Reading in today's New York Times (October 4) about the latest revelations that the Justice Department secretly approved extraordinarily brutal interrogation tactics made me wonder where these people got their ideas. What led them to a point of view where they could live with public decency and private corruption, lying...

First Dennett and Dawkins and Sam Harris, now Christopher Hitchens. Just what is it that's bugging these old-fashioned atheists? Is it just the demise of the "secularization hypothesis" and the evident persistence of religious belief that is driving them wild? In part perhaps, but in all probability what is getting...

At a conference at Yale Divinity School earlier this month, Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne quoted one of his Georgetown University students to good effect. "In the West," the student had said, "we feel obligated to justify our religious goals in secular terms. In many Islamic societies, secular goals must...