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Why is the highest journalistic award handing out prizes for reporting on the sexual dalliances of powerful pols? And we wonder why papers are closing their doors?

If American Muslims do not oppose torture and participate in the conversation on American morality, they become a special interest group with little relevance. But within Islam there is a strong religious case to be made against torture.

It’s difficult to believe that Newt’s role as critic of Obama’s foreign policy has as much to do with patriotism as with raw political ambition.

The word Islamophobia is used so broadly that it risks losing its meaning; fear is not the same thing as hatred.

I want to argue that we need to have a more expansive understanding of black religious identities, an understanding that Womanist Theologians have already pushed us toward, an understanding that does not compartmentalize black religious thought and responses into shallow categories like “right/conservative/prayerful” and “left/academic/protester”; categories that are too small, too static, and too constricting for us to comprehend the diversity of black religious lives and black political activity.

The Vatican has thus far given the thumbs down on the Obama admin’s first couple of candidates for ambassador. One wonders whether the U.S. routinely allows countries to decide who our ambassador should be?

In her 1969 essay “On Violence,” Hannah Arendt described bureaucracy as government by an intricate system in which no one person can be held responsible, the “rule by Nobody.” Atheism, then, would be the view that it’s bureaucracy all the way up. Now a…

Having a lesbian head a transdenominational body opens the door to gay rights across the board—a little like wondering if an Iowa marriage will be accepted in Alabama.

Obama might mention the super rich, for example.

Does poverty breed terrorism? Best-selling author Jared Diamond says it does, in a piece this week on the New York Times op-ed page. That’s not really Diamond’s point.