I figured it was time to check in on things Monday night over at Oprah's New Earth, the weekly web seminar (webinar!) the TV host is giving on the spiritual teachings of Eckhart Tolle.

When I logged on to live webcast, I found Oprah, Tolle and several hundred thousand people in the midst of a spiritual revival. Oprah meditated! She read a poem! She recalled childhood beatings! Something is going on over there at oprah.com and it is not to be ignored, I thought, and at that moment my screen froze and I couldn't get back on the web for 12 hours. Strange!

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Paris Hilton with her Ashton Kutcher-provided spiritual advisor. (AP)

Each Wednesday (okay, this one is a little late), we'll select an image that gives us some insight on religion in the world today. It's a complicated subject and so I figured we'd have our inaugural image be on the complicated side: behold Paris Hilton with her guru.

Earlier in March, Ms. Hilton -- heiress, reality TV and sex tape star -- spent an awkwardly conspicuous night on the town with a sagely bearded, saffron robed, "guru" who ushered Hilton to LA New Age landmark the Bodhi Tree for some reading and possible spiritual awakening. First her pre-jail time Bible reading and now this?

The Daily Mail put together a nice, pious album of the evening. And whatever you may think of Hilton, she is a savant of the symbolic and her ensemble nods to all spirituality as costume -- low rise pump, off white fishnets, headband, white lace dress, smallish purse and a serious sad look.

Of course, it was a pipe dream that Hilton was seeking divinity and, in fact, her guru turned out to be a bit actor (his MySpace page brags about his role in Pirates of the Caribbean, and includes an album of photos of him as Hilton's shaman). In the end, her actions were for Hilton's real God, the cameras. Sigh.

The scheme had been cooked up by Ashton Kutcher for his new MTV show, "Pop Fiction," which is meant to highlight the madness of the image obsessed fans and paparazzi. Genius! Hilton's lacy get-up and robed-friend underscore how pious behavior is viewed as preposterous in Hollywood these days -- at least the non-Kabbalistic, non-Scientological variety. What's more, Kutcher saw a lesson in the pseudo-spiritual prank, saying, "We're having fun, but we want to say to people, 'Can you really believe everything you read and see?"

A perfect lesson for our first signs and wonders. Next week, more.

When the government sticks its finger into private religious worlds, the results are always bizarre and often evoke bigger questions about ultimate authority. The story of this weekend's raid of a polygamist Mormon sect's ranch in West Texas are worth watching and thinking about.

By last night, more than 200 women and children had been taken away on buses from the compound in Eldorado called "Yearning for Zion," where close to 600 members of the Fundamentalist Church of Latter Day Saints (FLDS) have encamped for the last few years. The evacuation was peaceful -- putting to rest fears by locals of "another Waco," where a 1993 FBI/ATF seige of the Branch Davidian sect's compound ended with 82 deaths.

It remains to be seen whether the raid will be remembered as another Short Creek, the 1953 government action in Southern Utah/Northern Arizona that ended up bolstering the power of FLDS leaders like Warren Jeffs, who used their community's fear of the outside world to control them.

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Yesterday I wrote a post about the raid of a West Texas compound that belongs to the Fundamentalist Church of Latter Day Saints. In that post I described the Church as a "polygamist sect of Mormonism." I have received two dozen emails as well as many comments saying that I misunderstood what I was writing about and that these polygamists have nothing to do with Mormonism and my use of the Mormonism moniker was uninformed and incorrect.

I appreciate these comments and completely understand how loaded the appellation question and polygamy are in talking about the FLDS. As every news article is quick to point out, polygamy has been outlawed by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, known by outsiders as Mormonism, since 1890. Those who practice polygamy are banished and, usually, abhorred by members of the mainstream church.

But to say that the FLDS should not be considered Mormons, well that is a simplification of a very complex history and if you ask me, truly wishful thinking. I've spoken with former members of the FLDS and they certainly consider their former belief system "Mormon." Its history and its holy books - including the Book of Mormon and Joseph Smith's Law and Covenants - are Mormon, and members believe themselves to be carrying out the true covenant of Joseph Smith.

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Buddhist monks stage a protest calling for Tibet's independence in Gansu, China, April 9, 2008. (Kwon Young-suck - AP)

In the theater of global public opinion, you can really do no worse than having young Buddhist monks protest your actions. You can call them satanic or terrorists or murderers or whatever you want but these Buddhists have been stealthily crafting this image of themselves as the ultimate in righteousness for thousands of years.

Chinese officials, struggling against this rising tide of discontent, hit back with statements such as one made in late March that the Dalai Lama was "a wolf in monk's clothing. A devil," he said, "with a face of a human but the heart of a beast."

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Last week Obama said he thinks he's had trouble winning over working class voters in part because they have become frustrated with economic conditions, "get bitter" and then explain their frustrations by clinging "to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them".

I find Senator Obama very smart, but that comment struck me as sort of stupid -- the kind of half-baked Marxism that might be expected to appeal to a Bay Area audience (he was speaking at a San Francisco fundraiser).

Part of being political is being able to represent your constituents to one another in order to bring unity -- a task at which Obama has triumphed. But anyone hearing those words who has any attachment to faith, guns or discrimination is going to feel misunderstood and patronized. And there are a lot of Americans who like all of those things.

A look around the web shows that interperation varies wildly on what Obama's statement (or "bitter gate" if you're in the mood) means. Andrew Sullivan sees it as empathy. William Kristol sees it as elitism revealed. My take is that it highlights how difficult it is to talk about religion and the complex motivations of the faithful.

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As all you devoted readers of this blog know, we are on Oprah watch because the TV host has spent this year heralding the good news about Eckhart Tolle's "A New Earth," Oprah's new favorite book/spiritual belief system for the future of mankind!

Oprah's web seminars on "A New Earth" continue on this week to the seventh chapter, and me and millions around the world are riveted. This week? Finding out who you are!

At first, I found watching Oprah meditate onscreen and then talk about losing her self sort of trippy -- but now think I get it.

Oprah represents the noisiest and most self-centered face of the American mainstream. Now she has taken on the project of espousing a system of belief that focuses entirely on losing ego and becoming present and aware of the shared nature of consciousness.

"It's a life-changing concept. You are not who you think you are. So, who are you really? This week, Oprah and Eckhart helped you get in touch with your true self," says the website. And on the show, amid a montage of soft images of flower smelling and ribbon dancing, I learn that "only by awakening can you know true meaning. A new year. A new you. A new earth."

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Six-year-old Trinity Duggan, of Bowie, MD, holds up a personal greeting as she waits with her family along Massachussetts avenue for the Pontiff to drive by. (Bill O'Leary - The Washington Post)

One way of observing powerful objects is to look at the little ones that are affected. This week in Signs and Wonders, I offer up this photo of a young fan of Pope Benedict XVI. She's crafted a devotional collage and is waiting to catch a glimpse of the Holy Father during his quick trip to America to reinvigorate his flock of 65 million American Catholics.

For those with whom I've spoken this week about the Pope's visit, the consensus reaction seems to be a bemusement over the ritualism and pomp of the visit. As Americans, we are so often independent and even casual in our religious observance. The Pope -- with his entourage, his vestments, his Popemobile -- is a reminder of a different tradition. This photo reflects a really beautiful adoration but, with the police line, it also highlights a certain remove that many former Catholics I know feel with their Church.

Maybe deep adoration and remove have a symbiotic relationship? Many a love song would support that theory, as would letter-writers to felons. Does it apply to our feelings about religious leaders? You tell me. Next week, more tough questions at signs and wonders!

This will be my last post for a week as I'm going off to Northern California to a six day meditation retreat where I won't talk, read, email, text message or any of the other ceaseless noise that creates the constant buzz of my life.

I know it doesn’t make any sense for someone who writes a blog about religion to say this, but I’ve always felt private about my own religious beliefs and practices (or lack of). Still, I feel compelled to briefly tell you what I'm doing and why.

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Visitors to Berlin's Holocaust memorial. (Fabrizio Bensch - Reuters)

I want to start by thanking Claire both for trusting me with "Under God" while she's away and for letting our longstanding discussions of belief spill into the public realm. I've known Claire for just over 10 lovely years. We met while studying the anthropology of religion together at the University of California - Santa Cruz, and our shared interest in the topic soon led to weekend retreats at born again churches and lengthy conversations about the mechanics of religious awakening. Over the last decade of wandering and working and studying, we've continued our discussion of how brilliantly weird and complicated belief is, and how captivating it can be.

My professional expertise is in neither journalism nor religion: I am an architect. But I recognize that architecture has historically been both an agent and a subject of religious power, and I am particularly interested in how architecture can enrich our understanding of belief.

One of the greatest contemporary examples of architecture's ability to communicate the sacred is Berlin's Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, by architect Peter Eisenman. The work is one of architecture's most deft mappings of belief and religion. It positions us in an atmosphere outside of belief where we can experience the incomprehensible.

I went to speak with Eisenman last week mostly because I wanted to hear from one of the brilliant architects of our time. But I also wanted to learn if and how he felt architecture could negotiate competing political, religious, and historical forces in a way that enriches our world rather than dividing us. Eisenman wrestled one of the great works of contemporary architecture from the Holocaust, so I assumed that perhaps he had ideas on how to transcend our current cultural and political dramas.

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This week's episode of Oprah's A New Earth focused on one's awakening to life's purpose. Inappropriately, I couldn't help thinking of Steve Martin's awakening to his “special purpose” in The Jerk.

Billed as a global study group, packaged within the familiar rhythms of daytime television, episode eight of Oprah's newfangled spiritual enterprise/infomercial -- co-hosted with adviser/straight man Eckhard Tolle -- felt like a ritual intended to both create and enable spiritual narratives.

It is always surreal listening to celebrities, or anyone really, armed with newfound spiritual beliefs. What struck me about Oprah's New Age was her vocabulary, and how the newly appropriated language worked to re-frame her world and subsequently ours.

The strange flourishes of language – "abundance", "vibration", "presence", "thinking mind", "inner space" (also a great movie from the 80's), "object consciousness", "space consciousness" – pushed us into unfamiliar territory, a world fashioned through a language that reinforced its own ideology, but undermined our personal identities.

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This morning I was lucky enough to spend some time with Mark C. Taylor, Chair of the Department of Religion at Columbia University. I remember having some questions as I stepped into his office, maybe something about Obama or China, but those quickly evaporated. Taylor is one of those wild and brilliant thinkers whose conversations effortlessly cover time and space and everything in between. And once he gets going, it's hard to keep up and impossible to stop him. The following is a little morsel of the awesome urgency he brought to religion, just enough to whet the appetite.

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