I pray for the courage and wisdom to make the best decisions. Knowing that we are trying to help those less fortunate, and unable on their own, to achieve some measure of stability and security in their lives inspires me to press on, even when times are especially difficult. Our desired outcome is peace. I know that true peace is beyond my comprehension but I will try my best and trust in God for guidance to do His will.

Admiral William J. Fallon (USN) is Commander of the U.S. Central Command.

Keeping faith in times of war is always a challenge. For me, and for my fellow Marines, it comes down to this: You look to your left, you look to your right and you see your comrades. It is your loyalty, your allegiance and your complete trust in them that gives you your faith to literally soldier on.

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The first assignment I give the graduate students in my class at Chicago Theological Seminary is Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations. I figure it is only fair for them to do a thorough reading of perhaps the most prevalent theory of our times.

And then I spend the rest of the semester trying to dig out of that hole.

It’s not that my students – most of them bright, progressive, hopeful people of faith – want to believe that there is a clash of civilizations. It is that Huntington has created a framework that facts seem to fit in. And as our media continues to provide a microphone and a stage for religious totalitarians, the Huntington thesis that civilizations are inherently at odds with each other acquires the force of inevitability, which makes it the single most dangerous idea of our time.

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When my mom took me door-knocking on Saturday mornings to deliver the Watchtower magazine and a Bible message to the neighborhoods of Saginaw, Michigan, I didn’t realize I was a defender of America’s essential freedoms: speech, religion and personal liberty.

I was just a kid, who would rather be home watching cartoons on television like the other kids. At that age, being raised as one of Jehovah’s Witnesses was an embarrassment because it meant I was different. Getting sent to the principal’s office for refusing to say the Pledge of Allegiance was not a typical third-grade offense. Now, as an adult who became a journalist but never joined the religion, I can see why it’s important that Jehovah’s Witnesses are different.

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What do an American Idol contestant, a pro bass fisherman, a skydiving Elvis, and a pair of high-paid exotic strippers have in common? They found faith in America’s most unlikely place—Sin City.

Behind the glitz and the neon, some of the most improbable people are experiencing transformation. People like Donte and Stephanie, arguably Vegas’s premier adult dancers, who found their lives stripped of more than clothes, but stripped of meaning and purpose. They each began a spiritual journey. Eventually they came to faith, were married, and began to give back.

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On Faith is publishing selections from David Plotz’s Blogging the Bible, a series that’s been running over at our sister publication Slate. Read why Plotz started blogging the Bible here.

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Almost two years ago the citizens of London were victims of a great atrocity. Those who perpetrated those crimes would like you to believe that they were inspired by the religion of Islam. Nothing could be further from the truth.

There is nothing in Islam that could ever justify these blatant acts of aggression. Islam calls on Muslims to be productive members of whatever society they find themselves in. Islam embodies a flexibility that allows Muslims to do so without any internal or external conflict. This is why we see a vast variety of cultural, artistic and civilisational phenomena all of which can be described as Islamic, ranging from the Taj Mahal in India to the winding streets of Fez to the poetry composed by English converts that represents not only the rigor of English verse, but also encompasses the beauty of Islamic piety.

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If I could ask any of the people running for President—or forming an exploratory committee—just one question, it would be: “Who has your ear?”

If you are elected to the highest office in the land, from whom will you seek guidance and advice? With all due respect, forget the Cabinet and other official notable appointees. Truly, who has your ear? Who will influence your decision-making?

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I appreciate the opportunity to write for On Faith today. This is a unique community and it’s sparking a much-needed dialogue on some of the toughest issues we’re confronting as a country.

I’d like to use this space to relay a story from my recent book, "The Audacity of Hope," about my 2004 Senate campaign. I hope it adds to the dialogue on this website, and gives some insight into how I’m attempting to run my campaign for the presidency of the United States.

Two days after I won the Democratic nomination in my U.S. Senate race, I received an email from a doctor at the University of Chicago Medical School.

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On Faith is publishing selections from David Plotz’s Blogging the Bible, a series that’s been running over at our sister publication Slate. Read why Plotz started blogging the Bible here.

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My Mother’s legacy in my life runs very deep and wide. When I think of my Mother, I think of her sparkling eyes--she just loved life. She was full of fun, opinions, and a zest for living that was evident until her last breath.

Her arms always outstretched to welcome me into her presence with unconditional love.

Her quips and quotes, such as:

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In researching “Body of Lies,” my new novel about the Middle East, I asked the heads of several Arab intelligence services about interrogation techniques. They each said that in questioning Al Qaeda members, a useful method was to have a devout Muslim sheik present during the interrogation—someone who could pray with a young convert to Al Qaeda’s brand of Salafist Islam and convince him that this was a false path of Islam, not the true path.

Which raises an interesting question: Should clerics from any religion be part of an interrogation process? Having a sheik in the interrogation room is certainly better than extracting information through “waterboarding,” or some other grotesque form of torture. But what are the proper limits? When the British were interrogating IRA terrorists, for example, should they have brought a Catholic priest into the cell block, in the hope of extracting useful information? When Timothy McVeigh was questioned about the Oklahoma City bombing, should a priest or minister have urged him to “repent, repent!”?

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One of the foremost experts on what he refers to as Islamic democracy, Noah Feldman, explains in his book “After Jihad: America and the struggle for Islamic Democracy” how the Western paradigm has focused on two diametrically opposed models of government, each tracing its origin to one of two ancient cities: Jerusalem, the birthplace of Christianity and Athens, the birthplace of Democracy.

In broad strokes, Jerusalem represents a model in which religion is dominant, there is no separation between Church and State, and is characterized by near-absolute rule by an emperor who is also the head of the Church. Athens represents reason, where religion is strictly “privatized”, the god of science is dominant, and the people have a direct say in who is to lead them.

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Is monotheism itself a cause of war? Does the radical intolerance of “other gods” lead to intolerance of those who worship them? Are religious wars built into the structure of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam?

This has been the main charge lodged against all three Abrahamic faiths at least since the Enlightenment, yet ironically, this divisive notion of monotheism is itself a product of the Enlightenment. The very word, with that tell-tale “ism,” wasn’t even coined until the modern era (The OED dates it to the 17th century). Christians affirm the “Credo,” Jews the “Shema Yisrael,” Muslims the “Shahadah” – all declaring that there is one God. But what does that word “one” mean? In a scientific age, it is taken as a number. God is thought of as a solitary entity, standing apart from all others, and therefore, it is thought, against all others. If this is the meaning of monotheism, then, yes, such belief is inherently a source of conflict, not peace.

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On Faith is publishing selections from David Plotz’s Blogging the Bible, a series that’s been running over at our sister publication Slate. Read why Plotz started blogging the Bible here.

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Today's world seems to have gone insane in the name of God. Violence and extremism take center stage in international news and much of it speaks in religious terms. Nevertheless, there are examples of leaders who, in the midst of ongoing conflict, have renounced their former violence in order to engage their enemies using non-violent means while remaining religious.

How does that happen? How do once-violent religious extremists change course and become peacemakers?

These individuals give us reason to hope for the future of the human race. In the words of one of such individual, Imam Ashafa of Nigeria:

"Religion is more powerful than the atomic bomb. The passion of religion is more terrible than Katrina, more terrible than a tsunami. But if it is used positively, it can change the world".

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My first day of college was September 12, 2001. The day before, I sat shoulder to shoulder with relative strangers watching those horrific images on the only TV in our dorm with cable. One of them lent me a cell phone to call home.

Then the debates began and continued over the course of four years against an evolving backdrop of social, political, and religious issues. The Iraq war, legalization of same-sex marriage in Massachusetts, and finally a bitter Presidential election offered ample opportunity for discussion: in the classroom, dining hall, and between friends late at night.

Questions were everywhere: Painful. Personal. The normal process of self-discovery which often happens in college was suddenly imbued with a sense of urgency.

Those events and discussions jolted me out of a spiritual adolescence.

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All my life I stepped into a special realm of joy and peace and holiness once a week. No, it wasn’t a spa or a sweat lodge. It was Sunday, that most basic but overlooked of religious practices.

As a child I kept the holy day thanks to my parents’ example, then as a young adult out of habit. Now my family keeps it out of conviction and necessity. Frankly, we’d go crazy without that one-in-seven respite. We walk to church for Mass, then we linger outside chatting, walk home, stop to buy our children a treat, and then eat a big breakfast. We blob out, play games or sports or music, go for a hike or a swim or to a museum, visit the home-bound, and often have friends over for dinner. No chores, no email, no talk of money or worries about work, no TV till late afternoon. As parents, we try to curb angry words or even reprimands. It is a time with God, with each other and with our better natures. It is God’s great gift to us.

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By CARL BERNSTEIN

Before making a final decision in 1999 to undertake a biography of Hillary Rodham Clinton, I called a mutual friend—a woman as close, politically and personally, as any to the outgoing first lady. ‘The first thing you have to understand about Hillary is her Methodism,” this woman said. “Religion—and family—are the starting points.”

I was not surprised at the invocation of the importance of family in the Hillary Rodham Clinton schema, but religion and Methodisim, and some New age variants, it turned out, were indeed key to understanding Hillary Clinton. Her spiritual life, as I discovered, has always informed and infused her political life, and vice versa.

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Fully 81% of Americans say they believe in heaven, according to the most recent Gallup poll. But when people express belief in eternal life to a Gallup pollster who phones around dinner time, what are they really talking about?

The fact is that very few people – even people who say they’re believers in an eternal and perfect afterlife – hold any kind of coherent or considered view. Heaven is where you’re always happy, where there’s no sin, no anger, no competition. Heaven is where you and your favorite friends and relatives go after they die – even if they aren’t of your religion, even if they (or you) have done some pretty terrible things in life. (In a 2005 Newsweek/beliefnet.com poll, 79% of respondents said that people of faith traditions other than their own could go to heaven.) Heaven is up in the clouds, it’s where God and the angels live, it’s where you can have anything you want. In the runaway 2002 best seller “The Lovely Bones,” a 15-year-old girl who is brutally murdered goes to a heaven created just for her: a high school campus surrounded by fields of flowers; puppies and ice cream. The popular Christian writer Anne Lamott wrote in a recent book that heaven was a place where she didn’t have to floss.

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As I stood in church last Sunday, listening to a selection from the gospel of Luke about a woman washing the feet of Jesus with her tears and drying them with her hair, I could not help but wonder about her broken, tear-soaked, soul.

To what lonely, tragic circumstance had she fallen to where she would risk humiliation and scorn only for the chance to touch those feet. And how did the intimacy of that touch—hands cupping feet, tears soaking hardened skin, hair cascading into the crevices of toes—how did she effect the rabbi who was sitting in full view of the harsh Pharisees, the arbiters of moral behavior?

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On Faith is publishing selections from David Plotz’s Blogging the Bible, a series that’s been running over at our sister publication Slate. Read why Plotz started blogging the Bible here.

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