HAMBURG, Germany -- Some months ago, two news reports caused excitement. One was that "4000 Germans converted to Islam last year", and the other was that a "Council of Ex-Muslims" had been established. In a secular society where the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion includes freedom to change one’s religion or belief these should be side issues. But in fact, they caused considerable concern both to churches and among Muslims. Each group feared that those who turned away might actively contribute to a hostile atmosphere rather than quietly choosing another religion or ideology. Beneath the secularist surface, conversion remains a delicate subject. Is, then, religion not such a private matter after all?

Sociologically, religious communities may look like any other social group. Initially, a religious tradition may have been identical with the beliefs, laws and rituals of a tribe, making most sense in its particular geographical and economic environment and including local and tribal deities. We find traces of this system in the ancient Middle East, where the Biblical narrative evolved, or in a number of traditions in the Indian subcontinent under the umbrella of Hinduism.

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When Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad declared at Columbia University that “In Iran, we don’t have homosexuals, like in your country”, most everyone in the U.S. knew he was lying. What he meant to say is that he is doing his best to commit genocide against homosexuals in Iran and/or so terrorize them that they will deny their own identities as gay people.

This, of course, is not the only lie that Mr. Ahmadinejad tells, smirking as he does so. He lies about the Holocaust, he lies about the real lives of women in Iran, he lies about persecuting journalists and intellectuals, and he lies about his country’s nuclear program. He is helping to make Iran a liar society.

It is easy to see this pattern of being a liar society when it’s somebody else doing it. It’s also easier to see when the lies are such a bunch of big whoppers like Ahmadinejad tells. But a little deception is also bad and the thing about deception is that it tends to lead to more and more distortion so it’s hard to tell where the lies end and where the truth begins.

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Today marks the one-year anniversary of the West Nickel Mines Amish school shooting. People around the world were stunned by the execution-style slaying of five Amish girls, and perhaps even more stunned by the Amish response to it: forgiveness, extended to the gunman’s family within hours.

It wasn’t long until two of my colleagues and I received invitations to write books about “the happening,” as some Amish people call it. Some publishers wanted murder-and-mayhem narratives (yes, that’s an actual category at Amazon.com), but others approached us with a more reasonable request: might our knowledge of Amish life illumine the Amish forgiveness that emerged in the wake of the shooting?

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On Faith panelist and Sufi rock star Salman Ahmad sings the theme song for the new CW TV comedy "Aliens in America." The song, "What's So Funny About Peace, Love and Understanding," was written by Nick Lowe. Salman sings the version for the show with P.J. Olsson.

Listen to a bit of the song or Watch the video.

Here's a brief interview with Salman about the show and the song:

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The National Cathedral is marking 100 years of service to the city of Washington, the nation, and the world.

This Sunday, as part of the centennial celebration, On Faith moderators Sally Quinn and Jon Meacham took part in the Cathedral's first Sunday Forum: Critical Issues in the Light of Faith.

Cathedral Dean Samuel T. LLoyd III, an "On Faith" panelist, asked Quinn and Meacham about religion's impact on their personal and professional lives and about journalism's role in matters of religion. Quinn and Meacham then took questions from the audience.

The conversation will be podcast on the Cathedral's home page.

Celebrating the major transitions in life is as old as humanity. Even before there was organized religion, people marked key moments in their lives with ceremony and music, with solemn commitments and joyful celebrations.

The birth of a child is one of the most significant of these rites of passage. It is a time for family, friends and community to come together to offer love, support and encouragement. It’s a time for a party.

Rites of passage are also a time for reflection. They are moments when we step back from our daily concerns and look at our lives in a broader context. And when we think about the span of our whole life -- the arc of its development through key moments of birth, adulthood, love, parenthood, and death – we try to make sense it of it all. We explore the beliefs and values that give shape and meaning to our lives.

For many people these values – and their underlying existential beliefs – are spiritual. Every religion has ceremonies for welcoming new children.

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Sudan might currently be the last place on earth where one would expect to see creative forms of inter-religious cooperation and, at the same time, a diminution of hostility to conversion. Yet such cooperation is evident, especially since the signing of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement between predominantly Muslim Northern Sudan and the largely Christian South.

One notable example is a campaign to promote public education about HIV/AIDS, jointly undertaken by the government and churches in Northern Sudan. This is a dramatic shift for the government, which for years denied that Sudanese Muslims suffered from the disease.

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A group of clergy sexual abuse survivors in the Catholic Diocese of Davenport, Iowa did not ask for a financial settlement. They asked for a millstone: a large monument in the shape of a stone used for crushing grain that would be dedicated to the survivors of sexual abuse.

The millstone symbol comes from the gospels: “And whosoever shall cause one of these little ones that believe on me to stumble, it were better for him if a great millstone were hanged about his neck, and he were cast into the sea” (Mark 9:42).

The Millstone Marker in Davenport is a reminder of the suffering endured by the “little ones” of the diocese. It is a reminder to church officials to repent and sin no more. And, yet, despite the millstone monument and the monumental amount of information about abuse in our society, children continue to suffer and our churches and country continue to drown under the weight of abuse cases.

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A lot has changed since the Cold War, but U.S. nuclear policy has not. In a world where two superpowers no longer wrestle for dominance, the United States has retained a Cold War-level nuclear arsenal, and continues to rely on Cold War-era excuses for doing so.

In their groundbreaking op-ed last January in The Wall Street Journal former secretaries of state George Shultz and Henry Kissinger, former Senator Sam Nunn, and former Defense Secretary William Perry called for the elimination of all nuclear arms. They pointed out that the non-proliferation regime is contingent on a bargain: non-nuclear states agreed not to obtain nuclear weapons, and nuclear states agreed to eventually eliminate theirs.

But the shelf life of the non-proliferation regime is rapidly approaching, because non-nuclear states are increasingly skeptical of the good faith of nuclear states toward fulfilling their disarmament obligations. When their patience finally wears out, we may see an explosion in the number of nuclear-armed states. It will be difficult, if not impossible, to secure or track the proliferation of nuclear material in such a chaotic environment, bringing the prospect of an undeterrable terrorist bomb ever closer.

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Justin Peterson was my son Quinn's closest friend. Quinn is learning disabled and Justin was assigned to be his Teaching Assistant and tutor when he went to the New York Film Academy year before last.

We all fell in love with Justin. He was gorgeous, a brilliant young film maker (he was 25 at the time, having gone to New York University. He was witty and creative, had an extraordinary imagination, and was a terrific writer. But most importantly Justin was one of the kindest, most decent people I have ever met. Being a Teaching Assistant to Quinn, with his inability to focus and zero concept of time or direction, would have tried anyone's patience. Anyone but Justin.

Never, in the two years they were friends, did Justin ever raise his voice to Quinn or lose his temper or get frustrated. (That's more than I can say for myself). He was always sympathetic and understanding, always talking me down from the ceiling when I became overwhelmed with Quinn's multiple handicaps.

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After Justin’s death, I intensely wanted to die. If I didn’t have my grandkids, I would have killed myself. My remaining two sons had no power at all to make me think twice about it. Neither did my boyfriend, or my relatives or friends.

But my sweet little granddaughters made me understand that I could not do something so selfish. I could not deliberately take my life. That would be unconscionable. The innocents who need me would be permanently scarred.

Still, I fervently wished for my death. I passionately prayed for a heart attack or stroke. My sons would get my life insurance proceeds, and everyone would get over me. And I would be with Justin.

I just wanted to be with Justin.

And then I began to intuit that I should see a medium. Those people the dead speak through. I felt absolutely driven.

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Al Gore became the third Baptist to win the Nobel Peace Prize, joining Jimmy Carter in 2002 and Martin Luther King in 1964.

How is it that three sons of the Bible belt have each won the world’s most prestigious award for their advancement of human rights, peacemaking and now earth care?

The Bible is surely part of the answer, the role Scripture has played in shaping their moral vision and values.

In a June 2006 interview before the Nashville premier of the documentary “An Inconvenient Truth,” Gore told me that his Christian faith shaped his moral convictions about the environment.

"I was taught in Sunday school about the purpose of life," he said. "I didn't ever get a single lesson about the purpose of life at Harvard University or prep school I went to. But I learned about the purpose of life in Sunday school. And I was taught that the purpose of life is to glorify God.

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I have spent more than 15 years working on a collection of letters that my mother Sala received during her years of imprisonment in Nazi slave labor camps. These letters were so precious to her that she risked her life again and again to preserve them – yet when she arrived in the United States as the war bride of an American GI, she put them in a closet and said nothing about them, or about her experiences, for nearly 50 years, until fears of death forced her hand, and she gave the letters to me.

My mother overcame her illness, and is now 83. I have learned so much from her and from these precious documents, but there are still places I cannot follow her.

The youngest of 11 in a religious Polish-Jewish family, my mother was a bold and resolute sixteen- year-old when her older sister, Raizel was summoned to a Nazi slave labor camp. Sala volunteered to take Raizel’s place because she believed that her sister’s strict and uncompromising piety would make it hard for her to adjust to the unknown conditions of the camp.

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One of the great fears that parents and church leaders have about their youth engaging in interfaith dialog is that they will lose their connection to their own religion and will end up rejecting and leaving their faith, maybe even converting to another religion as a result. My experience as a Christian pastor has been just the opposite –I have watched young people become stronger in their own faith through exposure to other traditions.

Personal relationships matter a great deal in influencing how individuals come to faith, switch faiths or grow in faith. Most of us are part of the tradition of our parents and stay in a tradition that comes to us through the personal relationships in our home and our place of worship. High school students often deepen their faith because of a role model. College students often grow in faith because a person of faith was there for them during a time of pain. Young adults often stay with their faith because someone they admire is in the faith.

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When I was a 23 year old Lieutenant in the Army, I free fell 70 feet from a cliff during field maneuvers. That day I had an extraordinary experience. I nearly died. In the years that have since passed, my impressions of what occurred that day have swung from one extreme to another. At times I have felt as if I encountered God that day in a particular and intimate way. After undergoing training as a physician, I have wondered whether socialization, psychological conditioning, or simple low blood pressure influenced or skewed my memory of the event. The following describes what I remember of my own near-death experience. Attempting to understand it has been part of the mystery and gift of my existence.

One late winter day, in a state park somewhere in northern Kentucky, our company of about 120 men was training on rappelling and mountaineering skills. While supervising from the tree covered top of a rocky cliff, I failed to tie in the appropriate personal safety line. In my young arrogance and eagerness to train others, I had ignored my own training. The job assigned me was to hold a rope which a soldier below had tied about his waist. From this "belay" position I could catch men if they slipped ascending the rocks. For stability, I did find an excellent seated position where I could prop my feet against the trunks of two substantial pines and safely arrested the falls of several soldiers from that post. The arrangement worked well, until one of the soldiers reached a point still low upon the cliff face from which he could climb no higher.

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I recently sent Brian McLaren an e-mail introducing myself as the great-grandson of Walter Rauschenbusch. Brian is a pastor, the bestselling author of, among other books, “A New Kind of Christian,” and a leader in the Emergent Church, one of today’s most vibrant Christian movements.

I had just edited the 100th anniversary edition of Rauschenbusch’s first book, “Christianity and the Social Crisis” (with the updated title, “Christianity and the Social Crisis in the 21st Century”), and I was curious to see what Brain thought of Rauschenbusch. I knew that the Emergent Church shared some of my great-grandfather’s concerns, blending evangelical devotion to Jesus while preaching an active response to social questions of the day. But the intensity of Brian’s response caught me off guard.

“Like a lot of people from Evangelical backgrounds,” Brian wrote, “in my childhood and youth I was taught that the "social gospel" was nothing but evil. I heard it a thousand times in sermons...Now, of course, I think this kind of anti-justice, privatized-gospel propaganda is evil!”

Wow.

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The Dalai Lama, the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader, spent five days in Washington this past week.

He met with President Bush and was presented the Congressional Gold Medal, the nation’s highest and most distinguished civilian award. He also visited a homeless shelter and spoke at a number of other events on such issues as climate, America and its role in the world, and the need for compassion in every life.

The following are excerpts of some of his remarks:

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I’ve started hanging out at the Cathedral of St. Matthew in downtown DC. It’s a great old church, with gilt statues, deeply-hued mosaics and marble — oh the marble. It’s all green and gold and black and white and it all has the look of having been polished by the hand of God.

St. Matt’s also has these private alcoves — prayer nooks and crannies that modern churches lack. You can duck into the Chapel of St. Anthony of Padua or one devoted to Mary. And of course, there are those little stations (10 to be exact) where you can light a candle instead of cursing the darkness. The suggested candle donation is 75 cents, but the boxes always seem to be crammed with dollar bills. If you come to St. Matthew’s to light a candle, you’re probably in a “That’s okay, God, you can keep the change” frame of mind.

There’s also great people-watching. Sometimes, like for the 12:10 daily Mass, there’s a crowd of a hundred or more people. Sometimes, when I just poke my head in to kneel and say a few decades of the rosary, there might just be a handful of us. Very rarely am I the only one there. I’m not sure who I expected to show up at St. Matthew’s during the business day. But there’s no one type. There are homeless people, perhaps just getting out of the heat or cold. There are Catholic tourists, perhaps wanting to see where the Kennedy funeral was. (Don’t ask me how I know they are Catholic tourists; suffice to say that as after being Catholic for 43 years, I can spot another one from 20 pews away.) There are old men and pregnant women.
There are immigrants in blue collars and professionals in white ones. Some, no doubt, are regulars. Others are there for reasons they can’t quite fathom. They are there because of a pull that is as primal as anything they can imagine.

Put me in that category.

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From the Code of Hammurabi to the Code of Maimonides, most major systems of law have affirmed that apostasy must be punished.

In the renowned code of the Roman emperor Justinian (483-565 CE), corpus juris civilis - the basis of all Roman canon law and of modern civil law — apostasy was “to be punished by death” and there was “no toleration of dissent”.

The Biblical codes stipulate that the “one who doubts or ridicules one word of the Torah— or of the rabbinical authors — is a ‘heretic’ in the fullest sense, an infidel ... and there is no hope for him.” The laws concerning such an unbeliever are very strict: “he may be killed directly,” or as Maimonides, the 13th century Andalucian rabbi and philosopher, advised regarding navigating the abeyance of apostasy law in his era, “his death may be caused indirectly.”

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At some point in this endless process of selecting a president, I believe there must be a presidential debate solely on the subject of science. Nothing could be more important for the survival of our planet.

We have reached a stage in our development where, to quote sociobiologist E.O. Wilson, humans are “the first species in the history of life to become a geological force.” Through industrial pollution, the destruction of our rain forests, over-fishing, over-hunting and so on, we can destroy just about all life on earth. This is a problem that cannot be solved without an understanding of science, most specifically biology.

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It should come as no surprise that a recent opinion poll among younger people shows great skepticism if not outright resistance to Christianity. Given the preponderance of mainstream media reporting on a minority of U.S. Christians such attitudes make sense.

The research done by George Barna and released in September shows the younger generation, ages 16-29, views Christianity as judgmental, hypocritical, old-fashioned and too political.

Assuming the impressions of these young respondents are shaped by the media they would only know about the extreme ultra-conservative brand of Christianity. Most Christians in the U.S. are not that. Most Christians believe in an authentic, inclusive and welcoming gospel in the thousands of communities where they worship.

I suspect these young opinion poll takers are responding to what I call a political philosophy masquerading as gospel that is wrapped in religious rhetoric and painted red, white and blue.

One of its chief cheerleaders is Ann Coulter. She has dismissed most of the Bible and the words of Jesus defending the poor, the widow, the prisoner—the least among us—and spewed her venom that has little or nothing to do with orthodox Christianity. But Ms. Coulter and her ilk are the ones to whom the media gives most of its attention.

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One effort common to some 21st century Christians and Muslims is a desire to overthrow empirical science exemplified in Darwinist evolution and instead try and make science conform to sacred text in the Bible and the Qur’an.

On the Islamic side, The New York Times earlier this year pointed out how many Islamic fundamentalist political theoreticians, including some violent extremists, come from the fields of medicine and the sciences. In the Times’ view, this was a surprise and a contradiction.
I agree that it is a contradiction and not only of the intellectual method of modern science, which is based on experimentation to verify or disprove a thesis -- and then letting the facts lead where they may.

It is also a contradiction of the most intellectually productive period in Islamic history, which was the 750 years from the founding of the caliphates in Baghdad and Cordoba and somewhat later in Cairo until the rise of Europe in 1500.

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On August 10, at around 2 in the afternoon, I should have been on the beach. I should have been surrounded by the beautiful Caribbean Sea, perhaps an umbrella drink in my hand, breathing in the wonderful healing tropical air.

I have been traveling solo to the West Indies every year--sometimes twice a year--since 1998. I find the sun, sand, music, and people in the West Indies to be extraordinarily healing. I've even joked with my friends that I think God must be West Indian. This trip was highly anticipated.

While in the baggage check-in line for my Nassau flight, I started a conversation with the man in front of me. I noticed he had a folder that said "Baptist Conference" written on it. We started to chat. Sure enough--he was from Nassau Bahamas and was a Baptist minister at the oldest Baptist church in Nassau. I introduced myself as a minister also—an Ordained Interfaith Minister. What I didn’t add was a white Jewish lesbian ordained interfaith minister.

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Ghosts and goblins, witches on broomsticks, pumpkins, candy and spiderwebs…it’s that time of year again. Halloween—probably every child’s favorite holiday, combining the irresistible attractions of dressing up in costume and eating candy.

But there’s a deeper spiritual meaning that underlies the holiday for Pagans and real Witches—those who follow earth-based Goddess traditions that predate Christianity. As we (in the northern hemisphere) move into the time of cold and the dark of winter, we celebrate our New Year, and honor both death and regeneration.

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