Religion Today recently posted the results of a survey of Americans’ understanding of the term, “religious.” Apparently the old divide between those who define religiosity based solely on faith and beliefs (historically Protestants) and those who take the concept to mean primarily a person’s good works (historically Catholics) persists. The survey, carried out by the…

Has anyone else been annoyed by last week’s publicity tirade around the birth of Prince George Alexander Louis of Cambridge? I wonder if the joyous furor would have been so shrill if the new addition to the royal family were a girl? Or a baby born out of wedlock? Or an adopted son with a…

Sometimes God shows up in unlikely places. Take church for example. This past Sunday during the prayers of the people, a beautiful couple stood up to ask the congregation to agree with them in faith that their little boy would be healed from cerebral palsy. I remembered this couple well: on Easter Sunday, they had…

In Italy I saw this shirt or some version of it all over the place, usually worn by young people. When I pointed it out to my husband (whose area of study frequently takes him to Italy), he explained that much of the time Italians will wear T-shirts with logos or expressions whose meaning they…

Jon Krakauer’s Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith was one of my traveling companions in Tuscany. Here Krakauer, who has developed a reputation for writing about the extremes of physical adventure (Into Thin Air, Into the Wild), turns his attention to extremes in religious belief, in this case Mormon fundamentalism. The…

Something about good food, wine, art and the charm of the Italian people here in Tuscany has kept me from writing the last two weeks. For that I am a bit sorry– but admittedly not very much. In the last two weeks, while my husband teaches a summer program in Montepulciano, I have had the…

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Yesterday the dog trainer with the Atlanta Humane Society came to start a spate of in-home training sessions with our dog Roosevelt— this after Roosevelt had bitten a couple of neighbors, snapped at a child through our front fence and viciously attacked our other now geriatric dog Carter…

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