Religion is never going to go away, and anyone who thinks it will doesn’t understand what religion is. It is a language to describe the experience of human nature, so for as long as people...

The very purpose of designing the Temple of Jerusalem as a series of ever more restrictive ingressions was to maintain the priestly monopoly over who can and cannot come into the presence of God and...

American Muslims – young American Muslims in particular – are starting to understand that unless they are willing to stand up for all the other oppressed communities in this country, including those discriminated against for...

There’s only one reason to be crucified under the Roman Empire, and that is for treason or sedition. Crucifixion, we have to understand, was not actually a form of capital punishment for Rome. In fact,...

In the 5,000-year history of Jewish thought, the notion of a God-man is completely anathema to everything Judaism stands for.

A politician is a politician whether he’s wearing a suit or a funny hat.

In the history of the prophetic biblical canon that starts with Genesis, the Koran is by far the most tolerant of the views of other religions.

The Jews integrated themselves into American life to the point that the argument that the Jews aren’t American sounded so stupid, that people stopped thinking it.

Pilate, as the histories reveal, was not one for trials. In his ten years as governor of Jerusalem, he had sent thousands upon thousands to the cross with a simple scratch of his reed pen...

What the printing press is to Christianity in the 16th century, that’s what the Internet is doing to Islam now. It has opened up the monopoly over the interpretation of Islam that used to solely...

Many of the prophets of Jesus’s time were thought to just be mad men, just sort of crazy people who were claiming to channel the divine. Perhaps that means we should be a little less...

Is it possible that Jesus, unlike 98 percent of his fellow Jews, was literate and educated? Yes, it’s possible.

Whether for good or for bad, the Iran that ultimately rises out of the ashes of last summer’s uprising will be unlike the Iran we know today, and for that we can thank the Green...

When you forcefully suppress religious nationalism, you radicalize it.

I have watched Muslims chant ‘Death to America!’ on the streets of Tehran, then privately beg me to help them get a visa to the United States.

Thus it is written that the messiah would suffer and rise again on the third day,” Jesus instructs his disciples (Luke 24:44–46). Except that nowhere is any such thing written: not in the Law of...

The key to recognizing who Jesus was is to recognize this fundamental truth: He was a Jew.

Islamophobia has become so mainstream in this country that Americans have been trained to expect violence against Muslims – not excuse it, but expect it. And that’s happened because you have an Islamophobia industry in...

The idea of literalism in the Bible is a very new phenomenon. In many ways, it’s a product of the scientific revolution.

Those who did know Jesus – those who followed him into Jerusalem as its king and helped him cleanse the Temple in God’s name, who were there when he was arrested and who watched him...

It is no exaggeration to say that Syria holds the key for nearly all of America’s foreign policy goals in the Middle East. As Syria goes, so goes the region.