I love Oprah--she's beautiful and powerful, frank and human. She laughs and cries and cares about beauty and politics and me. She helps pick out books and movies and presidential candidates. But sometimes the power and reach of Oprah...well, it frightens me.

Tonight will mark a new zenith in Oprah-dom. The great one begins a series of "webinars," live online courses to discuss the spiritual teachings of her newest Oprah Book Club author, Eckhart Tolle. Tolle's book "A New Earth," was first published in 2005 but now Oprah has embraced Tolle's spiritual philosophy on creating a "shift in consciousness" and so, I imagine, will her audience of millions (my pre-registration page warns that this may be the biggest online event EVER).

Sigh. At the risk of angering my often humor-less commenters, or, worse, sounding like a cynic, I have to say that the combination of spiritual seeking and Oprah makes me grumpy. I truly believe in Oprah's mission, I really do--she's helping people free themselves from the shackles of negativity. It's all good, as they say, right?

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The squabble surrounding San Antonio televangelist John Hagee's endorsement of Republican presidential hopeful John McCain reminds me of why there should be less religion in politics -- incendiary faith is the opposite of consensus building.

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I wrote yesterday about signing up for Oprah's new "webinar"on Eckhart Tolle's book, "A New Earth." I was never able to sign on due to technical errors and I just got a note from Oprah.com about saying that "Monday night's webcast was one of the largest single online events in the history of the Internet. More than 500,000 of you simultaneously logged on to watch Oprah Winfrey and Eckhart Tolle live, resulting in 242 Gbps of information moving through the Internet. Unfortunately, some of you experienced delays in viewing the webcast."

The site's administrators said the webinar should be available on iTunes or at www.oprah.com/ondemand. Good luck in your pursuit of happiness!

Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee said goodbye last night in Texas. He stuck to his theme of ornate story telling with some baseball metaphor I didn't quite get, but his speech was sweet and from the heart. He said he wanted to be remembered as having given the race his best, and no matter how liberal you are you have to give that to the guy.

More significantly, Huckabee inspired a bloc of voters who saw themselves as religiously conservative but not necessarily angry, and I'm glad they've joined in this well-attended election cycle. To that end, I recommend checking out Huckabee's campaign blog. Supporters wrote in their fare-thee-wells to him last night, and it's exciting to see how many people he inspired to be a part of the political system.

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A couple of weird stories in the news in the past few days got me to thinking. One is the call by Italian researchers to dig up Galileo's remains and have his DNA tested to find the cause of his blindness and also if his sister is buried next to him. The other is the controversial paper published by an Israeli scientist who says Moses was tripping on hallucinogens when he saw the burning bush.

Both fall into the news of the weird. Both stories deal with deified historical figures -- one a Biblical prophet, the other a secular one. Both, it seems, say more about where many people see truth situated and what that truth means these days. What seems intriguing here to me is how these historical figures who've contributed to our largest sense of meaning, meaning that seems to be beyond the pale about the world, are now being held up against a sort of new next wave of truth providers -- DNA tests, paleobotany and the like.

Maybe I'm going too far, but I see both these stories as harbingers of a larger paradigm shift, where these figures who are so loaded with meaning and history are being taken down off the mantle and poked and prodded by our new meaning-givers: scientific tests.

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On Friday, the headlines out of Israel were brutal and bloody and tragic.

Eight students, from 15 to 26 years of age, were killed in a Jerusalem yeshiva by a Palestinian bus driver on Thursday evening. Nine others were wounded. The gunman was 25-years old, spoke Hebrew and had been engaged to be married. The slain students were remembered as smart and good. It was the first major attack on civilians in Jerusalem in four years.

As long as I've been reading newspapers, the news out of Israel has been horrible. Lately, things seem worse. From my breakfast table in Los Angeles, it's hard to stay on top of the bombings and the conflicts there--the violence sometimes feels like a sad incessant sound. A migraine. It's not a nice thing to say but I'm being honest because I'm guessing that I'm not alone in my numbness and confusion.

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I've long known of my power to commit wickedness against the environment.

Like most people of a certain age, I can't look at the plastic yokes of a six-pack without thinking of the strangulation of sea gulls or the deformation of turtles. Ever since elementary school ecology lessons, I've shuddered at the site of non-sorted recyclables and felt true shame when I see a light left on through the night.

Finally major organized religion is offering its services and calling all those ugly bad feelings we have a name: SIN.

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In the flood of information about Eliot Spitzer's taste for high-priced vice yesterday, all I could think of was a dead Protestant theologian: Reinhold Niebuhr. And, strange as it may sound, I bet Spitzer did, too.

Neibuhr was, after all, sort of the Grand Master when it came to human fault and the reality of sin. Below Niebuhr's image on the cover of Time magazine in 1948, the caption was succinct and brutal: "Man’s story is not a success story.”

Any student of the corrupting power of pride and ego knows Niebuhr, and thinks of him often. And as it turns out, Spitzer was such a student.

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Eliot Spitzer's predicament and resignation are viewed as well-deserved by the pro-life, traditional values crowd. Like the stock brokers on Wall Street, right-to-life blogs and religious groups opposed to abortions were happy to see Spitzer fall. Why? Spitzer's well publicized support for strengthening abortion rights.

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For most (ethical) people, the religious life is not usually a financially rewarding one.
So it's pretty sweet that a Roman Catholic priest, cosmologist, philosopher and all-around cool guy Michael Heller won the $1.6 million Templeton Prize on Wednesday. It is the largest monetary award made to individuals by a philanthropic organization and they gave it to Heller, 72, because he has spent his days "asking, and perhaps more impressively answering, questions like 'Does the universe need to have a cause?'”

Doesn't this make you so happy?

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When I first watched the YouTube videos of Barack Obama's fiery pastor, Jeremiah Wright, last week, it furthered a conviction I already had: religion in public life gets divisive.

In this election cycle presidential candidates have tried to build cohesive support among voters, and their only option when it came to their core beliefs was to acknowledge their religious faith but move away from the specifics. I saw Hillary do this in Iowa and I listened to Mitt Romney's speech on faith in December. In both, the seasoned politicians acknowledged that their faith was important to them but didn't say why.

In this tightly packaged, heavily-scripted and heavily-scrutinized world of politics, it didn't seem like there was room to be forthcoming about things like say, secret garments and impassioned prayer. But then Obama gave his speech yesterday, which dealt with both religion and race, and I was proven wrong. Totally wrong.

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The situation between Tibet and China is getting worse. In Lhasa, the traditional capital of Tibet, authorities arrested 24 suspects yesterday, accusing them of "grave crimes" following anti-Chinese riots that began late last week there.

China Human Rights Watch is urging the Chinese government to allow independent agencies to monitor the situation, citing unconfirmed reports of hundreds of arrests and the possibility, given the history, of torture. Independent reporting from the area hasn't been available because of China's lock down on information and the ban on foreign journalists.

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An old friend came to visit from New York this week and I drove him up to my favorite place in Los Angeles: the planetarium at the Griffith Park Observatory. We escaped the sunshine, leaned back and watched the feature: "Centered in the Universe." This was the third time I've watched it and I can't get over how well the movie walks gracefully down the tightrope of describing the universe in a way that is scientific, historical and cultural and yet totally open to religious belief.

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I'm down in Mexico City for a mini-vacation and to see my friend Fay Ray who is here for a month doing an art residency. Strangely, the New York Times Travel Section did a story earlier this month on visiting Mexico City during Easter so I was well-equipped with a laundry list of must-see devotional events when I got off the plane.

On Friday, we took the subway to visit the Villa de Guadalupe north west of the city center. The Virgin of Guadalupe is a beloved and pervasive saint here in Mexico. She is believed to have appeared shortly after the Spanish conquest before Aztec peasant Juan Diego. She left her unearthly imprimatur on Diego's cactus-fiber cloak, which is kept in the massive round Basilica, shaped for maximum viewing. The Guadalupe complex gets as many as 20 million visitors a year many with hopes of having their illnesses cured.

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In Mexico City this past week, I've thought over and over how it seems I'm just visiting Los Angeles-adjacent, with it's shared love of mini-marts and the same soft night breeze. Because of that familiarity, I've thought more than I usually do about how vital immigration from Latin America has been to religious identity in the United States. When I read the AP story on Sunday, which described how more than 100 foreign-born U.S. soldiers were granted citizenship only after giving their lives for this country, I felt frustrated with how ridiculous this was.

What jumped out at me in the story were the words of Cardinal Roger Mahony of Los Angeles, who oversaw one of these services and lobbied President Bush to change the policy, who took a stand on the issue. Mahony is the rare church leader who has agitated consistently for greater rights for illegal immigrants in the U.S.

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It goes something like this: a deserted rooftop in a Mexico City hotel at sunset. My friend Fay and I, huddled together in the wind, while below, in the park, a parade of hundreds of passers by are carrying Easter floats and flowers. Up here, we are commemorating our Easter alone, affirming our belief in rebirth and resurrection, but only to one another, and only as it pertains to our goals and ambitions for 2008.

"This is like my baptism," says Fay, staring up at the sky and sure you could dismiss her as being trite but she isn't and she means what she's saying. She will write to her mother and friends the next day in emails and tell them about the night as a moment that mattered, that changed her.

This last Sunday, while in Mexico, a country that is so ordered by institutional religion, I got to thinking that rituals and ceremonies are far from empty for the "not-religious." I thought of this when street vendors tried to sell me rosaries and folk-art crosses and I couldn't quite bring myself to collect the objects as whimsies. Despite the fact that I'm not a Christian, I can't dismiss the cross as a charming collectible or Easter Sunday as a day like any other.

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