The black theologian James H. Cone ripped me open and laid me bare, not with a knife but with his book, "The Cross and the Lynching Tree." And what he exposed was my own personal story of faith connecting -- or failing to connect -- to the issue of race.

Mitt Romney's doctrine of American exceptionalism is well known. Indeed, Romney often affirms his conviction that God chose the United States above all the nations of the earth to bring light, hope and freedom to all humankind.

What most Americans don't understand is the extent to which...

No religious idea has greater potential for shaping global politics in profoundly negative ways than "the new world order," an old idea that has gained fresh currency in the midst of the revolutions in the Middle East.

Its proponents have argued for years that the new world order would bring...

One can only hope that the shrill, ideological voices that distort the meaning of the Egyptian revolution will not prevail, for these are the voices that could lead to catastrophe.

Some of these voices claim that the revolution is the leading edge of a radical Muslim attempt to control the...

The ruling by U.S. District Judge Roger Vinson that the health care law is unconstitutional may ultimately lead to the law's demise, or it could turn out to be a bump in the road.

Either way, the continued flap over the health care law and the efforts to bring...

Weeks before the attempted assassination of Representative Gabrielle Giffords, four Americans gathered at a diner in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, only forty miles from the site of Lincoln's "Gettysburg Address."

They gathered to ponder the rising levels of incivility in America's public square.

And as they dealt with that question, they pondered...

Weeks before the attempted assassination of Representative Gabrielle Giffords, four Americans gathered at a diner in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, only 40 miles from the site of Lincoln's "Gettysburg Address."

Weeks before the attempted assassination of Representative Gabrielle Giffords, four Americans gathered at a diner in Harrisburg, Pa., only 40 miles from the site of Lincoln's "Gettysburg Address."

They gathered to ponder the rising levels of incivility in America's public square.

And as they dealt with that question, they pondered...

The election of Barack Obama in 2008 as the nation's first African American president suggests that the Christian Right -- at least as defined and shaped by leaders like Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, D. James Kennedy, Paul Weyrich and James Dobson -- was falling into disarray.

Contributing to that disarray...

Fundamentalisms, wherever they appear around the globe, typically emerge in response to crises that throw the world out of joint.

In the previous installment of this four-part series, we noted how a wide variety of cultural crises threw the world out of joint for conservative American Christians in the early...

There have always been Christians who have resisted religious pluralism and diversity and have sought to transform this nation of religious freedom into a nation dominated by Christian conviction and practice.

Thanks to the First Amendment, however, they could not achieve that objective by coercion or the force of law....

Thirty-five years ago, in a time that seems like ancient history to most young people today, the eminent social critic Robert N. Bellah wrote a book that illumines the current American crisis with devastating precision.

I do not use the phrase, "American crisis," casually. All Americans, whether...

Hostility toward Muslims is so pronounced in this country that a headline on a recent cover of Time virtually screamed off the page, "Is America Islamophobic?" But if the 83 percent of the American people who claim to be Christian were to take the teachings of Jesus seriously, this headline,...

When Glenn Beck advised Christians to "run as fast as you can" from churches that preach "social and economic justice," he told us a lot about Glenn Beck.

Clearly, the man knows little or nothing about the Bible, the Jewish religion, or the Christian religion. If he knew even the...

This two-part series of articles is based on Hughes' recent book, Christian America and the Kingdom of God (Illinois 2009).

In part 1 of this article, we posed this riddle: why do so many evangelical and fundamentalist Christians -- people who clearly honor the Bible -- so often disregard the...

Want to try your hand at solving a riddle with life-or-death implications for people all over the world? Why do so many evangelical and fundamentalist Christians--people who clearly honor the Bible--so often disregard two requirements that are central to the biblical text and central to the teachings of Jesus: peacemaking...