Staff Sgt. Robert Bales' alleged slaughter of 16 Afghan civilians highlights the folly of our repeatedly deploying a tiny fraction of Americans to fight our wars. Because we have eschewed universal military service, we currently rely on a tiny cadre of 309,670 soldiers to do our killing and...

Why should your employer have any say whatsoever about how you manage your reproductive health? Why? Can you think of one good reason? Your employer, of all people, influencing the most intimate decisions in your life -- could anything be more ridiculous?

Because it's all we have ever known in...

The year was 1990. February. It was a Sunday. Super Bowl Sunday, as it is now known across the country. A normal worship service was being conducted in a normal church in a normal town in America. Somebody said a prayer: "Lord, even as we enjoy the Super Bowl football...

One of the Republican party's shrewdest politicians just did a really stupid thing: he threw principle under the bus to avoid taking a stand. This was out of character for a man whom many Democrats like myself have admired at times for enacting unpopular but necessary reforms in New Jersey....

My last post addressed to the atheists who frequent the HuffPost Religion section triggered nearly 800 comments, many of them properly taking me to task for seeming to suggest that all atheists share certain less-than-congenial traits that some exhibit. But one put forth a query that I now address: "So,...

By using the "recess appointment" process to install Richard Corday as the first director of the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, President Obama has seemingly reaffirmed the end of his wishful working for bipartisan cooperation in Washington. Coupled with his recent speech given at the site of Teddy Roosevelt's historic...

Probably Mohamed Bouazizi would have taken down Saddam Hussein if the U.S. hadn't.

Who?

The official end of America's costly and misguided war on Iraq wasn't the only thing to commemorate in the past week. It also marked the first anniversary of the sacrificial self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi, the Tunisian...

Maybe, just maybe, President Obama is finally shaking off his subdued demeanor and will resume the kind of soul-stirring leadership stance that carried him into office. Deliberately echoing the rambunctious Teddy Roosevelt, Obama's recent speech calling for an America that is "fair" reminded us all how powerfully he can...

As a relative newcomer to posting articles in the Religion section of HuffPost, I've been struck by the number of "Comments" posted in response to my articles by people who are quick and loud to proclaim their atheism and the non-existence of God -- and equally quick and loud to...

We are smothering God. And our church. We're engaged in an unholy combination of implicit theocide and communal suicide.

That is the conclusion I have reached in trying to understand the long, anguished, painful decline of mainline Christian denominations. I look around and realize that I can't find among them...

The official numbers are out, and I just don't get it. It's now a documented fact: middle-class Americans are worse off today than they were 14 years ago, in 1997. I get the fact okay. What I don't understand is this: you can trace middle-class plight to their own political...

Ten years ago yesterday, we Americans suffered the most traumatic pain in living memory. Unlike the agonizingly long ramp-up we knowingly experience before full-scale wars, the al Qaeda attacks came literally out of the blue. Thousands of our friends and neighbors were murdered before our eyes, massacred in a rain...

"I don't get to vote on your marriage. How come you get to vote on mine?"

With that simple question to the Iowa State Legislature, a gay man recently laid bare the fundamental wrongheadedness of all the laws and referendums aimed at either permitting or forbidding same-sex marriage. Such a...

It is clear that the struggle to reduce our debt is hampered by many Republicans being shackled to their pledges only to cut spending and never to raise taxes. They fear their supporters' backlash if they violate such a pledge. So let me offer them a way out that will...

Fred Rogers knew so many things no one ever taught him.

One of them was the presence of God. He knew God's presence in his own life, and he knew God was present in the life of every person ever created on earth. This wasn't something he learned in...