Someone picked up scissors and snipped our mentalities. Our thoughts lay like scraps on the floor: thinking is severed from doing; spirituality is cut from its heritage and theological reflection mutates into one-liners from an adolescent-like preacher in an empty comedy club.

Such imagery comes in the wake of...

Call this a commentary on the commentary. Time has lapsed since that surreal week of weeks -- the week of explosions and a locked-down city and a Senate minority trampling the vast majority's common-sense dreams. We can now sift through the post-trauma media noise and ask: Are we really communicating?...

Imagine my shock when I saw how my childhood's domesticated Palm Sunday steered me into a domesticated Holy Week with a domesticated Jesus and a domesticated faith. It was a coloring-book Palm Sunday, a Palm Sunday of the early '60s suburban, mainline church -- before the assassinations and Vietnam and...

It's time I come clean. I'm an evangelical with a secret. A covert "real me" peaks from the shadows and longs to leap into the sunlight. World events compel me to throw caution to the wind and blare my confession: I'm a wanna-be Catholic.

There. I feel better.

Many...

Gaze through civil religion's in-creeping fog: Haloes blink on over sweltering men with wigs. They're now immaculate secular apostles; they kneel on a mountain top beside their polished spittoons while awaiting their Constitution's arrival. They never haggled, never referred to their honored but maddening mother country, and never debated behind...

Comes the moment when reason gels with emotion and the granite-faced Stoic marches into the backyard woods and shrieks like a wounded bobcat: "Twenty kids! And teachers! And school staff! And the beloved principle! And the assailant and his mother! Twenty-eight victims of a grisly binge even maniacal for lunatics!...

Want reasons for the restoration of the penitential Advent? Surf to the PBS News Hour website and click on its Nov. 23 broadcast. Watch the segment entitled, "Iran Cracks Down on Dissidents, Human Rights Attorneys, and Journalists." Behold the microcosm of twisted humanity -- complete with perverted, wrong-is-right...

Don't get me wrong. I'm all for harmony and understanding -- and I hope dreams of genuine good-faith dialogues are fulfilled. Maybe humbled Republicans and gracious Democrats will embrace; maybe they'll hear the call to "get things done" and steer us from fiscal and environmental cliffs; maybe they'll even walk...

Would anyone mind if I flung open a window and bellowed a primal scream: "It could have been different!"? Evangelical Christianity's hijacking was not inevitable. We barely missed the bus. We could have traveled with a more sophisticated political theology, free from clichés of the right and left.

Such were...

So there are two ants on a hill, see, and both feel the ground tremble and boom. They notice a gargantuan creature -- a sky-high behemoth -- walking toward them. One ant says to the other ant: "Human: better run." The other replies: "No worries. Humans would never hurt us...

I'm remembering the descent into the surreal. Radio reports told of crashing planes and dropping towers, of Pentagon flames and building evacuations, of stranded passengers in isolated airports -- and, behind it all, there was the leering face of a would-be Messiah-like figure, invoking religion, polluting its name, and wrapping...

The photo of the All-American family struck our Facebook walls hours after the announcement: A trim dad, donned with a baseball cap and a sweatshirt, sits on the porch swing beside his beautiful wife. Three children smile on their laps. The headline pleads above: "Please say a prayer for the...

So let me get this straight: That cheerful gold medalist traded in her family for a despotic coach, ran the gauntlet of a grueling training regimen for a crippling sport, mugged for television cameras and cut carrots with Mom for the up-close-and-personal NBC portrayal of family intimacy -- complete with...

Amid our quick-fire analysis, let's remember: No one asked 24-year-old James Holmes to invade a movie theater, mow down 12 people and wound about 60 more. It seems that he pulled the trigger. If so, he is responsible. Perhaps experts will establish his "insanity" (a legal, not psychological, term) and,...

NEWSFLASH: The controversy over God's alleged "loyalty gap" mounted yesterday when investigators discovered the Almighty's failure to register with either major American political party. What's more, God has not signed on with any minor organization either: Nothing resembling divinity was found on the mailing lists of the Libertarian Party, California's...

Don't look now, but this creaky ship might be turning: After months of conference calls and drafts and re-drafts, a group of Evangelical Protestants and Roman Catholics released a "Joint Declaration on Life," which sees links "between those who seek to defend human life and those who seek...

Maybe they're more than living museum pieces of a barely remembered schism-within-a-schism in Swiss history. Maybe they're reluctant beacons lighting a path away from dystopia. Maybe, if we look closely, we'll see freedom among the wary, rule-riddled Amish. Perhaps their backwardness isn't so backward and our advances aren't so advanced...

A question for the eco-friendly: Can we see those outreached hands? They're there, waiting for us, just beyond the fog of our prim, finger-wagging islands. Surveys show that three out of four U.S. voters favor regulating carbon dioxide emissions; some conservatives are reminding their kin of the word,...

I once swam in liquid darkness. I could touch it, taste it and smell it. It was far more sinister than the mere absence of light. It was an amoral creature with a deep, bloodcurdling growl. All my assumptions about God were challenged and, in a climactic moment, I peered...

Cue the off-key organ grinder monkey music. The postmodern circus has come to town, with Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich enrolled as the unlikely ring leaders. Step right up and watch them assert "traditional values" while twisting and bending the truth until it snaps. The political Left tries...