Who would have thought that at this point in the presidential campaign season it would be the Democrats who are embroiled in an intra-mural battle over the influence of a perceived religious extremist?

Remember, after all, it was the Republicans who played to form in their early May 3,...

With the Bill Moyers interview, Jeremiah Wright is back in the news. And with the exit polling showing that Barack Obama's race was a factor for one out of six voters in the Pennsylvania Democratic primary, there is no doubt that Obama's association with Wright is a significant political liability....

Much attention was given to Mitt Romney's speech on religion delivered on the eve of the Iowa caucuses. Comparisons were made between Romney and John F. Kennedy as both were presidential hopefuls representing a religious minority. As such, each in his own way made a plea for religious toleration and...

I'm currently teaching a course entitled "One Nation Under God?" that focuses on religion and politics in U.S. history. As you would expect in today's climate, college students come to this subject with a fair amount of skepticism, if not outright cynicism. Even after a study of the sociologist of...

In an especially moving passage from his recent speech in Vienna that kicked-off his three-day visit to Austria, Pope Benedict XVI said, "It should be everyone's concern to ensure that the day will never come when only its stones speak of Christianity." That was then followed with the...

In a story from this week's Time magazine, we learn for the first time of Mother Teresa's private crisis of faith. As Teresa confessed in her own private letters "I look and do not see, -- Listen and do not hear." And more painful still:

Lord, my God, who...

As a professor of religious studies, one of the things that is a continual source of surprise to me is how ordinary religious people wear religion lightly on their sleeves.

I first became aware of this when I spent a week as a visitor at the Trappist monastery of...

[Disclaimer: In the letter that follows, which was written in response to David Brooks' NY Times column from May 25th, I am guilty of shameless, though at least not unwarranted or unrelated, self-promotion.]

Dear Mr. Brooks,

On the pages of The Atlantic Monthly during the aftermath to...

Decorum dictates that we should not speak ill of the dead, and in what follows, I have no intention of doing so. But with the occasion of the death of Jerry Falwell on Tuesday, I cannot help but consider what his true significance will be. In a nutshell, I believe...

In what is perhaps one of the stranger reviews from The New York Times Book Review, Michael Kinsley writes adoringly of Christopher Hitchens, the man and the phenomenon, but little about the book in question. In the review, Kinsley tells us about Hitchens' sparkling conversation, that he is a...

This just in: unbaptized infants have been saved from an eternity in limbo. We have Pope Benedict XVI and the Roman Catholic hierarchy to thank for this good news. In a report released on Friday, April 20th (coincidentally only 2 days after the Gonzales v. Carhart 5-4 decision from the...