ORLANDO — In his flowing Middle Eastern robes, Coptic Bishop Youssef stood out among the other tourists in the newest theme park next to the highway between Walt Disney World and Universal Studios. Then again, he fit right in with the Holy Land Experience staffers who wear period costumes on the streets of this 15-acre model of old Jerusalem. And he felt surprisingly at home inside the Wilderness Tabernacle exhibit, a multi-media dramatization of the rites, chants, incense, vestments and... Read more

Once again, the Very Rev. Ted Turner has bravely stepped forward to blaze new trails for peace, love and religious tolerance. And all the people said: Say what? “I was looking at this woman and I was trying to figure out what was on her forehead,” said the founder of the Cable News Network, during a retirement party for anchorman Bernard Shaw. Looking around, Turner realized it was Ash Wednesday and several other Catholics were standing nearby. “What are you,... Read more

It’s the question haunting the U.S. Capitol: Does changing lives have anything to do with saving souls? If the answer is “yes,” then the Beltway powers that be will have trouble sharing tax dollars with faith-based charities. Truth is, America is packed with groups that offer radically different maps describing how souls get to heaven or hell. Many of these true believers don’t like each other much and there are swarms of secularists who distrust all of them. If the... Read more

When it comes to answering life’s big questions, the World Wide Web offers more research options than you can wiggle a mouse at. Trying to find the right used car? Doing homework to find an appropriate college for your firstborn child? Are you a cat person or a dog person? What breed? Perhaps you wake up in the middle of the night wondering if you need a new god or a fresh creed. Are you a liberal Protestant kind of... Read more

For generations, Serbs have visited the graves of their ancestors on All Soul’s Day to mourn, pray and give thanks for the ties that bind. But the refugees in a Brezovica hostel had a problem last week, as they prepared to make dangerous trips to cemeteries elsewhere in Kosovo. When they requested an armed escort, a KFOR official said the timing just wasn’t right. Couldn’t they do their rites some other day? The NATO officers didn’t get it. The Orthodox... Read more

It’s hard to move into a new office without spending some time exploring the past. Digging into a 20-year-old box, Drew University evangelism professor Leonard Sweet time-warped back to his Ph.D. studies as he dug through layers of onion-skin paper smudged with real ink and an ancient substance called “Wite-Out.” “I went from being an archeologist to, as I dug deeper, a paleontologist. I found carbon paper. This thing need to be carbon dated, it was so old,” he said,... Read more

The book was a global phenomenon and inspired sequel after sequel until millions rallied around the apocalyptic cry, “Don’t be left behind!” True believers handed copies to friends and warned strangers about the Second Coming. Evangelists said the books would convict sinners. It would have made a great movie, except that William E. Blackstone’s “Jesus Is Coming” came out in 1878, before Hollywood was born. “These books were very, very popular. … They gave evangelists a new weapon in the... Read more

The question was so simple that Haddon Robinson wasn’t sure he had heard it correctly. “What is Christmas?”, asked the man in the next airplane seat, once he learned that he was chatting with a seminary professor. The businessman thought he knew, since he was an ordinary American who had grown up surrounded by old movies and television specials. Then he asked, “What is Easter?” That led to, “What do you mean by ‘resurrection?’ ” Robinson described the biblical accounts... Read more

The pastor preferred to spend the moments just before the main Sunday service in prayer. But the two men who knocked on his door were leaders in his conservative church, and they insisted that their mission was urgent. What they said ended up in one of the stacks of congregational case studies that put flesh on the sobering statistics inside John and Sylvia Ronsvalle’s “Behind the Stained Glass Windows: Money Dynamics in the Church.” “We want you to stop talking... Read more

Hours before taking his U.S. Senate oath, John Ashcroft knelt before his elderly father. The Rev. J. Robert Ashcroft sat on a deep couch, while others stood to lay hands on his son’s head in an ancient dedication rite. The frail Pentecostal patriarch — whose journey included studies at New York University and the presidency of a liberal arts college in the Ozarks — began swinging his arms, trying to get up. Ashcroft later wrote that he urged his father... Read more