When Julie Sandorf’s daughter, Sarah, was 3 years old, she came home from nursery school and declared: “Mommy, I don’t want to be a Jewish, I want to be a Christian.” These words sent Sandorf, an assimilated Jew with almost […]

By the standards of episcopal Church meetings, it was a thrilling and entirely unexpected outcome. When the governing body of the U.S. branch of the worldwide Anglican Communion met in June to elect a new presiding bishop, Katharine Jefferts Schori,

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

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

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