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?

So here we go again – a religious act that polarizes. The Pope, a leader of 1.1 billion people decides to officially convert to Catholicism a well known Italian Moslem journalist on Easter, one of the holiest days of the Christian calendar, in front of millions of people. While the Vatican proclaimed the innocence of this international act it is not surprising that the reactions were swift and harsh. On all sides opinions were predictable with every opinion containing a partial truth that ignored, either consciously or unconsciously, other truths.

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The Question: John McCain's spiritual guide, televangelist Rod Parsley, calls Islam a "false religion" that should be "destroyed." Should McCain renounce Parsley? Will Islam be an issue in this year's U.S. presidential election?

So here we are again. We are a country in tremendous crisis and it seems anything we can do to deflect from the difficult conversations we need to have we will do. We are in a war that we can neither win nor afford to lose and we have a financial system that is damaged because of the greed of everyone from hedge fund managers to investment bankers, to commercial bankers to real estate sales people to home buyers. We have a health system that is bankrupting businesses and the government at the same time that millions of Americans can not afford health insurance. We have an education system that places us behind far too many western countries, have a country filled with repressed and not so repressed racial anger, an infrastructure that is rotting, a debate about immigration that is mostly fear mongering and illusion, have a prison system with more people incarcerated than any country in the world including China -- and we are worrying about whether politicians, in this case McCain, who has already, for political reasons, changed his position on taxes and immigration and proudly taken the support from a Pastor Hagee who has spouted vitriolic hatred for Catholics, should renounce his “spiritual guide” (is this a joke?) who spews hate against the now largest religion in the world. A presidential candidate running during a war against a very virulent and violent strand of Islam has as his spiritual guide a pastor who says Islam should be destroyed – yikes, it is like a cross between Twilight Zone and Saturday Night Live.

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I am not big on arguing whose oppression is the most severe or who is more of a victim than whom or which prejudice and discrimination is more entrenched in America. Women, African Americans, Hispanics, Native Americans, Jews, homosexuals, etc., are all in different and similar ways strangers in this country. With all the important and significant advances in political and human rights there is still much work to do.

As a Jew, I know personally, from stories of my family’s immediate past and of my people’s historic past, the pain, vulnerability, and humiliation of the “ism” anti-Semitism and the consequent damage, anger, and resentment it has produced in my community. I know what it is like to be made to feel like a stranger because I practice a strange/different religion from the majority. But as a white male I can only imagine what it is like to be the object of hate and discrimination simply for being of a “strange” race or of the “other” sex – identities that unlike my Jewish identity one can not conceal. The destructive effect of sexism and racism to individuals, communities, and societies (both its victims and its perpetrators) is generational and deep and addressing their worst manifestations, which we have done in America, is only the very beginning of what needs to be a thorough transformation of our political and cultural landscape as well a profound reimagining and reorienting of our inner landscape.

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The Question: Which "ism" is more entrenched in America, sexism or racism? Which should religion address?

I am not big on arguing whose oppression is the most severe or who is more of a victim than whom or which prejudice and discrimination is more entrenched in America. Women, African Americans, Hispanics, Native Americans, Jews, homosexuals, etc., are all in different and similar ways strangers in this country. With all the important and significant advances in political and human rights there is still much work to do.

As a Jew, I know personally, from stories of my family’s immediate past and of my people’s historic past, the pain, vulnerability, and humiliation of the “ism” anti-Semitism and the consequent damage, anger, and resentment it has produced in my community. I know what it is like to be made to feel like a stranger because I practice a strange/different religion from the majority. But as a white male I can only imagine what it is like to be the object of hate and discrimination simply for being of a “strange” race or of the “other” sex – identities that unlike my Jewish identity one can not conceal.

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So we have now gone through another more high-profile sex scandal with its obligatory mix of power (did you know there was talk Eliot Spitzer was going to be the first Jewish President) and money (Spitzer didn’t have sex with just any street hooker whose more gritty stories we get to see on HBO but with diamond or was it emerald escorts who earned more in an hour than the entire recently passed tax rebate our government spent weeks debating that our president thinks will raise our spirits and address our economic meltdown), a Harvard Law trained beautiful wife from a small southern town who stands by her man (as if she wasn’t beautiful and did not go to college her husband’s trysts would somehow have been more understandable or even justified), three young daughters (had they been sons would we feel the same way?) whose pictures we can drag through the media all the while proclaiming our genuine sympathy, and of course a lead character whose arrogance, self-righteousness, and prosecuting zeal – especially for prostitution rings -- made for the perfect karmic payback and who surprising for a politician did not have one friend.

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So we have now gone through another more high profile sex scandal with its obligatory mix of power (did you know there was talk Eliot Spitzer was going to be the first Jewish President) and money (Spitzer didn’t have sex with just any street hooker whose more gritty stories we get to see on HBO but with diamond or was it emerald escorts who earned more in an hour than the entire recently passed tax rebate our government spent weeks debating that our president thinks will raise our spirits and address our economic meltdown,) a Harvard Law trained beautiful wife from a small southern town who stands by her man (as if she wasn’t beautiful and did not go to college her husband’s trysts would somehow have been more understandable or even justified), three young daughters (had they been sons would we feel the same way) whose pictures we can drag through the media all the while proclaiming our genuine sympathy, and of course a lead character whose arrogance, self-righteousness, and prosecuting zeal – especially for prostitution rings - made for the perfect karmic payback and who surprising for a politician did not have one friend.

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I am one of the people interviewed in the PBS series and hope people will watch what I believe is the most nuanced and sophisticated telling of the Jewish American story to date: a story that has wisdom for any American because it is a story as much about being American as it is about being Jewish. So I will be sweet and allusive.

We do not know what Jewish identity meant in the past because there was no one Jewish identity to be known. There were Jewish identities. There were many different expressions of Jewishness that, as with any religious culture, were products of interactions between people, their times, their inherited tradition, the larger cultures in which they were embedded, and their personal biographies and biologies.

Jewish identity in the first century in Palestine was very different than Jewish identity in Poland in the seventeenth century which was very different than Jewish identity in Spain in the twelfth century which was different than Jewish identity in New Mexico at the end of the nineteenth century which is different than the many kinds of Jewish identities on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in the twenty-first century. In fact, when one studies the Jewish past one discovers that identity is really a verb and not a noun.

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How extremely sad that there are Christians in this country who feel so insecure about their own faith and so under attack that they need a group of politicians (and specifically a group that collectively has the lowest approval rating in recent history) to affirm the importance of their religion. People who confidently subscribe to their religion no doubt already know and appreciate the significance of their faith and don’t need a congressional resolution to affirm its importance. So this resolution reflects at best a deep lack of faith and at worst a nasty attempt (symbolic of course because this resolution has no legal or practical effect) to make non-Christians feel that this is a Christian country. Contrary to this resolution, Christianity, surely in the form observed by the lobbyists for this resolution, played little role in the founding of this great nation.

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Ah…the recently invented liberal war on Christmas, a war created and nurtured by a few conservative media folks like O’Reilly, Limbaugh, and Malkin, with the support of religious or is it political leaders like Dobson, Robertson, and Bauer, who seem to like nothing more than to exacerbate the animosity between Americans and exacerbate a culture war that itself is a product of a minority of ideologues on both sides. What a shame that a season that should be about Light and Love and Life has become one more place for our religious fundamentalists and secular fundamentalists to play out their insecurities and fears, and their inability to even imagine that there is some partial truth in the opinions of those with whom they disagree. It seems that the only way those inflaming our culture wars can be right is if those with whom they disagree are not only completely wrong but iare seen, in some paroxysm of paranoia, as out to destroy them and so need to be destroyed. Of course, the fierceness of their absolutism simply masks their own repressed uncertainty about their own views.

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Ah…the recently invented liberal war on Christmas, a war created and nurtured by a few conservative media folks like O’Reilly, Limbaugh, and Malkin, with the support of religious or is it political leaders like Dobson, Robertson, and Bauer, who seem to like nothing more than to exacerbate the animosity between Americans and exacerbate a culture war that itself is a product of a minority of ideologues on both sides. What a shame that a season that should be about Light and Love and Life has become one more place for our religious fundamentalists and secular fundamentalists to play out their insecurities and fears, and their inability to even imagine that there is some partial truth in the opinions of those with whom they disagree. It seems that the only way those inflaming our culture wars can be right is if those with whom they disagree are not only completely wrong but are seen, in some paroxysm of paranoia, as out to destroy them and so need to be destroyed. Of course, the fierceness of their absolutism simply masks their own repressed uncertainty about their own views.

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Can religion cure the world’s biggest social problems?! Who are we kidding?

The major challenge to religion, in this next period of human history, at least at this moment, is not whether religion can cure the world’s biggest social problems but whether it will make things incredibly worse and I say this as a religious person (an observant Jew) with a disciplined spiritual practice.

After the past three hundred years of modernity in which, for good reason, religion was minimized, privatized, and dismissed, religion has reemerged as a central force. This is not surprising, for at the same time that modernity radically questioned religion’s truth claims and thankfully liberated human reason from the superstition, literalness, and overextending of religion, which led to miraculous and revolutionary achievements in our ability to master the material world, e.g., the cure of diseases and the amazing increase in life span, it also resulted in a world disenchanted and disqualified - a wasteland (in T.S. Eliot’s apt description) that left human beings bereft of a sense of meaning, depth, and wholeness – precisely the purview of religion and spirituality and so we have a reawakening. But it sure does seem that in this initial period of the reincarnation of religion, that religion worldwide has done more damage than good – whether by inspiring suicide bombers, leading and inflaming culture wars, stopping scientific advances, or promulgating nasty moral judgments about fellow citizens especially in the area of sexuality.

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Can religion cure the world’s biggest social problems?! Who are we kidding? The major
challenge to religion, in this next period of human history, at least at this moment, is not whether religion can cure the world’s biggest social problems but whether it will make things incredibly worse and I say this as a religious person (an observant Jew) with a disciplined spiritual practice. After the past three hundred years of modernity in which, for good reason, religion was minimized, privatized, and dismissed, religion has reemerged as a central force. This is not surprising, for at the same time that modernity radically questioned religion’s truth claims and thankfully liberated human reason from the superstition, literalness, and overextending of religion, which led to miraculous and revolutionary achievements in our ability to master the material world, e.g., the cure of diseases and the amazing increase in life span, it also resulted in a world disenchanted and disqualified - a wasteland (in T.S. Eliot’s apt description) that left human beings bereft of a sense of meaning, depth, and wholeness – precisely the purview of religion and spirituality and so we have a reawakening. But it sure does seem that in this initial period of the reincarnation of religion, that religion world wide has done more damage than good – whether by inspiring suicide bombers, leading and inflaming culture wars, stopping scientific advances, or promulgating nasty moral judgments about fellow citizens especially in the area of sexuality.

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The craziness around Halloween is hard to ignore and as with anything “sacred”, be it a day, a story, an object, it has multiple meanings. These days, as with so much in our polarized public culture, each meaning has its own advocates who ardently believe they have the whole truth. There are our religious fundamentalists who oppose Halloween because of its pagan origins and occult and satanic symbols and believe the holiday undermines Christian values with its embrace of devils, demons, and goblins. Just as seriously, there are Wiccans who oppose Halloween for its offense to real witches by promoting stereotypes of wicked witches. (Opposition to fun often makes strange bed fellows.)

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Albert Einstein said it best, “science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind. Einstein understood what today’s “leading” scientists (at least those who write anti-religion best sellers) and today’s “leading” public religious figures (at least those who proclaim to know precisely what God wants with regard to public policy) sadly prove in their dismissal, denial, and rejection of each others truths. It seems like the responses to the question of the relationship between science and religion, that take up the most oxygen these days, are either fundamentalist scientific views (Dawkins and Hitchens and co.) that claim religion is a superstitious relic from the past or a survival trick that nature uses to reproduce the species or the religious fundamentalist view (Dobson and Perkins and co.) that science is part of the fallen world and has no access to the Real truth. As entertaining as the fight between these two fundamentalisms is it has led to an impoverishment of public conversation – a disenchanted, flattened experience of the world on the one side and an anti-science literalism that claims dogma and mythic beliefs as truth on the other.

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Do all major religious traditions basically carry the same message of love, compassion and forgiveness? Yes, of course and it also true that all major religions carry a message of hate, harshness, and resentment.

Every major religion can be read and understood at the lowest moral and ethical levels and at the highest. A narcissistic person interprets religion as constantly affirming and buttressing one’s ego and so a practicing meditator who is a narcissist will be someone who doesn’t share very well but who doesn’t share with calmness and centeredness. An ethnocentric person reading religious texts will produce ethnocentric interpretations of reality that affirm the superiority of his group and so a religious practitioner who is ethnocentric will be someone who shares generously but who does so only with members of his own group. A world centric person will discover that religious stories and rituals reveal and inspire an empathetic solidarity with all human beings, while a cosmic centric person will see religion as infusing an interdependence of all sentient beings.

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After close to three decades of profound experiences sitting with people who are dying and with their families, I am very pragmatic about the question of life after death. Rather than worry about intellectual consistency or religious dogma, or simply adhere to a scientific or secular materialist view or to one of the many spiritual and religious “truths”, my criteria is simple: Does your view – whether that there is no life after death and this life is all there is, or the many after-life intuitions, e.g., immortality of the soul, the next world, resurrection, reincarnation, rebirth, heaven, hell, the bardos, Kabbalistic mansions – create less or more fear around death? Does your view support you as you fight for life until you’re ready to die? Does it allow you and those around you to be more honest, more hopeful, more compassionate, more present, more loving and even more joyful in the face of death? Does it allow you to grasp the truth of the Ecclesiastes poet who wrote that there is a time for birth and a time for death?

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It is neither a candidate’s religious background nor lack of religious background that makes a difference to me in determining for whom I vote. I care about HOW a candidate uses religion. Religion/Spirituality is one of the most powerful forces in understanding the human experience – specifically our interior life - and it can be used in intellectually, morally, and psychologically destructive ways or ways that profoundly enhance human development. I would hesitate to vote for any one who claims to be religious who uses religion to simply legitimate or justify his or her political views whether on the right or the left. The God I experience and doubt is neither a Democrat nor a Republican, neither a conservative nor a liberal and surely not a partisan ideologue. God is not some larger than life politician in the sky confirming our policy decisions however “perfect” we think those policies are and however religious/spiritual we think we are.

Genuine religious faith and spiritual experience does not simply affirm what we already believe but destabilizes and challenges our inevitably limited human perspectives, whether they be liberal or conservative, that we attach ourselves to as if they are gospel. I am suspect of politicians who know exactly the political positions of the God in whom they believe (and not surprisingly they are always the positions they and their parties already seem to hold) and who use religion to dismiss people with whom they disagree and to divide people from each other. To imagine that one knows precisely what God thinks (or for atheists precisely what the God they do not believe in thinks) about the issues that most divide us as a nation is the classic definition of hubris. And these days, the quality we need least in a president (besides being against cutting edge science, human rights, health care for children and changing one’s mind…) is the arrogance of a person (on the right or the left) who confuses his/her own political views with God’s.

The God I experience – a code word for Reality experienced as seamless, spacious, luminous, and interdependent…demands not that I claim my view as absolutely correct (and the louder and nastier I claim this the more I am just revealing my own insecurity about the very view I am promulgating) rather that I specifically wrestle with those views that are contradictory to mine and discover how somehow they are contained in The One.

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The difference between a cult and religion is more often than not a group's staying power. Most religions were considered cults by the dominant religious or political authorities in their early years and many founders of religions were seen in their day as dangerous charismatic leadership. Cults that make it over the long term earn the label religion sort of like how disruptive religious innovations that make it are eventually called sacred traditions. The question, what is the difference between a cult and religion tends to arise in a time of cultural (scientific, technological, political) turmoil and ferment when old ways of understanding what it means to be human are dying and new ways have not yet been born. Human beings crave assurance and meaning and at these times new religions - always permutations of and mixtures of inherited religions - arise to make sense of the new age.

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I live in New York City. Two friends, including someone at whose wedding I had recently been the rabbi died in the World Trade Center. The acrid smell came through my apartment windows for days and sacred ashes, which I wiped away with tears, fell on my window sills for weeks.

My children who were 13 and 10 at the time were cut off from me and my wife as they could not get home from school on 9/11 because the subways were closed. The father of one of my daughter’s playmates from the time she was a toddler was killed on 9/11. The fear we felt was unforgettable and the innocence our kids lost forever so very sad.

So what message would I like to send to religious extremists? No words at all. Simply the following chant (using an ancient melody used to chant the Biblical book of Lamentations which describes the destruction of Jerusalem) of actual final cell phone conversations of people, who in the face of terror and the dearness of the vanishing moment, showed no anger or any desire for revenge but simply and heroically witnessed a yearning to love and the faith that love ultimately swallows up death.

Click here to listen to Rabbi Kula chanting.

The answer to the question how does God allow disasters like hurricane Katrina depends on what kind of God we believe in. The question assumes a God living high up above, a Divine Puppeteer or Shepard of sheep who rewards and punishes as he sees fit.

This conventional and most common God image of the Axial Age monotheistic religions, founded in the time of the great city-states with their kings ruling from on high, is simply one very limited and partial image of God. Using this puny, patriarchal, and punitive attempt to describe our experience of God (one I admit still works for me at times) leaves us with a number of explanations of the “problem of evil” each of which captures a partial truth about our experience of Reality and therefore does speak to us at different moments.

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