The handful of squat and humble warehouses that comprises Dubai's unofficial creative district bears little resemblance to the emirate's legendary multi-billion dollar skyline. But in just three years, around 30 galleries and cultural institutions have set up in this dusty neighborhood. In the process, they have helped inspire private and governmental initiatives designed to alter the perception that Dubai is nothing but a characterless, globalized marketplace of vulgar shopping malls and exploited workers. The swell of creativity — in ...

Richard Land, the head of the gigantic Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission and its most influential political operative, has dived headlong into what has become a favorite Baptist parlor game: What exactly is a Mormon? It's a question that has special significance right now, since it relates to how religious conservatives regard the Mormon candidate Mitt Romney. On Wednesday, the EthicsDaily.com newswire, which is written by and for Baptists with views more liberal than the ...

At the 1964 New York World's Fair, people stood in line for hours to look at a strange sight. They wanted to see the "Futurama," a miniaturized replica of a typical 21st century American city that featured moving sidewalks, computer-guided cars zipping along congestion-free highways and resort hotels beneath the sea. Forty years later, we're still waiting for those congestion-free highways -- along with the jet pack, the paperless office and all those "Star Trek"-like gadgets that were supposed to ...

As Supreme Court hopeful Sonia Sotomayor breaks ground for Hispanics, she is poised to add an exclamation point to another historic demographic shift: the move to a Catholic court. Sotomayor was raised Catholic and if she is confirmed, six out of nine, or two-thirds of the justices on the court will be from the faith. Catholics make up about one-quarter of the U.S. population. "It's most unusual," said Barbara Perry, a government professor at Sweetbriar College who was already writing ...

Just so you know, Bart Ehrman says he's not the anti-Christ. He says he's not trying to destroy your faith. He's not trying to bash the Bible. And, though his mother no longer talks to him about religion, Ehrman says some of his best friends are Christian. Ehrman, a best-selling author and a professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is a biblical sleuth whose investigations make some people very angry. Like the fictional ...

When Pope Benedict XVI touches down for his first papal visit in the United States next week, you may notice that he doesn't have the same onstage flair as his predecessor, John Paul II. But you may also begin to notice a very handsome man of the cloth never far from the pontiff's side. That would be Monsignor Georg Gänswein, the Pope's personal secretary, responsible for everything from deciding who gets to see Benedict, to keeping His Holiness on schedule, ...

The sign outside the door read "Cinema Club", but inside, a Catholic priest was conducting Friday mass in Arabic for Gaza's furtive Christians. Many of those Christians bowing their heads before a statue of the Virgin Mary were hoping that the power of prayer might nudge along the Israeli security bureaucracy. Six weeks ago, 250 Christians applied for permission from the Israelis to exit the locked down Palestinian enclave of Gaza for a day to see Pope Benedict XVI ...

Roudeline Lamy was 23 when she was shot in the stomach. The impact of the bullet sent the small baby she was holding tumbling to the ground. Roudeline still suffers from stomach pains and her daughter, now three years old, is paralyzed from the waist down. The mother and child sleep on the concrete floor of a shack that floods every time it rains. Since Roudeline's husband was killed by the gangs, she has had to rely on the charity ...

Ever since the year 1204 A.D., when the soldiers of the Fourth Crusade sacked the Christian city of Constantinople instead of "liberating" Jerusalem from Muslim rule, Christians in the Middle East have been understandably wary of emissaries of Rome. Today, as Christians in the Middle East welcome Pope Benedict XVI on his first trip to the Holy Land, many are worried that the unpredictable Pontiff might stir up passions at a time of religious strife and political cold war. "The ...

A Hindu man in Britain lost his court battle Friday for the legal right to be cremated in a traditional Hindu open-air funeral pyre. Davender Ghai, 70, a world-renowned charity advocate in Britain, argued the practice is already legal under British law, but he sought clarification in order to hold such cremations in the future. Ghai tested the law in 2006 when he lit the funeral pyre of a man in the northern English county of Northumberland. He was never ...