In The Story of Christian Theology, theologian Roger Olsen writes:

A popular misconception—perhaps a Christian urban legend—is that the United States Secret Service never shows bank tellers counterfeit money when teaching them to identify it. The agents who do the training, so the legend goes, show bank tellers only examples of genuine money so that when the phony money appears before them ...

The January 29, 2007, issue of TIME magazine was all about the brain. The lead article, "The Mystery of Consciousness," was by Dr. Steven Pinker, Johnstone Professor of Psychology at Harvard. While marveling at the workings of the brain, Pinker clearly thinks we have only the brain—no eternal soul. At the end of the article he writes:

And when you think about it, the doctrine of a life-to-come ...

The cover story of the September 18, 2006, edition of Time magazine asked, "Does God Want You to Be Rich?" In researching for that article, Time phoned 770 self-reporting Christians across the United States and asked them to agree or disagree with the following statements:

Obtaining wealth…
God wants people to be financially prosperous.
Agree: 61 percent
Disagree: 26 percent

Material wealth ...

A new, highly efficient system is being used by San Francisco and New York City to detect the presence of toxins in a city's water supply, a possible sign of a terrorist attack. They have found that the best tool for monitoring such threats are bluegills, those little fish so many catch on a lazy summer afternoon.

According to an article by the Associated Press, a small number of bluegills are kept ...

Radical Islamic clerics are undermining the World Health Organization's efforts to vaccinate children in Pakistan. Whenever vaccines are handed out to aid the country in its fight against disease, clerics spread rumors that the medicine is actually an effort to sterilize children. They call the medicine "infidel vaccines." The idea fashioned in the minds of whoever will listen is simple: "The health ...

Parked on the side of the road, waiting to catch speeding drivers, a state trooper sees a car puttering along at 22 mph. Thinking the driver is as dangerous as a speeder, the state trooper turns on his lights and pulls the car over.

...

The driver, obviously confused, says, "Officer, I don't understand. I was going the exact speed limit. What seems to be the problem?"

The trooper, trying to contain ...

In his book Jesus Mean and Wild, Mark Galli references his interview with Stephen Prothero in 1994. During that interview, Prothero said:

Christians traditionally, as they've shaped Jesus, have been worried about getting it wrong, including the Puritans. Americans today are not so worried. There isn't the sense that this is a life-and-death matter, that you don't want to mess with divinity. There's ...

"One can love religion like anything else in life: sports, science, stamp collecting. One can love it for its own sake without relation to God or the world or life," wrote Orthodox theologian Alexander Schmemann in his journals.

"Religion fascinates; it is entertaining. It has everything that is sought after by a certain type of person: aesthetics, mystery, the sacred, a feeling of one's importance ...

After discovering how to clone humans, two scientists challenged God:

"We don't need you anymore," they said. "We can make life by ourselves now."

"Okay," God replied, "let's have a man-making contest."

"All right," said the scientists. "We'll do it like you did in the beginning." Then they reached down to grab a handful of dirt to begin to form a man.

Then they heard God's voice from heaven: "Hold it—get ...

I recently toured the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, England, famous as the location of the prime meridian. It is a remarkable location. I was able to take a picture of my children straddling the meridian, each standing with one foot in the Eastern Hemisphere and the other foot in the Western Hemisphere.

As delightful as that might be, I would have to add that the prime meridian itself is not physically ...