Lisa Miller

Republican Senators Urge Obama To Withdraw Chuck Hagel Nomination

2013-02-21T13:15:14-05:00

Fifteen Republican senators sent a letter to the White House Thursday, urging President Barack Obama to withdraw the nomination of former Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.) for secretary of defense and going as far as stating that a nominee would require 89 votes for confirmation.

The letter was signed by Senate Minority Whip John Cornyn (R-Texas), along with other notable senators including Lindsay Graham (R-S.C.), Ted Cruz (R-Texas), Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.)

In the letter, the senators call for the president to withdraw the nomination because Hagel does not have "the broad base of bipartisan support and confidence needed to serve efficiently."

The letter came after a key Republican senator, Sen. Richard Shelby (Ala.), announced that he plans to vote for Hagel, making him the third GOP member to announce he would do so.

Notably, Republican Sens. John McCain (Ariz.) and Kelly Ayotte (N.H.), who have both opposed Hagel, did not add their names to the letter.

The letter claims that historically, no secretary of defense nominee has been confirmed with more than 11 opposing votes and calls for a less "controversial" and "divisive" candidate. However, presidential nominations have only required 50 votes for confirmation, and filibustering one, as has happened with the Hagel nomination, is unprecedented.

Despite the move, Republicans have signaled more willingness to consider the Hagel nomination for a full vote after the President's Day Recess.

Read the full letter below:

Letter to President Obama on Hagel Nomination by

Joe Biden Pope Rumors: Vice President 'Not Running' For Papacy

2013-02-12T10:04:32-05:00

Don't expect to see Vice President Joe Biden dressed like the pope anytime soon.

"I am not running," Biden said at a Philadelphia gun violence event on Monday, according to CNN.

The Vatican delivered Pope Benedict XVI's official letter of resignation earlier in the day, effective Feb. 28. Biden, who is considered a potential candidate for president in 2016, praised the pope at the gun violence event, saying he sets "an incredibly high standard."

"The decision reinforces for me as a practicing Catholic that this is a man of great integrity and looking out for what he believes is in the best interest of our church," Biden added. "I admire him for it."

Speculation has been brewing about Biden's presidential aspirations. Biden has kept busy since President Barack Obama's reelection, meeting with notable Democrats and spearheading the White House's gun violence task force.

Marco Rubio: Immigrants' Same-Sex Rights Not 'A Central Issue' (VIDEO)

2013-02-06T10:34:37-05:00

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) said Tuesday in an interview at Buzzfeed Brews that he does not believe equal treatment for same-sex couples should be made central in immigration reform talks.

Under the Defense of Marriage Act, Americans and legal permanent residents cannot petition for green cards for their same-sex partners -- even if they are legally married in their state -- in the way heterosexual ones can. A number of Democrats and some Republicans argue immigration reform should address that issue. But Rubio said the matter is already complicated enough without bringing in a controversial topic such as same-sex rights.

"I think if that issue becomes a central issue in the debate it's going to become harder to get it done because there will be strong feelings on both sides," Rubio told Buzzfeed's Ben Smith.

Rubio is one of four Republican senators in the bipartisan "gang of eight" that unveiled immigration reform proposals last week.

Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Lindsay Graham (R-S.C.), also members of the "gang of eight," have spoken out against inclusion of same-sex rights in immigration legislation.

McCain said he believes including provisions for same-sex couples would make passage of a bill close to impossible.

"Which is more important: LGBT or border security?" he said at an event hosted by Politico. "I'll tell you what my priorities are. If you're going to load it up with social issues, that is the best way to derail it, in my view."

President Barack Obama rolled out his own immigration reform plans last week. His desired reform policies mirror the "gang of eight" framework in many ways, but include a call to consider same-sex couples as families under immigration law.

The proposal "treats same-sex families as families by giving U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents the ability to seek a visa on the basis of a permanent relationship with a same-sex partner," according to a fact sheet released by the White House.

In Search of Heaven

2010-04-19T11:42:07-04:00

Of course I believed in heaven as a child. Every weekend, driving up to our country house in Vermont, I'd gaze out the window from the backseat of the family car and see the shape of God in the clouds. But I am a skeptic, a rationalist, and over time my childish imaginings gave way to disbelief. Heaven -- the hallmark card version, with people floating on clouds wearing wings and halos, the dead living "up there" as they did in life -- made no sense to me.

Not long after 9/11 I wrote a cover story for Newsweek called "Visions of Heaven." The theological conundrum it posed was this one: all suicide bombers think they're going to heaven. They imagine that they are martyrs who will be rewarded in Paradise for their heroism and sacrifice. The victims' families insist that their beloved ones are martyrs who, too, ascend immediately to God. Yet this puzzle makes no sense. Are there multiple heavens -- some for assassinated innocents and some for suicide bombers? Is heaven a true fact? Or is it based in individualistic conceptions that evolve through history and culture?

Reporting this story helped me sketch out some of the basic questions about heaven, questions that have haunted believers for millennia. Is heaven a "real place" or is it an idea, a metaphor? If real, what does it look like? A city? A garden? A banquet? Do we keep our bodies in heaven? And if so, do we do the things that bodies do: eat, drink, make love? Are we recognizable as ourselves? Do we have identities? Or are we disembodied spirits who achieve some mysterious union with a universal spirit?

And so I decided to write a book, which came out last month: Heaven: Our Enduring Fascination with the Afterlife.

I had no idea, when I entered this project, how massive it would be: there are as many ideas about heaven as people who imagine it. Great scholarly overviews on the subject have been written, notably Heaven: A History, by Colleen McDannell and Bernhard Lang, and Life After Death: A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion by Alan F. Segal. Other scholars have broken off important parts of the heaven problem and written books about resurrection, the ancient world, salvation theory, utopian societies, spiritualism, the intersection of science and heaven, the Reformation, afterlife visions, cremation, and Muslim afterlife beliefs. Heaven has been painted, written, or sung about by Dante, Milton, Botticelli, Michelangelo, Tintoretto, Mark Twain, Seamus Heaney, Emily Dickinson, New Yorker cartoonists, David Byrne, Albert Brooks, Bruce Springsteen, the Winans and Alice Sebold. And then, of course, there are the visions given to us by Scripture and tradition. Our own individual visions are aggregations of all of these; sometimes our imaginings are ours alone.

The only way through all this material, I decided, was to get personal. And so I wrote a book with myself as the protagonist. Not a memoir, exactly, but a sorting and discussing of the main themes in the heaven conversation by someone -- me -- who wants to believe, a skeptical, observant Jew who happens to write and report about religion for a living. I spoke not just to dozens of scholars but to everyday believers and clerics, trying to find for myself visions of heaven that worked, inspired, provoked. This makes for an idiosyncratic book. It is not comprehensive (I don't include a section on Milton, for example); it is not definitive. I don't claim to know where heaven is or what it looks like. But it does, I hope, offer useful, complex images and ideas about heaven that people can chew on. For if 80 percent of Americans tell pollsters they believe in heaven, it might be useful for them to know a little bit about what they mean.

Click here for a conversation about heaven among leading clerics and scholars, from the Washington Post's "On Faith." And click here to view a Q&A between me and the Washington Post's Sally Quinn.