Let’s say you want to get married and you’re thinking of joining an Internet dating site. Wouldn’t you want that site to be just a little bit picky? Wouldn’t you want it to eliminate the creepy already-marrieds

The Rev. Jeremiah Wright is a man of many faces. He’s an old-school ’70s lefty, a man who preached every Sunday in what the American religion scholar Martin Marty has called “greenish African-American pajamas.” He’s an intellectual, a professor who

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

(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.)

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

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