In recent weeks Pope Benedict XVI has unnerved liberal Catholics as well as many Protestants and Jews with two pronouncements. The first removed restrictions on celebrating the old Latin Mass which since Vatican II has been replaced by a more accessible version of this core Catholic rite. The second pronouncement reasserted that the Roman Catholic Church is the one and only true church through which salvation can be achieved. Many people, both within and outside the Catholic community, are perplexed and apprehensive that the Pope is taking the Church back to its exclusivist and even intolerant pre-Vatican II days.

But perhaps something very different is transpiring. Anyone familiar with Pope Benedict’s work knows that while he is indeed a deeply traditional thinker he is not some pre-modern religious fanatic. He is a genuine intellectual and theologian. Strikingly, in these pronouncements, he repeatedly points out that these decisions are “continuous with Vatican II” and that he remains “deeply committed to ecumenical dialogue” and the “mutual openness” necessary for such dialogue to be “truly constructive”. As if to make clear that he not be misunderstood regarding these commitments, the Pope approved the document on June 29, the feast of Sts. Peter and Paul — a major ecumenical feast day.

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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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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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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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