The summer slowdown is now fully upon us. The beaches are crowded, the weather is steamy, and clothes are skimpy. It’s time to relax.

Summer reading is a big part of reducing stress and creating quiet in a multi-tasking world. The books on the summer reading list therefore tend to be light novels that don’t tax the mind. But for the spiritually inclined, a long trashy read may not fill the bill.

Consider an alternative. Try a spiritual classic. Keep the reading short and the quiet time that follows it long. Try putting fewer shallow plots into your head and instead giving your spirit some time to express itself. Your spirit has much more interesting plots to share than any airport novel.

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Writing in the Wall Street Journal last week, President Bush’s former deputy chief of staff and master strategist Karl Rove compared Barack Obama’s recent policy statements to Richard Nixon’s strategy of moving to the center after a tough primary. Rove argued that policy issues were becoming “Mr. Obama’s biggest problem” and contrasted him with George W. Bush, the candidate of unshakable positions. In Bush’s 2000 campaign, he wrote, “there was no repudiation of past positions, no chameleon-like shifts in positions.”

Unfortunately, unshakable positions have made for a shaky country. What many voters once saw as a Bush strength—his firm and inflexible convictions—turned in practice into close-mindedness and a lack of intellectual curiosity. Conviction can quickly degenerate into obliviousness. And it did.

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Commentators increasingly compare the current presidential campaign to the one in 1960—full of idealism and inspiration, dominated by youth. But the 1960 campaign was only the first phase of a powerful surge in citizen activism, a surge that moved quickly from eager idealism to a potent combination of disaffection, anger and violence. The 1960s ended with tragedy, upheaval, and riots.

Today might not be so different. In some quarters, lurking beneath the exuberance of hope is deep anger--anger that may be ready to explode. That is the clear message of Youth Speaks, a group of young poets who performed at the Kennedy Center in Washington last week. They’re full of idealism but they’re also angry. And they’re most angry about the environment.

The largely peaceful environmental movement of naturalists and clean air believers could become unrecognizable if fury takes over. These young people aren’t like Al Gore, ready to devote years to patiently persuading people of the rightness of their cause. They want action.

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Last week, pictures of Barack Obama on military maneuvers in a helicopter, with heads of state throughout the Middle East and Europe, and with hundreds of thousands of cheering fans in Germany dominated the airwaves. But the most important stop he made wasn’t any of those; it was his visit to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Israel.

That’s where he saw evidence of evil. And there’s no religious or political problem more troubling than the problem of evil.

Like many world leaders who have preceded him to Yad Vashem, Obama grappled with the enormity of the Holocaust by echoing the words, “never again.” But the challenge that he would face as President is that more than 60 years after the end of World War II, the stark reality is that evil has returned again and again. From Srebrenica and Darfur to Rwanda and Myanmar and the World Trade Center and more, evil has resurfaced, unchecked, vicious, and bloody.

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