The Rev. Jeremiah Wright is a man of many faces. He’s an old-school 70’s leftie, a man who preached every Sunday in what the American religion scholar Martin Marty has called “greenish African-American pajamas.” He’s an intellectual, a professor who reads Hebrew and Greek, a gifted musician who can play a wide variety of instruments and a teacher who feels comfortable tossing around words like “hermeneutics,” as he did Monday morning in a speech at the National Press Club. And he’s an angry black man, a pastor who has spent his life fighting injustice everywhere he sees it. When a questioner asked him to explain the now-familiar sound bite-a snippet from a sermon in which Wright damned America for sending its young men and women to war--Wright did not flinch. He said that he had told Barack Obama that if the Illinois senator were to be elected President, “On November 5, I’m coming after you.”

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The Rev. Gerald Fogarty decided not to go to the pope's mass in Washington because he's busy teaching that day at the University of Virginia. The Rev. John Dufell considered joining him at Yankee Stadium, but he's got a couple of weddings to do, so he also passed. Paul Kane, a retired lawyer who goes to church in Georgetown, actually laughed at the idea, and Barbara Breshcia, who prays at St. Patrick's Cathedral several mornings a week, didn't even know the Holy Father was coming. Buttonholed on Fifth Avenue the week before Benedict XVI's arrival in New York, Breshcia was perplexed. "He's coming when? This week? Oh, next week. Is he coming to St. Patrick's?" Well, yes, and celebrating mass there, but never mind.

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When you walk into Trinity United Church of Christ on the South Side of Chicago, the first thing you see on a Sunday morning are the people crowding the lobby, hugging and kissing, asking after each other’s children. The congregation is older and formally dressed: many of the women wear fur coats, stockings and heels; almost no one is dressed in jeans. As an usher leads a reporter upstairs to the pastor’s office, he rebukes a young boy: “Take off your hat in church, son.”

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Bart Ehrman, Biblical scholar at the University of North Carolina and former evangelical Christian explains in his new book “God’s Problem” why theodicy – or the problem of suffering -- caused him to cease believing in the Christian God. Here's my interview with him.

The problem of suffering is the oldest philosophical problem in history. Why attempt to address it now?

The reason it’s an old problem is because people are constantly confronted with it. It’s the oldest problem for thinking people, but people still think.

Can you explain the problem, theologically?

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Will Bowen takes "uncomplaining" to an extreme. Bowen doesn't gripe about anything, ever. A reporter asks, "How are you doing?" "Great!" he answers. "Can't complain." Really? You can't complain? What do you do when your car breaks down? "I call the mechanic and ask him to fix my car." How about when something terrible and unfair happens for no reason? Everything happens for a reason, Bowen responds. "Absolutely. In my theology, that's what I believe." When he climbs into the pulpit of his church in Kansas City, Mo., each Sunday, he shouts, "God is good!" and the congregation shouts back, "All the time!"

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In the public school I went to in the 1970s, "secular" was A neutral, descriptive word. Our social-studies teacher taught us that ours was a "secular" government, by which she meant that we lived free of any religion established by the state. We were to be proud of this secular government, she told us; it differentiated us from people in other times and places where those speaking for God made the rules—rules that sometimes were corrupt and unfair. As I understood it then, "secular" had nothing to do with disavowing or disapproving of any particular belief in God.

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There's always strange stuff for sale on eBay—does anybody really need elk antlers?—but some of the strangest is in a category called "Collectibles: Christianity," subcategory "Relics." Relics, to put it crassly, are souvenirs of a holy life: a snippet of cassock, a shred of a shroud—anything that once belonged to or came in contact with a saint. To many Christians, especially Roman Catholics, relics are sacred objects of veneration. They have healing powers; they remind believers of God's promise that in his kingdom, everything broken will become whole again. Some of the relics thought to have the most power are bits of saints' flesh, bone and hair, which have been authenticated by the church. To put it very crassly, these are tiny, antique body parts, usually in pretty little frames. Relics this precious are not intended to be owned by individuals but worshiped by the whole Christian community.

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Reincarnation, according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, is "rebirth in new bodies or forms of life; especially: a rebirth of a soul in a new human body." This ancient belief, a core belief of more than 800 million Hindus, has been in the news, most recently because of allegations in Andrew Morton's new book, "Tom Cruise: An Unauthorized Biography." In his book, Morton says some Scientologists hoped that Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes's gorgeous daughter, Suri, would be the reincarnation of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard, a man who died more than 20 years ago. The Church of Scientology denies this in a statement: "The church does not and never has believed any newborn is the reincarnation of its Founder, Mr. Hubbard—never, never, never."

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In the 20th Century no group was better at chronicling its own experience than the American Jews. You want self-loathing, assimilation and paranoia? Turn to Philip Roth. You want bright young women resisting and yet conforming to family expectations? Check out Allegra Goodman. You want the passionate rediscovery of Jewish history and values? Turn to Steven Spielberg.

The story of the Yiddish-speaking bubby with the Harvard educated grandson has been told so often—in fiction and in life—it's become an American cliché and a reference point for subsequent generations of immigrants.

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You need only go back to the first chapter of Genesis to see how elemental water is to the observance of faith: "And the Spirit of God," the Bible says, "moved upon the face of the waters." In the Torah, water is used to ordain priests and to purify the sons of Aaron before they enter the temple. In the New Testament, John baptizes Jesus with water from the Jordan River. Observant Muslims wash hands and feet before they pray, orthodox Jewish women take ritual baths once a month—and every Christian denomination still uses water as part of its sacred rites. Mormons, when they take the weekly sacrament, drink water instead of wine.

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You might think of this week as Kay Warren's coming-out party. Her husband, Rick, who is perhaps the most celebrated evangelical pastor in the world under the age of 60, has long said that his commitment to solving the international AIDS crisis, culminating in the third global AIDS summit held at his Saddleback church in Lake Forest, Calif., this week, was initially her idea, and here she is, finally taking credit. Petite, blonde—"ordinary" is her description—Kay Warren has for 32 years played the role of nurturer, best friend and helpmeet. But for the past year Kay has been on the lecture circuit herself, preaching that Christians ought to apply themselves to the problem of AIDS, even though it raises uncomfortable questions about sex. This week her memoir, "Dangerous Surrender," comes out, and now Kay Warren has emerged at the center of things. Asked if she's comfortable in this new role—with the hustle and bustle and aides and assistants, her office resembles a senator's—she starts to cry. "I didn't see it coming," she says, sitting in a conference room in her suite of offices not far from Saddleback. "I never, ever saw it coming."

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Over the past three years, Sen. John Kerry has had a lot of time to think about his God, and at a meeting with journalists in Washington earlier this month he shared those thoughts. He grew up in a Roman Catholic home before Vatican II; though devout, he prayed in private behind his closed bedroom door, as was the custom at the time. In Vietnam, he prayed to God to save his life, and when he came home some of his foxhole promises no longer felt so pressing. Kerry, a divorced, pro-choice Democrat with a foreign-seeming wife, ran for president in 2004 against an incumbent whose personal Christian-conversion story was intricately woven into his public persona. Yet, out of principle or stubbornness, Kerry chose not to expound upon his own faith until late in the race—too late, he says in retrospect. In the spring and summer of '04, a handful of U.S. Catholic bishops announced they'd refuse Kerry holy communion on the grounds that his stance on abortion went against church teachings, and Kerry suddenly found himself having to answer fundamental questions about who he was and what he stood for. "I should have started earlier to introduce who I really was—in '02 or '03," he told NEWSWEEK last week. He gave a big Catholic-values speech in Florida in October, but by then it was too late. "October is October. You've got to do this earlier," he says. "People have to have a sense of this as a continuum. Explaining how Catholicism has shaped my view of public life—it would have made a difference."

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Imagine, if you will, a world in which the right-wing pundit Ann Coulter were not a grating opportunist who said horrible things on air for her own personal gain. Imagine--and it's a stretch--that she occasionally said something interesting or at least worth considering. Then her recent comments on Donny Deutsch's cable show might have generated a useful conversation instead a lot of name-calling and Scripture quoting.

Here is what happened: Coulter and Deutsch were bantering about Israel and Iran, when Coulter used the phrase that has gotten so much attention. Christians, she said, "just want Jews to be perfected."

"Wow, you didn't really say that, did you?" asked Deutsch.

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He is the nicest right-wing evangelical powerhouse you've never heard of. Jim Daly grew up the last of five children in what anyone would call a broken home. His mother died when he was 10 and he lived with, in turn, a stepfather, a foster family, his own alcoholic father and his divorced brother. He came to Jesus in high school, under the guidance of a football coach. His recent memoir, "Finding Home," has barely made a dent on the best-seller lists. Nevertheless, in 2005, Daly got the job of president and CEO of Focus on the Family, and although he denies this, it's clear that he was picked to be the yin to James Dobson's yang. While Dobson continues to threaten in the press, Daly chats amiably with a reporter about the fall weather. He sticks to the hard line on policy issues—gay marriage is bad for families, he says—but his presentation is all soft edges. "I'm sure there are wonderful gay parents out there; there's a poster child for everything." If one of his boys turned out to be gay, he says, "I'd love him."

Is the presence of Daly at the head of what is arguably the country's most politically powerful conservative Christian group more evidence of a shift by evangelicals toward the center? Or is this alleged shift simply cosmetic? Events of the past few weeks offer contradictory evidence. On the one hand, you have Dobson, creating a furor with a New York Times op-ed warning Republicans to deliver a presidential candidate with the right values—or else. On the other, a handful of new books and studies show some movement centerward, at least on the question of tolerance toward homosexuals. According to a new study by the Barna Research Group, 80 percent of churchgoers between the ages of 16 and 29 believe that the term "anti-homosexual" describes Christianity, and they complain that they don't get enough guidance from their pastors in how to apply Christ's message of love to their gay friends. According to another study cited in "After the Baby Boomers" by Robert Wuthnow, young evangelicals have grown dramatically more tolerant of gays over the past 20 years on issues like teaching in schools.

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I went, for the first time, to the recent National Prayer Breakfast in Washington, D.C. and I had good reasons to be suspicious.

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Like many people, I have long experienced a feeling of God when I'm in nature, especially after a long run, or a hike, when my pulse is steady and all the world - the breathable air, the ocean full of microorganisms, the sun making shadows in the trees - feels like a miracle.

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