Last week, as President Obama was announcing his pick for surgeon general—a Roman Catholic African-American and MacArthur “genius” award winner who has spent her career caring for the poor on Alabama’s Gulf Coast—I was on the phone with the Princeton

Their wives, it should be said at the outset, do not entirely approve: Bob and Ralph Brown, two 50-something brothers, are planning to steer their 21-foot flats boat—a motorized fiberglass raft—across the Atlantic Ocean to honor three Marines who died

Let There Be Universal Coverage Pastors sell health reform to the faithful. What, I wondered, is a Christian minister doing on CNN pitching the president’s health-care plan? Last week the Rev. Jim Wallis, founder of Sojourners, a Christian social-justice outfit,

First comes love, then comes marriage. Then come all the thorny issues that arise with raising kids in a religious tradition when that religious tradition doesn’t see you as married. When another state legalizes gay marriage, as New Hampshire did

A new book redefines the faith debate. The atheist writers Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens have presented us with a choice: either you don’t believe in God or you’re a dope. “It is perfectly absurd for religious moderates