What AMUSES me is something more serious about guilt. It is “guilt by association” -- the at least ungenerous if not mean accusation of a candidate as contaminated by a particular local leader of his/her religion. Hillary Clinton won no votes when she said that she would not have remained in a church – as Barack Obama did – whose pastor said some of the inflammatory things Jeremiah Wright said. (Would she have remained under the spiritual leadership of the biblical “Jeremiah,” the eponymous ancestor of the Rev.Mr. Wright? The very English word “Jeremiad” means an inflammatory sermon!)

And what WORRIES me is that the very flap over Obama’s former pastor miseducates the public as to both the place of preaching in congregational leadership (pastoring, as it’s generally called) and the relationship between pastor and parishioner (a relationship more complex than the teacher/student relationship). When the community (“church”) gathers for worship, pastor and people direct their attention to GOD: all aspects of the service - including anything the worship-leader (pastor) says - are to express this intention to worship God. Anyone who bothers to read any of Pastor Jeremiah Wright’s sermons will find this steady intention, through which all the particulars of the sermon (including “inflammatory” remarks) should be perceived and judged.

The latest dust-up in this controversy finds expression in the current “On Faith” 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?”

1.....John McCain has no “spiritual guide.” Understandably, he’s grateful for all the support he can get, especially when it’s the good word from someone whose mouth regularly reaches many thousands of ears. But he should be more explicit that such support is not retroactive, mutual: somebody’s supporting him for president should not be read as McCain’s supporting anything that somebody says about anything else.

2.....The change of locus is notable. The locus of the Obama/Wright relationship was primarily in church Sunday mornings: the locus of the McCain/Parsley relationship is an occasional meeting in which the second person recommends the first person for a particular job, and the television use of the clips.

3.....Islam teaches that the other religions should yield to Islam, and Parsley teaches that Islam should be destroyed. Each religion is a particular comprehensive way of seeing the world and living in it, and is therefore incompatible with every other religion: that’s the way it is with worldviews, nothing to get all excited and worried about. Each religion claims all the territory of space and time and truth, leaving all other religions outside and “false.” Cool it, that’s the way it is with paradigms, world-stories. / My world-story says that God came into the world in and as Jesus, and I face the fact that Islam teaches that Jesus was a prophet inferior to Muhammad. What? Muhammad is superior to God? Blasphemy!

4.....But when I taught Islam at the University of Hawaii, I did not preach that it or any other religion is “false” and should be “destroyed.” So far, we all have to live on the same globe; and we’d better find out how best to say “yes” to each other and to our heritages (with “no” voiced but muted). Yes, our world-stories collide; but they also converge. And its an old saying whatever truth you may wring from it: “Everything that rises must converge.”

5....In American history, this is the first presidential election in which there’s a candidate conversant with Islam. For at least this century, the predominant world-confrontation will be between Islam and the West. Barack Obama understands both, and his heart-and-mind commitment to reconciliation of unnecessary human conflicts is the most palpable aspect of his campaigning.....

6....so I think Islam will not “be an issue in this year’s U.S. presidential election.” If it were to come up, Obama would use it to his advantage – as he splendidly used race to his advantage when racism came up.