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Medieval mapmakers, with their limited knowledge of distant lands and uncharted seas, sometimes depicted dragons on the far edges of their maps. Hic sunt dracones (“Here be dragons!”), they warned. Dragons do not appear on our modern maps. But bodies on the rail lines of Madrid and the streets of Fallujah leave no doubt that Something Ferocious stalks the edges of our political and religious maps. Nationalism, tribalism, empire and religion mutate in draconian forms, and we sometimes fail to recognize the beastly genes in our own DNA.

"A virus breached the campus computer network last week and the entire system crashed. Repair has been difficult, but I bring a word of hope.” The director of information technology at the college where I was about to lecture on eschatology added, “This has been frustrating for everyone. Files have been corrupted and programs do not run properly. Please be patient. Some files have been restored. . . . Any day now we will be back to full operation.”

Reading this book is like joining an ongoing conversation, since Jeffrey Stout has been discussing religion and democracy with Stanley Hauerwas, Alasdair ...

Many seminaries and pulpits are filled these days with “second-career” clergy....

Journalism is said to be the first draft of history....

Where does a man turn, how does he live, when his hopes and dreams have failed him (or—perhaps no less commonly—when he has fail...

Charlie Kaufman may be both the most original screenwriting talent to emerge in the past ten years and the most exasperating....

In discussing two books on the new apocalypticism, Jason Byassee confesses that he failed as a pastor to know what his people were re...

A rabbi noted recently that when Jews and Christians view Mel Gibson’s movie The Passion of the Christ, they tend to see two different stories—and neither seems to appreciate or understand t...

Mea culpas: Counterterrorism expert Richard Clarke’s apology for the government’s failure to stop the 9/11 attacks has brought mixed reactions: some family members of 9/11 victims were deepl...

In the essay “Jesus Shaves,” from Me Talk Pretty One Day, David Sedaris describes a day in a French class that he enrolled in shortly after moving to Paris....

The acquittal of a lesbian Methodist pastor charged with violating a church ban on “self-avowed practicing” gay clergy does not change church law, United Methodist bishops have cautioned members as...

Massachusetts legislators have given initial approval to an amendment that bans gay marriage but explicitly authorizes identical civil benefits for same-sex couples....

Former USA Today reporter Jack Kelley, accused by that newspaper of fabricating many stories, has evangelical admirers in a spin because the journalist was celebrated for his Christian witne...

On the presidential campaign trail, Senator John Kerry (D., Mass.) is using the New Testament’s Letter of James to imply that the Bush administration may be long on expressing faith but lacks compa...

A ruling is not likely until June, but a church-state case widely discussed in the public has finally been aired in the U.S. Supreme Court....

The bishops of the Episcopal Church have rejected a bid by disgruntled conservatives to recruit like-minded bishops from other dioceses to assume control over their congregations....

When Abraham Smith retired from the U.S. Air Force in 1996, the last thing on his mind was preaching from a storefront in one of the most depressed areas of the nation’s capital....

Two top officials of the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel resigned in March after the church lost $14 million to two investment firms that have been alleged to be fraudulent....

Thomas O’Brien, the resigned Catholic bishop of the Diocese of Phoenix, has been sentenced to four years on probation for a hit-and-run accident that killed a pedestrian....