Palm Sunday Today is Palm Sunday, the beginning of the Christian "Holy Week" that culminates on Easter Sunday, April 15. It is also the first day of the Jewish Passover. The Bible records that the Passover occurred while the people of Israel...

Combining ecology and theology, hundreds of churches are choosing "eco-palms" for their Palm Sunday services this year. The idea is resonating with congregations that had not given much thought to where palms come from. But many of them have taken an interest in...

Pope Benedict XVI, in his Palm Sunday Mass, opened the Roman Catholic Church's most solemn week by urging young people to live pure, innocent lives.This year, Holy Week also includes the second anniversary of the April 2, 2005, death of Pope John Paul II. On...

A planned Holy Week exhibition of a nude, anatomically correct chocolate sculpture of Jesus Christ was canceled Friday after Cardinal Edward Egan and other outraged Catholics complained.The "My Sweet Lord" display was shut down by the hotel that houses the Lab Gallery in midtown Manhattan....

Kurt Vonnegut is the Danny Kaye of American Letters, a world-famous jester whose sweet and zany style has never been sealed by the academy as the high art of a Chaplin or a Keaton, who continues over the years to swoop up devotees without shaking off disdainers. Palm Sunday is not likely to send deserters scrambling from either side…. Palm Sunday is "an autobiographical collage," a literary bag lady—not your run-of-the-street bag lady but a Mary Kathleen O'Looney. In Jailb...

Kurt Vonnegut—public clown, master of disguises, wizard of the ironic approach, self-parodist, sender-up of his self-sending-up—gives the reader of Palm Sunday plenty of warning. Writing, he says, is playing practical jokes on readers: "If you make people laugh or cry about little black marks on sheets of white paper, what is that but a practical joke? All the great story lines are great practical jokes."… ["Somebody thought" is] the sort of response Palm Sun...

Like his fellow humorist Mark Twain, Kurt Vonnegut attains his main strength as a writer in his grasp of persona. Wear the right mask, he knows, and you can say anything. Critics are disarmed by this approach, not knowing which voice is that of the "real' Vonnegut and which only an illusion…. Thus, the typical Vonnegut book is endearing, puzzling, and infuriating, as is Palm Sunday, a book which should make Vonnecultists of the four or five Americans who still are not. Try, but it...