November/December 2004 Issue

Conflict and conversation.

Four recent films show a battle for control among men, women, and machines.

What’s real in espionage fiction?

Lessons learned in the church of U2.

A Man Alive in the Midst of Death

Alternate History

How to portray the Holocaust on stage and film.

I Want to Have a Space Alien’s Baby

Nostalgia for nature’s seasons in a climate-controlled world.

Faith, history, and the virtues of evangelical diffidence.

A sociologist’s surprising encounter with fundamentalism.

The inevitable and preordained trajectories of evolution.

So you think American history from the Great Depression through World War II holds no surprises? Read on.

John Wilkes Booth assassinated the president. Democracy proved harder to kill.

American Catholic intellectuals in the Progressive era.

Why Lewis was a Protestant.

In the Turkish city of Kars, schoolgirls forced to abandon their headscarves are killing themselves. A poet who is also a journalist is sent to cover the story.

The films of Douglas Fairbanks.

350 years of Jewish life in America.

Three Christians trace their roots back to the Hebrew Bible-and encounter God’s present-day chosen people.