- “The Supreme Love and Revolutionary Funk of Dr. Cornel West, Philosopher of the Blues,” Rolling Stone, May 28, 2009
- “The Martyrdom of Brad Will,” Rolling Stone, January 24, 2008
- “Jon Stewart’s Brave New World,” Rolling Stone, 2007
- “Teenage Holy War” — Rolling Stone, April 19, 2007
- “Jim Webb’s Never-Ending War,” Rolling Stone, June 14, 2007
- “God’s Senator,” Rolling Stone, February 9, 2006 (Senator Sam Brownback)
- “New Virgin Army: Life Among the Young and the Sexless,” Rolling Stone, June 30, 2005
- “Jesus Killed Mohammed: The Crusade for a Christian Military,” Harper’s, May 2009
- “Through a Glass, Darkly: How the Christian Right is Re-Inventing American History,” Harper’s, December 2006
- “Soldiers of Christ: Inside America’s Most Powerful Megachurch,” Harper’s, May 2005
- “Big World: How Clear Channel Programs America,” Harper’s, December 2003 — featured in DaCapo Best Music Writing 2004
- “Jesus Plus Nothing,” Harper’s, March, 2003 — featured in Submersion Journalism: Reporting in the Radical First Person, edited by Bill Wasik
- “Dock Boggs: The Voice of Despair,” Oxford American 2009 annual Southern music issue
- “The People’s Singer: The Embattled Lee Hays,” Oxford American 2007 annual Southern Music Issue — featured in DaCapo Best Music Writing 2008
- “Harlan County, USA,” Oxford American, 2007
- “Bad Moon Rising,” Oxford American, annual Southern music issue, 2006
- “Raw-Skinned and Born Again: Al Green,” Oxford American, annual Southern music issue, 2005
- “The Family,” Mother Jones, May 20, 2008
- “Hillary’s Prayer” — Mother Jones, September/October, 2007
- “Sex as a Weapon: Decoding the Literature of the Christian Men’s Movement,” Nerve, April 25, 2005
- “The Way of All Flesh,” Nerve, April 23, 2007
- “Holy Fools,” New Statesman, October 25, 2007
- “Preachers of Doom,” New Statesman, July 19, 2007
- “Keeping it Unreal,” New Statesman, April 22, 2007
- “Beyond Belief,” The Nation, May 22, 2008
- “Books Unwritten, Stories Untold,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, April 27, 2001
- “A Philosopher’s Call to End All Paradigms,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, September 15, 2000 (Steve Fuller)
- “Why Are We Afraid of Peter Singer?” The Chronicle of Higher Education, March 10, 2000
- “The Intimacy of Killing,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, October 22, 1999 (Joanna Bourke, historian)
- “I Was a Teenage Hamiltonian,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, September 14, 2001 (Joanne Freeman)
- “Parlor Politics and Power: A New View of Washington Women,” The Chronicle of Higher Education,December 12, 2000 (Catherine Allgor)
- “Fierce Debate Divides Scholars of 1994 Rwandan Genocide,”The Chronicle of Higher Education, August 3, 2001
- “Battle Lines in the Jesus Wars,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, May 11, 2001
- “Tinker, Writer, Artist, Spy: Intellectuals During the Cold War,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, March 31, 2001
- “Taking Black Studies Back to the Streets,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, May 19, 2000
- “God’s Own Knowledge: A Theology of Sex Shops, Movies, and Nothingness,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 2000
- “You Must Draw A Long Bead to Shoot a Fish,” included in Half/Life: Jewi-ish Tales from Interfaith Homes, edited by Laurel Snyder
- The Many Times My Mother Died,” Killing the Buddha, 2001 — included in Believer, Beware: First Person Dispatches from the Margins of Faith
- “Free Market Martyrdom?” Killing the Buddha, July 22, 2001
- “Yo Mama’s Orthodoxy: Rudy, Renee, and Religion at the Brooklyn Museum of Art,” Killing the Buddha, March 3, 2001
- “Making Torture Beautiful,” The Revealer, June 11, 2005
- “What God Gap? A Bush Voter Marches Against Bush” The Revealer, September 6, 2004
- “Prognosis: Death,” The Chicago Reader, February 25, 2000
- “Skip Tracer,” Washington CityPaper, January 28, 2000
- “Paradise Shot to Hell: The Westbrook Pegler Story,” The Baffler, no. 13, 1999
- “More Objective than Tears,” Pakn Treger, no. 25, Summer, 1997 (Chava Rosenfarb, Yiddish novelist)
- “The Last Yiddish Picture Show,” Pakn Treger, no. 22, Summer, 1996 (Miriam Riselle, Yiddish actress)
- “Troublemakers: Back to Madrid with the Veterans of the Spanish Civil War,” Pakn Treger, Fall, 1997
- “The Capitalist Spirit: In the post-9/11 healing boom, a new battery of mystics are raking it in,” New York, January 24, 2005
- “The Sutra Solution,” New York, December 6, 2004
Selected other publications
- “Faith, Reason, and Murder,” Columbia Journalism Review, May/June, 2006
- “Beyond Red and Blue,” Dallas Morning News, October 30, 2004
- “Fanatical about Free Speech,” Dallas Morning News, May 14, 2004
- “In Defense of His Amorality: I.B. Singer’s Demons,” Forward, birthday, June 25, 2004
- “Drunk on the American Dream,” Forward, 2002
- “Western Amerykanski: How the East Was Won,” In These Times, 2000
- “How the Holocaust Came to America,” Jewish Quarterly, no. 174, Summer, 1999
- “Goodbye, ‘Goodbye Columbus,’” Forward, November 8, 2002 (Dara Horn)