Lisa Miller

Once there was a Christian, a man from a wealthy family. He had conservative values, and he crusaded his whole life for social justice. In the end, he changed history.

Christian pastors do it with Muslim imams. High-school seniors do it with each other. Actors and authors do it, as do comedians and combat pilots. It's interfaith dialogue, and in the world of religion, it's very much in vogue.In the modern times, "interfaith dialogue" has come to mean both negotiating the crisis in the Middle East and holding a Passover Seder at the local church, and since 9/11, such efforts have exploded.

There is at least one moment in every religious person's life where commitment to faith collides, inconveniently, with desire. For Zeena Altalib, that moment occurred last year at the local swimming pool.

In your prayers tonight, you might want to thank God that no one has put you in charge of the Task Force on General Education at Harvard.The job wasn't going to be easy.

When Julie Sandorf's daughter, Sarah, was 3 years old, she came home from nursery school and declared: "Mommy, I don't want to be a Jewish, I want to be a Christian." These words sent Sandorf, an assimilated Jew with almost no grounding in her own religion, running, aghast, to the first place she could think of: her local bookstore. "I decided at that moment that we were not going to repeat another generation of ignorance and semi-self-loathing," she says.Over the next 17 years, Sandorf...

By the standards of episcopal Church meetings, it was a thrilling and entirely unexpected outcome. When the governing body of the U.S. branch of the worldwide Anglican Communion met in June to elect a new presiding bishop, Katharine Jefferts Schori, 52, wasn't high on anybody's shortlist.

The world into which Jesus was born and raised has shaped morals for two millennia. How Jewish mores became Christianity's customs.

Let's get right to the point, shall we? About halfway through Mel Gibson's movie "Apocalypto," which opens this week, viewers are treated to a stomach-turning scene of human sacrifice, set in a Mayan city around 1500.

Let's get right to the point, shall we? About halfway through Mel Gibson's movie "Apocalypto," which opens this week, viewers are treated to a stomach-turning scene of human sacrifice, set in a Mayan city around 1500.

Noah's Ark is the perfect children's tale. You have animals, a big boat, bad weather, a happy ending (good luck, though, answering the question: why did God kill all those people?).

The biggest surprise to come out of the U.S. Catholic Bishops' conference in Baltimore was not the bishops' statements on birth control (against it) or homosexuality (sympathetic, but against it).

In the beginning, God told the Jews what not to eat: the camel, the coney, the rabbit and the pig; the eagle, the vulture and "all creatures in the seas ...

It was a cold Halloween in Colorado Springs--The high barely hit 27 degrees--as Dr. James Dobson went about his work last week on the sprawling Focus on the Family campus he built in the shadows of the Rockies.

What does it mean to speak in tongues? And who has the right, or the privilege, to do so? These questions, largely theological, have lingered at the fringes of American Protestantism.

At lunch with Sam Harris, one is struck by how personable, how familiar he seems--a soft-spoken, thoughtful man with pleasant manners, a man who wrote two best-selling books while pursuing a degree in neuroscience.

Time was, not so long ago, that no one ever said a bad word about Pastor Rick Warren. He was the genius grower of churches, the California whiz who found a magic formula for marketing Christianity to the masses, who hit the jackpot with his book "The Purpose Driven Life," by some accounts the best-selling nonfiction book ever.

During the third century, in Egypt and throughout the Middle East, men and women fled the cities into the desert, following the example of St. Anthony. They wore simple clothes, ate simple food.

In the days leading up to the High Holidays, the holiest time of the year in Judaism, a senator running for re-election and a potential Republican candidate for president, announced that, yes, his mother was born Jewish.

Jack Danforth once stood at the intersection of religion and politics. He was a moderate Re-publican, three-term senator, diplomat. He is also an Episcopal priest, so pious that his Senate colleagues called him "St.

In 1949, the year he finished writing "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe," C. S. Lewis was leading at least four different lives. His reputation as a Christian apologist had already been launched with several books and a series of BBC radio speeches.

In the photo, Agnes Long looks drop-dead gorgeous. She's on vacation at the Jersey shore with her husband. He is tall, tan and trim; she wears a zebra-stripe bikini, a floppy hat and sunglasses.

What can you say about a 70-year-old guy who can kick your butt in spin class? Outdoors, it's below freezing, and, though technically morning, still dark as night.

One day, sometime around A.D. 90, a man named John climbed the spiny ridge that runs across the small Aegean island of Patmos. There, as legend has it, he found a cave, crawled inside and had a vision that would change the world. "I was in the Spirit on the Lord's day," John wrote, signaling to his audience that he was having a sacred experience, out of time and space.John's dream became the Book of Revelation, the final book of the Christian Bible, a vision of heaven and the end of the world...

"Don't hate me because my shoes are ugly." That's what I felt like telling people who leered at my Heritage 2 model Earth Shoes as I lumbered around NYC. They look like the ones I had in 1975--wide and lumpish, with that trademarked Negative Heel Technology that makes you feel like you're always walking uphill.

In Troubled Times, The Afterlife Beckons With Visions Of Dark-Eyed Virgins, Gardens And Palaces, The Bliss Of God's Eternal Presence And The Joy Of Uniting With Loved Ones. How Can The Promise Of Paradise Inspire So Many To Goodness, And Few To Murder?

For Years, Boston's Cardinal Kept On Priests Who Had Been Accused Of Molesting Children. Now Catholics Across America Are Confronting Similar Scandals And Questioning The Secretive Culture Of The Church.