As with some of the other panelists, I'm not convinced atheism is enjoying a "new vogue." That may be because in the various places I've lived--New England, California, Great Britain and, certainly, the Bible Belt--I've never had much trouble encountering people who not only didn't believe in a religious system but were not shy in voicing their unbelief.

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Since childhood, I've known science tells us Earth's life is finite. Our Sun, half-way through its predicted 10 billion-year life, will eventually burn itself out, expanding vastly outward as it becomes a Red Giant, the penultimate stage of a star's life. The solar system's inner planets, ours included, may be consumed in the process, rendered less than cinders.

But aren't there two questions at issue here--one about the planet's fate and the other about humanity's?

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I can't imagine such a discovery being a world-wide faith-shaker. As Professors Paula Fredriksen and Martin Marty point out, the concept of resurrection--as many in the first generation of Christians understood it and as many among their contemporary successors do today--simply doesn't lend itself to a single, easy proposition.

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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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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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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.