The Pew Report puts numbers behind what many already feel: Americans have become very flexible in their religious allegiances. The numbers are astounding: 44% of adults have switched from their religion or denomination of birth. This mobility liberates individual believers, but it also erodes religions. It threatens to deprive believers of the richness of their traditions and to contribute to the growing sectarianism in American religious life.

Continue »

Twenty years ago on March 8, my entire first squad and number one machine gun team were killed in a late night mid-air helicopter collision over Ft. Campbell. Nine soldiers from a platoon of thirty and eight others including the air crews died under an overcast Kentucky sky, a little more than two hours before midnight. Almost certainly, the majority of those poor souls never knew what hit them. As for what hit me that night, I have never fully understood it. I have kept those men in my prayers all these years. I pray for them especially because they had no warning to pray for themselves, because I doubt they had prepared themselves for death. This anniversary reminds me of the contingent and vicarious nature of my being; a solemn warning that it is good to be attentive to my own preparation for the end.

Continue »

In the West, "A Mufti, a Christian and a Rabbi ..." is often how a good interfaith joke begins. But I live inside this reality. I am a rabbi and my Syrian colleague, Hind Kabawat, is a Christian Arab. We have worked for four years with the Grand Mufti of Syria, Sheikh Ahmed Hassoun, in both Damascus and Aleppo.

Continue »

Hardly a day goes by that forgiveness doesn’t enter my mind in one way or other. Either it’s a tug on my conscience asking me again to forgive someone else or a nagging reminder that I’m the one who needs to be forgiven. Such items of unfinished business are rarely far from consciousness.

Experience tells me that such dilemmas are symptoms of the human condition. In the dense web of our interactions, we inevitably incur debts and acquire debtors. On a parallel note, when the grand theologian Reinhold Niebuhr was asked how he knew human beings were stamped with original sin, he said, “Because I have never met any other kind.”

Continue »

A narrative running through countless news articles over the last eighteen months goes something like this. Over the last 20 years, evangelicals, led by Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, could be counted on to vote Republican and focus on a couple of hot-button issues such as abortion and sexuality. Today, the movement’s younger generation, represented by Rick Warren, has a broader set of concerns which include care for the environment and social justice issues. As a result it is less rigid and more likely to vote Democrat. We might even look forward to the end of the ‘culture wars’ conflict. This, however, is an unfortunate oversimplification.

Continue »

We are overwhelmed in our time by images of suffering from far away -- devastation unfolding in real time in digital resolution and Dolby sound, lives being ruined before our eyes -- that we don't know what to do with, how to live with. It's a kind of relief to turn to another genre of dramatic images that bombard us: the lives of celebrities, people who by contrast "have it all." We can admire their excess of beauty and revelry and love affairs and then, when their marriages end or they head into treatment, we can follow their plight knowing that they require nothing of us, not even guilt. They have all the resources for all the solutions in the world.

Continue »

Here is how it happens.

I grow up in a place and among a people where bread is somewhat important. Every neighborhood has exactly one bakery, where loaves and rolls and raw pizza dough (Fridays only) are sold. The bread you are born into is the bread you eat. Ours is light-colored, more tan than golden, thin crusted, airy inside. The old women know when to go to bring home bread that is still warm. You see them lined up, waiting. All other times the place is nearly empty. If I were born six blocks south, or four blocks east, my bread would be different. Maybe brown and hard outside, or dense and chewy inside.

Continue »

Easter.

The word brings up so many different memories. I am a child of the Midwest and I was raised with a little help from the United Methodist Church. My parents felt it was important to indoctrinate their children into some church even though it had long ago stopped being a place for worship for them on a personal level. I think they felt that they had better bring their kids to a church just in case all that heaven and hell stuff might be true. So, at the very least, on Christmas and Easter we would get out of bed early, get dressed up and go to church. There I would hear “Jesus was crucified on the cross and put into the tomb and rose from the dead three days later, now go find some eggs that a bunny left in the yard.” I never thought to question or even try to figure it out. Everyone was doing it and having so much fun, I thought that it must make sense to someone.

Continue »

Look: I believe in Him. It’s that simple and that complex. I believe in Jesus Christ, the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity, the God Man who came to earth, born as a tiny baby and then lived over thirty years in our midst. I believe in what we celebrate this week: the scandal of the cross and the miracle of the Resurrection. My belief is total. And I know that I cannot convince anyone of it by reason, anymore than an atheist can convince me, by reason, that there is no God.

Continue »

When you live in a country that for a week has been transfixed by the
furious denunciations of America by Rev. Jeremiah Wright and furious
denunciations of Rev. Wright by much of America, it is startling to read the original Jeremiah -- especially when his own furious denunciations of his own country are emblazoned for the special sacred Prophetic reading the same week.

Continue »

When Barack Obama addressed the nation in his Philadelphia speech there was, as with a good sermon, enough in it to offend everyone. He reminded us of the flaw in our constitutional character, and hence of the fundamental flaw in our national identity. Politicians are meant to speak only of the flaws in their opponents, and when they venture away from that tried and true rhetoric they are likely to entertain trouble. In speaking to the twin toxic topics of race and religion in America, Mr. Obama was bound to cause offense; Emily Post was right when she banned those topics from polite conversation at the dinner table, and most politicians, unless otherwise compelled, tend to follow her advice in their campaigns. Presidential candidates run for office in order to run ‘America the Beautiful,’ forgetting that Katharine Lee Bates in her fourth verse asks God to “mend thine ev’ry flaw/Confirm thy soul in self-control/Thy liberty in law.” She was a brave woman to suggest that in the American ideal, to which her poem was in elegant dedication, there were flaws to be mended; and although ‘America the Beautiful’ did not make the cut as our country’s National Anthem, it should have.

Continue »

We are at a moment of great significance for humanity, at the beginning of this new century, which could be either a horrendous time of natural and man-made mega-disasters or the greatest century yet of environmental restoration and peaceful global community. Of all world leaders at this time, the Dalai Lama most convincingly provides spiritual, intellectual, and ethical leadership, exemplifying and elucidating the most reasonable path to peace and happiness. This is the secret of his worldwide popularity. His person and teaching really do matter, to the Tibetans, to the Chinese, and to all of us and our future generations.

Continue »

We tend to think of the supporters of separation of church and state as the liberals and the opponents as the conservatives. But much in the history of religious freedom should prompt conservatives to re-assess their view.

The Founders often viewed religion through a “free market” prism that should appeal to modern conservatives. “When a religion is good, I conceive it will support itself,” wrote Benjamin Franklin. “And when it does not support itself, and God does not take care to support it, so that its professors are obliged to call for help of the civil powers, 'tis a sign, I apprehend, of it's being a bad one." In the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, Jefferson made the same point: "It is error alone which needs the support of gov’t. Truth can stand by itself." During the fight in Virginia over whether to use taxpayer money to subsidize the churches, a Presbyterian petition opposing the idea predicted that such subsidies would lead to a colony “swarming with Fools, Sots and Gamblers." (That’s the preachers, not the congregants).

Continue »

For Barack Obama, campaign 2008 has been a series of absurd but consequential tests.

First, there was the faith test: Profess publicly that Jesus Christ is your Lord and Savior. Each candidate faced this test, but the stakes were higher for Obama because of the whisper campaign that he was (gasp!) a Muslim. He passed this test by often beginning speeches with “Giving all praise and honor to God” and noticeably ratcheting up his Christian references in key contexts.

Continue »

Women clergy were supposed to rewrite the old, patriarchal rules. Instead, many ordained women have bought into the old conventions -and added a few of our own.

Thirty years ago ordained women were a relatively rare phenomenon. Now they are almost a cultural commonplace, constituting 30 percent and more of the population of aspiring ministers in some mainline Protest seminaries.

Continue »