James M. Wall
Quarreling with God
God so rarely is taken seriously on television that it came as a shock when President Josiah Bartlet on The West Wing orders his Secret Service detail to block all entrances to the Nationa...
The power of good will
On this year’s Israeli Independence Day, Gideon Samet wrote in a column for the Jerusalem newspaper Ha’aretz that as long as Israel occupies the West Bank and Gaza, it will nev...
Missing the game
I should be attending a conference in New York, but I am at home staring at my computer, with an entire week of travel wiped out because of a pesky bronchial infection....
Media bias
In Why Religion Matters, Huston Smith argues for the importance of having and articulating a worldview....
Sullivan travels again
There was an innocent spirit in the movies that Preston Sturges made during World War II....
Revive us again
The Fourth Great Awakening and the Future of Egalitarianism by Robert William Fogel
...Bad example
Pundits and politicians used to say they were embarrassed to have to tell their children that Bill Clinton didn’t tell the truth about his escapades....
Paying the piper
He who pays the piper calls the tune. This is reason enough to feel uneasy about the Bush administration’s program to transfer public funds into religious programs. No strings attached?...
Top ten films
The Coen brothers, Joel and Ethan, are off-beat filmmakers, but their latest movie, O Brother, Where Art Thou?, is the best film released in 2000....
Rabbit lives
Nelson Angstrom works as a mental health counselor in an Adult Day Treatment Center....
Focus on Bush
Sunday morning comic sections occasionally include one of those confusing hidden pictures which can abruptly assume a different shape depending on how you focus on the images....
The Palestinians' missing map
When Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered Yasir Arafat new borders for a future Palestinian state, he couldn’t show them on a map. There is no such map....
End of an era
In an essay in the New York Times, written prior to the presidential election and its tension-filled aftermath, author Alan Ehrenhalt argues that the dominant fact of our political life du...
Palestinians in the pressure cooker
Middle East summits come and go with one repeated mantra: bring an end to the violence....
Deadly silence
As the first national election of the 21st century draws to a close, neither of the two major presidential candidates has given any attention to a shameful part of our foreign policy, one which his...
To protect children
In 1968, when the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and the National Association of Theater Owners (NATO) developed the motion picture rating system, they were working with a moviegoing ...
Probing the depths
My journey to the Montreal World Film Festival has become an annual spiritual retreat. Here citizens stand in long lines to pick up tickets to a sold-out Chinese film at 10:00 a.m....
Political maneuvers
Media, religion and politics have a way of smashing into one another in rich and sometimes perverse ways....
A simple solution
When a friend of mine was invited to a retirement party, he responded, “Sorry, can’t make it. I am going to be climbing a mountain in Kenya....
National Insecurity, edited by Craig Eisendrath
Veteran diplomats, former congressional staff members and journalists who specialize in intelligence coverage join forces in this collection of essays to call for a total overhaul of U.S....