Feiler Faster

I, for one, would like to ditch bulkly guidebooks with all those chapters on places I’m not going to, but the time is not now. I can see buying the overseas mapping service for my GPS and downloading a chapter to my Blackberry, but not yet. Still seems futurisitic. But change is coming. Lonely Planet…

How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice. How do you get to the Oval Office? Wikipedia. When Vífill Atlason, a 16-year-old high school student from Iceland, decided to call the White House, he could not imagine the kind of publicity it would bring. Introducing himself as Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson, the actual president of Iceland,…

I’m pleased to report that many PBS stations will be begin to air all three hours of WALKING THE BIBLE with BRUCE FEILER this week. Check local listings. There’s little uniformity on PBS stations, but I know that the show will air in New York and Seattle on Thursday nights at 8; in Boston on…

All the bloviating about the so-called “War on Christmas” just might provoke a war after all. New York mag decides to join the fray, on the anti-Christian side. Amid a welter of publicity for its supposedly anti-Christian message, The Golden Compass finally arrives in theaters today. We’ve seen it, and despite our high hopes, this…

Is Chabad the future of Judaism? Some Reform and Conservatives must think so, they’re criticizing it pretty heavily these days. First some background. WHAT’S Chabad’s secret? They offer ease of entry. People taking baby steps into Jewish life are intimidated by institutions that seem to demand a deep commitment at the outset. Although individual Chabadniks…

The speech was well written and might pass muster in an undergraduate class on religion and the founding fathers, though even there he made some glaring missteps. “We should acknowledge the Creator as did the founders – in ceremony and word. He should remain on our currency, in our pledge, in the teaching of our…

We celebrated Hanukkah for the first time last night with our two-year-olds. Sure, the last two years we lit the candles and gave them some presents. And a few weeks ago my family assembled for Thanksgiving and followed our (brilliant!) tradition of having an early Hanukkah celebration. The kids love it because they get all…

Out with the Religious Loyalties Test, in with the Baseball one. Since everyone must define their loyalties these days, here goes: I was not born a Red Sox fan. My mother grew up in Baltimore, so I was an Orioles fan in the American League, but I was really, really a Braves fan, years of…

From my experience, this article about tech for tots is dead-on. The Times says the hot toy items this year feature a screen and allow preschoolers to emulate their parents. Forget the toy phones, we want REAL phones Mom and Dad. But with screens now overshadowing wheels and dress clothes on toys, sounds like we…

One of the tent poles of my new book about the influence of Moses in America is Lincoln’s speech about Gettysburg, in which he use the paradigm of the Exodus to talk about the birth, struggle, and rebirth of America, drawing the parallel with the birth (Creation), struggle (slavery), and rebirth (Exodus) of Israel. How…

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