Features
A Christian appeal to Islam: A Coptic leader invokes the Qur’an
After years of enduring harassment and violence, Egypt’s Christians, the Copts, have seen their situation improve in recent months. The media have become more friendly to Christianity, and plans are being made to purge school textbooks of their hate messages. Certain newspapers have begun to publish articles that try to integrate Christians and their heritage into the Egyptian social and cultural fabric. Muslim religious and political leaders have been visible at Coptic events, attending groundbreaking ceremonies for new churches and the funerals of victims of violence against Christians.
Books
Foreign aid: Does it harm or help? Donors and clients in the developing world
Aid to Africa: So Much to Do, So Little Done, by Carol LancasterFuture Positive: International Co-operation in the 21st Century, by Michael Edwards...
At home in the spiritual marketplace: Five types of religious questers
Spiritual Marketplace: Baby Boomers and the Remaking of American Religion, by Wade Clark Roof...
Pope Pius XII and the Nazis: Shrewd diplomat or failed prophet?
Hitler’s Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII, by John CornwallPius XII and the Second World War: According to the Archives of the Vatican, by Pierre Blet...
Body politics
Starving for Salvation: The Spiritual Dimensions of Eating Problems Among American Girls and Women, by Michelle Mary Lelwica...
Gertrude and Claudius, by John Updike
John Updike's 19th novel, plotted as a "prequel" to Shakespeare's Hamlet, is a beautifully crafted, captivating story....
Departments
Candid reporting
If you want to correctly interpret the news, stop assuming that the mainstream media know it all; pay attention instead to voices speaking quietly over in the corner....
Stay of execution: A moratorium on the death penalty
It took Richard Nixon, a fervent anticommunist, to begin a new era of relations with communist China, and perhaps it takes a Republican supporter of capital punishment to launch a new era of opposition to the death penalty....
Power loss
I have just spent the last hour turning on and off light switches, standing in front of heater vents, and opening faucets. After four days without power in freezing weather, I do not take any of these things for granted....
Already avant-garde
The church regularly gets criticized for being behind the times. Let the culture come up with something and, in time, churches follow, critics say. Let there be rock music and 30 years later there is Christian rock....