Let’s get right to the point, shall we? About halfway through Mel Gibson’s movie “Apocalypto,” which opens this week, viewers are treated to a stomach-turning scene of human sacrifice, set in a Mayan city around 1500. It’s not revealing too […]

Let’s get right to the point, shall we? About halfway through Mel Gibson’s movie “Apocalypto,” which opens this week, viewers are treated to a stomach-turning scene of human sacrifice, set in a Mayan city around 1500. It’s not revealing too

Noah’s Ark is the perfect children’s tale. You have animals, a big boat, bad weather, a happy ending (good luck, though, answering the question: why did God kill all those people?). It’s not difficult to find a charming, well-written, nicely

he biggest surprise to come out of the U.S. Catholic Bishops’ conference in Baltimore was not the bishops’ statements on birth control (against it) or homosexuality (sympathetic, but against it). The biggest surprise last week was a dry, 36-page document,

In the beginning, God told the Jews what not to eat: the camel, the coney, the rabbit and the pig; the eagle, the vulture and “all creatures in the seas … that do not have fins and scales” (Lev. 11).

What does it mean to speak in tongues? And who has the right, or the privilege, to do so? These questions, largely theological, have lingered at the fringes of American Protestantism. Now, as charismatic Christianity sweeps the country and the

At lunch with Sam Harris, one is struck by how personable, how familiar he seems–a soft-spoken, thoughtful man with pleasant manners, a man who wrote two best-selling books while pursuing a degree in neuroscience. He is, in other words, an

Time was, not so long ago, that no one ever said a bad word about Pastor Rick Warren. He was the genius grower of churches, the California whiz who found a magic formula for marketing Christianity to the masses, who

During the third century, in Egypt and throughout the Middle East, men and women fled the cities into the desert, following the example of St. Anthony. They wore simple clothes, ate simple food. They turned their backs on the temptations