Are clergy and teachers of religious faith/thought public servants? Is their work on par with that of others who work for 501c3 non-for-profit groups and for government agencies? It used to be, but as of Jan. 31 the federal government has changed its mind about that.

Although not known to...

An Apple application that let users guess which French politicians or celebrities are Jewish was pulled from France's App Store. But its American equivalent is still available.

French activist groups said the "Jew or Not Jew?" app violated bans on compiling information on people's religion and revealing that...

The questions I am most commonly asked regarding the 9/11 attacks, certainly this week, are, "How do we explain 9/11, especially to our kids?" and "Did religion cause 9/11?" My short answer: be honest -- religion drove those planes into the building. It's painful to say, especially for a person...

Apparently Michele Bachmann thinks that she does, in fact, speak for God. Just hours after what a Chief of the FDNY theorized was a tornado touching down on my block early Sunday morning -- a tornado that felled giant trees and started two fires -- the GOP presidential candidate explained...

Where, if as 90 percent of Americans do, do you pray? Is prayer restricted to specific sacred locations, or can one pray anywhere? Could it be that anywhere one prays becomes a sacred space by virtue of having offered a prayer in that space?

The image of...

Whatever you do, wherever you do it, and whatever you think about bar and bat mitzvah, here are seven things to consider in order to help make sure that the event you get is the one you really want.

1. Reflect on what the words mean.
2. Remember that...

Texas Governor and potential presidential candidate Rick Perry is heading up "Response," a day of Christian prayer, to respond to the crises that face America today. The event itself is deeply disturbing, but so are many of the responses to it. Addressing both is necessary if there is any hope...

Anthony Weiner came clean, or at least he tried to. Speaking to the press, the embarrassed Congressman confessed, and confession is a central part of the process of penance in every tradition I know, religious and political.

But did Mr. Weiner really confess? Did he do the right thing or...

For years, historians, archeologists, anthropologists and pretty much all of the other "ologists" have agreed that agriculture created civilization, including religion, as we have known it for the past 12,000 to 15,000 years. The assumption was that settling down to lives of farming, people built cities, created art and made...

Stephen Hawking, the world famous cosmologist and physicist, declared in an interview published in the May 15 edition of England's Guardian that "there is no heaven." Whether he is correct or not is not something anyone can know for sure. We can believe as we choose, but we...

The Kabbalah Centre, a Los Angeles based world-wide Jewish spiritual movement, one not limited to Jews, is in the news again -- once more at the center of a controversy. This one, however, is not, as past ones have been, about the beliefs and religious practices of a group that...

Children may ask why if there is a Mother's Day and a Father's Day, is there no Children's Day. The classic response? Every day is children's day.

Maybe yes, and may be no, but according to the Bible, by at least some definition, every day should be mother's day...

President Obama will address our nation and the world tomorrow from the site of the greatest mass murder ever committed on American soil. At that same location in Lower Manhattan, and in front of the White House, celebratory crowds continue to gather in the wake of Osama bin Laden's death....

Passover 2011 begins Monday evening, April 18. And whether you are Jewish or not, whether you will be at a seder this year or not, the value of telling the story of liberation has never been greater.

Who doesn't long for greater freedom? Passover provides an opportunity to reconnect not...

Not since 2004 has Jerusalem been rocked by a bombing of the magnitude of this morning's attack -- years since dozens of broken and bloodied bodies were transported to hospitals as they were today when a bomb exploded by the city's central bus station. It's been long enough to be...

Were the three men wrapping themselves in leather straps and mumbling in a foreign language on this weekend's Alaska Airlines Flight 241 a security threat or were they Orthodox Jews preparing to pray in their tefillin -- amulets bound to the arm and head as part of traditional Jewish weekday...

With Rep. Peter King beginning hearings Thursday, hearings that will examine the issue of radicalization within the American Muslim community, two things should be stated very clearly: Islamic terror is real and so is Islamophobia. Denying the former is a deadly error, but addressing that real and pressing problem in...

If arguments were like swings at a baseball game, Former Arkansas Governor, Mike Huckabee, would be called 'out' on strikes for his recent comments about Islam. Three verbal swings and three verbal misses add up to a strike out. Like all strike outs, there will always...

People in the streets, Mubarak on the edge of collapse, Egypt's magnificent National Museum vandalized, looting rampant and no clear path to a better future -- that's Egypt today. And while it's easy to wax eloquent about the "democracy movement" coalescing in Egypt, it's not clear that what that movement...

Jan. 27 marks the International Day of Holocaust Remembrance, established by the United Nations in 2005 to remember past crimes with an eye toward preventing them in the future. The date chosen coincides with the date in 1945 when Soviet troops liberated Auschwitz-Birkenau, the most deadly of the Nazi death...