Yes, as audacious as that claim is to make, I do believe that Jesus Christ was, and is, the Son of God.

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Prayer is the soul’s response, that is to say the person’s inner response, to God’s movement at the center of one’s own being.

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Prayer is the soul’s response, that is to say the person’s inner response, to God’s movement at the center of one’s own being.

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My answer to this question is in a word: NO.

Christianity, from the perspective of the Episcopal Church, recognizes that acts of depravity, like the Virginia Tech shootings, are part of the human condition. A sign of humanity’s brokenness is precisely that people are capable of such acts of unspeakable cruelty. The word of promise that Christianity offers is God’s assurance that such brokenness is not life’s final word. We can be healed both of the causes and the consequences of such depravity. Death is evil, but evil is finally not triumphant. God’s love, God’s life defeats death.

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Questioning one's faith is essential to it. Questioning is the growing edge of understanding.

It is by our questioning that our understandings become our own. If we never question what we have been taught, or examine our understanding of those teachings, then we can expect of ourselves little more that compliance with dictum, but can never hope for a deepened comprehension of the unfolding mystery of God. It is by questioning that we enter into the risk and adventure of a life of faith. It is by a thoughtful, disciplined, courageous and prayerful questioning of our faith that it becomes vital.

We can have confidence that the very act of questioning our faith in God will ultimately strengthen that faith because, paradoxically, every reflection about God depends upon God.

Mercy and truth have met together;
Righteousness and peace have kissed each other.
Psalm 86:10

The few words of this brief passage capture the essence of a hope for human life that I believe lies at the heart of human aspiration -- in life as it is experienced by each of us individually and life as lived in the larger human community.

Each of these four is widely (though to be sure not universally) seen as a virtue. However, all too often they are understood and experienced as being if not exactly in opposition one to the other, then at least as alternatives. All too often “truth” is treated as though it were contrary to “mercy” and “mercy” as though it was incompatible with “truth.” All too often “truth” is used as a weapon to hurt rather than to heal, and “mercy” is used as a shield against the searing cleansing of “truth.” In the same way “righteousness” is far too often given, even perhaps usually given, as the justification for enmity and conflict. Our side is right; therefore, our actions to defend or enforce our understanding of the “right” are justified. “Peace” for its part is often, if not usually, understood to be an accommodation between competing perspectives or powers that allows an absence of conflict.
There is, however, nothing inherently opposed in these concepts. In an ideal world, in the perfect universe, mercy and truth are synchronous; righteousness and peace are in harmony. Further, this passage testifies to the fact that these are not simply abstractions, they are the concrete realities of life. They meet, they kiss. They exist.
It is that perfection which, as a Christian, I believe Jesus embodies. He, in Himself, brought these together into a living being. He showed, by his life and his death, that it is by means of courageous and self-less love that these elements, these life forces, are brought into harmony. It is by that living and dying, in company with him, that we approach the harmony that is the song of the universe.

Forgiveness is the path to freedom. If ever we are to live as free persons we must find the way to forgive even when our enemy is unrepentant, even when our enemy is actively pursuing what we find to be their evil intentions. To fail to forgive the repentant, as well as the unrepentant, enemy is to remain their prisoners. Hatred and fear isolate; and isolation diminishes a person.

Forgiveness, however, is a somewhat misunderstood concept. To forgive is to come to genuinely want “the good” for that person who is my enemy, as only God knows “the good”. However, to forgive does not mean pretending that some evil did not happen. Nor does it mean explaining away the culprit’s responsibility. It does not mean coming to like that former enemy, though that sometimes happens. And certainly, forgiving does not mean coming to trust that enemy. It is entirely possible, for example, for one person to genuinely forgive another while at the same time believing that he or she should spend life in prison.

The journey to forgiveness is not an easy one. Along that way one must stop to recognize the humanity of the enemy. Of equal importance is coming to grips with one’s own faults and failures. If ever a person is to truly and deeply forgive, they must know themselves to have been forgiven. I know of no short-cut on this journey. From within my own Christian tradition the only way that I know to grow in forgiveness is by taking the time to reflect on the deep reality of the other person’s fundamental humanity, to examine oneself, and to hold both, and all, before God in prayer.

One final point: the enormous power of forgiveness to free oneself from the deadly entanglements of anger and hate is a power reserved to the injured party. Forgiveness is not easy – but it is essential to freedom.

The first part of the question is best addressed by members of the Jewish community itself – as they will be its principle authors. We can all hope and expect that they will be as successful in the future as they have been in the past.

All of us in the larger community have a stake in helping to create and sustain an environment in which a religion professed by a minority of people can thrive. The key to this survival, as the Jewish community has so clearly demonstrated over the centuries, is that the core beliefs are held firmly while beliefs and practice more peripheral to those core beliefs are allowed to accommodate to the culture in which the believer finds himself or herself. The perennial challenge before believers is determining exactly what is a core belief and what is a cultural adaptation. If everything is a core belief then religious communities will be progressively isolated from an ever changing culture. If nothing is core then the whole enterprise of faith will fade into the vapor.

The role of a free society is to allow maximum scope for the believers to define what the core belief might be.

The advantage that a religion professed by a minority of citizens has is that it is less likely that there will be confusion between the religion and the culture. Few Jews would imagine for an instant that America is a Jewish nation where many Christians mistakenly believe that the U.S. is a Christian nation. Given that Christians for a large part of our population, if not an actual majority, many may find cultural assumptions about their faith sufficiently resonant with their faith claims that culture and faith become blurred and confused. This is a grave danger for many Christians in America, for example.