I just saw a remarkable film called District 9 . It’s an exciting, science-fiction adventure movie, but it is much more than that. In fact, it explores, with great perceptiveness, a problem that has preoccupied modern philosophers from Hegel to Levinas, the puzzle…

The death of Sen. Edward Kennedy has unleashed for me a flood of memories and triggered a number of rueful meditations.  I come from a family of intense Kennedyphiles.  Both of my parents — Irish and Catholic to the bone…

Perhaps you’ve heard of the publishing phenomenon called The Shack. The book, written by William P. Young, was brought out in 2007 and has become an international sensation, riding atop the New York Times paperback bestseller list for nearly a year…

I first became acquainted with the barbarism of certain aspects of Shari’a law through an article published a few years ago in the New Yorker magazine.  The author detailed how, in many middle eastern countries, Muslim men use the prescriptions…

As I was coming to the end of Ron Howard’s latest movie, Angels and Demons , I felt like shouting out to the screen, “no, no, you’ve got it precisely backward!” The central theme of the film, based on Dan Brown’s thriller…

Somehow during the long campaign season, I never got around to reading Barack Obama’s The Audacity of Hope. In recent weeks, two very bright friends of mine — and not political supporters of the president — rather warmly recommended the…

Just a few days ago, the latest findings of the American Religious Identification Survey were published, and they revealed several interesting trends. One of the most startling is that northern New England — once a bastion of both Protestant and Catholic…

Perhaps you’ve heard about a successful campaign sponsored by some atheists in Europe to put placards on the sides of buses propagating the anti-God point of view.  The signs displayed in and around London and Genoa read “The Bad News…

Last year, Oprah Winfrey recommended to her world-wide audience a book written by the German-born spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle entitled A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose. As expected, the book became a runaway bestseller, and an Internet program…

The country, as you all know, has been reeling these past several weeks from the economic crisis that has affected the stock market, as well as the bond and credit markets.  Many who are knowledgeable in the field say that…