Let the conversation begin with wonder....I've just co-directed a three year project on The Child in Religion, Law, and Society and written a book on The Mystery of the Child .

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"I believe that Jesus Christ, true God, begotten of the Father in eternity, and also true human being, born of the virgin Mary, is my Lord." Little Martin Marty was brought up on that Catechism affirmation, and old MM is not smart enough to forget it, refute it, or improve on it.

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In the autumn of 1947, when I knew I wanted to write, but was giving Christian ministry as a vocational choice a chance, I was sent to do "field work" at an old-style tuberculosis sanitarium in St Louis.

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Do I pray? In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says (Matt. 6:5): "Don't tell." But since you asked: "Yes."

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Not some religions, but all religions have much to say about sex. Why? Because sex is scary, combining as it does procreative and pleasure mysteries.

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I celebrated with most of the two billion people called by the name of Jesus Christ. In a way, that answers the question.

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"Our tradition," Christian "of the Lutheran persuasion," if it is true to Luther and the originating documents refuses even to try to answer the "why" the killing happened--except in respone to what can be known about the warped mind of the killer. That is, we cannot answer "why" one student was spared and another hit.

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Taking off from Max Scheler, on whom Pope John Paul II wrote his doctoral dissertation: the "offender" has to ask not "what did I do?" or "what kind of person am I that I could do that?" but "what kind of person am I now that I am capable of doing that?"

An aggrieved party (e.g. the Rutgers team) has to feel that the offender has asked himself that, and can then take him or her seriously. Christians (and I try to be one) live between "unforgivingness" and "cheap grace."

Unforgiving? Jesus has parables denouncing the forgiven who can't forgive others. They have not caught on.

We are not to be interested in casual, public relations-related apologies. All onlookers can spot a phony who uses them.

Forgiving is great: neither party has to keep on keeping score. So it is liberating. But the forgiver has to be aware that after the mouthing of the "I'm sorry" phrase, we do not always or even often see amended lives.

One always hopes, and, therefore, takes risks.

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On the "place of questioning in faith."

The place is clear: it is central.
Begin scripturally:
- Abraham and Sarah questioned when told of potential good news
- The Psalmist questioned, on more pages than not
- Prophets like Habakkuk, asking what one book called 'The Eternal Why'
- The disciple Thomas questioned so much he gets nicknamed 'doubting Thomas'
- A questioning man in a Jesus-story said, "Lord, I believe, help my unbelief"
- The disciples of Jesus did
- The apostle Paul dealt with the questions of faith and unfaith
- Oh, by the way, Jesus questioned: in a garden the night before he died and in a shout when he was dying, according to gospel stories. "My God, my God, WHY have you forsaken me?" is pretty strong.
- You could not get far in writing stories of saints and scholars in the Christian tradition--and, not likely, very far in other religions--without question marks
- My specialty in Christian history is Martin Luther, who regularly wrote and showed how the underside of faith is doubt, and that doubt never goes away permanently and completely.

Given that score for "Bible believers" and and believers through the ages, my question would be:

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With most orthodox mainstream Christians I am with Reinhold Niebuhr who said we should not be concerned with "the furniture or the temperature of hell." Heaven as a "place" has been out for a long time. Heaven as a way of picturing and imaging and providing a means of expressing hope remains "in;" whatever else that hope means, it envisions that "nothing shall separate us from the love of God," including death. I believe that about death and God, and know that to say more takes us into the realms of the unimaginable and indescribable. . .

As for hell: some years ago U.S. Catholic magazine asked its readers who they pictured for sure would be in hell, and they only found two--Hitler and Stalin. No doubt most of us could picture more. Or maybe not. I gave the Ingersoll Lecture at Harvard some years ago: "Hell Disappeared--No one Noticed. A civic argument." 19th-Century public school readers from the "good olds days," as they are known, told children that if they would lie and not repent they would go to hell; and their parents would look at them from heaven and see them in flames, and know they had it coming. I'd like to think that such pedagogy and envisioning is not around.

While I believe that God is a judge, I don't think God ratifies all our decisions. . . Frankly, I almost never believe a believer in literal hell. I'll be at dinner with one, and ask him or her to hold a finger over the candle for ten seconds. No way. Now picture it all over you, forever. No way. If you believe that, why are you spending two hours with me when you could be rescuing them?

One does not hear much hellfire preaching even from hellfire preachers these days; they attract more with the "prosperity gospel" than with fright.

Hell is separation from God, from Love; it's a self-chosen situation.

To the second question: would I vote for a pagan?
[I doubt if one will rise to candidacy for president, but as for other offices:'
Would I vote for a pagan? I probably already have.
They come in many informal forms.

To the first question, about chaplaincy:
Some years ago I spoke to the chaplains' committee on endorsement, or whatever it is called: they check the credentials of the religious groups that want to be represented in chaplaincy. I've studied American religion for decades, but those two days I heard testimony from any number of groups that want to be in on the act.
Curiously, while Catholics, Jews, mainline Protestants are not producing enough chaplains--in part because their religious bodies have more dissesnters against recent wars, the less familiar, small, and, to others, "exotic" groups were ready to go. In some senses, it seemed that they welcomed this credentialing.
So it may be with Pagans.
since Chaplains are supposed to serve people of many faiths, and most do, it may be hard to picture many non-pagans welcoming services by pagan priests.
Still, on church-state grounds it's hard to know on what principle to rule them out: one does not want the government being the determiner of what is a legitimate religion and what isn't.
Some folks on both sides of this issue will get emotional about it, and most of the rest of the military and civilian citizenry will go about its business the same way, whether or not . . . .

The physician has a vocation, a calling, to deal with the deepest issues and commitments of life. Call it "sacred." The believer has a vocation, a calling, to deal with the deepest issues and commitments of life. Call it "sacred" as well.

Most of the time the two vocations are symbiotic: They live off each other, nourish each other, and prosper together. Rarely is there or must there be conflict between the two. However, most physicians report that on occasion there is competition for priority and conflict between the two.
What then?

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Rejoicing over the birth of a child or facing my own death, I'd choose one kind of text. If I am to work for justice or mercy, others would come to mind. But for my lifelong vocation, dealing as I do at the junctures of "faith" and "culture" or "society," I'd choose Paul's letter to the Colossians 1:16b-17. "For all things have been created through [Jesus Christ] and for him. He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together."

Those who know me well will know--I think and hope!--that I do not interpret this passage imperially to promote exclusivism, but rather to urge an expansive vision. A story will help me tell why it means so much:

The late Robert McAfee Brown and I were co-lecturing at the University of California at Berkeley in the late sixties or early seventies. We were interrupted when exactly twelve young men in black leather jackets stormed the stage and positioned themselves in a precise formation. They announced their identification with one of the groups then identified as "Jesus People."

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Do I think more or less of Mother Teresa after the publication of her diaries? Answer: I think the same (which is quite highly), though in a different category. I think less of those who use her experience of the absence of God as proof for the non-existence of God.The two have nothing to do with each other. I welcome her honesty, her eloquence, the passion of her soul-searching, and regard the disclosures as signs of pathos: how sad the she, who sought so hard, did not find, or receive.

If and as she proceeds to sainthood--on a track that does not concern us non-Roman Catholics--she can still be a model with whom many will identify. The absence of the experience of God or the experience of God is a classic theme with which many can identify. I once wrote a whole book, "A Cry of Absence," taking off from writing by perhaps the most noted theologian in 20th century Catholicism. He wanted us to concentrate on a "wintry sort of spirituality," and not just market summery, sunny, everything-solved spirituality. Such wintry sorts are all over the Bible and the pages of Christian history.

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This one is easy.

Why does a merciful God allow human-caused and natural disasters to happen.

Answer: I don't know.

I doubt whether there's ever been a natural disaster in which it's not been natural for thoughtful believers to ponder the question, and there are libraries full of answers, none of them informed, because humans do not know the mind of God.

Their answers cancel each other out, or are based on contrived reasoning of intellectual sleight-of-hand.

This does not mean that there's no value in discussing the theme: it helps us sort out other aspects of our experience of and witness to God.

Whatever else believers in the Bible find in the book, it all stops back with the observation that "he makes his rain to fall and his son to shine on the just and on the unjust."

Where biblical authors do address the issue, it can get pretty scary, as it does in Isaiah 45:7, Yahweh speaking: "I form light and create darkness, I make weal and create woe." And in the Book of Job we get three chapters of "who do you think you are?" questions when we want final solutions to our existential problems.

When good things happen, the believer is licensed to give thanks, but claiming to know why a hurricane cloud blew where it did or our team or army won--that's tricky, because then "when bad things happen" one cannot skip out and say that someone can know the "why."

Not having the answers in the ultimate sense has not deterred (us) believers from expressing belief. They, we, have instead to be more humble about what we claim--and do what we can to prevent man-made disasters.

"Atheism is violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism and tribalism and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children." Oops! That first word was supposed to be "Religion."

Never mind. The two cancel each other out. But since "religion" came up as a topic, we can play with "atheism" as a substitution.

Most societies and polities throughout history were shaped or influenced by some form or other of religion: Hindu, Buddhist, Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Sikh, Native American, etc. They were all mixed bags, since everything human is some sort of mixed bag.

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I hope my answer will be uninteresting and routine:

When I profess the creed with the congregations where I am worshiping, I don't gulp at the final words and indeed delight in them:

. . . and I look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come. . . .

Translation: If I begin the creed with "I believe in a Creator. . . "and go on to witness to the reach and protection and love of God, then it makes more sense to assume that that love will not end with my physical death.

Explain? I have not the faintest idea. I like to quote theologian Karl Rahner who called death "the abyss of mystery," which is a way of saying that I/we have no words, concepts, reaches of imagination to make sense of that in ordinary conceptions. And I don't need that.

No, I have had no post-death experiences, and have not been moved by any testimonies by those who have. I wouldn't dream of talking them out of it, but just have to say that I do not find them convincing or helpful.

I'll just stay stuck with the beginning and end of the creeds, along with most of two billion others, even as we commend to God with hope and no sense of dismissal the hopes of those who are not Christian. It's not a contest of "our concept is better than your concept," but rather grateful acceptance of what little one grasps in the "abyss of mystery."

Whether holidays are happy or not depends largely on personal and private moods and situations.

Observations of culture-wide tensions and unhappinesses usually fall into two zones:

1) Most holidays have some sort of religious cast--even "civil" holidays tend to. Those rooted in particular religious traditions are most likely to induce tension.

This is the case in "mixed marriages" or in citizen arguments about public displays.

Mixed marriages: people bring highest expectations to holidays, and so they make greatest demands on each other. It may well be that holidays are the WORST time to try to solve anything. Relax. Enjoy "both" (or more) traditions and sets of customs. They are NOT the same; they have different stories and promises. But these stories do not conflict at all points. They are often parallel and overlapping. I'd advise halves of split families not to try to score points or settle anything. Sit back. Listen to the other side; Learn from each other.

Citizen disputes: as churches and synagogues and families neglect the gatherings where holidays are celebrated, they want the public order to take over. That's the worst place. For example, you can mount a creche on a hundred thousand private lawns and almsot everyone will cheer. Insist that your symbols have monopoly or privilege on the court house lawn or in school and you are demeaning your own faith and trampling on the ways of others. Why make the public order have to compensate for our failure to "do" holidays in their natural habitats.

2) Other unhappinesses? We don't notice them so much as we scurry to and from work and meet deadlines; When we relax, let things go, "idle," we expect too much and bring up all the unhealed things that we don't attend to on non-holidays. We defeat the purpose of holidays in such cases. Again, advice; relax. Enjoy. Reach out to people to whom you can bring happiness.

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: 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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