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A group called the Florida Family Association wants to make sure I don’t watch a show on TLC called “All-American Muslim.” They needn’t worry about me, because the show is on TLC. (Maybe if it were on ESPN, but TLC…?) They are so worried about me watching it that they’ve inspired advertisers – [...]

Images are powerful. More than “holding a thousand words,” as the adage goes, images carry a power and weight that can strike us to the core. They speak to the depths of our emotional, social and spiritual lives in ways that we cannot always verbalize, but which impact us nonetheless. I think about the work of [...]

Your church probably does not include research laboratories among those organizations it supports. Yet a recent announcement by the Catholic Church describes a partnership with NeoStem, a U.S.-based for-profit research firm. This partnership will provide $1 million of support for research into medical treatments using adult stem cells and has raised public concern [...]

Thanks in part to a Showtime series that seeks to disprove supernatural beliefs, including religious ones, magician Penn Jillette and his shorter, quieter partner Raymond Teller have become public faces for atheism and skepticism. Now Jillette, in his new book “God, No!,” says he has little use for performers who try to [...]

Business is booming in Brazil. So is Christianity. What does the latter mean for the former, and vice versa? The former statement has become commonplace in discussions about the world’s economy. While the United States and Europe experience the full weight of fiscal irresponsibility and their national limbs strain to hold up the [...]

Harold Camping, the would-be San Francisco Bay prophet, wasn’t all wrong. Late October 2011 brought Judgment Day to this world, but not as he predicted. No earthquake or rapture was required. God didn’t even need to show up to do the judging. We’re judging our own culture through debate over the life and death of [...]

“The conditions of my life are precarious,” film critic Roger Ebert wrote recently in a post on his online journal titled “Fall from Grace.” Ebert, 69, perhaps the pre-eminent film critic in the United States and a longtime colleague of mine at the Chicago Sun-Times, where he’s been a staff writer since 1966, has been battling [...]

Today marks the first public event to take place at Park51, the controversial Islamic community center in New York City that came to be known as the “Ground Zero Mosque.” Earlier this year at the Q Ideas conference, a Q&A was held with Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, who was an early supporter of Park51. Rauf [...]

I was raised in a conservative, dogmatic Christian tradition that approached anything not explicitly “Christian” as wrong. Yet, as the years progressed yoga has become an essential part of my life and spirituality, even though a recent global survey of evangelical leaders indicated that 92 percent of the 2,196 surveyed believe [...]