Benjamin A. Plotinsky, managing editor of City Journal, has written a 4,000-word essay on Christian themes in science fiction. An editor at a respected journal gives serious attention to a theme otherwise restricted to fan sites — normally this would be cause enough for rejoicing among the edi...

I’ve been debating whether to write about Ariel Levy’s “Lesbian Nation” essay for The New Yorker’s March 2 issue. An abstract is here. The full article is available to non-subscribers for $4.95. I’ve decided to write about Levy’s eight-page report because it...

One part of Michael Kinsley’s legacy at Slate is an almost predictable fondness for contrarianism. This sometimes results in a bracing departure from pack journalism, such as Kinsley’s proposal that all parties in the debate about gay marriage would best be served by removing government ...

My first preview of at photographer Jona Frank’s book of portraits about Patrick Henry College occurred through Mother Jones , where it appeared alongside image galleries on phone sex operators, Aryan outfitters, and women in Afghanistan. (Mother Jones’ photo galleries reflect a wide var...

Paul Elie, an editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, has written a lengthy and sometimes well-informed profile of Rowan Williams for the March issue of The Atlantic. He makes some noteworthy errors, writing that Williams was “elected archbishop of Canterbury in 2002 by the other bishops on a wav...

When Roger Ebert was watching The Charlie Rose Show and saw director Tony Scott describe The Reader as another Holocaust movie, it set off a blog reverie on truth-telling. Ebert, who lost his voice after a protracted and heroic struggle with thyroid cancer and related complications, writes of keepin...

Darrah Johnson has written a masterpiece of a story for The Washington Post Magazine about young Catholics living in an intentional community known as Simple House (or, more fully, A Simple House of Sts. Francis and Alphonsus). Johnson concentrates most of her 7,900-word story on Laura Cartagena. Sm...

Newsweek recently published a one-page story about Ted Haggard that showed a remarkable sympathy for the former president of the National Association of Evangelicals. The story, reported by Tony Dokoupil and drawing heavily from the new HBO documentary The Trials of Ted Haggard , was especially uncr...

Veteran journalist Charles Sennott appeared on MSNBC’s Morning Joe today to promote GlobalPost, which strives to be a less expensive alternative source for global news coverage (compared to the more comprehensive Associated Press). Sennott mentioned that every correspondent for GlobalPost will...

The New York Times Magazine has wandered into the testosterone-heavy world of Pastor Mark Driscoll’s Mars Hill Church and emerged with a feature story that mostly does justice to both Driscoll and his critics. The coverage is by Molly Worthen, who has also written a previous New York Times Mag...