The only question that matters with regard to a religion and its mythology is “What do these stories mean?

I think if you place Jesus firmly in the historical context... you can make very educated hypotheses and guesses about how he lived.

Well, to be clear, I am a scholar of religions with four degrees, including one in the New Testament and fluency in Biblical Greek who has been studying the origins of Christianity for two decades who also happens to be Muslim.

It is no exaggeration to say that Syria holds the key for nearly all of Americas foreign policy goals in the Middle East. As Syria goes, so goes the region.

Well I wouldn't want to tell Obama specifically what to do, but obviously he's already promised publicly and privately, both before and after he was elected president, that he was going to open up communications with Iran.

Anyone who says that Iran will commit suicide with its nuclear power is a moron and has no business in discussion.

Many of the prophets of Jesus's time were thought to just be mad men, just sort of crazy people who were claiming to channel the divine. Perhaps that means we should be a little less judgmental of some of our own crazies talking about God on the corner. They might actually have found a pretty comfortable place in Jesus's time.