The Question: How should Barack Obama have responded to inflammatory remarks made by his former pastor, Dr. Jeremiah Wright? Are you responsible for what your spiritual leader says from the pulpit?

In the aftermath of Obama's major speech on race, one expects the affair of Rev. Wright to fade away. But one major theme of the speech was that moving beyond the racial divide can't be accomplished in a single election. It was a stretch to hold Obama culpable for a preacher's tiresome anti-white rants. Under normal circumstances nobody would call him on it, any more than Nixon would have been held responsible for Billy Graham's social views. But strategists in the Clinton camp and troublemakers on talk radio never thought of this as a moral issue. Rather, it was a political trap. They were playing on widespread doubt that Obama's integrity and idealism are too good to be true. Not so much for him as for us. He challenges us to follow our better angels, and we wind up worrying about our hidden demons.

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The Question: The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated 40 years ago. What are your memories of that day? What impact did it have on you? How is King relevant to you and to us today?

To turn into a sainted memory is a poor memorial for a man of action. I was in medical school in India in 1968 and therefore saw the murder of Martin Luther King as a blurry image from a faraway land. Moving to America was still three years off. But unlike other foreigners who self-righteously decried the level of guns and violence in the U.S., Indians were keenly aware of what an assassination can do. It can end an era of idealism, which is what happened when Gandhi was killed in 1948 by a Hindu extremist while taking his evening stroll. In both cases the ideal that died was the same: Satyagraha, or active non-violent resistance. Dr. King was consciously a descendant of Gandhi as well as of Thoreau and his philosophy of civil disobedience.

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The Question: Pope Benedict's recent baptism of a well-known Italian Muslim has prompted criticism in much of the Islamic world. Has Benedict done enough to build bridges to Islam?

The Vatican scored an undoubted public relations coup by converting a Muslim who was also a prominent newspaper editor in Italy. This comes as an after note to the quieter conversion of Tony Blair, who wanted to join his wife's faith. But once the reporters leave, the fact remains that Italy and England, like the rest of Western Europe, have very low Church attendance, generally between 10% and 18%. Church-going has been on the decline for decades and is basically limited, for most citizens, to weddings, funerals, and holidays.

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The Question: What can Pope Benedict XVI say and do to repair the growing rifts between the Vatican, the clergy and the laity in America?

Giving the Pope advice is a contradictory task, because the Church's position is that he is infallible to begin with. To an outsider, infallibility seems like an impossible burden for someone who, the day before his election to the Papacy, was as fallible as any other mortal. But the Church's whole existence is based on a special relationship to God. The Pope sits on a throne that belongs to Jesus when he returns, and this symbolizes a duty to care for the Kingdom of God here on earth. The current crises inside Catholicism are only the latest difficulties that began after Christ disappeared from view. In every age balancing the two worlds of God and man has been a deep mystery.

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Half-truths are the bread and butter of politics. This must be so where compromise is the only way to move ahead and warring constituencies have to be placated. But after Watergate personal dishonesty became a central issue, and the simmering contempt that Americans have casually felt toward "lying politicians" was ignited into something far more contentious. Bill Clinton was impeached for a lie that most husbands would at least attempt if caught cheating. This wasn't an indication that America sets a high standard of personal integrity but exactly the opposite: politics has become an arena for vitriol and personal attack. Everybody's untrustworthy if your opponent is cynical enough to keep hurling false accusations (hence the 20% of the public who believe that Barack Obama is a Muslim.)

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