In the end I believe the essential spirit that animates those places animates me. If that spirit is God, then I found God…If that spirit is life, then I found life…If that spirit is awe,...

All couples have been told to schedule regular one-on-one time. ‘Date night’ is the default answer to most problems in modern marriages. And research backs this up.

Tired of nagging your kids to hurry up, get dressed, drink their milk and brush their teeth? Here’s a radical idea: Don’t.

Happy families do have certain things in common. Today we finally have the knowledge to know what those things are.

The way to tell a really big story, I think, is to tell a really small story.

One of the reasons Abraham is an important figure in the world today is because he is not a saint,

At Abraham’s burial, his two most prominent sons, rivals since before they were born, estranged since childhood, scions of rival nations, come together for the first time since they were rent apart nearly three-quarters of...

Americans know more about religion than almost any other topic.

If you tell your own story to your children – that includes your positive moments and your negative moments, and how you overcame them – you give your children the skills and the confidence they...

It turns out there’s only 10 minutes of productive conversation in any family dinner. The rest is taken up with ‘take your elbows off the table’ and ‘pass the ketchup.’ And what researchers have found...

It is our responsibility to find God in someone who is different from us. I think that God basically says, ‘I created diversity on purpose, and it is your responsibility to figure out how to...

It’s a story that fails as history, but that’s why it succeeds as scripture — because it’s elliptical, … The story has the ability to be perpetually now.

One of the things that happens in the world is that people try to avoid conflict. Whereas in the home, you can’t. You’ll end up getting divorced or becoming estranged from your kids. Keep in...

Don’t forget, God uses words to create the world. Words! Words are only hope.

The simplest consequence of walking on crutches is that you walk slower. Every step must be a necessary one. When you hurry, you get where you’re going, but you get there alone. When you go...

Abraham is the shared ancestor of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. He stands at the heart of these three faiths. And yet you know almost nothing about him.

Let your kids pick their punishments. Our instinct as parents is to order our kids around. It’s easier, and we’re usually right! But it rarely works.

I was wading waist deep in the freezing, raw sewage of Jerusalem in some quixotic attempt to discover how King David had captured his capital,

When faced with a challenge, happy families, like happy people, just add a new chapter to their life story that shows them overcoming the hardship. This skill is particularly important for children, whose identity tends...

Everybody has heard that family dinner is great for kids. But unfortunately, it doesn’t work in many of our lives.

I definitely subscribe to the idea that 9/11, to use an overused phrase, was a wake-up call. There was a year-long national teach-in on Islam – everyone read books and suddenly talked about Islam, and...

I grew up as a fifth-generation Jew in the American South, at the confluence of two great storytelling traditions. After graduating from Yale in the 1980s, I moved to Japan. For young adventure seekers like...

I was surprised how relevant the Moses story was to contemporary American debates – from our ongoing debate about values, to our role as champions of freedom, to our place as a country that welcome...

Take a walk with a turtle. And behold the world in pause.

Fathers can find great inspiration in faith.

I grew up in the age of discount air fare, and for me, the act of joining a culture was a great way about learning about that different culture. So I grew up in the...

I say the same thing that I’ve said for decades now, which is: don’t go over to Japan trying to change it, thinking that you know better. Go there trying to understand.

Moses became America’s true founding father because he evangelized action; he justified risk. He gave ordinary people the courage to live with uncertainty.

Knowing more about family history is the single biggest predictor of a child’s emotional well-being. Grandparents can play a special role in this process, too.

Here’s a confession: I hate parenting books. I hate the ones that are earnest and repetitive.

The older I get, the more I realize that religion is not going to be easily marginalized by one of its wannabe successors – science, capitalism, consumerism.

The biblical story is in dialogue with the other stories of its time. And if the Bible can be in dialogue with other cultures, why can’t the people who are descendants of the Bible be...

Every writer dreams of writing a book that will touch people.

The most successful families embrace and elevate their family history, particularly their failures, setbacks and other missteps.

I set out to write an anti-parenting parenting book.

Decades of research have shown that most happy families communicate effectively. But talking doesn’t mean simply ‘talking through problems,’ as important as that is. Talking also means telling a positive story about yourselves.

When I was growing up, I, like many Jews, cheered what appeared to be the receding of faith from everyday life. The further religion got from our lives the better our lives would get, I...

Moses is our true founding father.

The bottom line: If you want a happier family, bring those skeletons out of the closet.

I’m a fifth generation Jew from the South, and I would say that I felt this connection to my religion, but it wasn’t a spiritual connection.

Celebrate your family’s bleakest moments and how your relatives overcame them. In doing so, you will encounter darkness, but you’ll give your children the confidence that they, too, shall overcome.

The great religions were not born in isolation from one another; they cannot survive in isolation from one another.

I was so naive about writing, I went to the public library and checked out the only volume they had on the topic – an academic treatise about publishing from the WWII era.

There’s a reason the Exodus story has inspired so many Americans. It’s a narrative of hope.

One question hovers over all of us who choose to spend our lives writing: why keep doing this in a world where so many forces are aligned against us?

One of the core ideas of the Bible is that meaning can be found in history. The sheer act of telling and retelling stories helps us to understand God’s role in the world as well...

Where God Was Born: A Journey by Land to the Roots of Religion

But humans disappoint. Adam, in tasting the fruit, indicates that he prefers Eve to God, so God banishes them.

‘Walking the Bible’ describes the year that I spent retracing the five books of Moses through the desert, and I was actually working on a follow-up, which would look at the rest of the Hebrew...

Children who plan their own schedules and evaluate their own work build up their brains and learn to take more responsibility.