America is not and its Christians should not want it to be "a Christian Nation."

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Women have fared badly in all religions. If someone tries to convince you that somewhere goddess-worshippers or witches were exceptions, they are making that up: Stories of these date mainly from the 20th century and only pretend to be archaic.

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Religious leaders should make concern for the environment one of the two or three top issues. If we do not survive, we do not do anything else, either. And "we," our descendants, will not survive on our present course.

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Yes, Islam is a violent religion. So are Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and all the rest.

Islam is also a non-violent religon. So are Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and all the rest.

(The exception would be those which had not had much "earthly" power, such as Baha'i.)

How can they all be violent and non-violent?

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"Social revolutionary" is not a concept that would fit in the time of the 8th century B.C.E. prophets or of Jesus; "social" is a modern understanding and "revolution" is a word invented in recent centuries. So, no, it'd be unfitting to put Jesus in that category.

HOWEVER, in the gospel portraits of Jesus we find plenty of attitudes, expressions, sayings, and teachings which are more readily appropriable by people we call "social revolutionaries" than they would be to those who oppose them.

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My former colleague, emeritus professor and senior super-historian (world history) recently wrote an article pointing out that there have been few, very very few, years of recorded history that does not record wars going on. Since there has presumably been faith, some sort of faith, all sorts of faith, throughout recorded history, believers must have been taking wars into account when they have and express faith.

So it would be a matter of generational egocentrism for us to think that we should be or are unique in dreaming up the question about how war and faith can coexist in mind and in the same century: they always have.

Sad to say, often they coexisted because or so that one could invoke God or the gods in the unholy causes of war. So such believers "kept their faith." The vast majority of believers, we must presume, were benumbed, befuddled, puzzled, often grieving, probably prayerful, sometimes reflecting on human folly, on occasion praising the courageous.

War can indded obscure thoughts of the goodness of God and inspire vivid thoughts about the outrageousness of evil. For some it can mean a loss of faith, or self-examination if they never had it. Albert Camus told the Dominicans who admired him in the French Resistance that if he could believe in a God who let the war go on and let babies die, he would - but he could not. He wanted the priests to respect him in his unbelief if their virtues matched and they inspired each other, and he would respect them. War or no war, he kept unbelieving and they kept believing.

Faith is born, love extended, hope magnified in the face of and in spite of human finitude, chance in nature and history, and transience. I keep my faith, or my faith is kept for me, in the face of the same. I have no secret or special techniques for faith-holding: accept a gift as a gift, and ponder, and wonder.

On this question I suppose I should declare "I have an interest," because I am a member of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, and, to pile it on, an ordained minister in it. Further, I am a friend and fan--dare one call one's self that?--of the Presiding bishop, Mark Hanson, and the local bishop, Paul Landahl, was my pastor for twenty-two years and remains a cherished friend. With only one exception (heading the committee that drafted a "concordat" between ELCA and the Episcopal Church), I've not been directly involved in ELCA affairs, and feel free to pick and choose my issues.

The gay ordinations theme has not been central in my thinking and work, but circumstances push it ever closer to the center. I often observe in editorials and lectures that every Christian church body in the world is torn apart over issues that one can grasp in two terms, "sex" and "authority."

Sex means the whole biological range, with controversies over in vitro fertilization, contraception, abortion, stem cell research, sexual interactions. Authority means who decides issues in the modern world where we all have so much freedom. The ELCA is far along in what appears to me to be a comprehensive and searching study of "sex-and-your-faith," and is due to report in 2009.

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Most scholars of religion have abandoned the word "cult" in the senses that it came to be used a couple of decades ago and on occasion still is. When the Unification Church, the Divine Light Mission, the Hare Krishna group, and scores more were attracting especially the offspring of well-off suburbanites, nonplussed parents and others were threatened, and needed a term to describe the movements that produced the threats. They reached back for "cults," and for some years a stream of books appeared with the word 'cult' on the cover.

Where draw the line between a cult and everybody else? It became clear that the word was almost always used pejoratively: "we" good people are secular or we belong to a standard-brand denomination, church, temple, mosque, while "you" bad people brainwash others and do strange and secret and scary things. Again, where was the borderline? To anti-Catholics, the formation of monks and nuns was cultic; to anti-Baptists, becoming "born again" meant entering a cult. Eventually it became clear that everyone called someone a cult, and the word served few clarifying purposes.

Earlier the word had been "sect," a term which began innocently but came to be used to dismiss others. 'Sect' was less condemnatory than "cult," but it still wasn't nice. To this day some headlines will refer to a mainline church as a sect, but wins no points for doing so.

When words get tired and nothing-but-misused or confusing, people who like to use words with conceptual priority and good manners shelve them. The usual and most nearly neutral term was "New Religious Movements," NRMs, which worked for those that were new. Of course, many claim ancient ancestry, but are simply "new to us." If we need an all-purpose categorizing term, the NRM concept will have to serve. "Denomination" works for those that become mainstream, but not all in them like to be called that, either. All categorizing and cataloguing terms have to be handled with care.

In his Varieties of Religious Experience, William James noted that in order to understand phenomena we must catalogue and label and categorize, but must also know that we miss something. Thus, if you could interview a crab, he said, the creature would protest being categorized as a crustacean: "I am not a crustacean. I'm a crab. I'm not even only a crab; I want to be taken for MYSELF, MYSELF." Give his or her SELF a chance to define herself, is the best advice.

Meanwhile, goodbye "cult." It's been non-nice to know you.

(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...

Everybody who was anybody in Chicago journalism had gathered in the top restaurant in the Prudential Building, then Chicagoans' highest party place, to toast an anniversary of Syn Harris, cherished columnist in the late Chicago Daily News.

While tributes flowed along with the drinks, someone burst into the room and shouted that Dr. King had been shot and, presumably, killed. Never have I seen such a frantic rush for elevators, as the crowd dispersed almost instantly. Being journalists, they had jobs to do. The rest of us, marginally journalists like myself (professor at the University of Chicago), academics, politicians and friends, made our way just as quickly.

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