Over the past four years, President Bush has pointed to various Iraqis and Afghans who represent life after liberation. One individual he hasn't mentioned — and likely doesn’t want to — is Sayad Parwez Kambaksh, a 23-year-old journalism student in Afghanistan.

Kambaksh has just been sentenced to death by an Afghan court for downloading and distributing a document that offends Muslim clerics. Welcome to a surreal spin-off of the Bush “Freedom Agenda.”

Recently, I blogged about the irony of liberating Afghans just enough to create a new constitution that makes Sharia law pre-eminent. Article 3 of Afghanistan’s constitution states that “no law can be contrary to the beliefs and provisions of the sacred religion of Islam.”

That’s freedom? For whom? Ali in Wonderland?

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Maharishi Mahesh Yogi of India, whose death on Tuesday in the Netherlands was announced by his associates today, invented the multi-billion-dollar swami business with a simple mantra: "Transcendental Meditation." Madison Avenue would have done well to hire him as a brand consultant.

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This past July, Kevin Sullivan, the Washington Post London correspondent, went to Siberia, 2,000 miles from Moscow, to interview a man who claims to be the reincarnation of Jesus Christ. Sergei Torop, now called Vissarion, "he who gives new life", lives in a tiny new town built up around him which is named "Abode of Dawn" and is the spiritual leader of a new religion, Church of the Last Testament. He now has over 5,000 followers.

We thought it might be interesting to talk to this man. There were those who disagreed, arguing that it would be offensive to publicize someone who claims to be Jesus. How could he possibly be? Most Christians believe that Christ will return someday. How will we know if it is the real Christ? How do we know this man is not? We thought you might like to read Kevin's story, see Kevin's video, and then read Kevin's interview with Vissarion that follows.

--Sally Quinn

Q: Are you Jesus of Nazareth, and if so, is your presence here on earth proof of the second coming, which, in traditional understanding, is supposed to signal the end of times?
If not, that is, if you are not here to initiate the coming of the kingdom, then what are you here for?

A: My dear friends, you’ve touched upon a very complicated question to which, of course, I’m ready to answer. But every answer will inevitably arouse deeper and deeper questions. Because people’s traditional understanding has very little to do with the Truth and is very primitive and awkward. People could have such understanding in medieval times but now we must have a much more exact understanding. During such a significant period for all mankind it is important for many people to have a clear view on everything, which concerns the Truth of God.

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We are hearing a great deal about the emergence of America into a “post-Christian right” era—meaning, essentially, that liberal religious believers are going to take back the rubric of religion from ultra-conservative fundamentalists. I am all for that. I prefer liberal Baptists like former President Jimmy Carter, who believes in the separation of church and state, to anti-secular Baptist fundamentalists like Mike Huckabee. But it is a dangerous delusion, based on wishful thinking, to underestimate the organized, well-financed strength of Christian fundamentalism and its profound anti-rational influence on every aspect of American culture.

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I used to think God was a Catholic. Well… maybe Christian. Then… perhaps Judeo-Christian. But my work as the host of Interfaith Voices has introduced me to a God who defies such definitions and seems to revel in interfaith diversity of all kinds.

I’ve been introduced to many facets of this God through my guests and friends, representing a wide variety of faiths. In Swami Sachidananda, I met a God of openness and interfaith understanding. “Swamiji,” as he was affectionately known, was born a Hindu in India, but crossed the globe to promote interfaith harmony. His mantra was simple, yet complex: “Truth is one; paths are many…” That mantra still guides the ashram in Yogaville, VA that bears his name today where life is simple, and his followers celebrate an interfaith roster of feasts from the Hindu Diwali, to the Jewish Passover, to the Christian Easter, to the Muslim Eid-al Fitr and countless others.

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I did something in synagogue on Saturday that I have never done before in all my years of attending services. I put on a tallit. My tallit.

A tallit is a rectangular prayer shawl with fringes, called tzitzit, at each corner. It stems from God’s injunction to the Israelites “to make for themselves fringes on the corners of their garments throughout the ages,” that they might “look at it and recall all the commandments of the Lord and observe them…”

When I was growing up, my father’s tallit was my antidote to synagogue boredom. I spent hours playing with its fringes—-braiding and rebraiding, running my fingers through them, using them to make designs on the top of my prayerbook.

I never imagined that I would have a tallit of my own.

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Perhaps it is no surprise that the 2008 presidential primaries are shaping up to be a nationwide personality contest. Electoral politics, after all, are subject to the same mediating forces that have transformed every aspect of American life into YouTube material. After eight years of a maverick and wayward presidency, the persona premium -- like the price of gas -- is at an all time high.

This trend is one likely explanation for the recent meteoric rise of what has been dubbed the Obama phenomenon. While there is little doubt that Senator Obama has played popularity politics more skillfully that Senator Clinton (and Senator McCain for that matter), Americans ought to tread carefully when choosing a leader in today’s “image is everything” world.

As even a mature Andre Agassi will admit, image is not everything. Historically, image is notoriously unstable. To understand just how unstable image can be, even for the most gifted politicians, one need only look back to one of the most overlooked occasions in global affairs: the sixtieth anniversary of the death of Mahatma Gandhi.

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The recent and controversial call by Dr. Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, primate of the Church of England and spiritual leader of 80 million Anglicans, for incorporation of Sharia law into British law will not be the last utterance in favor of Islamic law. Nor should it be. The addition of Sharia law to "the law of the land", in this case British law, complements, rather than undermines, existing legal frameworks. The Archbishop was right. It is time for Britain to integrate aspects of Islamic law.

Sharia law is unequivocally clear that Muslims who live as minorities in non-Muslim majority communities are required to abide by the law of the land. That doesn't prevent British Muslims from practicing aspects of Sharia that don't conflict with British law, or from seeking changes in British law. The Archbishop's assertion was forward thinking, recognizing that increasingly diverse Britain will be better off, not worse, with coordinated legal frameworks that guarantee more, not fewer, adherents to its legal system. There are three reasons to believe this will be the case.

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Searching for the real Jesus has been a growth industry and an obsession for several decades now. We read about “discovering” the tomb of Joseph and Mary the way medieval pilgrims heard that the head of John the Baptist had just surfaced in a French cathedral. The difference is that modern Christians want scientific, historical proof that Jesus walked the earth, and for many believers such proof supports their conviction that the New Testament is literally true in every detail.

Yet in almost every respect the hunt for the real Jesus is misguided. To begin with, there are two conflicting versions of Jesus, neither of which can be unearthed in an archeological dig. The first Jesus is the historical rabbi who wandered the northern shores of Galilee two thousand years ago. His public career lasted no more than three years, scholars inform us, and may have been as brief as eighteen months. The first Jesus disappeared in the shifting sands of time, leaving barely a footprint in history.

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More than six years ago, I walked into an adult Sunday School class at Old Bridge United Methodist Church in Woodbridge, Va., not knowing what to expect.

I came with some strong ideas about the kind of Christian I did not want to be, but no real sense of what it meant to accept Jesus. I knew what I wanted to avoid, but was unsure of what I was embracing.

It didn’t seem a terribly good fit at first. In the weeks after Sept. 11, one of the class members recounted seeing antiwar demonstrators near the Capitol and expressed the belief that they should be locked up. That was my cue to leave, but when another member of the class calmly observed, “I’m glad we live in a country where people are free to express their opinions,” I decided to stick around.

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Last week I was equated with the Antichrist. The accusation was
predictable, as was the semi-hysterical tone that lay behind it. I had
written about the current crisis in Christianity, which exposes you
automatically to smears, personal vilification, and a very great deal of
misreading. I had pointed out the undeniable fact that millions of people
have deserted organized denominations but still want to follow Jesus as a
teacher of love, peace, and (here comes the truly offensive part) higher
consciousness.

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“How come your novels always have vicars in them?”

The question came as part of the Q and A after a talk I’d given on my second novel, "March," whose protagonist is a minister with the Union Army during the Civil War. My first novel, "Year of Wonders," had featured a clergyman leading a rural Derbyshire village through a year of plague. My questioner had no way of knowing it, but the novel I was just then finishing, "People of the Book," also had a priest in it. And a rabbi. And an imam. Sort of like the set up for a bad joke. I hadn’t consciously set out to write about religious people and yet they kept popping up in my fiction like uninvited guests at a party. I mumbled something about being attracted to stories of the past, when religious leaders loomed so large in people’s lives, shaping fates and dictating behavior. But later I realized that answer was woefully incomplete.

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