In our culture, disasters such as Katrina and 9/11 are often the occasion on which we confront the problem of evil publicly together, though of course as individuals we bump into it every day, and theologians have broken their heads over it 24/7 for thousands of years.

After the desperate scramble for survival, for shelter, water, food, after searching for the living and then searching for the dead, it is time to bury the dead and to grieve, and that is always a moment that, to borrow Samuel Johnson's phrase, concentrates the mind wonderfully. Christians and, to a lesser extent, Jews, have approached the problem of evil with monotheistic blinders and fallen into the trap of the four-fold paradigm: God is good (or merciful), God is all-knowing, God is all-powerful, and there is evil. How could God do this to us? (Woody Allen, a much under-rated theologian, came up with the best answer to these questions, I think: God is not evil, he’s just an underachiever.)

But Hinduism, the religion I know best, is not hobbled by monotheism, and therefore most Hindus do not assume that their god is merciful, or all-knowing, or all-powerful, though they are well aware of the existence of evil, which they formulate in a more basic and existential, rather than monotheistic, way. The question then becomes, not, How could God do this to us? but How can this happen to us? Why us?

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The controversy about the Latin Mass involves two very different issues, form and content. Both of them could be solved by the judicious use of super-titles.

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Sure I’d vote for a Pagan (I think I probably already have, quite often), but I don’t think there should be a Pagan chaplain. There are two different issues here, complicated by the fact that there are two very different sorts of people that have been called Pagans.

The first sense of the word is the traditional bigoted Christian term of opprobrium; the shorter Oxford English Dictionary defines “pagan” simply as “heathen, unenlightened person,” and the full-length OED says: “A person not subscribing to any major or recognized religion, esp. the dominant religion of a particular society; spec. a heathen, a non-Christian, esp. considered as savage, uncivilized, etc. Now chiefly hist.” A pagan in this chauvinist sense is just someone who doesn’t have the brains, or the luck, to be a Christian.

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“Are there dogs in heaven?” someone once asked Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, author of several wonderful books celebrating the pleasures of life with dogs. “Of course,” she replied; “otherwise, it wouldn’t be heaven.” And she’s right.

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Traditionally, war has strengthened faith. “There are no atheists in foxholes,” we say (a cliché against which the official organization of American Atheists lodges formal protests from time to time). Any time when we bury the dead is a moment that, to borrow Samuel Johnson’s phrase, concentrates the mind wonderfully, the sort of moment for which religion was invented.

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Surely not only religion but all gods are made by humans, imagined by humans. The Greek philosopher Xenophanes was right when he said, "If cattle and horses or lions had hands, or could draw with their feet, horses would draw the forms of god like horses.” But at the same time, humans may be god-made in the sense of imagined by the gods; perhaps horses were conceived by gods in the form of horses.

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In the midst of the great city of Chicago, I live as a forest-dweller. Forest-dwelling is where I am now in my life, and, yes, I am satisfied—or, more precisely, grateful--to be there.

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The problematic “m” word in this week’s question is not “Mormonism” but “mainstream”: If you tell me where the mainstream is, I’ll tell you if the Mormons are in it.

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This is one of the most pressing issues of our times, for it applies not only to the recent quasi-scandals and Freudian slips of the tongue but to the need for individuals to accept the apologies of, and to forgive, those who abused them in childhood, and the need for victims of genocide and centuries of racism to move beyond the need for more than apology, the need for reparation and, sometimes, revenge.

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Sex and religion are joined at the hip. The most interesting distinction is not between religions that say 'yes' to sex and those who say 'no' but between two aspects of a single religion, one of which regards sex as a blessing and the other as a curse.

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