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I wanted to think about how we mediate the past for children—and how we tell stories about children who lived in the past. Writing about religion, memory, and children’s literature became my way of doing that.

As a theologian—or as I like to say, a Christian intellectual—there comes a point when the words you write crowd into the life you live and demand that you reorganize your space or you will live in a mess. My sense is that many of us are experiencing a similar overcrowding. A world controlled by banking interests, multinational corporations, and a very powerful extremely wealthy few is an intolerable situation, and governments that love them and protect them more than the people will have to be reminded that some of us will make demands in the name of our God.

Once you produce garbage, by your own logic we have the right to recycle what you have wasted all humanity’s energy to produce (in Man of Steel, Krypton goes to hell literally because they fracked their planet to death); you could say, then, that they turned their planet into a bomb and blew themselves up. How do we make sense of this otherwise? So I suggest Man of Steel as an exercise in the language of racism, the politics of dispossession, and the danger of too much power.

A new book on ‘only children’ adds an interesting dimension to the politics of making babies.

A new book by a Constitutional scholar argues that the founding document does not protect religion—it protects religious freedom.

In a jolly pope-a-gram, Benedict welcomes the new president; the head US Cardinal is not so friendly in his welcome.

The outgoing president’s much-vaunted faith may have given religion a bad name.

Warren’s prayer began with all of us, narrowed itself to the Judeo-Christian monotheist, then more narrowly still on the Christian, then more narrowly still on that faith as experienced by Rick Warren himself. A stunning rhetorical achievement.

The Portuguese Cardinal’s warning manages to be a cocktail of Islamophobia, racism, sexism, xenophobia…

The door is not just open to Muslim Americans; we are not sitting in the living room; there is a room for us in the house now.