“Begin low, start slow, rise higher, catch fire!” From my 1935 course in public speaking, I remember that formula for oratory. No fire, no conflagration, no change. Lectures may inform the mind, but it takes oratory to move the heart, motivating to action.

In the history of American rhetoric, the Lincoln-Douglas debates stand out for massive public attention and for consequences, including Lincoln’s presidency. People got to hear each oration only once as the opponents traveled from place to place. The power was more in print than in presence: many hundreds of newspapers carried every word.

Poor Hillary and Barack! Millions hear their rubber speeches (slightly stretched for each occasion) many times, boringly many times; and few read and ponder their words. That is the setting for this “On Faith” question:

“The percentage of voters who find Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama ‘honest and trustworthy’ is declining as the campaign wears on. Why? From a moral standpoint, how important is this quality in a president?"

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The Question: Jeremiah Wright's sermons continue to be an issue in the presidential campaign. Why? What do you think of his preaching style? What do you wish you understood better about it?

“’God so loved the world,’ not just the black community.” In his 4.25.08 conversation on Bill Moyer’s Journal, Jeremiah Wright quoted from the Gospel of John 3:16 to correct the widespread sound-bite-media impression that Barack Obama’s pastor preaches black racism (black racial superiority) and hatred of America. (He has been no more critical of America than the Bible’s prophets were of their people.)

“On Faith” says that “Jeremiah Wright’s sermons continue to be an issue in the presidential campaign.” Would that they were! For 36 years they have motivated their hearers to Christian hope and to extensive ministries of help in south Chicago. At issue rather are only a few inflammatory, out-of-context sound bites. I cannot image any greater distortion of a preacher’s message and ministry.

When I was pastoring there 67 years ago, that area of south Chicago was white-ethnic, so our church-style was white-ethnic: for two millenia, Christianity has shown itself to be culturally adaptable. Now, that area of Chicago is black-ethnic, and Trinity United Church of Christ is black-ethnic, with an “Africentric” church-style.

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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?

As I read the Pope’s 4.16.08 address to the Roman Catholic bishops of America, I became convinced that this was his formative question in composing it: “What would I say and do if I were a bishop in the United States?”

Benedict XVI’s diagnosis of our religio-cultural condition contained the expected catalog of isms – privatism, secularism, materialism, individualism, moral relativism, latitudinarian pluralism.

The current “On Faith” question suggests a central concern of the speech:
“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?”

I must disagree before I agree.

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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?

“Nothing” is my first thought: you don’t send the problem to fix the problem.

The problem is not the excellent scholar Joseph Ratzinger, or this good man in the papal role. The problem is the traditional autocratic papacy itself, of which he is the current embodiment.

The Roman pope is the structural descendant of the Roman emperor, whose power was absolute. Most of the Roman Church’s modern woes have this absolute power (in lesser forms distributed in the hierarchical pyramid of bishops under the pope) as a component.

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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?

Christianity and Islam are dynamic (missionary) rather than static (cultural) religions and have always experienced cross-conversions. In the new world of the emergent global mind, we can expect this two-way flow to increase. But there is this difference: If a prominent Christian converts to Islam, it won’t cause a ripple: the Christian religion has no specific penalty against leaving. However, when this prominent Muslim converted to Christianity, “much of the Islamic world” is said to have complained: the Qur’anic-Muslim punishment for defection is death.

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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?

I am pleased, amused, and worried about all this media-chatter about the putative influence of “spiritual guides” on presidential candidates.

What PLEASES me is that most of my long life has been spent in the profession of “spiritual guide” - being one, helping to prepare hundreds for the work, and teaching clergy on the job (continuing education). It’s nice to feel important (though with a tinge of guilt) after feeling too little important (with a larger dollop of guilt).

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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 response to QUESTION 1: After the shock of grief and wave of sadness, I said to myself, “The curtain has come down on the stage he managed, but the play has not ended.” On the staff of a national church-organization deeply supportive of “the Movement,” I knew King as a strategist as well as as a word-master and was personally conversant with his best-known lieutenants.
(We were paying the salary of one of them. King asked us to send him the checks so he could be the paymaster, and we complied. He was a tight manager of his stage-crew.)

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When Ashley Montagu came out with his “The Natural Superiority of Women” (1952), I asked him whether it would have been more scientific to write on “The Mutual Superiority of the Sexes.” We had just had a debate in which he opposed my “God is love” to his “Love is god.” He was a feisty character, with a preference for inflammatory utterance. In the debate, I objected that he left God out; in the conversation, I objected that he left men out. They are related: the natural superiority/inferiority of the sexes is a divine design.

Photo your average man alongside your average woman and what do you see? Only the natural superiority of the male, in size and musculature – a superiority decreasingly functional to the protection and control of women and children as societies become more complex. / Since the female is naturally superior in the perception and manipulation of human relations, female power increases with the complexity of society. / As the imbalance increases, desperate males increase their battering of females. / As the muscular battering is visible (though female internal wounding of males is not), social and legal sanctions against it increase. / As society sees men as at least potential batters, male dignity declines in the public mind.

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Jesus didn’t die (says Islam, it was somebody else); Jesus died and stayed dead (says Judaism); Jesus died but didn’t stay dead (says Christianity).

That’s the negative way to put the truth of Easter: Jesus didn’t stay dead. The person known as “Jesus bar Joseph” was known not only before but after his death and burial. They knew him before, and afterward they recognized him as the same embodied self (though with some additional powers). They included not just his intimates, but “more than five hundreds brothers and sisters at one time, most of whom are still alive” (1 Corinthians 15:6 New Revised Standard Version). Beyond that earliest New Testament account, all four Gospels have post-resurrection, simple and complex interactions between Jesus and his disciples.

Now to the “Resurrection Faith” question: “Do you have to believe the resurrection is literally true – that Jesus came back to life in his body – to be a Christian?”

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The Question: How should Barack Obama have responded to inflammatory remarks made by his former pastor, Dr. Jeremiah Wright? Are you responsible for what your spiritual leader says from the pulpit?

Jeremiah Wright and I are retired clergy in America’s most liberal Christian denomination, and “inflammatory” remarks can be clipped from our archives depending on what the clipper wants to burn up. Currently, what the Wright clippers want to burn up is a former parishioner, who is said to be guilty of inflammation by association.

1. NONinflammatory speech gets nothing burned up, nothing cauterized, nothing welded. From Public Speaking 101 in 1935, I remember this: “Start Slow: Speak Low: Rise Higher: CATCH FIRE!” Without such oratory, nothing changes in religion or politics. “Tongues of flame” are associated with the birth of the Christian Church (Acts of the Apostles 2:1-4). From Wright, Obama caught the fire of the Gospel and became what he is today, a devout and faithful Christian.

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Some Sunday in the late 1920s, a sober-faced church-school teacher looked down into my eyes and intoned “Let him who thinketh he standeth take heed lest he fall.” (1 Corinthians 10:12) Yesterday, at age 90, I had my first fall from loss of balance: I thought I was standing, but the truth is that I was falling. The Scripture was morally right, and my senior-exercise trainer was physically right.

The metaphor from our two-leggedness hit me as I read our question: “What does the Elliott Spitzer scandal say about our public and private morality? Should he have resigned?”

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That “more than 4 in 10 Americans have switched their religious affiliation since childhood or dropped out of any formal religious group” is more “a mark of the health of American religion” than of its sickness.

1.....In the history of our land of freedom, religion is one of the social currents that ebb and flow. While Yale was founded primarily to produce Christian ministers, the student body of the year 1800 had not even one professing Christian. But after a series of “awakenings,” before century’s end Yale and America were overwhelmingly Christian. Today, dropping “out of any formal religious group” is the most noticeable phenomenon. Tomorrow?

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We human beings are moved more by passion than by reason. Reason can only enlighten, it cannot touch our springs of action. No matter the elaboration of communications-technology, we cannot outgrow our need for oratory.

Among the surviving presidential candidates, Obama is the only orator. He will be our next president.

1.....Orators are trilingual. (1) They speak “mother-speech,” everybody’s first language, which has the shortest and richest words (e.g., mother/father/home/God). (2) Orators speak “communal,” the particular speech of their particular communities. (3) Orators speak “general,” the language enabling communication between communities (as the English language functions in multi-lingual India).
For short, we may call this three-layer cake of language “homey,” “sacred,” and “secular.”

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In thousands of Islamist madrasas worldwide, Muslim youth are being told that their fundamental choice is between going to hell or struggling (“jihad”) to cover the world with sharia governments.

No matter our respect for Islam as contributive to world civilization, and our recognition that the ummah (Muslim community) in the form of a political state is entitled to have its own laws (in the case of Muslim states, sharia), in Islamists’ hearts and hands sharia is not only the legal structure of Muslim states but also a programmatic sword for penetrating and conquering “dar es harb” (war territory, meaning all the world not presently under sharia).

Now to the question: “The Archbishop of Canterbury has suggested that English law must accommodate some aspects of sharia – the body of Islamic religious law. Do you agree? Should U.S. law make room for sharia?”

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The reason secular ideas are “getting shorter shrift” in this year’s presidential campaign is that the people are scared and angry that secularism has taken over so much in American life, especially public education (beginning with the [1933] Humanist Manifesto campaign). Sang Wordsworth, “Let heart and mind, according well, make one music....” But the critical mind, honoring reason above faith, has sidelined God and religion.

A two-string lyre cannot be played on one string. The fundamentalists—on the right, religious; on the left, secularists—are wrong. The universe is two-string: computers [the digital age] and the human mind are binary.

Human beings need to be APART: we have individual minds, able to distance us from all else. This critical (no-saying) consciousness is secularism’s string on the lyre. But we need also to be A PART of some whole: we need to be together. This social (yes-saying) consciousness is faith’s string on the lyre. It is our trust, which makes possible both community among us and communion with the transcendent (“God,” for short).

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More and more as his youthful beard grew longer, Sergei Torop doubtless heard, “You look like Jesus!” He could step cleanly into a thousand paintings of Jesus as a strikingly handsome Northern European, the living image of a false face (since Jesus was Near Eastern). We should not be surprised that he spends much of his time painting.

If we don’t block our narcissistic tendency, what people think of us will become the mold into which we pour the liquid plastic of our self-perception. Sergei didn’t watch it, and inwardly became a plastic Jesus with the unbiblical character which that Northern European image entails.

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As a Christian, I hesitate to criticize other religions. Nothing human is perfect, no culture is perfect, no religion (the root and heart of culture) is perfect. And pointing to others’ flaws has the double downside that it misdirects attention both from one’s own weaknesses and from others’ strengths. But faced with this question, I cannot avoid a few comments on Islam and violence: “A journalism student in Afghanistan has been sentenced to death for distributing an internet article that was considered an insult to the Prophet Muhammad. Do Islamic beliefs preclude freedom of speech? What about other faiths?”

1.....I preface these remarks with what I said in prefacing my teaching of Islam in the University of Hawaii: "This is a noble religion of high contributions to humanity and with a high potential for contributing to global peace and prosperity." I am pained to have to speak of any downside of any religion. Would that we could speak of the downside each of one's own religion and only of the upside of all the others! But we can honor truth and hope only by admonishing as well as affirming one another.

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Life would be easier—wouldn’t it?—if we didn’t need human leaders in either “state” or “church,” and didn’t need to suffer the successions from one leader to another. But we must somehow sail—in “church” and “state”—between lawless anarchy and freedomless tyranny, and the sailing takes skilled piloting.

The current “On Faith” question is, “How important are leadership styles and personalities of religious leaders to rank and file members of the faith and to public perception of those faiths?”

1.....The question implicitly invites religious leaders to ask themselves “How do I look to my people, and what does my faith look like to the general public?” Good question, but of third importance. Of second importance is the leader’s faith, character, integrity, authenticity, quality. Of first importance is the leader’s self-understanding as standing under the judgment and guidance of a superior—the source of the primary humility of worthy leaders of "state" as well as of "church."

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Visible from any angle within my father’s courtroom, and situated between the judge’s bench and the witness stand, was a small BIBLE. It was the cynosure of solemnity, both symbol and sacrament. Symbol in that the sessions of this New York court were conducted under the Judge of all the earth (“Shall not the Judge of all the earth do what is just?” [Genesis 18:25]). Sacrament (Latin for “oath”) for the hand of the witness, about to be judged on veracity by both the Court of heaven and the court of earth.

Now to the question: “Presidential candidate Mike Huckabee says ‘we...need to amend the Constitution so it’s in God’s standards rather than try to change God’s standards so it lines up with some contemporary view.’ What do you think?”

I think that statement delivered a knockout blow to Huckabee’s hope of the White House.

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Around the world and through history, VIRTUE//VICE lists are a staple of ethics and religion, behavior and belief. The current “On Faith” questions involve a VICE list: “In Christian theology, there are Seven Deadly Sins: pride, envy, gluttony, lust, anger, greed and sloth. Which of these do you think is the worst? Which is most prevalent and harmful in our society today?”

GREED is my choice. It’s both the worst and, in our society today, the most prevalent and harmful. But before supporting my choice, I must make two adjustments:

..........The Seven Deadly Sins are broadly “in Christian theology,” but specifically they are a vice catalog within Roman Catholic ethics. In the English language, they are not known to have appeared together until 1711. Further, virtue/vice catalogs precede Christianity in classical (Greek and Roman) and Jewish literature.

..........Generally, Christian ethics treats first of virtues, only thereafter of vices. Traditionally, the virtues are seven: four classical (prudence, justice, courage, temperance), three specifically Christian (faith, hope, love).

In the Christian paradigm, life in all its aspects is to be seen as providential, as divinely given. Early Christianity described Christian character by lists of virtues-values so conceived. In Galatians 5:22, the virtues are “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.” In Ephesians 5:9, the values are “all that is good and right and true.” In Philippians 4:8, Christians are to “think about these things”: “whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable...any excellence...anything worthy of praise.”

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