…completely. Roger Cohen, in his powerful piece on Iran in the current New York Review, tries to capture the mix of anti-clericalism, religiosity, and secularism he witnessed during last month’s post-election protests: In that moment, the crowd seemed irresistible, too large to be harmed, too strong to be cowed, and it was as if the […]

To subsidize coverage of abortion services or not to subsidize, that is the question. Pro-life activists and legislators don’t want health insurance reform to provide a back door for federal funding of abortions. However, not only could that make it impossible for some taxpayers to obtain coverage for abortion services that private insurers now offer, […]

For 30 years, abortion has been the keystone of the culture wars. It is the issue that galvanized the religious right as a national political force and brought evangelicals and conservative Catholics together. If gay rights has been a moving target that wise conservative heads see as a losing cause, abortion stands solid, as divisive […]

A new study from the National Bureau of Economic Research shows that while the Humanities are most likely to attract religious youth as majors, they are also  most likely to turn them away from religion. The explanation? Postmodernism. The authors suppose that what’s taught in Humanities (and many Social Science) courses is one or another […]

WaPo’s lede on its new poll is that Sarah Palin’s favorables are down with the American public. That’s news? We’re talking about a decline from 51-46 unfavorable last October to 53-40 now. The actual bad news for Palinites, if not for Sarah herself, is that  Mike Huckabee is now the 2012 front-runner among Republican and […]

(UNDATED) Every day, millions of us use search engines to find what we’re looking for on the Internet. We try Google, or Yahoo, or other sites until we find what we need. If a search engine repeatedly yields unsatisfactory results, we try different key words or use a different search engine entirely. Search-engine companies are […]

The religious right is up in arms about the place of abortion in the health insurance reform bills making their way through Congress. Today, an all-star cast of pro-lifers will appear on a webcast headlined as “Stop the Abortion Mandate Now.” Not surprisingly, several separate issue are being conflated to create an abortion healthcare bogeyman. […]

LAGUNA BEACH, Calif. — Along with about 20 million other Americans who’ll do the same this summer, my family just moved house. It’s the biggest relocation of my life — 2,016 miles to be exact — from a bohemian suburb of Chicago to a groovy beach town in Southern California. It’s been said that moving […]

Corners of the blogosphere have been atwitter with a remark made yesterday by House minority whip Eric Cantor to the annual conference of John Hagee’s Christians United for Israel; to wit: Reaching out to the Muslim world may help in creating an environment for peace in the Middle East, but we must insist as Americans […]

(UNDATED) After reading reports from the Episcopal Church’s recent General Convention in Anaheim, Calif., I was reminded that church conventions aren’t “the church,” any more than Congress is “the nation.” At church conventions, a handful gather to conduct institutional business, tackle two or three hot-button issues, vote on budgets, hold elections, and pass a few […]

A couple of days ago, the Israeli daily Haaretz broke a story about a booklet being distributed to Israel Defense Forces (IDF) soldiers asserting, among other things, that the pope and the cardinals of the Vatican “help organize tours of Auschwitz for Hezbollah members to teach them how to wipe out Jews.” Purporting to tell […]

By writing about his decade-old departure from the Southern Baptist Convention in an Australian paper, Jimmy Carter has caught the attention of people who may have missed the news the first time. What’s a little curious is that, the first time around, Carter gave as his reason his sense that the SBC’s ”increasingly rigid” doctrines […]

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Back in 1954, when “under God” was added to the Pledge of Allegiance and Congress required all U.S. coins and paper currency to bear the slogan “In God We Trust,” the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Constitutional Amendments held hearings on proposal by Sen. Ralph Flanders (R-VT) to amend the Constitution to recognize the authority and […]

From time to time, academics have noted the religious role performed by the news media in American society, and if there was anyone who emblemized that function it was Walter Cronkite. At the final moment of Mainline Protestant ascendancy, he was the Mainline presence on television par excellence–providing the comfortable, paternal, embracing, and morally serious […]