He was an itinerant preacher who claimed god have revealed him to be the one true prophet. He kidnapped Elizabeth Smart  and lived with her in a makeshift camp for years. She was hard to find; not because he was sly, but because Utah is full of prophets with multiple young wives.

On the visionary architecture and disturbing goals of Yearning for Zion, the utopian experiment undertaken in rural Texas by the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.

On the religious revival underway in China.

Nineteenth century Muslim-Christian hero Abd el-Kader, the “Algerian George Washington.”

An interview with R. Crumb on how he adapted Genesis into comic form.

A rare co-mingling between Hasidic Jews and their Crown Heights neighbors within Brooklyn’s ‘Basil Pizza & Wine Bar.’

An investigation of Scientology.

Inside the C Street house in Washington and the little-known spiritual group behind it.

How the U.S. Army went evangelical and turned a war into a crusade.

The author enrolls in three cults - ADIDAM, the Moonies, and Aleph (formerly Aum, who carried out the Tokyo metro Sarin attacks) - via their New York branches.

A profile of Francis Collins, a fervent Christian, former head of the Human Genome Project and Obama’s appointee to head N.I.H., now at the center of the stem cell research debate.

Alex Haley interviews the Honorable Elijah Muhammad’s number two - Malcolm X - in a Harlem restaurant.

A new Egyptian TV channel called 4Shbab—“for youth” in Arabic—aims to get young people interested in Islam through music videos and reality shows.

Pat Robertson was 29 years old, possessionless, and living in a Bed-Stuy brownstone when he announced that God had told him to buy a fledgling TV station in Virginia. Here’s what happened next.

Admiring evangelicals are helping David Berkowitz, the imprisoned serial killer who murdered six people in NYC during the summer of 1977, with an unusual image makeover.

Sandinista, reverend, and president of the U.N. General Assembly.

An early 1995 peek at what happens when secretive groups meet the Internet: a Scientology Usenet group, populated by believers and critics, stirs conflict that results in raids.

75 years after its founding, it’s still hard to explain exactly why Alcoholics Anonymous works.

A weekend at a Christian gay-to-straight sexual reorientation retreat.

An acquaintance dies in Iraq and a writer investigates. “How did Michael come to inspire such loyalty? And how did he come to die on the floodplain of the Euphrates? I looked closer and saw they were the same.”

Hipsters vs. Hasids in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. A skirmish over a bike lane becomes a battle for a neighborhood.