When President Obama used the occasion of the National Prayer Breakfast to say that for the fortunate to pay a little more to help the less fortunate "coincides" with Jesus' teachings, he must have touched a nerve.

How else to explain the volcanic eruption of hate that has spewed from...

You are special.

Don't worry, this is not the start of yet another Joel Osteen sermon. I mean only that your existence, itself a wildly improbable fact, increasingly seems to be the only peg on which cosmologists can hang the existence of our Universe.

Oh, and not...

Steve Doocy, soulmate to 30 Rock's Kenneth Parcell and cheerleader-in-chief for the annual "War on Christmas" pity party at Fox News, posed an interesting question. Interviewing the group church ladies behind a "Merry Christmas from Jesus" billboard campaign, he asked them what their Lord and Savior would say...

O, Mary don't you weep, don't you mourn,
O, Mary don't you weep, don't you mourn,
Pharaoh's army got drownded,
O, Mary, don't you weep.

But weep I did, when as a white boy caught up in the civil rights movement I had to grasp the horror...

The Xian Right (as distinct from mainstream Christianity) has finally tired of trotting out "defense of marriage" ballot measures. Now, they've got a shiny new lure to bring the base to the surface on election day.

It's the personhood amendment, and it awaits the decision of Mississippi...

Hold everything! The Nobel Committee has made a terrible mistake! Sure, Perlmutter, Schmidt and Riess thought they were seeing a bubble Universe expanding at increasing speed, but that was before string theorists told us that it's all just a sort of great big holographic movie, like the ghostly...

Texas Governor Rick Perry, the GOP presidential front-runner, began his campaign by planting his flag in the anti-evolution camp.

Evolution, he told a boy during a campaign stop in New Hampshire, is just "a theory that's out there" -- one that's "got some gaps in it." With...

In staging (would any other verb be as apt?) a distinctly evangelical Christian prayer rally in Houston, Rick Perry has probably boosted his chances of gaining the GOP presidential nomination. But has he done the nation or his faith any good? Almost certainly not.

God's record of response...

People who don't pay close attention to politics -- which is to say, the stay-a-beds and muddled swing voters who decide elections -- tend to have "a pox on both their houses" reaction to political stalemates, You know, like the one we're experiencing now as we drift toward the roaring...

May 2003: The first phase of the invasion of Iraq had just ended; the tough part -- rebuilding -- was about to begin. At the time, the war in Afghanistan continued to drain American blood and treasure.

President George W. Bush chose that moment to visit Nebraska as part of...

Success has a thousand fathers, the old saw goes, but failure is an orphan. Not this time. There is one and only one big loser in the New York's long overdue decision to legalize gay marriage: old-time religion. Rather than retreat in shame the self-anointed defenders of God's law continue...

Damn! Here was I, preparing to astonish the world with my tale of a visit to heaven, and I get beaten to the bestseller list by a tow-headed kid. Well, strictly speaking, I've been bested by his dad, the Rev. Todd Burpo of Imperial, Neb., author of "Heaven...

OK, Fairy Tale Religion. You've had your chance. In fact, you've had hundreds of chances, and you've blown every one. Isn't it high time we give grown-up faith an opportunity?

Harold Camping made millions with his claim to have derived the date of the Rapture from the Bible. He was...

A battle broke out in the streets of Baghdad. This was no fight over the presence of Americans, or flare up between Sunnis and Shi'ites. No, this was a battle over the role of rationalism, and it was fought -- literally fought -- more than a thousand years ago

The ultrarich have a problem. They are few and we are many. Throughout much of history, this was not much of a problem -- they just told us what to do, and, on pain of whipping or worse, we did it.

But now we live in a democracy that features...

"If there is a God, He is infinitely incomprehensible since, having neither parts nor limits, He has no rapport with us. We are therefore capable of knowing neither what He is nor if He is."
-- Blaise Pascal (Pensees, 233)

Ever since Galileo hoisted his telescope to the skies...

My wife and I went to Gibbon, Nebraska, last weekend to view the migrating cranes. The last thing I expected was a reminder of the devastation in Japan.

Yet the moment I walked into the Rowe Sanctuary, there it was: a six-foot-high stand of paper cranes....

In this busy age of ours, many people read only the headlines and first few lines of a story. I feel compelled, therefore, to start out by declaring that I find everything about the Westboro Baptist Church vile and repugnant.

They picketed the funeral of a friend of mine,...

"I, for one, welcome our new computer overlords."
-- Ken Jennings, former Jeopardy champion, conceding to Watson.

Five years ago Time Magazine, echoing the novelist Douglas Coupland, asked, "Is Google God?" This week, the mantle has passed to IBM's spectacular quiz-show computer, Watson.

If...

Brian Greene, the people's physicist, is everywhere these days. He's appearing on behalf of his new book, The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos. Indeed, if we take him at his word, he may be making an infinite number of appearances to promote...