Seward, Alaska -- Just how many species of animals are there on the globe? It's a question I asked myself after visiting the Alaska SeaLife Center here. The answer depends on whom you ask. For ...

Different religions have different views about what scripture is. In fact, often there are debates within a single religion about that, as all the Christian arguments about the nature of the Bible and ...

What's the worst that you could say about, say, love. Or kindness. Or sympathy. Or generosity. I'll wait. It turns out that if we add empathy to that list, there is now, apparently, a growing crowd of ...

Keeping track of a process I sometimes think of as the Europeanization of American churches can be pretty disheartening. The trend in membership -- particularly of congregations that are part of ...

One of the intriguing things that has happened in the United States in recent decades has been the changing religious landscape. Protestants, for instance, who used to make up nearly 80 percent of the ...

The famous Protestant Reformation leader John Calvin (1509-1564) used to decry what he called the "total depravity" of humankind. It was rooted in the questionable idea of "original sin," which my ...

Almost every tour guide here who has spoken about totem poles has emphasized that they are in some way spiritual but are not ...

After a couple of years of hot public debate about racism -- years that followed several decades of many Americans trying to acknowledge and fix racism -- maybe it's time to drop back a bit and think ...

Although I'm often disappointed in the religious literacy of many Americans, I'm only occasionally shocked, gob-smacked, startled by evidence of religious ignorance and bigotry coming from elected ...