The Question: John McCain's spiritual guide, televangelist Rod Parsley, calls Islam a "false religion" that should be "destroyed." Should McCain renounce Parsley? Will Islam be an issue in this year's U.S. presidential election?

If I hear one more word about candidates' "spiritual guides" and the utter nonsense spouted by so many of these ecclesiastical and televangelical nitwits, I will be tempted to write in the name of someone--anyone--who has the guts to stand up and say that conscience is, and should be, our only guide.

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The Question: The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated 40 years ago. What are your memories of that day? What impact did it have on you? How is King relevant to you and to us today?

My memories of the night of Martin Luther King's assassination, and the days of rage that followed in Washington, are indelible. I was a young reporter for The Washington Post, and when I stepped into a cab to get to the office as early as possible the next morning, my black taxi driver turned around and said, "I want you to know that if I didn't need the money, I wouldn't pick up any white passenger today." At that moment, I understood that King had been indispensible--the only man, at the time, who was capable of bridging the vast, generally unacknowledged gap between black and white America and a leader who was uniquely capable of reaching "the better angels of our nature."

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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?

The most significant fact about modern American Catholicism appears in a recent report on the changing U.S. religious landscape by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. Although 31 percent of Americans were raised as Roman Catholics, only 24 percent consider themselves Catholics today. One in ten adult Americans--a stunning figure--have left the church for another religion or have abandoned organized religion altogether. The saying, "Once a Catholic, always a Catholic," a favorite maxim of the nuns in the parochial schools I attended, is no longer true.

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The Question: Pope Benedict's recent baptism of a well-known Italian Muslim has prompted criticism in much of the Islamic world. Has Benedict done enough to build bridges to Islam?

One thing that devout believers in ecumenical dialogue simply don't get about the Roman Catholic Church is that its leaders, including Pope Benedict XVI, truly believe that theirs is the one, true faith. Although the church has given up conversion by the sword and waterboarding (a form of interrogation used on heretics during the Inquisition), the Vatican's raison d'etre remains the conversion of everyone--including Muslims. We don't hear much about this today, because the belief that your religion is truer and better than anyone else's doesn't sit well in democratic societies.

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The Question: In his speech to U.S. bishops last week, Pope Benedict XVI said: "Any tendency to treat religion as a private matter must be resisted . . . To the extent that religion becomes a purely private affair, it loses its very soul." Do you agree or disagree? Why?

One could hardly expect the head of the Roman Catholic Church to take any other position. Union of church and state was, of course, the ideal situation--from the church's point of view--in pre-Reformation Christian Europe. But Americans were an overwhelmingly Protestant people at the time of the revolution, so the Constitution's separation of church and state was a huge help to both Catholics and Jews in the young republic. Americans' prejudice against "papists" in the first half of the 19th century was much stronger than anti-Semitism (a first in western history), and Catholicism could never have flourished if that prejudice had been bolstered by a state-established Protestant church.

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