It was a sensational charge in a country where food is yet another marker of political, religious and caste divides. For centuries, the Tirupati temple in the south Indian state of Andhra Pradesh has given laddu, a ball-shaped sweet, to devotees. The temple is the richest Hindu holy site in …
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A monthlong meeting of Catholic bishops and lay people at the Vatican ended on Saturday with a call for women to be given more leadership roles in the church. But on the question of whether women could be ordained as deacons, the church said the possibility “remains open” and required …
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The heyday of the new atheism in Western life, when anti-God tracts by Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens bestrode best-seller lists, did not arrive because brilliant new arguments for God’s nonexistence were suddenly discovered. Rather, it arrived because specific events and deeper forces made the time ripe for unbelief — …
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My family recently adopted a rescue dog. As we were going through a long list of possible names for our pup, two of the more charming possibilities were Odin (the king of the gods in ancient Norse mythology) and Zeus (the leader of the gods in ancient Greek mythology). I …
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