

There’s always strange stuff for sale on eBay