Lisa Miller

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Saint Sarah: Is Sarah Palin the Next Jerry Falwall?

June 11, 2010 By Lisa Miller

Another memoirist might prefer to keep such matters private, but Sarah Palin is not another memoirist. In Going Rogue: An American Life, Palin describes, perhaps for the first time in the history of political autobiography, a furtive trip to an out-of-state drugstore to obtain a do-it-yourself pregnancy test. This was in the fall of 2007, […]

Filed Under: Newsweek, Religion Tagged With: Abortion, Barack Obama, Beverly LaHaye, Carly Fiorina, Down syndrome, Down's syndrome, fetus, Gallup, George W. Bush, Guttmacher, James Dobson, Jerry Falwell, John McCain, Karl Rove, Margaret Thatcher, Marjorie Dannenfelser, Nikki Haley, politician, pregnancy test, president, R. Marie Griffith, Religion, Richard Land, Roe v. Wade, Ronald Reagan, Sarah Palin, Senate, Susan B. Anthony List, Trig Palin

Do Yoga’s Hindu Roots Matter?

May 15, 2010 By Lisa Miller

I don’t care much for bland spirituality, so at yoga class I generally tune out the prelude, when the teacher reads aloud—as is the custom—an inspirational passage on which to meditate. Recently, though, I was startled to attention when the teacher chose a paragraph on compassion from the Dalai Lama’s bestseller The Art of Happiness. […]

Filed Under: Newsweek, Religion Tagged With: Bhagavad Gita, Dalai Lama, Eastern religions, Hindu scripture, Lisa Miller, Ralph waldo Emerson, Tibetan Buddhism, Tibetan Buddhist, yoga, Yoga Journal

How Jews Invented Heaven

March 28, 2010 By Lisa Miller

Do Jews believe in heaven? I can’t begin to count the number of times I’ve been asked this question. Modern people—and especially Jews raised in the Reform tradition—are flummoxed by the notion of heaven, and the rabbis are less than helpful. “Jews believe it is this life that matters, not the next”: You hear this […]

Filed Under: Religion Tagged With: heaven

Can Science Explain Heaven?

March 26, 2010 By Lisa Miller

There are those who believe that science will eventually explain everything—including our enduring belief in heaven. The thesis here is very simple: heaven is not a real place, or even a process or a supernatural event. It’s something that happens in your brain as you die. I first encountered this idea as I was researching […]

Filed Under: BeliefWatch: Lisa Miller, Newsweek, Religion Tagged With: heaven, Lisa Miller

Heaven: Our Enduring Fascination With The Afterlife

February 16, 2010 By Lisa Miller

“Heaven: Our Enduring Fascination with the Afterlife” by Lisa Miller (Harper-Collins ISBN 978-0-06-055475-0) “Heaven. The word evokes all kinds of images and feelings in the hearts of people virtually everywhere. In some corners, heaven is seen as a vague sense of euphoria, a state of everlasting bliss. In other corners, heaven is a busy place, […]

Filed Under: Religion Tagged With: heaven, Lisa Miller

Should Harvard Have A Religion Department?

February 11, 2010 By Lisa Miller

It doesn’t take a degree from Harvard to see that in today’s world, a person needs to know something about religion. The conflicts between the Israelis and the Palestinians; between Christians, Muslims, and animists in Africa; between religious conservatives and progressives at home over abortion and gay marriage—all these relate, if indirectly, to what rival […]

Filed Under: BeliefWatch: Lisa Miller, Newsweek, Religion Tagged With: Abortion, Christians, Lisa Miller, Muslims

Stephanie Saldana’s Memoir Bread of Angels

February 9, 2010 By Lisa Miller

It is understandable to want to run screaming from a “spiritual memoir”—especially when you discover it’s been written by a 27-year-old. Memoirs are bad enough, with their cringe-making confessions, their sordid tale-telling, and their self-important self-examination. Why, the reader too often wonders, should we care about you? Spiritual memoirs frequently inhabit the lowest tier of […]

Filed Under: BeliefWatch: Lisa Miller, Books, Newsweek, Religion Tagged With: Christians, Lisa Miller

The 2010 Super Bowl’s Pro-Life Ad

February 5, 2010 By Lisa Miller

Americans like values, but they don’t know which values they like best. The hype over Tim Tebow’s pro-life ad—sponsored by the conservative faith-and-values group Focus on the Family and scheduled to air during Sunday’s Super Bowl—is a case in point. When a corporation uses a television ad to sell us a product (car, gadget, hamburger) […]

Filed Under: BeliefWatch: Lisa Miller, Newsweek, Religion Tagged With: Lisa Miller

Richard Cizik – an unrepentant former evangelical leader

January 28, 2010 By Lisa Miller

Redemption America’s evangelicals exiled their leader for insufficient orthodoxy. Now he’s back, and he’s unrepentant. Richard Cizik remembers it this way: he had just come home from a week in Australia and was about to jet off to Paris when he sat down on Dec. 2, 2008 for his post-election interview with NPR’s Terry Gross. […]

Filed Under: BeliefWatch: Lisa Miller, Newsweek, Religion Tagged With: evangelicals, Lisa Miller

Why God Hates Haiti

January 15, 2010 By Lisa Miller

Haiti is surely a Job among nations. It is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere: half its population lives on less than a dollar a day. With 98 percent of its forests felled and burned for firewood, Haiti is uniquely vulnerable to flooding from hurricanes. In 2008 four storms in as many weeks left […]

Filed Under: BeliefWatch: Lisa Miller, Newsweek, Religion Tagged With: Lisa Miller

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About Lisa Miller

Lisa-Miller-Headshot

Lisa Miller is a staff writer at New York magazine. She is the former religion columnist for the Washington Post, former senior editor of Newsweek magazine, and author of "Heaven: Our Enduring Fascination with the Afterlife."

In 2014, Lisa Miller was nominated for the National Magazine Award and featured in Best Magazine Writing of 2014.

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NOMINATED FOR THE NATIONAL MAGAZINE AWARD

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