The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormonism) is the fastest growing world religion. From a reviled and feared sect for much of its history, the LDS have become a politically, economically and globally powerful church. The partial accommodation Mormons have made to American culture, especially in the official repudiation of “plural marriage” (polygamy), as well as their growing economic and political power makes it inevitable that their cultural and religious location would change.

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“Jesus sat down opposite the treasury, and watched the crowd putting money into the treasury.” (Mark12:41a)

Everybody knows the touching biblical story of the “widow’s mite” where the poor widow puts all she has into the temple treasury. Jesus contrasts her generosity in giving out of her poverty to the gifts of the rich, who give only give out of their abundance. (Mark 12: 42-44)

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The Rev. Jerry Falwell will be remembered very differently on the religious and political right and on the religious and political left.

The current polarization of American religion and society is a product of the mixing of religion and politics that Jerry Falwell advocated. That is his legacy. If you like that polarization, you will remember Rev. Falwell as a pioneer; if you decry that polarization, you will hope that the country repudiates the mixing of religion and politics that he so typified and that he orchestrated so effectively.

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One of our students at Chicago Theological Seminary has an adopted son who is severely handicapped. This young man has only been able to learn to say two words. I sat beside him at the spring picnic and discovered that the two words he says can carry him a long way in a conversation. His two words are “what’s next?”

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Dietrich Bonhoeffer coined the term “religionless Christianity” and used it in his writings from a Nazi prison that were published posthumously under the title Letters and Papers from Prison. While Jewish theologians have had to ponder questions of what the Jewish covenant with God means in light of the Holocaust, Bonhoeffer challenged Christians to recognize that the forms of the Christian religion had failed utterly to confront the massive evil Nazism represented, indeed even cooperated with it.

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“War is hell,” said General William Tecumseh Sherman. Hell can be defined simply as the furthest away you can get from what is good and right, the furthest away you can get from God. War, therefore, is the antithesis of God’s will for humanity. God’s will is that we take care of one another and the creation. War, by contrast, is the organized destruction of human beings and the deliberate infliction of damage to their land, their homes, their communities and all that they hold dear.

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