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Talk of compassion in the wake of the shootings seems like the typical namby-pamby response of religious liberals. Could it be the answer?

Across South Carolina—and indeed the country—voters attend tiny churches, Bible studies, and prayer meetings. Their collective views on the candidates are much more difficult to measure and assess. And while they may be consumers of Christian talk radio, or televangelism, or other religious media, they are not lock-step followers of the decisions of elites who met at a ranch in Texas, or of Jim Bob Duggar, or of anything but their own received revelation.

Many commentators have assumed that somehow Egypt would follow Iran’s unique trajectory.

The humanist community assembled many of its leading lights recently to award Richard Dawkins a prize for furthering rational thought. A secular humanist convention is not the witches’ coven that some sheltered theists might expect. I did not see anyone smoking and never heard a profane word. Drinking at the reception was modest by anyone but a teetotaler’s standards, and far less than at the Episcopal fundraiser I’d attended the previous week. Also unlike the Episcopal affair, I did not spot a single same-sex couple. I began to wonder how much fun these people, freed from religion’s rules, were having with their liberty.

I started smiling and continued to do so whenever I caught sight of the Ka’abah.

Has there ever been a major pop group more concerned with exploring personal anxieties, aspirations, and narratives through music defined so fundamentally by religious themes? The turmoil and paranoia of the last decade—wars, attacks, economic crashes, myriad color-coded fears—run through Arcade Fire’s three full-length records. The newest effort induces a look back to previous decades, when suburbia seemed to offer placidity and refuge from the wilderness downtown.

A scholar returning from a visit with Syrian opposition figures discusses the role of religion in the Syrian civil war, including whether it’s a sectarian war, what Americans need to know, and whether a post-war Syria will be an Islamic state.

The Confession app relies on a certain level of theological understanding, liturgical compliance, and spiritual will that we might be hard-pressed to find in even a relatively sophisticated believer. This is not entirely a failure of catechism or human will, I suspect. Rather, it is a continuation of what I have seen as a failure of mainline Catholic and Protestant pilgrims into new digital territories to grasp the social nature of new media.

On August 31, a few days before the opening of the current American-led Middle East peace talks in Washington, four Israelis were killed by Hamas operatives in the West Bank. Among them was a pregnant woman. This did not bode well for the future of the talks, about which there was already a great…

I knew something horrific had happened just from my friend Lisa’s email: “R U watching the news?” When you report on violence, when your family has been pierced by violence, people assume you are interested in violence. And you are. Very.