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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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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