The Question: Jeremiah Wright's sermons continue to be an issue in the presidential campaign. Why? What do you think of his preaching style? What do you wish you understood better about it?

What's made the Rev. Jeremiah Wright into America's most famous preacher is a single, short phrase, "God damn America," uttered during a sermon and repeated endlessly on various media loops. Yes, it's shocking, even when taken within its larger, sermonic context. And it's completely unsurprising that a great many people find it baffling and even enraging. The latest news media short-hand for the phrase is to call it "unpatriotic."

Is it really?

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The Question: What can Pope Benedict XVI say and do to repair the growing rifts between the Vatican, the clergy and the laity in America?

Pope Benedict XVI is surprising the American news media. Wasn't the former Cardinal Ratzinger supposed to crack the whip over the worldwide church and particularly its American branch? He was the "conservative," right?

When his charismatic predecessor, John Paul II, visited the United States on his three major pastoral visits (in 1979, 1987 and 1995) media coverage followed two increasingly standard paths--first the stories about widespread American dissent over sexual and gender issues, then (once the pope arrived), an outpouring of commentary on just how effective he was at working a crowd. The narratives came to be predictable, well-worn and, for that reason, absent the very component they were supposed to carry--news.

But this pastoral visit is different: Benedict has proven himself fully capable of creating his own narrative.

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The Question: How should Barack Obama have responded to inflammatory remarks made by his former pastor, Dr. Jeremiah Wright? Are you responsible for what your spiritual leader says from the pulpit?

As a nation, we seem to have embarked on an evermore demanding trajectory when it comes to politicians and their personal religion. It is reasonable to allow for political figures who sincerely hold (or lack) a religious identity to say so. Let the public decide whether they have crossed a boundary by being so revealing. But it's another matter entirely to hold a political figure somehow "responsible" for what his or her minister/priest/rabbi/imam says. Do we really want to go there?

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If Americans find it easy to switch religious affiliations, as the Pew Forum's extensive research reports, we shouldn't take this as either a sign of "sickness" or "health" in the nation's religious landscape. Rather, it's a practical result of two inescapable factors: being an American and, more basically, being human.

Being a citizen of the United States, in a nation lacking an established church but legally guaranteeing freedom of conscience, has meant living with religious choice. And although Pew presents us with interesting new statistics, the fact that people have grasped that choice is nothing new. Take, for example, some of the people we admire most.

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The challenge to Jews in America has always involved living in a culture in which anti-Semitism (certainly by European standards) has been muted. So what happens when individuals find themselves confronted without that decidedly negative force that helped maintain clear community boundaries and practices elsewhere?

Well, the result has been a flowering of ideas about how an ancient identity should relate to and live within a democratic culture that itself lacks much sense of history or social permanence. To put it simply, Judaism in the United States has been inventive and adaptive--including as it has such energetic and creative intellects as Isaac Mayer Wise, a key founder of Reform Judaism; Solomon Schechter, the great leader of a traditionalist response in Conservative Judaism; and the vastly imaginative Mordecai Kaplan, from whose ideas arose Jewish Reconstructionism.

None of this is to slight the Orthodox, who have played a highly important and (within themselves) varied role in the continuing question of how to respond to the broad religious and economic currents that flow within American culture.

With such a creative spirit, with such determination to conceive of ways that tradition ought to engage culture, it's very difficult to envision American Judaism as being anything other than vital and enduring. After all, 350-plus years in this country is a pretty good run. Here's a great future.

Based on the experience of having lived through the past seven years, I think I can boil down to five the questions I consider important in trying to assess a presidential candidate's moral grounding. Sure, these overlap with broad religious principles, but they work from a secular standpoint, as well.

First, are you able to admit a mistake and, as a chief executive, take responsibility for it and work humbly to undo any damage resulting from it?

Second, will you listen to others and give thoughtful weight to reasonable arguments with which you may be inclined to disagree?

Third, will you show sufficient curiosity about the world to believe that you can learn from and respond with care to changing global circumstances that affect your fellow citizens?

Fourth, will you demonstrate enough respect to other human beings to be truthful with them, even if that costs you politically?

And finally, will you state categorically that you will not start a war?

I couldn't vote for this bill. I don't like that whiff of defensiveness that clings to it, as if the authors had spent too much time thinking about an alleged "war on Christmas" to which a certain television network has devoted much attention.

But could it be amended? Not easily. But let's see. We might start by dealing with the numbers quoted. They represent an extremely diverse group, theologically and ecclesiastically, and incorporate a great many who don't recognize each other as Christians as well as those who might be described as only nominally within the faith. On the other hand, we might insert a statement I once heard from the great Rev. Gardner Taylor, a fellow panelist here, in response to a question he got about the success of so-called megachurches. Don't be overly impressed by crowds, I recall him saying. Wise and memorable words.

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Can the use of torture ever be justified? Nope.

Three reasons: a.) It's against international law, to which the United States is (we thought) party; b.) it's morally wrong, as it utterly degrades and devalues human dignity; and c.) it's impractical as a law enforcement tool, as often enough the tortured will say absolutely anything and give up anybody to stop the pain.

One might add that a lot of Americans don't want their government to do it--69 percent, according to a CNN poll released Tuesday.

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The answer to the question is both. Children's health care is a parental responsibility and a moral imperative for society. Why should adults bother to have children if they do not take care of them? Why should a nation bother to imagine a future if it does not make basic investments in its coming generation? Taken together, that means a collaboration between parents and government to make sure children are healthy, well-fed, educated and not burdened by onerous financial debts that they will inherit as adults.

That's the ideal. Now, what's the real? Reality is that we live in a country ever torn torn between the cult of individuality and the ideal of a generous communitarianism. In that division, we typically lean toward individualism, which at its best does wonderful things for our creativity in all fields.

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From where I sit, I plainly see many examples of the physically dead very much alive among us. They live on in words, either their own or those of others. Within arm's reach, I've got a copy of Thomas Merton's "Seven Storey Mountain," beneath John Muir's "My First Summer in the Sierra." In my bookcase, I can see a copy of Susan Jacoby's "Freethinkers," with its lively (pun intended) chapter on Robert Ingersoll. Merton died in 1968, Muir and Ingersoll a century ago. Think they're gone? You're dead wrong. I've taught all three in my classes on American religions, introducing students to these different spiritual viewpoints or (in Ingersoll's case) critiques of religion.

This fall, in one class, we've read Abraham Lincoln's speeches and some of William James's "Varieties of Religious Experience." I've got Jack Kerouac coming up next. They are as intellectually alive today than they were within their lifetimes. Their words do not go out of circulation, but continue to challenge and stimulate us, changing patterns of thought, even lives, in the process. Indeed, there may more people reading these authors (and reading about them) now in our globalized culture than ever before. Take Merton, for example--some of his major works have been recently translated into Chinese.

Let me add, too, that you don't have to be a writer or to have written about for this process to occur. In my family, we talk from time to time about relatives and ancestors who have died, some very long ago. Don't tell me we're the exception. The dead have been remembered orally for as long as humans have walked the planet.

And if that's not life after death, I don't know what else you call it.

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John McCain's a war hero, but not much of a legal scholar. The Constitution forbids any "religious test" for elective office. (Again, thank you, James Madison.) Still, McCain reflects the feelings of a good many Americans: Polls show a majority want someone who at least acknowledges a personal faith. Ronald Reagan, with his occasional invocations of a non-sectarian God, handled this expectation about as well as most Americans seemed to want.

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Christopher Hitchens can be entertaining; that's apparent in his work. But the statement above is a rant: you either agree with it absolutely 100 percent or you don't. There's no room for conversation here, no space for dialogue, no opportunity for mutual discovery, for actual learning. And that's the stuff that causes us to engage intellectually, you might say makes us fully human.

Hitchens' statement is fully protected by the First Amendment. He's got every right to declare his opinion. So does the guy wearing the "Yankees Suck" t-shirt. The law, fortunately, doesn't compel anyone to respond to either. What's there to say, beyond unimaginative exclamations, like "Yeah!" or "Says you!" We get enough of that shout-you-down stuff in the stadiums... but there, at least you can get a beer and a hot dog.

A few days back I read somewhere that Thomas Jefferson was a lousy public speaker. Interesting, but kind of beside the point, I thought. I've had something of the same reaction to the news that Mother Teresa often felt cut off from God. Yes, I know there's gain in discussing doubt as an essential to faith. The Trappist monk Thomas Merton, speaking in Calcutta (interestingly) in 1968, perhaps said it definitively when he stated that a person of faith who suffered no doubt could not possibly be a person of faith.

Mother Teresa's letters do nothing to diminish her status as a social entrepreneur whose vision focused on helping people despised for the disease and poverty. Coming from Albania (maybe the most obscure nation in Europe), she built a worldwide organization that attracted an awful lot of people who dedicated themselves full- or part-time to helping utter outcasts achieve a measure of dignity in their living and dying.

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I lack a single passage within scripture or literature with which to define my faith. I'll argue instead that's because the field of possibilities is too rich -- and one might add in the case of literature, ever-growing. I doubt I'm alone in saying my beliefs can be inspired, magnified, by what I read, often in unlikely places.

But shouldn't that make sense? Follow the Jewish and Christian claim that we humans are made in God's image, and we should, occasionally, have the power to reflect glory through our artistic abilities. My ongoing encounter with literature, as with the visual arts (including film) can leave me feeling I've shared vicariously with authors in their uniquely illuminating experiences of the divine.

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The libertarian in me wants to say, Let the patient's judgment rule. (Martin Marty puts this with considerably more elegance when he speaks of the "covenant" between patient and physician.) Problem is, medical decision-making is often not so neatly simple as to be a clear, two-party affair. The primary players may be the doctor and patient, but the patients' family is as likely to be involved, particularly in critical medical issues. And guess what? The family may not always agree among themselves (including with the patient), particularly when there are religious, ethical and moral issues involved.

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The single most surprising aspect of having a Hindu priest offer an opening prayer in the United States Senate is that it happened on July 12, 2007. I can't be the only person to whom that must seem a bit late. After all, Hindu scriptures have been read and admired in this country for more than 150 years. (Thoreau took the Bhagavad-gita with him to Walden Pond.) These days, more than one million Hindus call themselves Americans; from Queens, N.Y., to Laguna Beach, Calif., their communities are not exactly obscure. Note that the priest, Rajan Zed, is a resident of Nevada. And, of course, if Protestants, Roman Catholics, Orthodox Christians, Jews and Muslims are extended the courtesy of having one of their own pray for the Senate, then that symbolic honor can hardly be denied other religious groups.

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What matters about the discussion this week is that it exposes important, leading figures from throughout the Islamic world to the American public (and I assume to a wider world audience as well). Thus, we have the opportunity to sit down and read at leisure the thinking of the scholar Tariq Ramadan, to browse the pithy responses of Murad Hofmann and to reflect on former Indonesian president Abdurrahman Wahid's thoughts about Islam's internal struggle against its own fundamentalists. This is an opportunity that affords us a vital introduction into Islam's internal intellectual and spiritual diversity. (Overall, it seems to validate what a colleague of mine says when she refers to "Islams," rather than Islam, a formulation that might as easily be applied to world Christianity.)

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Are we talking here about faith in God, in fellow human beings, or in one's self? Perhaps it's unavoidable that we think about all three in times of war.

Despite the old adage about a supposed lack of atheists in foxholes, I do think personal claims to religion can suffer terribly in wartime. How could they not?

Some years back, an Anglican bishop told me that he believed a part of the Church of England's decline was directly related to British soldiers' experience of World War I--living months, even years, in trenches while continually subjected to random sniper shots, raking machine gun fire and high-intensity artillery bombardments.

You get a flavor of this in (if I remember right) Sebastian Faulks' novel, "Birdsong," which paints a vivid scene of the Battle of the Somme on July 1, 1916, when British troops were ordered to make a direct assault on heavily fortified German positions. Twenty thousand men in this assault--60 percent of all officers and 40 percent of those in the ranks--died on a single day. Faulks has a chaplain witness the opening minutes of this madness; overcome, the character tears a cross from his uniform. (And, think about it, if humans are made in God's image, as Christians and Jews are taught, then such murder runs perilously close to blasphemy.)

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I notice that several of the panelists have praised Christopher Hitchens's writing, if not his conviction. And to be sure, the current question, which borrows his phrasing, seems to have inspired some of the most interesting theological reflection I've yet seen from the esteemed panel.

But like Bishop Wright, I too have a problem with the use of the term "man-made" (aside from its being a rather antique, gendered locution). As Wright writes, in this context it does sound "somewhat sneering." Hitchens means to use it as a perjorative... religion is, as he says, phony, un-divine because there is no divine. But to speak of human creativity implies no single value: it may result in the utilitarian (i.e., the plumbing under my sink), the abominable (Auschwitz) or the exhalted (anything by Beethoven).

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When I first read the question, my immediate response was, "Yes, sure..." I was thinking of my beloved wife and sons, the friends and colleagues whom I admire and from whom I learn, the students with whom I feel privileged to interact. For those individuals, for my being able to live with and among them, I feel unreservedly grateful.

But there's a wider context to one's life, isn't there? And somehow the word satisfied just doesn't really work there. For one thing, you can't reach middle-age without coming to a certain realism about how the world works. Not when you've had friends die, both from "natural" causes and by means to which we would never apply that adjective. Not after illness has struck very close within one's family.

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