Since I am not a theologian, the question of whether greed is ever morally justified doesn't much interest me. Like vindictiveness, greed is a base but probably ineradicable human instinct that must, for the good of society, be restricted not only by moralizing rhetoric but by law. We cannot live in a society in which greed is allowed to operate without limits, and the real civic and economic question is not the morality or immorality of greed but what legal restrictions we are prepared to place on greed--whether it manifests itself in usurious credit card interest rates, golden parachutes for executives of failing corporations and brokerage houses, the abandonment of pension and health care promises to retired workers, or moves to cut taxes for the richest 1 percent of Americans.

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Barack Obama had no choice but to resign his church membership, after the Rev. Jeremiah Wright's fiery comments about race were followed by a gadfly Roman Catholic priest's mockery of Hillary Clinton from the same pulpit. (I'll bet that Pope Benedict XVI disapproves of that priest too.)

This entire episode, like John McCain's disavowal of an endorsement by a sleazy televangelist who considers Hitler a hunter sent by God to return the Jews to Zion, is a case study in the danger of mixing religion with politics. If we were to hear a tape of every sermon delivered in churches attended by any of the candidates over the past 20 years, I venture to say that we would find a great many additional priests, ministers, and rabbis who have said something offensive to some segment of the American electorate. That is exactly why candidates should stop all of their sanctimonious talk about faith and why the public should return to the better angels of our national traditions, which treat faith as a private matter between an individual and God.

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Since religious faith is a construct of the human mind, it undoubtedly has the same power--no more, no less--as any other intellectual or emotional attribute does over the welfare of the body. But there is nothing supernatural at work here. All of the qualities that we call spiritual, intellectual, or emotional are products of the human brain, which is is an organ of the human body. Love, grief, anger, passion, joy--the whole gamut of human feelings--all affect the way we deal with health problems. Why should faith be different?

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There is no legal line in this country between "acceptable humor about religion and offensive disrespect," just as there is no legal line between acceptable humor about ethnicity, race or politics and "offensive disrespect." The First Amendment grants religion no immunity from criticism or satire, however vulgar and insulting such comments may seem to believers. Satire-- from Aristophanes through Jonathan Swift, Monty Python, and Stephen Colbert--is inherently disrespectful, and its targets are always offended.

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The King James Bible, which is indeed the only great book ever written by a committee. Thank you, authors in the mists of recorded history and seventeenth-century translators, for demonstrating, in the most glorious English possible, the full range of human possibilities and the ridiculousness of supernatural explanations for human behavior.

Hope Against Hope, by Nadezhda Mandelstam. Translated from the Russian by Max Hayward. 1970. Madame Mandestam was the widow of the greatest 20th-century Russian poet, Osip Mandelstam, who died in the Gulag after writing a satirical poem about Joseph Stalin. Her memoir is a cultural history of Russia from the pre-revolutionary era to the mid-1960s. It is a history of words that could not be suppressed and that will never die.

Goodbye, Columbus And Five Short Stories. By Philip Roth. 1959. I was fourteen when I first read one of the short stories, titled "Defender of the Faith," in The New Yorker magazine. Like everything Roth writes, it is terrifically funny but is also a poignant tale of the claims of individual conscience versus group loyalty. This was the first piece of contemporary adult fiction I had ever read, and--how obvious this sounds!--made a huge impression because it showed me that great literature can be written about the here and now, not only about the past.