In foreign policy, the George W. Bush era was the era of Samuel Huntington's thesis on the clash of civilizations. In an influential essay that became a book, Huntington argued that with the end of the Cold War, future conflicts would be fought between civilizations. The civilization he really worried...

There's a student in my Introduction to Religion class at the University of Miami -- let's call him Eric -- who isn't Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu, or Muslim. In fact, he doesn't subscribe to any particular religion. But he's not an atheist or indifferent to things religious, either. Instead, he...