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Aspiring New York City councilman Dan Halloran is a practicing Neopagan, more specifically a Heathen, devoted to the religious practices and beliefs of early Northern Europe. But the oddest thing of all, to many people, is that he’s not an anti-war, enviro-activist, free-loving liberal—he’s a Republican.

Poet and writer Rhoda Janzen rebounded from a series of overlapping crises by going home to her Mennonite family—and lived to tell the (surprisingly funny) tale.

Here’s hoping the president will do the right thing in the wake of this week’s promises to LGBT Americans.

Once again Comedy Central is the forum for calm, reasoned debate.

Wealth creation guru James Arthur Ray is under investigation for criminal negligence in the deaths of two participants in a sweat lodge last week. Is this the inevitable result of outsider appropriation of a sacred ritual, or is the story more complex? Our writer, whose own tradition includes the sweat lodge ceremony, explains the nuances.

Barbara Ehrenreich’s new book on the dangers of Positive Thinking recalls Mark Twain’s obsession with the 19th century’s most famous mind-over-matter exponent: Christian Science founder Mary Baker Eddy. Are critics just jealous?

A Muslim everyman paddles his canoe to the rescue of a drowned New Orleans, and gets, for his pains, locked up in a local version of Guantanamo. This novel—a chronicle of faith and romance, of crisis and conversion—demands not just reading, but recommending.

In the great tradition of Socrates and Kierkegaard, Lars von Trier realizes that his role is to enable the audience to ask questions and confront themselves.

“For me, the process of writing this book was a real eye-opener that demonstrated that even small, some might say, “marginal” religious groups are connected in so many ways to so many other groups, crossing lines of space, race, and time. It led me to rethink the utility of the “marginal” and to discover just how rich those religions are as a way of understanding the world.”

Father Damien de Veuster was a Belgian priest who ministered to a community of exiles on the island of Molokai. He has been, for many years, the unofficial patron saint of AIDS/HIV, a disease that has a history of misunderstanding akin to that of the illness he himself died of—Hansen’s disease, or leprosy.