Americans are practicing religion in sports stadiums, at Star Trek conventions, at Michael Jackson’s memorial, and on pornographic websites. Holy is all over the place in America, says author Gary Laderman, a professor of American Religious History and Cultures at Emory University and the author of a new book, “Sacred Matters.”
On Writing & Reading
Here you'll find author profiles as well as mini – and not-so-mini – book reviews. I’m a writer who loves to talk about writing, so if you like to write I hope you’ll stop by now and then for some writing tips and to chat about the writing life.
Book Openers: Barack Obama — How He Got So Smart
Barack Obama was a president who could think. His memoir, “Dreams from My Father,” explains how Obama got so smart. Read more.
The Rhetorician in the White House — Or, How I Learned to Love the Passive Voice
The passive sentence gets a bad rap — it’s weak, it’s vague, it’s passive. But sometimes a neatly turned passive sentence is just what our ever-shrinking world needs. Obama’s Cairo speech is an example. Read more.
In the Garden With the Grammar Geek: Is It Ever OK to Use the Passive Voice?
Passive sentences can be wordy and vague — or useful. For me, a passive sentence is one that, like it or not, obscures the doer of the action. Read more.
The Writing Room: Splitting the Infinitive — How to Boldy Go There
“To boldly go where no man has gone before.” Nitpickers and pedants take exception to that stirring old Star Trek slogan. I don’t.
What’s Rhetoric? Let My Two-Year-Old Enlighten You
My daughter Christina discovered the art of rhetoric when she was being weaned from baby bottle to plastic cup. She’d say, “I want milk and I don’t want it in a cup” — an elegant illocutionary statement that usually got her what she wanted, her bottle.
A Case of the Human Condition: Jane Johnston Schoolcraft and the Indian I Wanted to Be
Growing up in Michigan, I read “Hiawatha,” but I was never exposed to the poems and stories of Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, a nineteenth-century Ojibway Indian from the Upper Peninsula. I was culturally deprived.