Paul Baumann

n the beginning, preaches God Is Back: How the Global Revival of Faith Is Changing the World, God created Adam. No, not the dim-witted Adam with the nagging girlfriend and forbidden-fruit problem, but Adam Smith, the enterprising fellow with the thick burr, the invisible hand, and all those economic maxims drawn from an eighteenth-century pin […]

t is widely bruited about these days that the once storybook marriage between the religious right and the Republican Party is troubled. Rumor has it that evangelical Christians and conservative Catholics have even been seen flirting with that most disreputable of suitors, the Democratic Party. The 2006 election of Senator Bob Casey in Pennsylvania and […]

t will come as no surprise to those who watch cable TV, or who read Vanity Fair or Slate or the Atlantic, that Christopher Hitchens is mad as hell and isnt going to take it anymore. For years the indefatigable Hitchenspolitical columnist, ardent biographer of George Orwell, and self-styled scourge of liberal correctnesshas fulminated against […]

Opus Dei has unquestionably gotten a lot of bad press, originally because of the prominence of some members in Franco’s cabinet toward the end of his regime. But the group has also been accused of, among other things, obsessive secrecy, an authoritarian ethos, being in cahoots with right-wing forces in Latin America, accumulating an indecent […]