Former LA Times reporter William Lobdell tells of his own journey into and out of born-again religious faith.

Sister Olga Yaqob was born and raised in Iraq. She came of age in the terrible years of Saddam Hussein’s rule and hard Western sanctions. She worked with the poor and wretched in the streets of Baghdad and in Abu Ghraib prison long before American troops took the Iraqi capital.
For the last half dozen years, [...]

“Faith doesn’t just influence me,” Mike Huckabee told evangelicals last week. “It defines me.” And then he lost in South Carolina to John McCain.
In Nevada, labor lined up for Barack Obama, then Clinton took the vote. And Latinos carved their own way over political and color lines.
These are big players, speaking for the first time [...]

It sounds like a culture-war set piece: Hollywood rolls out a religious-themed Christmas blockbuster and conservative believers go ballistic. That was the story this weekend with the release of “The Golden Compass.”
Based on the wildly popular fantasy novels by British author Philip Pullman, a famously outspoken atheist, the film casts God and the Church as [...]

In the deep pages of the Bible, no woman gets more ink than a queen named Jezebel. Not Eve. Not Mary. But Jezebel’s ink is no love letter.
In the three thousand years since this Phoenician princess came south to marry a king of Israel, her name has become synonymous with wanton sexuality — the harlot [...]

Whether you grew up in temple, or church, or the church of rock-and-roll or reggae, you know the Bible’s Book of Psalms. “By the rivers of Babylon.” “Sing a new song.” “Out of the mouths of babes.” “The valley of the shadow of death.”
The Psalms are the song and poetry of the Bible. Poetry of [...]