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

It was only a matter of hours before the data in the new Pew study on American religion found its way into the political bloodstream, to be bandied about by Christian conservatives on the one hand and secular liberals on

In the public school I went to in the 1970s, “secular” was A neutral, descriptive word. Our social-studies teacher taught us that ours was a “secular” government, by which she meant that we lived free of any religion established by

There’s always strange stuff for sale on eBay

On paper, Mitt Romney was an excellent candidate for the Republican nomination for president. Handsome, professionally successful, personally wealthy, happily married and with a blemish-free past, Romney looked like a pretty good bet. He was pitching himself as a conservative’s

In the 20th Century no group was better at chronicling its own experience than the American Jews. You want self-loathing, assimilation and paranoia? Turn to Philip Roth. You want bright young women resisting and yet conforming to family expectations? Check