The Question: E-mail: Blessing or Curse?

Our concern is with the soul: is E-mail a blessing or a curse, so far as the soul is concerned?

I will tell a story. Decades ago the Annenbergs endowed a new center at the University of Southern California, and invited Librarian of Congress and my former teacher Daniel Boorstin, technological visionary Buckminster Fuller and me to share a panel on the emergent technology called "the computer." The Annenbergs, generous philanthropists, whose interests included the Philadelphia Inquirer, Racing Form, TV Guide and other media-related companies, had been reading a then-in-vogue intellectual, Jean Gimpel, on the "decline of the West." We were urged to be declinists with him.

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The Question: What does the Eliot Spitzer scandal say about our public and private morality? Should he have resigned?

Yes, Governor Spitzer should have resigned. New York government would have been paralyzed and the media would have remained paroxysmal in its obsession with the story of one person, while six billion others also have lives to live.

What does his fall tell us about the state of morals in the United States? Ethicists urge that one should not make full-blown generalizations on the basis of single extreme cases. This is an extreme case. Step back from it and survey the scene, and you will find plenty of moral lapses and human faults and falls to inspire immeasurable whining, finger-pointing, and judging.

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(Excerpted with permission from the Chronicle of Higher Education. Go here to read the entire essay.)

Through the decades, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. has called me teacher, reminding me of the years when he earned a master's degree in theology and ministry at the University of Chicago — and friend. My wife and I and our guests have worshiped at Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, where he recently completed a 36-year ministry.

Images of Wright's strident sermons, and his anger at the treatment of black people in the United States, appear constantly on the Internet and cable television, part of the latest controversy in our political-campaign season. His critics call Wright anti-American. Critics of his critics charge that the clips we hear and see have been taken out of context...

While Wright's sermons were pastoral — my wife and I have always been awed to hear the Christian Gospel parsed for our personal lives — they were also prophetic. At the university, we used to remark, half lightheartedly, that this Jeremiah was trying to live up to his namesake, the seventh-century B.C.E. prophet. Though Jeremiah of old did not "curse" his people of Israel, Wright, as a biblical scholar, could point out that the prophets Hosea and Micah did. But the Book of Jeremiah, written by numbers of authors, is so full of blasts and quasi curses — what biblical scholars call "imprecatory topoi" — that New England preachers invented a sermonic form called "the jeremiad," a style revived in some Wrightian shouts.

In the end, however, Jeremiah was the prophet of hope, and that note of hope is what attracts the multiclass membership at Trinity and significant television audiences. Both Jeremiahs gave the people work to do: to advance the missions of social justice and mercy that improve the lot of the suffering. For a sample, read Jeremiah 29, where the prophet's letter to the exiles in Babylon exhorts them to settle down and "seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile." Or listen to many a Jeremiah Wright sermon...

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

Mistreatment of one sex by another or of one race or set of peoples by another is as old as recorded humanity. Humans, in their insecurity, seek an identity by finding or inventing an "other"--"other is a technical term now!--and follow up by seeking and finding license to treat them as objects, which means, to do whatever you want to them or against them.

Attaching the "ism" to both--as in "sexism" and "racism" is not very helpful. "Isms" usually get in the way so we stop seeing individuals. This is as true of the ones who beat others up as it is of the ones who are busy categorizing all the "others" and lumping them together into one hateable glob.

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