Although a religion writer by trade, I confess that some faith traditions and practices have remained mysterious to me, eluding understanding even for a reporter covering America's increasingly pluralistic, spiritual landscape.

But I've found that fiction can sometimes do what forbidding, serious scholarship cannot: provide insight into another's faith and,...

Appeared originally in the Forward.

Leon Elnekave, the affable leader of the dwindling Jewish community of Bursa, Turkey's old Ottoman capital, met my wife and me on a narrow, cobbled lane and unlocked the black wrought iron gate to the 500-year-old Gerush Synagogue. As he led us into...

Originally published by The Forward.

ORLANDO -- Thanks to overwhelming support from a growing Puerto Rican community in Central Florida, Alan Grayson, the pugnacious Jewish Democrat ousted in the Tea Party wave of 2010, is returning to Congress after a historic landslide.

Grayson's success comes after the...

As someone outside the disability community, I thought myself an unlikely choice to write a book about the faith dimension of disability. Over two decades as a religion writer for daily newspapers, I had written just a handful of stories about the subject.

But the Alban Institute, a religion think...

ORLANDO -- For Passover, the cheerful voice on the radio invites me and all other Jews in Central Florida to a "traditional family Seder" at an upscale hotel in this city's bustling tourist corridor.

The menu, prepared by the sponsoring Congregation Gesher Shalom, features the spring festival's familiar food, singing...

SANFORD, FLORIDA -- In the halcyon days of the 1960s civil rights movement, no march, protest or demonstration in the South was complete without white ministers, priests and rabbis prominently in the ranks, linking arms with their African American brothers and sisters. Each was acting -- as the Rev. Martin...

For more than 40 years, a decade longer than I've been married to my wife, another woman has had a hold on me, and shaped my life: A young community organizer named Nancy Dean Morgan, murdered in the mountains of North Carolina. It's a one-sided relationship to be sure, one...

Unquestionably, there is a dark, fundamentalist side to American evangelicalism, most recently showcased in a new book, "The Anointed: Evangelical Truth in a Secular Age," by Karl Giberson and Randall Stephens.

Extremist theoreticians and theologians like Dominionist David Barton and C. Peter Wagner of the New Apostolic Reformation would like...