Compelled by Faith: When Prayer is Not Good For You
Abby Sher collected thumbtacks and paper clips, traced the patterns on her wallpaper, and prayed fervidly to avert disaster. In another era she might have been just another pious eccentric; today she’s...
View ArticleOrrin Hatch: Health Care Dollars for Prayer Cures, But Not Abortion
The Senate bill could require insurers to cover Christian Science prayer treatments but not abortion?
View ArticleSacred Texting: When Religious Writ Gets Wired
The Vatican’s Web site considers a patron saint of the internet, Muslims debate divorce by text, and Jews pray by email; How does the inevitable transition to the virtual realm affect religious...
View ArticleForget Right or Wrong
If the traditional practice of prayer in the context of traditional institutional religions is increasingly meaningless for a significant and growing proportion of American believers and seekers, one...
View ArticleThinking About God Makes Your Brain Bigger
A new book argues that spiritual practices, be they secular or religious, are inherently good for you. Meditation and prayer—be it about God, or evolution, or peace, or the Big Bang—will actually...
View ArticleDoes Hitchens Have a Prayer?
When I was told that Christopher Hitchens has been diagnosed with cancer and that this has sparked a discussion about whether people ought to pray for him, my first reaction was a stupefying...
View ArticleWho (or What) are Sarah Palin’s Prayer Warriors?
The perils of reporting on the faith of Sarah Barracuda.
View ArticlePrayer Group Runs Away From Home, Sparks Fear of Mass Suicide
Another California story? Or is there something here we can learn about Pentecostal, charismatic religion?
View ArticleNuns Pray, Rangers Lose
So much for the efficacy of remote prayer. Or is there more to think about?
View ArticleShould Faith Healing ‘Do Business’ with Modern Medicine?
Although medicine should stay in the business of being evidence-based, says Harvard historian of science Anne Harrington, other healing communities don’t necessarily need to follow that model. There’s...
View ArticleThe Week in Religion: Haggard Would Identify as Bisexual, Trademarking the...
If RD were 21 it would identify as Bisexual too.
View ArticleTurn Off, Slow Down, Drop In: The Digital Generation Reinvents the Sabbath
As National Day of Unplugging looms (it begins a week from today) I hope we all can agree that taking time away from the frenzy of everyday life is a good thing. And pausing to reflect on the role of...
View ArticleManly Prayers at Penn State
Besides the weighty matters of truth, justice and protection, Coach Brown prayed for something much less obviously connected to the alleged sexual abuse: a restoration of masculinity to the game of...
View ArticleGod Wants You to Work Harder, and to Stop Complaining
So-called “workplace spirituality” teaches people that the anxieties associated with global capital are inevitable, even part of the natural order of things. Under the highly deregulated conditions...
View ArticleRomney Lets his Inner Mormon Out Just in Time for Tampa
With a Mormon scheduled to pray at the Republican National Convention, here’s a Mo-splainer on LDS prayer customs.
View ArticleConventional Wisdom: RNC/DNC Giving God a Bad Name?
All the invocations of God’s name and snippets of the Bible and Nuns On the Bus and what have you can't really help the Democrats so long as the larger religiously-tinged framing about what’s good and...
View Article“I’ll Pray For You”—Powerful or Pointless?
The title of Anne Lamott’s new book Help, Thanks, Wow: The Three Essential Prayers is such a boldly brilliant summation that I laughed with delight the first time I heard it. So much truth in three...
View ArticleSpiritual-Not-Religious or Just Lazy?
The folks most likely to be alienated by Daniel's book are, unsurprisingly, the seekers—those who call themselves SBNR, of course, but also those who want religious community, or at least want to want...
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