In Ted Kennedy's new memoir, being published today, the Senator describes his first meeting with Bill Clinton in the White House. The new president had stumbled into a firestorm about gays in the military and invited the Democratic members of the Armed Services Committee to a meeting. All of the...

Moses has entered the abortion wars.

From the "Baby Moses Law" in Texas to a pitched battle over "Choose Life" on license plates, the Bible's leading prophet has become the latest touchstone in America's hottest hot-button issue.

This week, synagogues across the country consider Moses's farewell speech on Mount...

In The Making of the President 1964, Theodore White compared the death of John F. Kennedy to the death of Moses on Mount Nebo. Moses had led the Israelites out of slavery into freedom, put up with their kvetching and complaining for 40 years, only to be stopped short of...

THIS WEEK IN MOSES: Harry and Louise meet Moses.

In a conversation with religious leaders last week, Barack Obama hit back against some of the more outlandish attacks against his health care proposals. Responding to rumors of "death panels" that would "decide whether elderly people would live or die,"...

THIS WEEK IN MOSES: The biblical hero becomes the face of America.

Immediately after approving the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, the Continental Congress formed a committee to design a new seal for the United States. As proof of its importance, the committee was comprised of three...

Moses has finally made it to the White House.

On August 15, 1620 -- nearly 400 years ago this week -- the Pilgrims set sail on the Mayflower from Southhampton with 102 passengers on board. Their leader, John Robinson, described them as the chosen people, casting off the yoke...

The speech was well written and might pass muster in an undergraduate class on religion and the founding fathers, though even there he made some glaring missteps.

"We should acknowledge the Creator as did the founders - in ceremony and word. He should remain on our currency, in our pledge, in...

My wife and I celebrated Hanukkah for the first time last night with our two-year-old twin daughters. Sure, the last two years we lit the candles and gave them some presents. And a few weeks ago my family assembled for Thanksgiving and followed our (brilliant!) tradition of having an early...

The American press, predictably, is portraying the summit in Annapolis in strictly Bush v. Clinton terms. Clinton got engaged and failed, Bush is not getting engaged... and will also fail. The process is doomed to failure without outside pressure. Maybe. But also: Maybe not.

The Israeli press, equally predictably,...

The '07 election season, as much as the '08 to come, has involved a string of back-to-back-to-back primaries. We've had the Announcement Speech Primary. The Money Primary. The God Primary. The last few weeks we've been having the Talk Primary. At least on the Democratic side, the questions have...

A friend asked me how important I thought the discovery of Herod's tomb was on a scale of 1 to 10: 1 being Jesus's tomb, in other words, a hoax; 10 being the Dead Sea Scrolls, meaning the find of the century. (Great scale, by the way.) My...

Even a casual glance at bookshelves in my home, as with bookshelves of people like me around the country, would reveal multiple volumes by David Halberstam. The sheer breadth of his interests and places that he reported from in his five decades plus as a major figure in American journalism...

The tickets are huge - about eight inches long and three inches wide - and are covered in the shiny red foil, sort of like Super Bowl tickets, only without the holograms. I was surprised. And I was even more surprised when someone handed me a set last week and...

When the story of "The Lost Tomb of Jesus" is written, it will have an interesting asterisk: As the first of a long list of biblical scams to be perpetrated in the age of the blogosphere. It was a little over a week ago that Time.com first broke the...

The headline on CNN captured the question: Major Revelation or Titanic Fraud? And the first thing to say about the claims by "King of the World" James Cameron and "investigative journalist" Simcha Jacobovichi to have single-handedly debunked Christianity is that they're hardly the first to try. For 200 years, frauds...

Contrary to conventional wisdom, the acceptance speeches should be the best part of the Academy Awards, the one time all evening when the show is spontaneous, raw, and, with luck, emotional. Yet acceptance speeches have become nearly universally maligned - for their repetition (the same winners keep thanking the same...

Ever since George Washington held up his first inauguration to summon a Bible from the nearby Masonic Lodge to be sworn in on, the question of what the president is reading has fascinated Americans. In recent years, we've seen swoons of interest whenever a president endorses a book -- from...

Harvard slipped a stunning statistic into the footnotes of its new curriculum proposal released this week: Ninety-four percent of incoming students report that they discuss religion "frequently" or "occasionally," and a whopping seventy-one percent say they attend religious services. Ninety-four percent!! The Me Generation has given way to the...