Over the Memorial Day weekend I visited a friend who lives with his large family and who owns, improbably, a horse--a retired police horse, to be exact. As we ambled through the stables, my friend’s 13-year-old daughter said, "Do you like Taylor Hicks?" Somehow the look on her face t

Jon Meacham managing editor of Newsweek and author of the bestselling book Franklin and Winston states in American Gospel that the United States of America is not a Christian nation that is it was not founded as a confessional state Rather the United States is a nation that allows for religiou

The Fourth of July is a time for challenging ourselves on the state of the American proposition.

Sometimes resurrection happens right under your nose. Maybe that’s especially possible when the land is watered by soft rains, most of which fall upon less than appreciative heads, and smiled upon by sunny spring days, a rare treat that can all too easily be missed if you blink. Such a land is

One night a few months ago, my 8-year-old son was very sick in bed. He lay there moaning and crying because of terrible pain in his ears. While my wife was on the phone attempting to get hold of a doctor, I did what I could to comfort him. We tried the usual things, but nothing worked. The choices s

The need to expand and better integrate the resources of the U.S. intelligence community was one of the central recommendations of the admirably bipartisan 9/11 commission. With the close of the cold war, Congress had reduced the resources available to the Central Intelligence Agency, as the traditi

Christianity has a rich cultural seam in the Middle East. On the first Pentecost, when the disciples were blessed with tongues to tell the good news, one of the languages spoken was Arabic. So successful was the spread of Christianity across a region that now includes parts of Iraq, Syria, Palestine

In all probability more people have read Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code in its Farsi translation than have read all my publications put together. No wonder. It is splendid junk, and I mean that as a positive remark, sort of. Brown has a flawless sense of his genre, and the book delivers exactly

Religious faith exerts a powerful influence on life in the United States and throughout the world The Center for Moral Clarity established and operated by the Rev Rod Parsley of Columbus Ohio--one of 10 outreaches of his World Harvest Church--advocates against abortion pornography and same-sex m

Backpacks did not figure in my life as a child. At school in Maryland, most students either carried their books in simple satchels of various sizes and shapes made of imitation leather or, in high school, symmetrically arranged on three-ring binders balanced against the hip. Even when theology studi

U.S. Bishops to Vote on New Translation of MassThe U.S. bishops will be asked to approve a new translation of the Order of Mass when they meet in Los Angeles on June 15-17. If the new translation is adopted as proposed and subsequently approved by the Vatican, Catholics will have to learn a number o

"I take on as my primary task the duty to work tirelessly to rebuild the full and visible unity of all Christ’s followers,” said Benedict XVI in his first message after being elected. Primary task, one might well ask? Is this primary task of full, visible Christian unity something t

For the woman who died Tuesday of raging cancer and left two children.

The authors of this book set out to correct what they describe as a widespread American perception that in effect Islam treats women at best as second-class citizens To counter this notion they cite the testimony of women in the United States who are eager to assert their identity as Muslims Th

A German Pope at AuschwitzAt the close of Pope Benedict XVI’s prayers at the concentration camps of Auschwitz-Birkenau, in Poland, storm clouds overhead gave way to sunshine and, improbably, a rainbow appeared.Unlike his predecessor, Benedict is not much of a world traveller. He has taken only

In this column I want to make three points. First, various state initiatives are rushing to fund embryonic stem cell research and therapeutic cloning. Second, the naughty word cloning is avoided, even though it is in fact the procedure described by the sanitized locution somatic cell nuclear transfe

For almost five years now (since I was a young 74), I have entertained a friend who entered my life unexpectedly: daily physical pain. I am a diabetic, which is not painful in itself, but I eventually developed a condition known as neuropathy. In my case it causes continual pain in the bottom of my