Jay Parini

Sarah Palin is a figure of fun on the American left, easily lampooned as a know-nothing, gun-toting ex-beauty queen who loves God and the red, white and blue above pretty much anything else except for Todd, her macho husband, who races snowmobiles across the Alaskan tundra.

Within the Christian tradition, fundamentalism arose in the 19th century as an effort to push back against modern' readings of the Bible that suggested everything in the text wasn't true in some literal sense.

Fundamentalism takes different forms in different religions, but there is one striking similarity in all forms of fundamentalist thought. Each wishes dearly to hold in check all varieties of 'modern' or 'decadent' thinking.

God is God, but he has various names in different languages, and each strand of monotheistic religion has multiple ways of describing the godhead.

The ancient Greeks and Romans were comfortable with any number of deities and were quite open to allowing conquered nations to continue to worship in whatever ways they saw fit, as long as they didn't mind having an emperor who required taxes and tributes.

A long-running argument exists over whether Christians and Muslims worship the same God. In my view, they certainly do.

It's time that Americans dealt seriously with guns, getting in place strong and appropriate measures - there is no excuse for anything but the strictest controls.

Language kills, and inflamed rhetoric of the kind that spews almost daily from the lips of Donald Trump, Ben Carson, Mike Huckabee, and others running for public office in this country should be condemned.

Indeed, we might all forget where we have been if we didn't have somebody to assemble and arrange the little blocks called facts from which history is constructed, artfully or less so.

History is, of course, a made thing. It does not exist by itself in anything like a recognizable form.

'Bag of Bones' was a big, distorted yet wonderfully entertaining novel that rode high on the bestseller lists in 1998.

To bolster his right flank and attract women voters, John McCain had cynically opted for a running mate who was, by any stretch of the imagination, unqualified for a position a heartbeat away from the presidency.

Beginning in the late 18th century, some German scholars began to regard Holy Scripture not as a single revelation but a sequence of inspired texts that occurred in specific times and places and were subject to varied and multiple meanings.

The ability to sympathize with those around us seems crucial to our survival, and it's connected to the mirroring functions of the brain.

Jesus discouraged the accumulation of wealth, worried about its effects on those who had it, and took special pleasure in helping the poor, dedicating his efforts to them. He must have shaken his head at the large gaps between rich and poor throughout ancient Palestine in the first century.

Ridding the world of poverty is, of course, a fantasy.

I often think that the last holiday is the greatest, but then some really stand out in my mind. One of the best was one my wife and I had in the Lake District. We stayed in a B&B and walked around the countryside for two weeks.

My earliest memories of holidays are from when I was about eight. We lived in Pennsylvania, and every year we'd visit Miami.

American failures in Vietnam and Iraq suggest that it's not really possible to create and sustain a proxy government in a country far from our own borders.

For no good reason, George W. Bush and the best and brightest he could muster, including the likes of Paul Bremer and Paul Wolfowitz, decided it made sense to attack Iraq.

The U.S. invaded Vietnam because many in our government - Lyndon Johnson's best and brightest - imagined it could impose a government on that country that would provide a buffer against China and stop the supposedly rolling dominos of Communism.

Even among those who have no special allegiance to a particular branch of Christianity, there are plenty of seekers as well as agnostics and atheists who harbor a certain curiosity about Jesus and his story.

Whether we're looking at the burial box of St. James, a fragment of the True Cross, the Shroud of Turin, or some bones supposedly belonging to John the Baptist, there is always excitement and distrust, faith and doubt.

Jesus remains the most influential person in history, one who has inspired untold followers for millennia.

It's probably incorrect to say that Islam is 'a religion of peace,' as some politicians like to say. Overstatements like that don't clarify anything.

American politicians who dwell on American exceptionalism only dishonor us by suggesting we play dumb to our past.

We should never forget that Americans continue to advocate for individual liberty, equality and self-governance. We often step in when it's necessary to help countries in need. But our history needs no whitewashing. To attempt this does us a terrible disservice.

We are a nation of immigrants, a quilt of many colors, and we've managed over more than two centuries to create a way of life that allows for a reasonable degree of upward mobility, that prizes individual liberty, promotes freedom of religion and genuinely values equal rights for all citizens.

The United States is truly remarkable, a nation founded on a set of Enlightenment ideals so beautifully expressed by the Declaration of Independence and codified in the U.S. Constitution. We should feel good about our ideals, even when we don't quite manage to live up to them.

In a country where Americans sense, quite genuinely, that their freedoms have been taken away by the government - as in the U.S. Patriot Act, as in NSA surveillance - people feel powerless.

The idea that owning a gun in America was an individual right only dates to the 1980s.

Christmas is, for those who wish to follow the way of Jesus, an invitation to accept into our comfortable and safe lives those who come to us from far away, who seem ragged, marginal, in transition.

The whole point of the Resurrection stories - and the Resurrection itself - is that we don't recognize Jesus when he comes back to us.

I have always found the baptism of Jesus, with a dove descending and voice from Heaven, one of the great moments in the Jesus story. This is where Jesus hears the deep call from God.

I envy Muslims their practice of regular and genuine prayer. It's a beautiful practice that enriches their daily lives.

As a Christian, I try to meditate or pray at least once a day, however briefly.

Each year in early spring, during the season of Lent, which begins on Ash Wednesday and concludes on Easter, a plenitude of books, magazine articles, and television shows about Jesus appear.

To Western eyes and ears, Sharia law seems devoid of respect for differences of opinion or complex moral thinking. Certainly the American idea of separation between church and state is lost in Sharia-style governance.

With the Patriot Bill in place, the NSA no longer needed to get a warrant from a judge to tap into anybody's electronic information. A Surveillance State that would have boggled the mind of Orwell was born.

I've spent a good deal of time in the Middle East over the years, lecturing at universities in places like Egypt, Jordan, Israel, and Morocco.

Who was Jesus anyway? After twenty centuries, there is not much anyone can agree on. The four canonical gospels don't measure up to modern standards of biographical writing, and - outside of this material - there is precious little contemporary evidence, apart from a few glancing mentions of Jesus or the movement centered on him.

In truth, Jesus did not, in his own time, attract much notice.

So who is Jesus? For me, he's the central character in the greatest story ever told. It's a story about a gradually realizing kingdom that lies inside of us.

The gospels were, in fact, written anywhere from forty to a hundred years after Jesus, and their authors attempted to demonstrate that Jesus could be seen to fulfill various Old Testament pronouncements.

I argue that the resurrection was not the Great Resuscitation. It was a total transformation. I just don't accept the black-and-white thinking that goes along with needing to regard the gospels are literally true.

I regard Jesus, like the Buddha, as a figure with the power to shape our lives.

What I'm trying to argue, as passionately as I can, is that the Jesus story isn't worth dying for, it's worth living for. Jesus presents a third way, a way of being in the worth that embraces the Sermon on the Mount, with its challenge to violence and greed.

American fundamentalist thought connected strongly to reactionary political ideology as nervous Christians pushed back against liberal reforms on many fronts.

Actually, a myth is a story that is not just not true, but it's a story that is especially true. And I think the myth of Jesus is especially true.

I have written about some truly great writers - John Steinbeck, Robert Frost, and William Faulkner. Faulkner and Frost were the very peaks of American poetry and fiction in the 20th century.