As the child of a devoutly secular Jewish home, the last place Lisa Schiffman expected to be on Rosh Hashanah was sitting in worship with her parents and her self-avowed “lapsed Unitarian” husband. It was a highly unorthodox service. The leaders of Aquarian Minyan – a “Jewish renewal” flock near the University of California at Berkeley – spread pillows on the floor and asked worshippers to bring drums. While the Hebrew prayers remained safely foreign, Schiffman noted that an awkward... Read more

Researchers who study America’s “civil religion” usually end up studying sound bites by pious politicians, the on-camera prayers of victorious athletes and other displays of lowest-common-denominator faith. Now, the American Banking Association has added a strange text to the public canon, circulating a Y2K sermon that it hopes will calm nerves in pulpits and pews. “We want to go into the new millennium with hope, eagerness and faith in this new century of promise,” says the speech, which was prepared... Read more

CHICHESTER, England — Terry Anderson walked through refugee camps in Lebanon, filling his eyes, ears, nostrils and memory with death, disease and destruction. He counted bodies. He interviewed evil people and innocent people. He wrote it all down, because that’s what journalists do. Sometimes, he was able to give a suffering mother his water bottle or share food with a child. Then he had to go back to his desk and write. “As a Christian, that’s not enough. I want... Read more

Vice President Al Gore has faith in the power of faith, as long as faith-based groups that take government money are willing to forgo asking people to embrace any particular faith. Hopefully, details of this generic, non-sectarian, yet life-changing brand of faith — faith in faith itself — will emerge later in the race for the White House. Meanwhile, Texas Gov. George W. Bush wants government agencies to be free to financially support all kinds of faith-based groups, without discriminating... Read more

Dimitri Petrov quickly realized that the men who shot out the tires on his humanitarian-aid truck weren’t fighting for the breakaway Russian republic of Chechnya. The situation was worse than that. The gunmen were bandits. They weren’t interested in politics or religion or debates about freedom and international law. They didn’t care if the food and medicine was destined for Moslems or Christians or anyone else in the village of Aki-Yurt, on the border of Ingushetia and Chechnya, back on... Read more

Heidi Johnson didn’t volunteer to fight in America’s culture wars, she got caught in the crossfire in the Columbine High School library. A crowd of preachers, political activists, rock musicians and boisterous teens became extremely quiet last week when the willowy 16-year-old spoke at a rally on Capitol Hill in Washington. She is one of several survivors who has spoken at religious rallies and conventions and faced waves of media interviews. Still, she seemed poignantly out of place in the... Read more

The last thing Father Andrew remembers from the afternoon of July 31, 1998 was asking his brother monk if he was too tired to continue driving back to New Mexico. It had already been a tough day. They had taken the pre-dawn vigil hours as Orthodox Christians in eastern Colorado prayed the Psalms for 24 hours before the funeral of a friend killed in a car crash. The young novice said he was tired, but OK. Father Andrew went to... Read more

WASHINGTON — The reports pour in via a handful of understaffed and overlooked religion news services that have sprung up on the Internet. In Pakistan, two Christians were jailed after they clashed with a vendor who refused to serve them ice cream in the same bowls offered to Muslims. “I do not have any bowls for Christians,” he said, according to the Compass Direct news service. The brothers were accused of attacking Islam, under a statute that, if read literally,... Read more

WASHINGTON — A story can be inspirational without having a happy ending. Activist Jim Jacobson of Christian Freedom International is used to seeing suffering during his illegal visits to Southern Sudan, where war bands sent by Khartoum’s Islamist regime continue to terrorize Christians, animists and even other Muslims. But his face still clouds over when he describes what happened this April to a tribal matriarch in the burned-out village of Akoch Payam. It’s not an unusual story. That’s the problem.... Read more

The worshippers may gather in a candle-lit sanctuary and follow a liturgy of ancient texts and solemn chants, while gazing at Byzantine icons. The singing, however, will be accompanied by waves of drums and electric guitars and the result often sounds like a cross between Pearl Jam and the Monks of Santo Domingo de Silos. The icons, meanwhile, are digital images downloaded from the World Wide Web and projected on screens. The people who are experimenting with these kinds of... Read more