I love the fact that Sally Quinn chose to break with her regular practice, and take communion at Tim Russert’s funeral. I love it, because as she describes it, it was an expression of love and respect for her departed friend on his own terms, not her own terms. That kind of empathy is always powerful, but in the realm of religion, it is sacred. Of course, all that is easy for me to say, because I am not Catholic.

The fact that taking communion worked for her and impresses me does not mean that it might not be upsetting to Catholics who attach a whole range of spiritual and doctrinal meaning to communion that we do not. Ms. Quinn’s apparent tone-deafness to that fact should not be overlooked. But charging her with “narcissism “, as the Catholic League did, is outrageous. Sadly it also typifies the responses of all religious watchdog groups, be they Catholic, Christian, Jewish, Muslim or Hindu. They never miss the opportunity to read a well-intentioned ritual misstep, as purposefully provocative or shamefully disrespectful.

It seems to me that the rub here, lies in surfacing a tension within the Catholic community itself, and that Ms. Quinn was an innocent bystander who got caught in the cross fire. As communion was explained to her by Mr. Russert, it was a ritual in which she could participate with integrity, so she did. Even the transubstantiation part worked to the extent that it brought her closer, though admittedly to Tim and not Jesus.

What sparked the anger here was that an individual Catholic, Tim Russert, explained communion his own way – one that does not fit with the doctrinal requirement of some other Catholics. Since they can no longer blame him, they took out their frustrations on her. By participating in the ritual, while acknowledging that she did not fully support its theological underpinnings, Ms. Quinn opened up the complex relationship between a ritual whose purpose is to constitute a particular community and the inevitable variety of motivations and understandings that are brought to that ritual by the individuals who participate in it.

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I give thanks to God for the 21% of atheists who affirm their belief in Her or Him, and I am blown away by the holiness of such people who manage to pray once a week. In fact, I think that I aspire to being one of them (though with a bit more regular prayer).

Of course the quick response to such a finding is that American atheists must not be a very bright group if over a fifth of them say that they believe in God. Don’t they know what the word means?! But in truth, they may be way ahead of many of us who count ourselves among the faithful.

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Three books that have changed my life are Dare To Believe, The Talmud, and You Don't Have To Be Wrong For Me To Be Right.

The first, by Jean-Marie Cardinal Lustiger, includes Addresses, Sermons and Interviews with the departed Bishop of Paris, who began life as the Jewish child of Polish immigrants to France, survived the Holocaust because of the courage of a Catholic family, and became a priest who never renounced his identity as a Jew. His is a story that must be read by all of us who wrestle with how to be deeply committed to the tradition we love, while continuing to see the truth of others. Categories are important, but as Cardinal Lustiger taught, they can never fully encompass the complexity of identity or the mystery of an infinite God.

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Hindu groups that are protesting “The Love Guru” should relax, buy some popcorn and enjoy the movie. The fact is that it’s pretty innocuous at worst and actually a humorous, if wildly over-simplified version of some of the most popular teachings that have emerged from Hindu teachers and traditions. Where else can one find a popular film that shares Gandhi’s teaching that a world animated by the spirit of “an eye for an eye” will simply create a world of blind people?

No, the movie is neither a sophisticated rendering of a wise and ancient tradition, nor does it pretend to be one. But there is no more disrespect of the tradition here than there is when similar portrayals of Jewish, Christian, or Muslim faith are used to make us laugh. In fact, such portrayals assume that we know enough and care enough about the tradition being lampooned, that we can appreciate the humor. Such material only works when that is the case. So this is as much about the popular foothold that Hinduism has established in American pop culture as anything else. And that kind of popularity always makes the purists in any community nervous. But that’s their problem. And it’s not limited to Hindus.

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It’s ironic to me that the inverse of this question would be far less controversial. If we were asked whether or not the state of our belief was affected by the state of our physical health, there would be, I suspect, broad agreement. Those who are comfortable with faith would regale us with tales of spiritual awareness that came at moments of illness, extreme physical suffering, or great physical accomplishments.

Those who think that faith is “nothing more” than an electro-chemical or neuro-biological reaction in the brain, would see evidence for their conclusion in the fact that people under physical stress experience new mental states which help them to explain or cope with new realities. But because the issue here is whether or not faith is real in the physical sense, we are likely to see some genuine disagreements. I wonder if that is even necessary.

This issue is not whether or not “one believes” that faith affects our health, because it is a scientific fact that it does. My hunch is that each of us has had the experience of pulling ourselves together emotionally, or insisting to ourselves that we can overcome a specific challenge and experience a newfound strength that helps us to achieve our desired goal. That is no less a matter of faith simply because it is momentary faith in ourselves than it would be if we called upon God, Jesus, Allah, or any other Divine name in whom we might believe.

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Barack Obama needed to speak out years ago, not resign now. Leaving now is just a sad example of politics as usual from a candidate who promises change, and that is truly disappointing. The issue is not leaving the church now, which if he believes in its teachings, he ought not to do. Nor is it accepting the tired canard that membership within any community implies agreement with all of its teachings. That is simply a path to creating homogenous communities of spiritual/intellectual automatons.

But it is fair to ask Obama, especially in the context of a spiritual community so proud of a prophetic voice which speaks truth to power, how come he never took the initiative to speak out against those words and deeds with which he disagreed, when he was a member of Trinity Church? Had he done so, he might have modeled the kind of loving critique which is so absent from contemporary discourse, especially when it comes to religion.

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It’s easy to say that Gordon Gekko, the character played by Michael Douglas in Wall Street, was wrong when he declared that “greed is good” – too easy by far. If we simply define greed as the desire for more of something than is needed, than of course it is easy to sit back and declare others’ desires for those things which we don’t want, or in quantities beyond our desire, as sinful expressions of greed. But that is simply the use of moral language to tell others that because we don’t want those things, they shouldn’t either, and that seems just a little arrogant to me. Not to mention that religious and moral arrogance are every bit as deadly, especially in today’s world, as greed is.

But if we understand that greed is the desire for that which suits our needs but comes at a cost so high, whether to ourselves, others, or the world, that we fear we may be “overpaying,” then the answer is that it may be not only justifiable, but genuinely sacred. And that dilemma has been with us since the time of God, the original “greedy” character. Yes, greedy.

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The Supreme Court of California has stumbled badly, even if in so doing it has stumbled into what amounts to a good conclusion. With the thinnest of legal reasoning, they have opted to make social policy rather than adjudicate the law. Simply asserting that marriage is a constitutional right does not make it so, and the fact remains that their ruling about this so-called right, does not extent to all those who want to be in a marriage -- their ruling clearly rejects extending their new definition of equal protection to either polygamous marriages or those between close relatives.

In other words, the court stepped in to “resolve” an issue which deeply divides both our nation and the voters of California (49% of whom oppose gay marriage and 45% of whom favor it). In fact, they have trumped the rights of individuals to make this decision and done so in a way that will only deepen the cultural divides and fan the flames of an already dangerous culture war around this issue.

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This week’s release of a manifesto signed by a group of Evangelical Christian leaders is good news for all of us, but is not without its problems. Before addressing that issue however, the direct question is about the definition of the term evangelical itself. In my mind, an Evangelical is one who believes in the Good News of Jesus as savior and seeks to spread that News as widely as possible.

Contrary to what many expect and most Jews fear though, spreading the News is not always about conversion. To be sure, my experience of most Evangelical Christians is that they hope for it, but that their sense of mission is far richer and more complex -- based on the notion that everything they do, can serve as a witness to the good news in which they believe and which they hope all will eventually share.

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