USC Media Religion

Press coverage of religion tilts right

Thu, 07 Jun 2007 00:00:00 -0500

With its recent report "Left Behind: The Skewed Representation of Religion in Major News Media," Media Matters confirms what some news consumers previously suspected: Press coverage of religion tilts right. The media watchdog's survey reveals that mainstream television and newspapers quote, mention and interview conservative religious leaders nearly three times more often than their moderate and progressive counterparts. That exposure explains how and why the right's pet issues define public religious discourse and shape conventional wisdom about the "culture wars."

Released in late May, "Left Behind" traces the coverage imbalance to the 2004 "values voters," the media's term for religious conservatives more concerned with morals than politics or economics (thus explaining President Bush's re-election despite an unpopular war and a shaky economy). The significance of values voting was quickly discredited (a faulty exit poll was blamed), but many reporters continued to treat conservative values as a key wedge issue, playing up the Right's political clout.

"Left Behind" is correct as far as it goes. But the real story is more complex. The religious right does dominate news coverage but that's because it's had a significant hand in framing the news agenda.

In the mid-1980s, religious conservatives as a voting bloc were barely a blip on the media's radar. Despite growing grassroots clout of groups like the Moral Majority, the increasingly contentious debate about abortion, and overwhelming evangelical support for Ronald Reagan, reporters failed to see what was unfolding before their eyes: the transformation of the Republican Party. But by the time the GOP had morphed into God's Own Party, journalists regarded right-wing orthodoxy as the authentic religious voice. Leaders like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson quoted the Bible and commanded a voting bloc ergo they represented America's faithful.

The right not only became the de facto religious face of the nation, it also drove some of the biggest religion stories. In the mid-1980s, conservative leaders launched a strategy to defund and de-legitimate mainline Protestant moderates and progressives. The plan proceeded on two fronts -- from within the mainline, by fomenting internal dissension over the role of gender and sexuality and from without, by using the mainstream media to attack the mainline. Documented by historians and reported in the alternative and online media, these campaigns were instigated by the Institute for Religion and Democracy (IRD), a conservative think-tank. In the waning days of the Cold War, with Reagan in the White House and what remained of the Civil Rights movement in disarray, the IRD mounted the first attack in what was to become a long campaign against progressive religious institutions when it took to the nation's airwaves and news stands to accuse mainline Christians (especially those in the National Council of Churches) of being soft on Communism. IRD's claims led to stories in Readers Digest and The Wall Street Journal and on 60 Minutes that charged ecumenical leaders with supporting and funding Marxist guerrillas, liberation theology and other Communist fronts in Third World nations.

At the same time, IRD cultivated fifth column forces in the United Methodist Church, the Presbyterian Church, USA and the Episcopal Church. Subsequent theological and ecclesiastical debates over the ordination of gays and lesbians, same sex marriage and acceptance of GLBT people as church members in good standing became wedge issues, if not grounds for schism, among Methodists, Presbyterians and Episcopalians. As a result, news coverage of religion focused on conflicts over sex and gender rather than efforts to promote environmental concerns, immigrant rights and economic justice. Many religious moderates --Catholics and Jews as well as Protestants-- felt their issues were invisible to the media.

But the real squeeze came after 9/11. The religious right had a two decade history of shaping how the press covered faith and values. But its ability to influence media coverage of politics blossomed after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. The Bush administration yoked American politics to the conservative Christian project, a linkage most of the press uncritically and unquestioningly repeated for nearly five years. Why did it take the mainstream media so long to interrogate the president's religious rhetoric and the significance of religion in public life? In part, the "echoing press" reflects the post 9/11 political climate. But it also underscores the news media's ignorance of both the actual role and the rhetorical importance of religion in many Americans' lives. Cowed by leaders who spoke as true believers and wary of offending readers and viewers, journalists fell into line.

One caveat: it would be wrong to blame everything on the media. The religious right's message slipped easily into America's national narrative: God's people in God's land doing God's business. Even Max Weber could not have anticipated how Calvinist strands would be rewoven by Protestants who believe that shopping can be sacred. The very vitality of the Christian market everything from religious tee shirts to faith-based films-- makes the progressives' urge to clothe the naked and feed the hungry seem naïve by comparison. That vision, in which greed and materialism are sins, is antithetical to the current cultural moment. Until that moment passes, moderate and progressive religious voices will remain left behind in and out of the mainstream media.

In Games, an Insight Into the Rules of Evolution

Tue, 31 Jul 2007 00:00:00 -0500

When Martin Nowak was in high school, his parents thought he would be a nice boy and become a doctor. But when he left for the University of Vienna, he abandoned medicine for something called biochemistry. As far as his parents could tell, it had something to do with yeast and fermenting. They became a little worried. When their son entered graduate school, they became even more worried. He announced that he was now studying games.

In the end, Dr. Nowak turned out all right. He is now the director of the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics at Harvard. The games were actually versatile mathematical models that Dr. Nowak could use to make important discoveries in fields as varied as economics and cancer biology.

"Martin has a passion for taking informal ideas that people like me find theoretically important and framing them as mathematical models," said Steven Pinker, a Harvard linguist who is collaborating with Dr. Nowak to study the evolution of language. "He allows our intuitions about what leads to what to be put to a test."

On the surface, Dr. Nowak's many projects may seem randomly scattered across the sciences. But there is an underlying theme to his work. He wants to understand one of the most puzzling yet fundamental features of life: cooperation.

When biologists speak of cooperation, they speak more broadly than the rest of us. Cooperation is what happens when someone or something gets a benefit because someone or something else pays a cost. The benefit can take many forms, like money or reproductive success. A friend takes off work to pick you up from the hospital. A sterile worker bee tends to eggs in a hive. Even the cells in the human body cooperate. Rather than reproducing as fast as it can, each cell respects the needs of the body, helping to form the heart, the lungs or other vital organs. Even the genes in a genome cooperate, to bring an organism to life.

In recent papers, Dr. Nowak has argued that cooperation is one of the three basic principles of evolution. The other two are mutation and selection. On their own, mutation and selection can transform a species, giving rise to new traits like limbs and eyes. But cooperation is essential for life to evolve to a new level of organization. Single-celled protozoa had to cooperate to give rise to the first multicellular animals. Humans had to cooperate for complex societies to emerge.

"We see this principle everywhere in evolution where interesting things are happening," Dr. Nowak said.

While cooperation may be central to evolution, however, it poses questions that are not easy to answer. How can competing individuals start to cooperate for the greater good? And how do they continue to cooperate in the face of exploitation? To answer these questions, Dr. Nowak plays games.

His games are the intellectual descendants of a puzzle known as the Prisoner's Dilemma. Imagine two prisoners are separately offered the same deal: if one of them testifies and the other doesn't talk, the talker will go free and the holdout will go to jail for 10 years. If both refuse to talk, the prosecutor will only be able to put them in jail for six months. If each prisoner rats out the other, they will both get five-year sentences. Not knowing what the other prisoner will do, how should each one act?

The way the Prisoner's Dilemma pits cooperation against defection distills an important feature of evolution. In any encounter between two members of the same species, each one may cooperate or defect. Certain species of bacteria, for example, spray out enzymes that break down food, which all the bacteria can then suck up. It costs energy to make these enzymes. If one of the microbes stops cooperating and does not make the enzymes, it can still enjoy the meal. It can gain a potential reproductive edge over bacteria that cooperate.

The Prisoner's Dilemma may be abstract, but that's why Dr. Nowak likes it. It helps him understand fundamental rules of evolution, just as Isaac Newton discovered that objects in motion tend to stay in motion.

"If you were obsessed with friction, you would have never discovered this law," Dr. Nowak said. "In the same sense, I try to get rid of what is inessential to find the essential. Truth is simple."

Dr. Nowak found his first clues to the origin of cooperation in graduate school, collaborating with his Ph.D. adviser, Karl Sigmund. They built a version of the Prisoner's Dilemma that captured more of the essence of how organisms behave and evolve.

In their game, an entire population of players enters a round-robin competition. The players are paired up randomly, and each one chooses whether to cooperate or defect. To make a choice, they can recall their past experiences with other individual players. Some players might use a strategy in which they had a 90-percent chance of cooperating with a player with whom they have cooperated in the past.

The players get rewarded based on their choices. The most successful players get to reproduce. Each new player had a small chance of randomly mutating its strategy. If that strategy turned out to be more successful, it could dominate the population, wiping out its ancestors.

Dr. Nowak and Dr. Sigmund observed this tournament through millions of rounds. Often the winners used a strategy that Dr. Nowak called, "win-stay, lose-shift." If they did well in the previous round, they did the same thing again. If they did not do so well, they shifted. Under some conditions, this strategy caused cooperation to become common among the players, despite the short-term payoff of defecting.

In order to study this new version of the Prisoner's Dilemma, Dr. Nowak had to develop new mathematical tools. It turned out that these tools also proved useful for studying cancer. Cancer and the Prisoner's Dilemma may seem like apples and oranges, but Dr. Nowak sees an intimate connection between the two. "Cancer is a breakdown of cooperation," he said.

Mutations sometimes arise in cells that cause them to replicate quickly, ignoring signals to stop. Some of their descendants acquire new mutations, allowing them to become even more successful as cancer cells. They evolve, in other words, into more successful defectors. "Cancer is an evolution you don't want," Dr. Nowak said.

To study cancer, however, Dr. Nowak had to give his models some structure. In the Prisoner's Dilemma, the players usually just bump into each other randomly. In the human body, on the other hand, cells only interact with cells in their neighborhood.

A striking example of these neighborhoods can be found in the intestines, where the lining is organized into millions of tiny pockets. A single stem cell at the bottom of a pocket divides, and its daughter cells are pushed up the pocket walls. The cells that reach the top get stripped away.

Dr. Nowak adapted a branch of mathematics known as graph theory, which makes it possible to study networks, to analyze how cancer arises in these local neighborhoods. "Our tissue is actually organized to delay the onset of cancer," he said.

Pockets of intestinal cells, for example, can only hold a few cell generations. That lowers the chances that any one will turn cancerous. All the cells in each pocket are descended from a single stem cell, so that there's no competition between lineages to take over the pocket.

As Dr. Nowak developed this neighborhood model, he realized it would help him study human cooperation. "The reality is that I'm much more likely to interact with my friends, and they're much more likely to interact with their friends," Dr. Nowak said. "So it's more like a network."

Dr. Nowak and his colleagues found that when they put players into a network, the Prisoner's Dilemma played out differently. Tight clusters of cooperators emerge, and defectors elsewhere in the network are not able to undermine their altruism. "Even if outside our network there are cheaters, we still help each other a lot," Dr. Nowak said. That is not to say that cooperation always emerges. Dr. Nowak identified the conditions when it can arise with a simple equation: B/C>K. That is, cooperation will emerge if the benefit-to-cost (B/C) ratio of cooperation is greater than the average number of neighbors (K).

"It's the simplest possible thing you could have expected, and it's completely amazing," he said.

Another boost for cooperation comes from reputations. When we decide whether to cooperate, we don't just rely on our past experiences with that particular person. People can gain reputations that precede them. Dr. Nowak and his colleagues pioneered a version of the Prisoner's Dilemma in which players acquire reputations. They found that if reputations spread quickly enough, they could increase the chances of cooperation taking hold. Players were less likely to be fooled by defectors and more likely to benefit from cooperation.

In experiments conducted by other scientists with people and animals, Dr. Nowak's mathematical models seem to fit. Reputation has a powerful effect on how people play games. People who gain a reputation for not cooperating tend to be shunned or punished by other players. Cooperative players get rewarded.

"You help because you know it gives you a reputation of a helpful person, who will be helped," Dr. Nowak said. "You also look at others and help them according to whether they have helped."

The subject of human cooperation is important not just to mathematical biologists like Dr. Nowak, but to many people involved in the current debate over religion and science. Some claim that it is unlikely that evolution could have produced humans' sense of morality, the altruism of heroes and saints. "Selfless altruism presents a major challenge for the evolutionist," Dr. Francis S. Collins, the director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, wrote in his 2006 book, "The Language of God."

Dr. Nowak believes evolutionary biologists should study average behavior rather than a few extreme cases of altruism. "Saintly behavior is unfortunately not the norm," Dr. Nowak said. "The current theory can certainly explain a population where some people act extremely altruistically." That does not make Dr. Nowak an atheist, however. "Evolution describes the fundamental laws of nature according to which God chose to unfold life," he declared in March in a lecture titled "Evolution and Christianity" at the Harvard Divinity School. Dr. Nowak is collaborating with theologians there on a project called "The Evolution and Theology of Cooperation," to help theologians address evolutionary biology in their own work.

Dr. Nowak sometimes finds his scientific colleagues astonished when he defends religion. But he believes the astonishment comes from a misunderstanding of the roles of science and religion. "Like mathematics, many theological statements do not need scientific confirmation. Once you have the proof of Fermat's Last Theorem, it's not like we have to wait for the scientists to tell us if it's right. This is it."

Hindus up in arms as god clashes with government

Fri, 14 Sep 2007 00:00:00 -0500

Thousands of furious Hindus took to the streets after the Indian Government claimed that the epic that forms the cornerstone of their religious beliefs was a work of fiction.

Police used teargas to disperse crowds in the central state of Madhya Pradesh, where protesters accused the Government of blasphemy.

The row erupted when the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI), an arm of the Culture Ministry, told the country's highest court that there was no evidence to support the existence of the characters in the Ramayana, a revered ancient text. Nor was there any historical record that Lord Ram, one of Hinduism's most popular heroes, was a real person or that any of the events in the epic took place.

The highly controversial claim formed part of statements submitted to the court in support of a plan to dredge a channel between India and Sri Lanka that would allow cargo ships a faster route around the tip of the sub-continent, cutting 36 hours off a typical passage.

Many Hindus oppose the £250 million scheme because the proposed shipping lane would demolish a submerged stretch of limestone shoals that Hindus believe was constructed by Lord Ram to rescue his kidnapped wife, Sita. They want the Ram Setu to be declared an ancient protected monument. The controversy over the fate of Ram Setu Adam's Bridge as it is known to nonbelievers has dragged on for years, but is reaching a climax.

The court has allowed dredging work to continue but will consider at a hearing today whether the bridge can be touched. C. Dorjee, the monuments director of the ASI, said in the 400-page affidavit: "The issue has to be approached in a scientific manner . . . [it] cannot be viewed solely relying on the contents of a mythological text."

The "blasphemous" statements were seized on by the opposition Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), whose supporters blockaded roads. It accused the Congress-led Government of "assaulting" Hindu sentiments.

"The Government has set in motion the process of questioning religious beliefs. We will launch a nationwide movement if it does not withdraw immediately this blasphemous submission questioning the very existence of Lord Ram," Rajnath Singh, the BJP president, said.

Historians and scientists have long disputed the legitimacy of Ram Setu and have questioned the authenticity of the Ramayana, considered to be set 1.7 million years ago, and its original author, Valmiki. Geologists consider the bridge to be only 5,000 to 7,000 years old.

"Belief has to be separated from historical facts," T. K. Venkatasubramaniam, professor of history at Delhi University, said. "Ram Setu has gotten into the culture and psyche. Even in the 21st century it is very difficult to come out of that belief."

Keeping the faith

The construction of a bridge from Goolwa to Hindmarsh Island in the Murray River estuary, South Australia, was halted in 1994 after a local tribe of Aborigines claimed that the island was sacred to them for reasons that they refused to reveal. A year later other Aborigines went public with accusations that the objections of the tribe were a hoax, and the construction of the bridge was reauthorised by the Government.

In northern Arizona this year a consortium of Native American tribes successfully blocked the expansion of a ski resort that lay well outside their tribal borders. They claimed that the use of wastewater in snow making machines would desecrate peaks that they hold sacred.

Kenya: Historic Case Challenges the Trial of Jesus, 2000 Years On

Mon, 03 Sep 2007 00:00:00 -0500

A society of Christians has filed an unprecedented case in Kenya seeking a constitutional interpretation of the trial, sentencing and punishment or death of Jesus Christ.

On August 29, 2007, the Friends of Jesus, acting through Mr Dola Indidis, a Christian, lawyer and also the spokesman for the Judiciary, filed a petition in the Constitutional Court in Nairobi against the States of Italy and Israel and a host of characters featured in biblical accounts of the events leading to Jesus' crucifixion.

Among the respondents listed are Tiberius, the Emperor of Rome at the time; Pontius Pilate, the Governor of Judea; the Jewish Chief Priest; Jewish Elders; Jewish Teachers of the Law and King Herod. The Kenya Civil Liberties Union has joined the proceedings as amicus curiae (friend of the court).

Certificate of urgency

The advocate for the plaintiff, Michael Chemwok from Chemwok & Co Advocates, Nairobi, filed a certificate of urgency on August 30 in the Constitutional Court.

He justified the urgency of the matter by arguing that the application seeks to challenge the abuses used in criminal prosecutions. He also seeks to show that the origin of these abuses, which if unresolved to date, undermine the propriety and dignity of courts worldwide and condone, without redress, malicious prosecution and judicial misconduct in the trial, conviction and sentencing of Jesus Christ as portrayed in the books of Exodus, Leviticus and Deuteronomy in the Holy Bible, the Holy Torah and/or existing Roman laws.

The Petitioners are challenging the mode of questioning used during the trial, prosecution, hearing and sentencing of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, the form of punishment meted out against him and the substance of the information used to convict him. They also challenge the law that was used to convict him and claim that the trial was a nullity in law because all proceedings in the Roman Courts in 42 BC-37 AD "did not conform to the rule at the material time".

Urgency of petition

The urgency of the petition is founded on the need to establish that a wrong was meted out to Jesus Christ of Nazareth and address it since it is an issue of utmost importance to all Christians and which has sparked a fervent religious debate in and outside of the country. They add that it is also an issue that affects all courts, parliaments and sanctifiable places where the Bible is sworn by.

The petitioner applied for a constitutional redress of the judicial misconduct, malicious prosecution, abuse of office, fabrication of evidence and human rights abuses during the trial, prosecution, hearing and sentence of Jesus through a three judge bench, and requested that the Republic of Italy and the State of Israel be served through their respective consuls and ambassadors to Kenya.

They added that these groups were being cited in these proceedings for their failure to intercede and correct these matters, and for their incorporation of the laws from the Roman Empire, laws which were applied during the trial of Jesus, into their current laws.

The petitioners request that in the alternative, all documentation be forwarded to the International Criminal Courts registry for their determination under the Roman Statutes.

The records of the Bible have stood for more than 2007 years.

Vatican says no to euthanasia even in the case of

Fri, 14 Sep 2007 00:00:00 -0500

A document from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith: giving water and food is not a therapy, which in some cases can be suspended, but a natural means by which life is preserved. The issue was raised by the US bishops.

Vatican City (AsiaNews) People in a "permanent vegetative state" have the right to food and drink, even via artificial means: those instruments are in fact "ordinary and proportionate means of preserving life and not a therapeutic treatment", which can however be interrupted when there is no further possibility of curing the patient whose suffering is being uselessly prolonged. The Vatican today reiterated its no to euthanasia, recalling at the same time not only its refusal of so-called assisted suicide but also underlining the possible existence of some cases such as when the patient is unable to assimilate either food or drink which allow for the suspension of the administration.

These are the indications which with explicit papal approval the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith supply in answer to two questions posed by the United States Bishops Conference on the issue of patients in a "permanent vegetative state".

Evidently brought to light by the case of Terry Schiavo, the women in a "permanent vegetative state" who died in the USA at the end of March 2005 as a result of the suspension of feeding.

"The administration of food and water affirms the Vatican's Doctrinal ministry - even by artificial means is, in principle, an ordinary and proportionate means of preserving life. It is therefore obligatory to the extent to which, and for as long as, it is shown to accomplish its proper finality, which is the hydration and nourishment of the patient. In this way suffering and death by starvation and dehydration are prevented".

These "ordinary" means should not be suspended not even when "competent doctors judge with moral certainty that the patient will never regain consciousness". A patient in a "permanent vegetative state" in fact, "is a person with fundamental human dignity and must, therefore, receive ordinary and proportionate care which includes, in principle, the administration of water and food even by artificial means".

A long note accompanying the document from the Congregation retraces the indications offered by past popes on the issue starting with Pius XII and the self same dicastery. In it, in particular, it reveals how "patients in a "vegetative state" breathe spontaneously, digest food naturally, carry on other metabolic functions, and are in a stable situation. But they are not able to feed themselves. If they are not provided artificially with food and liquids, they will die, and the cause of their death will be neither an illness nor the "vegetative state" itself, but solely starvation and dehydration. At the same time, the artificial administration of water and food generally does not impose a heavy burden either on the patient or on his or her relatives. It does not involve excessive expense; it is within the capacity of an average health-care system, does not of itself require hospitalization, and is proportionate to accomplishing its purpose, which is to keep the patient from dying of starvation and dehydration. It is not, nor is it meant to be, a treatment that cures the patient, but is rather ordinary care aimed at the preservation of life.".

In affirming that the administration of food and water is a moral obligation in line with principal, the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith "in very remote places or in situations of extreme poverty, the artificial provision of food and water may be physically impossible, and then ad impossibilia nemo tenetur. However, the obligation to offer the minimal treatments that are available remains in place, as well as that of obtaining, if possible, the means necessary for an adequate support of life. Nor is the possibility excluded that, due to emerging complications, a patient may be unable to assimilate food and liquids, so that their provision becomes altogether useless. Finally, the possibility is not absolutely excluded that, in some rare cases, artificial nourishment and hydration may be excessively burdensome for the patient or may cause significant physical discomfort, for example resulting from complications in the use of the means employed. These exceptional cases, however, take nothing away from the general ethical criterion, according to which the provision of water and food, even by artificial means, always represents a natural means for preserving life, and is not a therapeutic treatment. Its use should therefore be considered ordinary and proportionate, even when the "vegetative state" is prolonged".

Christian court watchers keep tabs on judges

Fri, 03 Aug 2007 00:00:00 -0500

MANCHESTER, Kentucky (AP) -- John Becknell enters the courtroom and finds his usual spot in the front row, just behind the prosecutor's table.

Becknell -- a devout Christian known to many as "Brother John" -- pulls out a pen and an inch-thick docket, mostly of drug and alcohol cases. For the next three hours, he takes diligent notes on the judge's actions, the attendance of police officers, repeat offenders making another appearance, and so on.

The purpose? To make sure drug offenders in eastern Kentucky are getting what they deserve.

Frustrated with widespread drug abuse -- especially of easily accessible prescription painkillers -- a handful of mountain churches are moving away from their traditional role as a refuge for the poor and addicted. Now they're more interested in law enforcement.

The Community Church of Manchester is leading the way through "Court Watch," a program in which volunteers attend court hearings to monitor judges overseeing drug-related cases.

"It's kind of a new position and very controversial," said Becknell, who also runs his church's local Christian television station. "A lot of churches shun getting involved in politics or going to court."

The Rev. Doug Abner, pastor at Community Church -- whose slogan for a 2004 anti-drug march was "get saved or get busted" -- said the presence of Court Watch volunteers puts "mild pressure" on judges "to do the right thing." The volunteers collect information for a database and look for trends in drug crimes.

The program concerns some other people of faith, who say it cuts against Christian values.

"The churches have traditionally been the humanitarian influence in society," said the Rev. John Rausch, director of the Catholic Committee on Appalachia.

Churches should focus on drug counseling and ministering to inmates, he said, citing part of the Gospel of Matthew (25:36) concerning the final judgment: "When I was in prison, you came to see me."

"It isn't 'I was up for charges and you made sure they threw the book at me,"' Rausch said.

Abner said his church hasn't neglected its prison ministry or other counseling programs. Still, he added, "we believe in giving people chances, but how many chances do you give them?"

The Community Church, 95 miles south of Lexington, also has fielded concerns about the volunteers overstepping the bounds of keeping church and state separate, but he said there's no reason why congregants should stay away from the criminal justice system.

Ken Bolin, pastor at Manchester Baptist Church, said he supports Court Watch and sees no reason why churches and courts can't work together to combat drug offenders.

"We're such a major part of mountain life -- why shut the church out of the institution?" he said.

Court Watch and Community Church came together three years ago, when Christian leaders in Clay County were overwhelmed by their deep-rooted drug problem. As in much of eastern Kentucky, drug abuse was a longtime epidemic in this area of about 25,000 -- even afflicting members of Becknell's family.

"Good people have sat back and done nothing," Abner said.

Desperate for a solution, Becknell began to work with Operation UNITE, a federally funded drug task force that covers 29 counties in southeastern Kentucky and which created Court Watch. He said that during his first few sessions as a court observer, he noticed officers not showing up, cases getting dismissed, judges doling out lenient sentences and the same defendants appearing before the same judge.

He came to this conclusion: "If you're waiting for the courts to combat drugs, how long are you going to wait?"

Becknell and his fellow volunteers don't limit themselves to collecting information -- they also approach law enforcement and judges when they believe something is amiss.

UNITE Executive Director Karen Engle recalled the time Becknell questioned the task force about its own officers not showing up to court in his county. Turns out the officers hadn't been properly subpoenaed, she said, but "we wouldn't have known about the problem if he hadn't reported it."

Court Watch "holds everyone accountable, including UNITE," she said.

Over the years, Becknell has trained around two dozen churches or church-sponsored groups in the program.

"The churches have such influence in the community -- they're an obvious place to recruit volunteers," said Dale Morton, spokesman for UNITE. "They're a captive audience ... they're always looking for a mission."

During a recent training session at the First Baptist Church in Grayson, Becknell described the transformation in his community: "If you do the crime in Manchester, you do the time."

"If your circuit and district judges decided to hold people accountable under the law, your community would change in 60 days," he told the group.

While Clay County's judges say they welcome Court Watch, they also say they'd operate the same way -- with or without observers.

"They know they're welcome in my court anytime I'm there," said District Judge Renee Muncy.

Yet, she added that she doesn't feel pressured by the presence of Court Watch participants.

Neither does Circuit Judge R. Cletus Maricle, who said, "Some judges probably feel they are there to intimidate him. If the judge is intimidated, that's his fault."

Pope: Creation vs. evolution an 'absurdity'

Wed, 25 Jul 2007 00:00:00 -0500

LORENZAGO DI CADORE, Italy - Pope Benedict XVI said the debate raging in some countries particularly the United States and his native Germany between creationism and evolution was an "absurdity," saying that evolution can coexist with faith.

The pontiff, speaking as he was concluding his holiday in northern Italy, also said that while there is much scientific proof to support evolution, the theory could not exclude a role by God.

"They are presented as alternatives that exclude each other," the pope said. "This clash is an absurdity because on one hand there is much scientific proof in favor of evolution, which appears as a reality that we must see and which enriches our understanding of life and being as such."

He said evolution did not answer all the questions: "Above all it does not answer the great philosophical question, 'Where does everything come from?'"

Benedict also said the human race must listen to "the voice of the Earth" or risk destroying its very existence.

The pope is wrapping up a three-week private holiday in the majestic mountains of northern Italy, where residents are alarmed by the prospect of climate change that can alter their way of life.

"We all see that today man can destroy the foundation of his existence, his Earth," he said in a closed door meeting with 400 priests on Tuesday. A full transcript of the two-hour event was issued on Wednesday.

"We cannot simply do what we want with this Earth of ours, with what has been entrusted to us," said the pope, who has been spending his time reading and walking in the scenic landscape bordering Austria.

Our Earth is talking to us
World religions have shown a growing interest in the environment, particularly the ramifications of climate change.

The pope, leader of some 1.1 billion Roman Catholics worldwide, said: "We must respect the interior laws of creation, of this Earth, to learn these laws and obey them if we want to survive."

"This obedience to the voice of the Earth is more important for our future happiness ... than the desires of the moment. Our Earth is talking to us and we must listen to it and decipher its message if we want to survive," he said.

Last April, the Vatican sponsored a scientific conference on climate change to underscore the role that religious leaders around the world could play in reminding people that willfully damaging the environment is sinful.

McCain: I'm a Baptist

Sun, 16 Sep 2007 00:00:00 -0500

Republican presidential candidate John McCain, who has long identified himself as an Episcopalian, said this weekend that he is a Baptist and has been for years.

Campaigning in this conservative, predominantly Baptist state, McCain called himself a Baptist when speaking to reporters Sunday and noted that he and his family have been members of the North Phoenix Baptist Church in his home state of Arizona for more than 15 years.

"It's well known because I'm an active member of the church," the Arizona senator said.

While McCain has long talked about his family's and his own attendance at the Arizona church, he appears to have consistently referred to himself as Episcopalian in media reports.

In a June interview with McClatchy Newspapers, the senator said his wife and two of their children have been baptized in the Arizona Baptist church, but he had not. "I didn't find it necessary to do so for my spiritual needs," he said.

He told McClatchy he found the Baptist church more fulfilling than the Episcopalian church, but still referred to himself as an Episcopalian.

The Associated Press asked McCain on Saturday how his Episcopal faith plays a role in his campaign and life. McCain grew up Episcopalian and attended an Episcopal high school in Alexandria, Va.

"It plays a role in my life. By the way, I'm not Episcopalian. I'm Baptist," McCain said. "Do I advertise my faith? Do I talk about it all the time? No."

McCain does discuss faith on the campaign trail. He regularly tells crowds about a North Vietnamese POW guard who would loosen his bindings while he was a prisoner. One Christmas, the man surreptitiously signaled his Christian faith, McCain says, by making the sign of a cross with his toe in the dirt.

McCain said Sunday he doesn't know how his Baptist faith might affect his showing in South Carolina.

"I have no idea," McCain said, laughing. "I was a member of that church in 2000 and it didn't save me then." McCain lost to George W. Bush in the hotly contested South Carolina primary seven years ago.

McCain made the comments after speaking to about 200 people on this resort island during a stop on his "No Surrender" tour, to push for support of U.S. troops and the president's strategy in Iraq.

The Nonbelievers

Sun, 16 Sep 2007 00:00:00 -0500

Rosy-cheeked angels smile from stained-glass windows, and crucifixes hang on the granite walls. The vaulting stone arches lend voices a holy echo. A chandelier-illuminated red carpet leads to the large casket, which is covered with white roses. When the balding man walks into the 165-year-old Gothic chapel, he greets mourners warmly, solemnly, with reverent words and tender handshakes, like a rabbi or a priest. But the well-wisher in a pin-striped suit is no man of the cloth. He doesn't wear flowing robes or a skullcap, and instead of a Bible or other sacred text, he carries a book titled Funerals Without God.

"This is Reverend Epstein," says a friend of the deceased, a physician who considered religion a pernicious fiction.

Epstein interrupts: "It's chaplain. . . . It's OK. A lot of people aren't sure what to call me."

Over the past two years, Greg Epstein, 30, has become a kind of ministerial paradox, a member of the local clergy who disavows God, preaches to atheists and agnostics, and seeks to build the equivalent of a church for nonbelievers and others skeptical of or alienated by religion. A former lead singer of a rock band, he now serves as the humanist chaplain at Harvard University, one of a small but growing number of such chaplains for nonbelievers on college campuses. In his position, which is endowed, he has helped marry and bury fellow atheists. He has presided over baby-naming ceremonies and organized a "coming out" ceremony for a congressman, Representative Pete Stark of California, one of the few public officials to acknowledge he doesn't believe in God. He also counsels students and approximates evangelizing by handing out pamphlets with the question: "Are you a humanist?"

From the pulpit at Bigelow Chapel in Watertown (located in Mount Auburn Cemetery), speaking with the slow cadence of a clergyman delivering a sermon, Epstein tells those gathered not to expect a traditional service. "We intend, of course, no disrespect to those who have religious beliefs. . . . We hope and believe you will find the occasion dignified and acceptable."

He continues: "A religious funeral is a celebration of a particular faith, giving homage to God. A humanist funeral is a celebration of the individual human life and his contribution to humanity."

Later, after delivering a homily that might have been heard on a Sunday morning, he explains the contradictions of his role. "I have a religious personality, without a scintilla of religious belief," he says. "If it's an oxymoron to believe that people who have ceased to believe in God still need caring and community, then I'm proud to be a walking oxymoron."

In a world where zealots crash planes into buildings in the name of God and politicians use the Bible to craft public policy, Epstein sees himself as in the vanguard of an emerging movement fueled by the rise of skepticism, advances in science and technology, and a spreading aversion toward radical religious ideologies and traditions. He and other humanists, who also call themselves atheists, agnostics, freethinkers, secularists, or brights, point to a survey published in January by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, which found that 20 percent of Americans between the ages of 18 and 25 say they have no religious affiliation or consider themselves atheists or agnostics nearly double those who said that in a similar survey 20 years ago. Another Pew survey in March concluded the nation is witnessing a "reversal of increased religiosity observed in the mid-1990s." Today, 12 percent of Americans surveyed age 20 and older describe themselves as not religious, up from 8 percent in 1987. "This change," the survey's authors wrote, "appears to be generational in nature, with each new generation displaying lower levels of religious commitment than the preceding one."

Epstein, a Jew from New York City who trained as a "humanist rabbi" after becoming disillusioned by the music industry during a year and a half crooning for a band called Sugar Pill, embodies that generational shift. He calls himself a humanist, because he sees it as a more embracing term than atheist. "Atheism is what I don't believe in; humanism is what I do believe in," he says. He defines it as a "philosophy of life without supernaturalism that affirms our ability and responsibility to lead ethical lives of personal fulfillment aspiring to the greater good of humanity."

His deepening involvement in humanism has mirrored a rising interest in nonbelief throughout the country. Books about atheism have become a publishing phenomenon in the past few years, with five of the most popular combined accounting for more than a million copies in print. Some have spent weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, such as Sam Harris's 2004 The End of Faith. The publisher of Christopher Hitchens's God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything had printed some 300,000 copies less than two months after it went on sale this year. Other popular titles include evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion, of which there are more than a half million hardcover copies in print; Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon by Tufts University philosophy professor Daniel Dennett; and God: The Failed Hypothesis by Victor J. Stenger.

The spike in interest in atheism can be attributed to a backlash against militant Islam and a response to the faith-based initiatives and religiosity of the Bush administration, says Steven Pinker, the cognitive scientist at Harvard whom the American Humanist Association last year named its Humanist of the Year. But he says interest in the new literature also reflects how science is increasingly displacing religion as a way people understand the world. "Aside from fundamentalists, most people [outside the United States] have given up on creationism and seeing the Earth as the center of the universe," he says. "More and more of what used to be the domain of religion has been ceded to science. It's the trend of modernity. I think this is a tide. We've seen it happen everywhere else in the developed world. This is the direction of history."

Students on college campuses and others have begun to organize nonbelievers. The number of campus groups affiliated with the Secular Student Alliance, for example, has increased by more than 50 percent in the past two years, to more than 80 groups, says August E. Brunsman IV, executive director of the Albany, New York-based alliance. Since January, the Center for Inquiry in Amherst, New York, a science-promoting umbrella group, has sponsored or helped organize more than 50 atheist outfits on campuses from the University of Georgia Law School to the University of Texas at Austin to Kent State University in Ohio, says D.J. Grothe, the center's vice president of outreach. The MySpace atheist and agnostic group has grown by about 10,000 members a year since it began in 2004 and now is about one third the size of MySpace's largest Christian group, says Bryan J. Pesta, an assistant professor of management at Cleveland State University, who moderates the group.

"We need to get visible and let people know that we're much more like [believers] than different from them," Brunsman says. "By banding together under the umbrella of nontheism, we can show the country that we are a sizable part of the population, and we can show closeted nontheists that they are not alone."

Five years ago, to try to change the low opinion many Americans have of atheists (a national Gallup poll this year found more than half of those surveyed would not vote for an atheist for president), a group of four organizations started the Secular Coalition for America. Now, the coalition employs a full-time lobbyist in Washington, regularly issues press releases about everything from stem cell research to religious language used by politicians, and represents eight national organizations with more than 25,000 members, more than a third from the Freedom From Religion Foundation. Lori Lipman Brown, the coalition's director, acknowledges they have a long way to go in a country where, polls show, two-thirds of the population still believes in God. But the venom she used to hear has faded.

"When I'm on right-wing radio or Christian radio, I no longer hear people say as much that I'm immoral or liable to commit murder," she says. "Now, it seems, they acknowledge it's possible that I could be a good person."

Humanists trace their roots to the ancient Greeks, among them philosopher Diagoras, who burned images of the era's gods. Their apostate forebears include the philosophers David Hume, who promoted skepticism and logical reasoning during the Enlightenment; Karl Marx, who likened religion to opium; Friedrich Nietzsche, who gained infamy by declaring God dead; and novelist Ayn Rand, who argued that reason is our only guide to action. Even Mother Teresa doubted the existence of God, according to a new book that unveils her private journals and letters. Humanists align themselves with more recent proponents of ridding society of God, including the author Dawkins, the popular astronomer Carl Sagan, and the novelist Kurt Vonnegut, who in 1980 asked a Unitarian congregation in Cambridge: "How on earth can religious people believe in so much arbitrary, clearly invented balderdash?"

Today, Americans appear to be following a larger trend of people around the world abandoning organized religion, particularly those in wealthier, more educated countries. In the 2007 Cambridge Companion to Atheism, Phil Zuckerman, a sociologist at Pitzer College in Claremont, California, studied religion surveys in some 50 countries. Over the past 50 years, according to a 2004 survey he cites, the percentage of people believing in God has plunged in Sweden, where as many as 85 percent of the population now say they don't believe in God; Australia, where about 25 percent are nonbelievers; Canada, where as many as 30 percent don't believe in God; and Japan, where about 65 percent are now nonbelievers.

Overall, according to 2007 World Almanac, there are nearly 1 billion nonbelievers in the world, which would make them the world's third-largest persuasion, after Christianity and Islam.

While the ranks of nonbelievers are increasing, they likely account for a decreasing percentage of the world's population, as religious nations tend to have higher birth rates, Zuckerman notes. In India, for example, he cites surveys that show between 3 percent and 6 percent of the population say they don't believe in God. In the Middle East, where Islam the world's fastest-growing religion with about 1.3 billion adherents (about 800 million fewer than Christianity) thrives, Zuckerman cites surveys showing that fewer than 1 percent of those in countries including Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq, and Syria say they don't believe in God. "Making definite predictions of the future growth or decline of atheism [is] difficult," Zuckerman writes. "What is clear is that while most people continue to maintain a firm belief in deities . . . in certain societies, nonbelief in God is definitely increasing."

Here in the United States, where atheism remains a relatively weak current against the tides of religion, the rising interest in Godlessness is most visible on college campuses and among recent graduates. Many of them regard religion as the perpetuation of superstitions and mythology and see the world's largest faiths as sowing division and enmity more than the peace they profess.

Nina Lee, president of the Tufts Freethought Society, says a university survey of the Class of 2009 showed nearly one-third of her fellow students cited no religious affiliation equal to those identifying themselves as Christian. Many of those who listed a religion, she says, are not actually religious. "I don't think people are taking religious beliefs as seriously as they used to, but they still go through the habit of using religion as a way to meet people and as a social space," says Lee, 22, a senior majoring in psychology who was raised by Chinese Buddhists but who embraces humanism today. Lee studied religion but says she found no evidence to support it her prayers to Jesus and Buddhist deities went unanswered, she says and faults religion for standing in the way of science.

"I oppose any ideology that motivates people to ignore or deny scientific evidence, especially when that evidence is crucial for improving people's lives," she says.

David Rand went to Hebrew school until he was a senior in high school. But the 25-year-old graduate student at Harvard never really believed in God and was excited to find like-minded students when he left home. "I don't think religion is the source of all evil, but I think it can be a source of division in a world that does not need division," says Rand, who studies biology. "I don't find the answers offered by religion satisfactory. Trying to find answers rationally is much more satisfying. . . . I think there's also pleasure and beauty in natural explanations."

Zach Bos, 25, who works at Boston University and serves as director of the group Boston Atheists, grew up going to Sunday Mass, was active in his church's youth group, and was confirmed as a Catholic. But now, he says, "my atheism is sustained by the continual absence of evidence for a single supernatural event. You might as well ask if my belief in gravity is sustained; it is only insofar as I haven't seen any apples falling up off the tree today."

Still, for Bos and the others, there's something missing, and it's a void Greg Epstein wants to fill.

From his office in Harvard Yard, where the shelves are crammed with hundreds of books including Who's Who in Hell, Politics at God's Funeral, and Losing Faith in Faith, Epstein can't escape the religious. He works in the bowels of the Memorial Church, where prayers literally seep through his walls and an organ groans from above. Crucifixes abound, and the surrounding offices are filled with Harvard's faith-oriented chaplains. But unlike other humanists, many of whom argue that acceptance of even moderate views about religion legitimizes religious extremists, Epstein is more ecumenical in his atheism. He has even sparked controversy by criticizing more militant, religion-bashing atheists in a press release promoting a conference on humanism last spring, his office referred to that group as "fundamentalists." His goal is to prod nonbelievers to go beyond denouncing religion and denying the existence of God; he wants them to focus on what they value, what unites such a disparate array of people and views. "Life can be lonely, challenging, and we need community," he says. "We do want to be part of something bigger than ourselves."

In the office of his chaplaincy, which has an endowment worth more than $2 million and pays him a salary of $20,000, Epstein keeps a stack of cards printed with a summary of the American Humanist Association's Humanist Manifesto III, a successor to a draft from 1933. The foldout card lists maxims such as "Knowledge of the world is derived by observation, experimentation, and rational analysis"; "Ethical values are derived from human need and interest as tested by experience"; and "Working to benefit society maximizes individual happiness."

Epstein wants those bullet points to be more than bromides. Ironically, he would like humanism to share some of the accouterments and traditions of religion, sans notions of heaven and hell, of course. He envisions common songs, rites for weddings and funerals, and common spaces that might substitute for churches. "We have this critical mass of people that need more," he says, adding that nonbelievers need to build humanism so that it's thought of as beautiful and inspiring. "You should be able to get out and say, 'I did humanism.' "

But Epstein's vision and criticism of fellow atheists has angered some of the very people he wants to unite. R. Joseph Hoffmann, a senior vice president at the Center for Inquiry , argues that Epstein has "abused" his links to Harvard "as a shortcut to the legitimacy he craves."

In a letter that has made rounds in the blogosphere since last spring, Hoffmann wrote: "If the word spiritual works, they wear it; but if they need to spin things in a secular direction to win friends and influence people, they spin away like sodden spiders. This is Gen-X humanism for the Passionately Confused, and owes almost nothing to philosophy, intellectual commitment, or serious political involvement. It's about bringing people to the table because eating together is always nice. Family-time, yes?"

The letter added: "What makes Epstein special is his determination to turn his role into that of World Leader of the New Humanism, using the Harvard name as a whip to bring recalcitrant or struggling humanist groups into his new order."

In one posting on his popular atheism blog, Brian Flemming, the director of the film The God Who Wasn't There, called Epstein a "train wreck" who "seems determined to take the worst possible approach in his response to the controversy he started" when he used the "fundamentalists" label, which atheists consider a religious epithet.

"The accusation that blunt but reasoning atheists . . . are equivalent to the dogmatic fundamentalists on the other side is false, quite dumb, and constantly deployed by their enemies to derail useful conversation," Flemming wrote. "And that is not something of which you want to be part."

In response to his critics, Epstein who speaks softly and has a gentle, rabbinical way about him says the "fundamentalist" label was misinterpreted but that he has no intention of curtailing his efforts to promote a more communal humanism. "I'm proud to say I want and need to be part of a supportive community. Sadly, this can stir up the emotions of a few atheists who have been wounded by religion and want to distance themselves from it. . . . It's true that religion has done some terrible, irrational things, but the key question for a humanist isn't 'Who am I angry at?' It's 'How can I make this world a better place?' "

On his blog at Harvard, Epstein wrote that he hopes atheists avoid vilifying believers as they have disparaged atheists. "I don't even have a problem with all the people who are blogging about me right now and slamming me as some kind of representative of 'appeasement,' " he wrote. "We want to be treated as equals? Let's raise hell about it, fine, but perhaps think twice about slamming me so hard as some kind of Uncle Tom (I definitely heard that one on a few blogs) if I want to speak for myself, and for the millions of atheists and Humanists out there who actually *like* and care deeply about a lot of religious people and don't feel the need to hurt their feelings in addition to disagreeing with them."

The rift occurred as Epstein was about to assume a much larger mantle. After months of planning arranging satellite links, choreographing schedules, and securing speakers such as the novelist Salman Rushdie, the Pulitzer Prize-winning scientist E.O. Wilson, and Nobel laureate and economist Amartya Sen Epstein used his perch at Harvard to host more than a thousand nonbelievers at the humanism conference in Cambridge in April.

As a jab at his critics and to draw a distinction between their views, he titled the gathering "The New Humanism."

The conference, which featured speakers including Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz and a performance by the folk singer Dar Williams, was so packed that organizers had to turn people away. The panel discussions, stamped with Epstein's agenda, had titles like "Toward an Abrahamic Humanism" and "Dialogue Among Religions, Cultures, and Civilizations." There was even an invocation read for the dead.

The most attended event was at Memorial Church, beneath a large crucifix, where Rushdie received an award. As the author of The Satanic Verses spoke amid the surrounding emblems of religion, he joked: "Thank you all for coming to this little Black Sabbath." Rushdie talked about growing up without religion and said his family celebrated holidays from many religions. But he later wondered: "Where's the one for the unbelievers? Where is the Kwanzaa for the atheists? Surely we could make one of those up, [like] Atheismas."

The allusions to religion upset some atheists, a few of whom described events at the conference as "religious humanism." Rebecca Watson, the editor of Skepchick magazine who spoke at a panel presentation titled "The Next Generation of Humanism," says she supports the building of a support network for humanists. But on her blog, she wrote about the conference's "disturbing trend of kowtowing to religion." She cited a teleconference Epstein organized with the Southern Baptist Convention and his dubbing the earth "The Creation," which Epstein later explained was a reference to the title of E.O. Wilson's latest book.

"A number of the talks were sermons," she wrote. "I mean, they were really, really sermons, just without the god. The syntax, the tone, and some of the message (such as pleas for money) made many in the audience noticeably uncomfortable."

A few weeks later, while working on a book about what he calls "cultural humanism" and planning a class at Harvard Divinity School he has titled "Humanist Polity: Building a Community for Atheists, Agnostics, and the Non-Religious," Epstein learned of the death of 66-year-old physician Don Burke. He had attended the conference and helped support the humanist chaplaincy, which was founded in 1974 by Catholic priest turned atheist Thomas Ferrick and endowed in 1995 as part of a $100 million gift to Harvard by the philanthropist John L. Loeb.

Leading the service for Burke was a chance to act on his vision, to begin filling the emptiness inherent in atheism. So Epstein, who succeeded Ferrick as humanist chaplain two years ago, began perusing Funerals Without God to prepare for this day, his first humanist funeral. Standing at the pulpit of the ornate chapel in Watertown, Epstein delivers a eulogy that could be appropriate in any tradition. He reads a poem, Wendell Berry's "The Peace of Wild Things," about the beauty of nature, asks those gathered to stand in honor of the man, and provides time for silent prayers (or reflection).

Epstein relays a story Burke told him of how he came to identify as a humanist after growing up in Ireland, where some people believed in ghosts. He "could not believe in such unseen things and was outraged by the way such beliefs terrified people into living their whole lives in unnecessary fear," Epstein says. "And so from his early boyhood he sought a more rational, scientific way of life."

Then he addresses death by quoting Sherwin Wine, a humanist Epstein considered a mentor. "It is so overwhelmingly final that it fills our lives with dread and anxious fear," Epstein says. "We cry out at the injustice of destiny and wait for answers that never seem to come."

To cope with it, he says, humanists need a certain courage. "Courage is loving life, even in the face of death. It is sharing our strength with others, even when we feel weak. It is embracing our family and friends, even when we fear to lose them. It is opening ourselves to love."

Before closing with a meditation on the precariousness of life, Epstein offers lines adapted from a familiar Christian burial rite.

"His body we commit to be burned and returned to the cycles of nature," he says. "Earth to earth, dust to dust, ashes to ashes."

Pulling Rank on Religion

Mon, 13 Aug 2007 00:00:00 -0500

THE PENTAGON'S inspector general has concluded that seven current or former military officers, including two major generals and the Pentagon chaplain, violated ethics rules when they appeared in uniform in a promotional and fundraising video for the evangelical group Christian Embassy. The report on Christian Embassy, an offshoot of Campus Crusade for Christ that recruits diplomats, government leaders and military officers, underscores the need for Pentagon officials, both uniformed and civilian, to be more careful about mixing religious activities with government duties.

Free exercise of religion doesn't stop at the entrance to the Pentagon or other government buildings; it's appropriate for Christian Embassy to hold prayer breakfasts and fellowship meetings at the Pentagon as long as other religious groups have similar opportunities. But especially in the military, with its emphasis on rank and discipline, those at senior levels need to ensure that their actions are not seen as a government endorsement of a particular religion.

The 47-page inspector general's report offers a vivid picture of how inappropriately intertwined Christian Embassy had become with Pentagon operations by the time the video, with its extensive scenes inside the Pentagon, was filmed in 2004. When Christian Embassy asked the chaplain at the time, Col. Ralph G. Benson, for help in gaining access to the Pentagon, Col. Benson obtained approval by "mischaracterizing the purpose and proponent of the video," the report found. His request said that a Christian Embassy film crew would be "filming various aspects of our ministry" and had "volunteered to help us on this project." In fact, Christian Embassy had approached Col. Benson for help.

Other officers appeared equally heedless of the separation of Christian Embassy and state, and the impropriety of appearing to use their official position to endorse a private enterprise. Maj. Gen. John J. Catton Jr. explained that he felt comfortable praising the group because it had effectively become a "quasi-federal entity." As the inspector general noted, Taco Bell has been selling food at the Pentagon for years, but "Maj. Gen. Catton's endorsement of Taco Bell under circumstances similar to those of the present video would be similarly improper."

The report offered an inkling of the mischief such activities can cause. "What's important to me in the context of our work here in the Pentagon is to get together with other believers and be encouraged," Maj. Gen. Peter U. Sutton says on the video. Maj. Gen. Sutton is now based in Turkey, where an article in a Turkish newspaper about the video described him as a member of a "radical fundamentalist sect." The article, Maj. Gen. Sutton told the inspector general, "caused his Turkish counterparts concern and a number of Turkish general officers asked him to explain his participation in the video."

What's important here is not policing appearances on an obscure video.

Squeezed Freedom in Buddhist Tibet

Tue, 14 Aug 2007 00:00:00 -0500

In the third of a series of pieces from Tibet, the BBC's Michael Bristow looks at the amount of freedom Tibetan Buddhists are given to practise their religion.

Every day, hundreds of Buddhist pilgrims prostrate themselves in front of the Jokhang Temple, the spiritual heart of the Tibetan capital Lhasa.

Their devotion is sometimes literally etched on their faces: many carry marks on their foreheads from constantly lying face down on the floor.

China says more than one million pilgrims visit Lhasa each year - evidence, it says, that the Chinese authorities are protecting religious freedom in Tibet.

But the real picture is more complex. Although people can worship openly, Beijing maintains ultimate control over Tibetan Buddhism.

An example of this control came earlier this month when China's State Administration for Religious Affairs issued new guidelines about who can and cannot be declared a "living Buddha".

From 1 September, all reincarnated living Buddhas - eminent monks - will first have to be approved by the government.

The guidelines appear directed at the selection of the next Dalai Lama, Tibetan Buddhism's spiritual head.

The current Dalai Lama, the 14th, has lived in exile in India since fleeing his homeland in 1959 along with thousands of other Tibetans after a failed uprising against Communist rule. Tenzin Gyatso is now 72.

New rules

China's new ruling on reincarnation also seems designed to prevent exiled Tibetans who have fled the region from helping to select their spiritual leader.

Article 2 makes it clear Beijing will not tolerate "interference" from any person or organisation outside the country.

If there are succession problems when the Dalai Lama dies, it will not be the first time there have been difficulties over the selection of a reincarnated monk.

When the 10th Panchen Lama - second in seniority only to the Dalai Lama - died in 1989, the search began for his successor.

In 1995, the Dalai Lama announced that six-year-old Gedhun Choekyi Nyima had been selected. Three days later he disappeared with his parents.

Nyima Tsering, vice-chairman of the Tibet Autonomous Region, told the BBC that this Panchen Lama, now 18, is still in Tibet, living a quiet life.

"He wants to live in peace and does not want his life disturbed," said the official, although China does not allow anyone to see him.

Instead, Beijing approved another Panchen Lama. He lives mostly in Beijing, travelling to Tibet every year or so.

Unspoken subject

China seeks to control the selection of senior religious leaders in Tibet because it fears their political power.

Although Beijing says Tibet has been part of China since the mid-13th century, eight centuries on there are still many who dispute that claim.

Beijing believes senior monks provide a focal point for those advocating Tibetan independence.

The Dalai Lama "is not only a religious figure. He is also a political figure agitating for Tibetan independence," said Nyima Tsering.

Religious and political issues remain mostly under the surface in Tibet. Senior monks are wary when talking about sensitive issues.

When asked about the Dalai Lama, Ping La, head of Shigatse's Tashilunpo Monastery, just shrugged and said: "He's just the Dalai Lama".

It is like saying the Pope is just another Catholic.

But scratch the surface and it is not hard to find political tension.

"The Dalai Lama is in here," one Tibetan in Shigatse told the BBC as he pointed to his heart. "But we cannot speak about him."

There have also been reports this month that the Chinese authorities are cracking down on pro-Dalai Lama sentiment in Tibet by sacking ethnic Tibetan officials.

China has worked hard to promote the view that it governs Tibet with a light touch.

Since 1951, when it reasserted its control of Tibet through what it called "peaceful liberation", Beijing says it has spent more than 1 billion yuan ($132m, £66m) restoring cultural sites.

People, it says, are free to worship and express their views.

"We do not have any political prisoners," said Nyima Tsering.

But it seems odd that in the Tashilunpo Monastery there are pictures of a smiling Chinese President Hu Jintao, but none of the Dalai Lama.

There might be political and religious freedom in Tibet, but it is a freedom severely curtailed by Beijing.

Science and the Islamic World - The Quest for Rapprochement

Wed, 15 Aug 2007 00:00:00 -0500

This article grew out of the Max von Laue Lecture that I delivered earlier this year to celebrate that eminent physicist and man of strong social conscience. When Adolf Hitler was on the ascendancy, Laue was one of the very few German physicists of stature who dared to defend Albert Einstein and the theory of relativity. It therefore seems appropriate that a matter concerning science and civilization should be my concern here.

The question I want to poseperhaps as much to myself as to anyone elseis this: With well over a billion Muslims and extensive material resources, why is the Islamic world disengaged from science and the process of creating new knowledge? To be definite, I am here using the 57 countries of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) as a proxy for the Islamic world.

It was not always this way. Islam's magnificent Golden Age in the 9th13th centuries brought about major advances in mathematics, science, and medicine. The Arabic language held sway in an age that created algebra, elucidated principles of optics, established the body's circulation of blood, named stars, and created universities. But with the end of that period, science in the Islamic world essentially collapsed. No major invention or discovery has emerged from the Muslim world for well over seven centuries now. That arrested scientific development is one important elementalthough by no means the only onethat contributes to the present marginalization of Muslims and a growing sense of injustice and victimhood.

Such negative feelings must be checked before the gulf widens further. A bloody clash of civilizations, should it actually transpire, will surely rank along with the two other most dangerous challenges to life on our planetclimate change and nuclear proliferation.

First encounters

Islam's encounter with science has had happy and unhappy periods. There was no science in Arab culture in the initial period of Islam, around 610 AD. But as Islam established itself politically and militarily, its territory expanded. In the mid-eighth century, Muslim conquerors came upon the ancient treasures of Greek learning. Translations from Greek into Arabic were ordered by liberal and enlightened caliphs, who filled their courts in Baghdad with visiting scholars from near and far. Politics was dominated by the rationalist Mutazilites, who sought to combine faith and reason in opposition to their rivals, the dogmatic Asharites. A generally tolerant and pluralistic Islamic culture allowed Muslims, Christians, and Jews to create new works of art and science together. But over time, the theological tensions between liberal and fundamentalist interpretations of Islamsuch as on the issue of free will versus predestinationbecame intense and turned bloody. A resurgent religious orthodoxy eventually inflicted a crushing defeat on the Mutazilites. Thereafter, the open-minded pursuits of philosophy, mathematics, and science were increasingly relegated to the margins of Islam.1

A long period of darkness followed, punctuated by occasional brilliant spots. In the 16th century, the Turkish Ottomans established an extensive empire with the help of military technology. But there was little enthusiasm for science and new knowledge (see figure 1). In the 19th century, the European Enlightenment inspired a wave of modernist Islamic reformers: Mohammed Abduh of Egypt, his follower Rashid Rida from Syria, and their counterparts on the Indian subcontinent, such as Sayyid Ahmad Khan and Jamaluddin Afghani, exhorted their fellow Muslims to accept ideas of the Enlightenment and the scientific revolution. Their theological position can be roughly paraphrased as, "The Qur'an tells us how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go." That echoed Galileo earlier in Europe.

The 20th century witnessed the end of European colonial rule and the emergence of several new independent Muslim states, all initially under secular national leaderships. A spurt toward modernization and the acquisition of technology followed. Many expected that a Muslim scientific renaissance would ensue. Clearly, it did not.

What ails science in the Muslim world?

Muslim leaders today, realizing that military power and economic growth flow from technology, frequently call for speedy scientific development and a knowledge-based society. Often that call is rhetorical, but in some Muslim countriesQatar, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Pakistan, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Nigeria among othersofficial patronage and funding for science and education have grown sharply in recent years. Enlightened individual rulers, including Sultan ibn Muhammad Al-Qasimi of Sharjah, Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani of Qatar, and others have put aside some of their vast personal wealth for such causes (see figure 2 and the news story on page 33). No Muslim leader has publicly called for separating science from religion.

Is boosting resource allocations enough to energize science, or are more fundamental changes required? Scholars of the 19th century, such as the pioneering sociologist Max Weber, claimed that Islam lacks an "idea system" critical for sustaining a scientific culture based on innovation, new experiences, quantification, and empirical verification. Fatalism and an orientation toward the past, they said, makes progress difficult and even undesirable.

In the current epoch of growing antagonism between the Islamic and the Western worlds, most Muslims reject such charges with angry indignation. They feel those accusations add yet another excuse for the West to justify its ongoing cultural and military assaults on Muslim populations. Muslims bristle at any hint that Islam and science may be at odds, or that some underlying conflict between Islam and science may account for the slowness of progress. The Qur'an, being the unaltered word of God, cannot be at fault: Muslims believe that if there is a problem, it must come from their inability to properly interpret and implement the Qur'an's divine instructions.

In defending the compatibility of science and Islam, Muslims argue that Islam had sustained a vibrant intellectual culture throughout the European Dark Ages and thus, by extension, is also capable of a modern scientific culture. The Pakistani physics Nobel Prize winner, Abdus Salam, would stress to audiences that one-eighth of the Qur'an is a call for Muslims to seek Allah's signs in the universe and hence that science is a spiritual as well as a temporal duty for Muslims. Perhaps the most widely used argument one hears is that the Prophet Muhammad had exhorted his followers to "seek knowledge even if it is in China," which implies that a Muslim is duty-bound to search for secular knowledge.

Such arguments have been and will continue to be much debated, but they will not be pursued further here. Instead, let us seek to understand the state of science in the contemporary Islamic world. First, to the degree that available data allows, I will quantitatively assess the current state of science in Muslim countries. Then I will look at prevalent Muslim attitudes toward science, technology, and modernity, with an eye toward identifying specific cultural and social practices that work against progress. Finally, we can turn to the fundamental question: What will it take to bring science back into the Islamic world?

Measuring Muslim scientific progress

The metrics of scientific progress are neither precise nor unique. Science permeates our lives in myriad ways, means different things to different people, and has changed its content and scope drastically over the course of history. In addition, the paucity of reliable and current data makes the task of assessing scientific progress in Muslim countries still harder.

I will use the following reasonable set of four metrics:
The quantity of scientific output, weighted by some reasonable measure of relevance and importance; The role played by science and technology in the national economies, funding for S&T, and the size of the national scientific enterprises;
The extent and quality of higher education; and
The degree to which science is present or absent in popular culture.

Scientific output

A useful, if imperfect, indicator of scientific output is the number of published scientific research papers, together with the citations to them. Table 1 shows the output of the seven most scientifically productive Muslim countries for physics papers, over the period from 1 January 1997 to 28 February 2007, together with the total number of publications in all scientific fields. A comparison with Brazil, India, China, and the US reveals significantly smaller numbers. A study by academics at the International Islamic University Malaysia2 showed that OIC countries have 8.5 scientists, engineers, and technicians per 1000 population, compared with a world average of 40.7, and 139.3 for countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. (For more on the OECD, see http://www.oecd.org.) Forty-six Muslim countries contributed 1.17% of the world's science literature, whereas 1.66% came from India alone and 1.48% from Spain. Twenty Arab countries contributed 0.55%, compared with 0.89% by Israel alone. The US NSF records that of the 28 lowest producers of scientific articles in 2003, half belong to the OIC.3

The situation may be even grimmer than the publication numbers or perhaps even the citation counts suggest. Assessing the scientific worth of publicationsnever an easy taskis complicated further by the rapid appearance of new international scientific journals that publish low-quality work. Many have poor editorial policies and refereeing procedures. Scientists in many developing countries, who are under pressure to publish, or who are attracted by strong government incentives, choose to follow the path of least resistance paved for them by the increasingly commercialized policies of journals. Prospective authors know that editors need to produce a journal of a certain thickness every month. In addition to considerable anecdotal evidence for these practices, there have been a few systematic studies. For example,4 chemistry publications by Iranian scientists tripled in five years, from 1040 in 1998 to 3277 in 2003. Many scientific papers that were claimed as original by their Iranian chemist authors, and that had been published in internationally peer-reviewed journals, had actually been published twice and sometimes thrice with identical or nearly identical contents by the same authors. Others were plagiarized papers that could have been easily detected by any reasonably careful referee.

The situation regarding patents is also discouraging: The OIC countries produce negligibly few. According to official statistics, Pakistan has produced only eight patents in the past 43 years.

Islamic countries show a great diversity of cultures and levels of modernization and a correspondingly large spread in scientific productivity. Among the larger countriesin both population and political importanceTurkey, Iran, Egypt, and Pakistan are the most scientifically developed. Among the smaller countries, such as the central Asian republics, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan rank considerably above Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan. Malaysiaa rather atypical Muslim country with a 40% non-Muslim minorityis much smaller than neighboring Indonesia but is nevertheless more productive. Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the UAE, and other states that have many foreign scientists are scientifically far ahead of other Arab states.

National scientific enterprises

Conventional wisdom suggests that bigger science budgets indicate, or will induce, greater scientific activity. On average, the 57 OIC states spend an estimated 0.3% of their gross national product on research and development, which is far below the global average of 2.4%. But the trend toward higher spending is unambiguous. Rulers in the UAE and Qatar are building several new universities with manpower imported from the West for both construction and staffing. In June 2006, Nigeria's president Olusegun Obasanjo announced he will plow $5 billion of oil money into R&D. Iran increased its R&D spending dramatically, from a pittance in 1988 at the end of the IraqIran war, to a current level of 0.4% of its gross domestic product. Saudi Arabia announced that it spent 26% of its development budget on science and education in 2006, and sent 5000 students to US universities on full scholarships. Pakistan set a world record by increasing funding for higher education and science by an immense 800% over the past five years.

But bigger budgets by themselves are not a panacea. The capacity to put those funds to good use is crucial. One determining factor is the number of available scientists, engineers, and technicians. Those numbers are low for OIC countries, averaging around 400500 per million people, while developed countries typically lie in the range of 35005000 per million. Even more important are the quality and level of professionalism, which are less easily quantifiable. But increasing funding without adequately addressing such crucial concerns can lead to a null correlation between scientific funding and performance.

The role played by science in creating high technology is an important science indicator. Comparing table 1 with table 2 shows there is little correlation between academic research papers and the role of S&T in the national economies of the seven listed countries. The anomalous position of Malaysia in table 2 has its explanation in the large direct investment made by multinational companies and in having trading partners that are overwhelmingly non-OIC countries.

Although not apparent in table 2, there are scientific areas in which research has paid off in the Islamic world. Agricultural researchwhich is relatively simple scienceprovides one case in point. Pakistan has good results, for example, with new varieties of cotton, wheat, rice, and tea. Defense technology is another area in which many developing countries have invested, as they aim to both lessen their dependence on international arms suppliers and promote domestic capabilities. Pakistan manufactures nuclear weapons and intermediate-range missiles. There is now also a burgeoning, increasingly export-oriented Pakistani arms industry (figure 3) that turns out a large range of weapons from grenades to tanks, night-vision devices to laser-guided weapons, and small submarines to training aircraft. Export earnings exceed $150 million yearly. Although much of the production is a triumph of reverse engineering rather than original research and development, there is clearly sufficient understanding of the requisite scientific principles and a capacity to exercise technical and managerial judgment as well. Iran has followed Pakistan's example.

Higher education

According to a recent survey, among the 57 member states of the OIC, there are approximately 1800 universities.5 Of those, only 312 publish journal articles. A ranking of the 50 most published among them yields these numbers: 26 are in Turkey, 9 in Iran, 3 each in Malaysia and Egypt, 2 in Pakistan, and 1 in each of Uganda, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Kuwait, Jordan, and Azerbaijan. For the top 20 universities, the average yearly production of journal articles was about 1500, a small but reasonable number. However, the average citation per article is less than 1.0 (the survey report does not state whether self-citations were excluded). There are fewer data available for comparing against universities worldwide. Two Malaysian undergraduate institutions were in the top-200 list of the Times Higher Education Supplement in 2006 (available at http://www.thes.co.uk). No OIC university made the top-500 "Academic Ranking of World Universities" compiled by Shanghai Jiao Tong University (see http://ed.sjtu.edu.cn/en). This state of affairs led the director general of the OIC to issue an appeal for at least 20 OIC universities to be sufficiently elevated in quality to make the top-500 list. No action plan was specified, nor was the term "quality" defined.

An institution's quality is fundamental, but how is it to be defined? Providing more infrastructure and facilities is important but not key. Most universities in Islamic countries have a starkly inferior quality of teaching and learning, a tenuous connection to job skills, and research that is low in both quality and quantity. Poor teaching owes more to inappropriate attitudes than to material resources. Generally, obedience and rote learning are stressed, and the authority of the teacher is rarely challenged. Debate, analysis, and class discussions are infrequent.

Academic and cultural freedoms on campuses are highly restricted in most Muslim countries. At Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad, where I teach, the constraints are similar to those existing in most other Pakistani public-sector institutions. This university serves the typical middle-class Pakistani student and, according to the survey referred to earlier,5 ranks number two among OIC universities. Here, as in other Pakistani public universities, films, drama, and music are frowned on, and sometimes even physical attacks by student vigilantes who believe that such pursuits violate Islamic norms take place. The campus has three mosques with a fourth one planned, but no bookstore. No Pakistani university, including QAU, allowed Abdus Salam to set foot on its campus, although he had received the Nobel Prize in 1979 for his role in formulating the standard model of particle physics. The Ahmedi sect to which he belonged, and which had earlier been considered to be Muslim, was officially declared heretical in 1974 by the Pakistani government.

As intolerance and militancy sweep across the Muslim world, personal and academic freedoms diminish with the rising pressure to conform. In Pakistani universities, the veil is now ubiquitous, and the last few unveiled women students are under intense pressure to cover up. The head of the government-funded mosque-cum-seminary (figure 4) in the heart of Islamabad, the nation's capital, issued the following chilling warning to my university's female students and faculty on his FM radio channel on 12 April 2007:

'The government should abolish co-education. Quaid-i-Azam University has become a brothel. Its female professors and students roam in objectionable dresses. . . . Sportswomen are spreading nudity. I warn the sportswomen of Islamabad to stop participating in sports. . . . Our female students have not issued the threat of throwing acid on the uncovered faces of women. However, such a threat could be used for creating the fear of Islam among sinful women. There is no harm in it. There are far more horrible punishments in the hereafter for such women.'6

The imposition of the veil makes a difference. My colleagues and I share a common observation that over time most studentsparticularly veiled femaleshave largely lapsed into becoming silent note-takers, are increasingly timid, and are less inclined to ask questions or take part in discussions. This lack of self-expression and confidence leads to most Pakistani university students, including those in their mid- or late-twenties, referring to themselves as boys and girls rather than as men and women.

Science and religion still at odds

Science is under pressure globally, and from every religion. As science becomes an increasingly dominant part of human culture, its achievements inspire both awe and fear. Creationism and intelligent design, curbs on genetic research, pseudoscience, parapsychology, belief in UFOs, and so on are some of its manifestations in the West. Religious conservatives in the US have rallied against the teaching of Darwinian evolution. Extreme Hindu groups such as the Vishnu Hindu Parishad, which has called for ethnic cleansing of Christians and Muslims, have promoted various "temple miracles," including one in which an elephant-like God miraculously came alive and started drinking milk. Some extremist Jewish groups also derive additional political strength from antiscience movements. For example, certain American cattle tycoons have for years been working with Israeli counterparts to try to breed a pure red heifer in Israel, which, by their interpretation of chapter 19 of the Book of Numbers, will signal the coming of the building of the Third Temple,7 an event that would ignite the Middle East.

In the Islamic world, opposition to science in the public arena takes additional forms. Antiscience materials have an immense presence on the internet, with thousands of elaborately designed Islamic websites, some with view counters running into the hundreds of thousands. A typical and frequently visited one has the following banner: "Recently discovered astounding scientific facts, accurately described in the Muslim Holy Book and by the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) 14 centuries ago." Here one will find that everything from quantum mechanics to black holes and genes was anticipated 1400 years ago.

Science, in the view of fundamentalists, is principally seen as valuable for establishing yet more proofs of God, proving the truth of Islam and the Qur'an, and showing that modern science would have been impossible but for Muslim discoveries. Antiquity alone seems to matter. One gets the impression that history's clock broke down somewhere during the 14th century and that plans for repair are, at best, vague. In that all-too-prevalent view, science is not about critical thought and awareness, creative uncertainties, or ceaseless explorations. Missing are websites or discussion groups dealing with the philosophical implications from the Islamic point of view of the theory of relativity, quantum mechanics, chaos theory, superstrings, stem cells, and other contemporary science issues.

Similarly, in the mass media of Muslim countries, discussions on "Islam and science" are common and welcomed only to the extent that belief in the status quo is reaffirmed rather than challenged. When the 2005 earthquake struck Pakistan, killing more than 90 000 people, no major scientist in the country publicly challenged the belief, freely propagated through the mass media, that the quake was God's punishment for sinful behavior. Mullahs ridiculed the notion that science could provide an explanation; they incited their followers into smashing television sets, which had provoked Allah's anger and hence the earthquake. As several class discussions showed, an overwhelming majority of my university's science students accepted various divine-wrath explanations.

Why the slow development?

Although the relatively slow pace of scientific development in Muslim countries cannot be disputed, many explanations can and some common ones are plain wrong.

For example, it is a myth that women in Muslim countries are largely excluded from higher education. In fact, the numbers are similar to those in many Western countries: The percentage of women in the university student body is 35% in Egypt, 67% in Kuwait, 27% in Saudi Arabia, and 41% in Pakistan, for just a few examples. In the physical sciences and engineering, the proportion of women enrolled is roughly similar to that in the US. However, restrictions on the freedom of women leave them with far fewer choices, both in their personal lives and for professional advancement after graduation, relative to their male counterparts.

The near-absence of democracy in Muslim countries is also not an especially important reason for slow scientific development. It is certainly true that authoritarian regimes generally deny freedom of inquiry or dissent, cripple professional societies, intimidate universities, and limit contacts with the outside world. But no Muslim government today, even if dictatorial or imperfectly democratic, remotely approximates the terror of Hitler or Joseph Stalinregimes in which science survived and could even advance.

Another myth is that the Muslim world rejects new technology. It does not. In earlier times, the orthodoxy had resisted new inventions such as the printing press, loudspeaker, and penicillin, but such rejection has all but vanished. The ubiquitous cell phone, that ultimate space-age device, epitomizes the surprisingly quick absorption of black-box technology into Islamic culture. For example, while driving in Islamabad, it would occasion no surprise if you were to receive an urgent SMS (short message service) requesting immediate prayers for helping Pakistan's cricket team win a match. Popular new Islamic cell-phone models now provide the exact GPS-based direction for Muslims to face while praying, certified translations of the Qur'an, and step-by-step instructions for performing the pilgrimages of Haj and Umrah. Digital Qur'ans are already popular, and prayer rugs with microchips (for counting bend-downs during prayers) have made their debut.

Some relatively more plausible reasons for the slow scientific development of Muslim countries have been offered. First, even though a handful of rich oil-producing Muslim countries have extravagant incomes, most are fairly poor and in the same boat as other developing countries. Indeed, the OIC average for per capita income is significantly less than the global average. Second, the inadequacy of traditional Islamic languagesArabic, Persian, Urduis an important contributory reason. About 80% of the world's scientific literature appears first in English, and few traditional languages in the developing world have adequately adapted to new linguistic demands. With the exceptions of Iran and Turkey, translation rates are small. According to a 2002 United Nations report written by Arab intellectuals and released in Cairo, Egypt, "The entire Arab world translates about 330 books annually, one-fifth the number that Greece translates." The report adds that in the 1000 years since the reign of the caliph Maa'moun, the Arabs have translated as many books as Spain translates in just one year.8

It's the thought that counts

But the still deeper reasons are attitudinal, not material. At the base lies the yet unresolved tension between traditional and modern modes of thought and social behavior.

That assertion needs explanation. No grand dispute, such as between Galileo and Pope Urban VIII, is holding back the clock. Bread-and-butter science and technology requires learning complicated but mundane rules and procedures that place no strain on any reasonable individual's belief system. A bridge engineer, robotics expert, or microbiologist can certainly be a perfectly successful professional without pondering profound mysteries of the universe. Truly fundamental and ideology-laden issues confront only that tiny minority of scientists who grapple with cosmology, indeterminacy in quantum mechanical and chaotic systems, neuroscience, human evolution, and other such deep topics. Therefore, one could conclude that developing science is only a matter of setting up enough schools, universities, libraries, and laboratories, and purchasing the latest scientific tools and equipment.

But the above reasoning is superficial and misleading. Science is fundamentally an idea-system that has grown around a sort of skeleton wire framethe scientific method. The deliberately cultivated scientific habit of mind is mandatory for successful work in all science and related fields where critical judgment is essential. Scientific progress constantly demands that facts and hypotheses be checked and rechecked, and is unmindful of authority. But there lies the problem: The scientific method is alien to traditional, unreformed religious thought. Only the exceptional individual is able to exercise such a mindset in a society in which absolute authority comes from above, questions are asked only with difficulty, the penalties for disbelief are severe, the intellect is denigrated, and a certainty exists that all answers are already known and must only be discovered.

Science finds every soil barren in which miracles are taken literally and seriously and revelation is considered to provide authentic knowledge of the physical world. If the scientific method is trashed, no amount of resources or loud declarations of intent to develop science can compensate. In those circumstances, scientific research becomes, at best, a kind of cataloging or "butterfly-collecting" activity. It cannot be a creative process of genuine inquiry in which bold hypotheses are made and checked.

Religious fundamentalism is always bad news for science. But what explains its meteoric rise in Islam over the past half century? In the mid-1950s all Muslim leaders were secular, and secularism in Islam was growing. What changed? Here the West must accept its share of responsibility for reversing the trend. Iran under Mohammed Mossadeq, Indonesia under Ahmed Sukarno, and Egypt under Gamal Abdel Nasser are examples of secular but nationalist governments that wanted to protect their national wealth. Western imperial greed, however, subverted and overthrew them. At the same time, conservative oil-rich Arab statessuch as Saudi Arabiathat exported extreme versions of Islam were US clients. The fundamentalist Hamas organization was helped by Israel in its fight against the secular Palestine Liberation Organization as part of a deliberate Israeli strategy in the 1980s. Perhaps most important, following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, the US Central Intelligence Agency armed the fiercest and most ideologically charged Islamic fighters and brought them from distant Muslim countries into Afghanistan, thus helping to create an extensive globalized jihad network. Today, as secularism continues to retreat, Islamic fundamentalism fills the vacuum.

How science can return to the Islamic world

In the 1980s an imagined "Islamic science" was posed as an alternative to "Western science." The notion was widely propagated and received support from governments in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and elsewhere. Muslim ideologues in the US, such as Ismail Faruqi and Syed Hossein Nasr, announced that a new science was about to be built on lofty moral principles such as tawheed (unity of God), ibadah (worship), khilafah (trusteeship), and rejection of zulm (tyranny), and that revelation rather than reason would be the ultimate guide to valid knowledge. Others took as literal statements of scientific fact verses from the Qur'an that related to descriptions of the physical world. Those attempts led to many elaborate and expensive Islamic science conferences around the world. Some scholars calculated the temperature of Hell, others the chemical composition of heavenly djinnis. None produced a new machine or instrument, conducted an experiment, or even formulated a single testable hypothesis.

A more pragmatic approach, which seeks promotion of regular science rather than Islamic science, is pursued by institutional bodies such as COMSTECH (Committee on Scientific and Technological Cooperation), which was established by the OIC's Islamic Summit in 1981. It joined the IAS (Islamic Academy of Sciences) and ISESCO (Islamic Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization) in serving the "ummah" (the global Muslim community). But a visit to the websites of those organizations reveals that over two decades, the combined sum of their activities amounts to sporadically held conferences on disparate subjects, a handful of research and travel grants, and small sums for repair of equipment and spare parts.

One almost despairs. Will science never return to the Islamic world? Shall the world always be split between those who have science and those who do not, with all the attendant consequences?

Bleak as the present looks, that outcome does not have to prevail. History has no final word, and Muslims do have a chance. One need only remember how the AngloAmerican elite perceived the Jews as they entered the US at the opening of the 20th century. Academics such as Henry Herbert Goddard, the well-known eugenicist, described Jews in 1913 as "a hopelessly backward people, largely incapable of adjusting to the new demands of advanced capitalist societies." His research found that 83% of Jews were "morons"a term he popularized to describe the feeble-mindedand he went on to suggest that they should be used for tasks requiring an "immense amount of drudgery." That ludicrous bigotry warrants no further discussion, beyond noting that the powerful have always created false images of the weak.

Progress will require behavioral changes. If Muslim societies are to develop technology instead of just using it, the ruthlessly competitive global marketplace will insist on not only high skill levels but also intense social work habits. The latter are not easily reconcilable with religious demands made on a fully observant Muslim's time, energy, and mental concentration: The faithful must participate in five daily congregational prayers, endure a month of fasting that taxes the body, recite daily from the Qur'an, and more. Although such duties orient believers admirably well toward success in the life hereafter, they make worldly success less likely. A more balanced approach will be needed.

Science can prosper among Muslims once again, but only with a willingness to accept certain basic philosophical and attitudinal changesa Weltanschauung that shrugs off the dead hand of tradition, rejects fatalism and absolute belief in authority, accepts the legitimacy of temporal laws, values intellectual rigor and scientific honesty, and respects cultural and personal freedoms. The struggle to usher in science will have to go side-by-side with a much wider campaign to elbow out rigid orthodoxy and bring in modern thought, arts, philosophy, democracy, and pluralism.

Respected voices among believing Muslims see no incompatibility between the above requirements and true Islam as they understand it. For example, Abdolkarim Soroush, described as Islam's Martin Luther, was handpicked by Ayatollah Khomeini to lead the reform of Iran's universities in the early 1980s. His efforts led to the introduction of modern analytical philosophers such as Karl Popper and Bertrand Russell into the curricula of Iranian universities. Another influential modern reformer is Abdelwahab Meddeb, a Tunisian who grew up in France. Meddeb argues that as early as the middle of the eighth century, Islam had produced the premises of the Enlightenment, and that between 750 and 1050, Muslim authors made use of an astounding freedom of thought in their approach to religious belief. In their analyses, says Meddeb, they bowed to the primacy of reason, honoring one of the basic principles of the Enlightenment.

In the quest for modernity and science, internal struggles continue within the Islamic world. Progressive Muslim forces have recently been weakened, but not extinguished, as a consequence of the confrontation between Muslims and the West. On an ever-shrinking globe, there can be no winners in that conflict: It is time to calm the waters. We must learn to drop the pursuit of narrow nationalist and religious agendas, both in the West and among Muslims. In the long run, political boundaries should and can be treated as artificial and temporary, as shown by the successful creation of the European Union. Just as important, the practice of religion must be a matter of choice for the individual, not enforced by the state. This leaves secular humanism, based on common sense and the principles of logic and reason, as our only reasonable choice for governance and progress. Being scientists, we understand this easily. The task is to persuade those who do not.

Death inspires faith, survey finds

Tue, 11 Sep 2007 00:00:00 -0500

As people get closer to death, they become more religious, according to a poll.

Nearly half of all teenagers have no religion or faith, according to a Mori survey of 2000 people.

But among those in their 20s, the number with no religious beliefs falls to just one fifth. And as people get towards their 60s, the numbers professing atheism fall even lower, to little more than one sixth.

The poll was commissioned by the British Library as part of its popular holy texts exhibition, Sacred.

Christianity was the most popular religion, with 64 per cent of those surveyed saying they were Christian. Islam was the second most popular, at 4 per cent.

However, Muslims were twice as likely to say they practise their religion a great deal or a fair amount in their lives as Christians. Muslims were also more likely to see religion as "relevant to their life."

The event most likely to make people religious was the death of a family member, the survey found.

Images of Christ and Virgin May appear on poplars at a Ukrainian village - believers

Thu, 06 Sep 2007 00:00:00 -0500

Kiev, September 6, Interfax - Believers are carrying flowers and candles to a road place near the Dobryany village 40 km away from Lvov. They believe they see images of Christ and the Virgin Mary appearing on two trees.

'At sunset I hurry down here for an evening prayer. An image of the Virgin Mary at a poplar looks like a sculpture at this time of the day, while the image of Christ reflects suffering caused by pain for our sins', Galina Ivanonko, a Dobryany villager, says as cited by the Ukrainian issue of the Komsomolskaya Pravda daily on Thursday.

A first-grade schoolgirl was the first to see the image of the Saviour. The girl's father filmed it on his mobile and showed the video picture to his relatives. The news spread around in an instant.

Both old poplars stand 100 m away from each other, one split by a lightning. At sunset, the head of Christ is clearly seen at a certain angle, the faithful maintain. The other poplar shows clearly at its trunk clear of dry bark a figure with the bent head and hands folded in a prayer.

The village church choir and some priests from Lvov have already been to the place. They photographed the images but refused to comment on them, the newspaper noted.

Defender of the Faith?

Sun, 09 Sep 2007 00:00:00 -0500

Late in life he was in his 80s, in fact Sigmund Freud got religion. No, Freud didn't begin showing up at temple every Saturday, wrapping himself in a prayer shawl and reading from the Torah. To the end of his life, he maintained his stance as an uncompromising atheist, the stance he is best known for down to the present. In "The Future of an Illusion," he described belief in God as a collective neurosis: he called it "longing for a father." But in his last completed book, "Moses and Monotheism," something new emerges. There Freud, without abandoning his atheism, begins to see the Jewish faith that he was born into as a source of cultural progress in the past and of personal inspiration in the present. Close to his own death, Freud starts to recognize the poetry and promise in religion.

A good deal of the antireligious polemic that has recently been abroad in our culture proceeds in the spirit of Freud's earlier work. In his defense of atheism, "God Is Not Great," Christopher Hitchens cites Freud as an ally who, he believes, exposed the weak-minded childishness of religion. Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins come out of the same Enlightenment spirit of hostile skepticism to faith that infuses "The Future of an Illusion." All three contemporary writers want to get rid of religion immediately and with no remainder.

But there's more to Freud's take on religion than that. In his last book, written when he was old and ill, suffering badly from cancer of the jaw, Freud offers another perspective on faith. He argues that Judaism helped free humanity from bondage to the immediate empirical world, opening up fresh possibilities for human thought and action. He also suggests that faith in God facilitated a turn toward the life within, helping to make a rich life of introspection possible.

"Moses and Monotheism" was not an easy book for Freud to write or to publish. He began it in the 1930s while he was living in Vienna, and he was well aware that when and if he brought the book out he could expect trouble from the Austrian Catholic Church. The book, after all, insisted on some strange and disturbing things. Most startling, it argued that Moses himself was not a Jew. How did Freud know? First of all, he claimed that Moses is not a Jewish name but an Egyptian one; second, Freud's study of dreams and fairy tales convinced him that the Bible had inverted things. In the Exodus story, Moses' mother, fearing Pharaoh's order to kill all Jewish boys, leaves the infant Moses in a basket on the river's edge, where he is discovered by Pharaoh's daughter. But Freud maintained that the Jews were the ones who had found him by the river. (In fairy tales and dreams, the child always begins with rich parents and is adopted by poor ones, yet his noble nature wins out or so Freud insisted.) Freud also said that monotheism was not a Jewish but an Egyptian invention, descending from the cult of the Egyptian sun god Aton.

In March 1938, the Nazis invaded Austria and put Freud and his family in mortal danger. Freud managed to escape from Vienna with the help of the wealthy Princess Marie Bonaparte, whom he adored, and of the government of the United States of America, which he relentlessly disliked. President Roosevelt even took a measure of interest in Freud's case, but that did not change Freud's mind about the rogue republic at all. America is enormous, he liked to say, but it is an enormous mistake.

Before leaving Vienna, Freud gave the Nazis a parting gift. They had made it clear to him that his emigration was contingent on signing a statement saying that he had not been molested in any way and that he had been able to continue with his scientific work. Freud signed, but then added a coda of his own devising: "I can most highly recommend the Gestapo to everyone."

n London, where Freud arrived in June 1938, he encountered another sort of resistance to finishing and publishing the Moses book. The first person who came to see him at his house on Elsworthy Road was his neighbor, a Jewish scholar named Abraham Yahuda. Yahuda had gotten wind of the contents of the volume and had come to beseech Freud not to publish. Didn't the Jews have enough trouble in the world without one of their number saying that Moses was not Jewish and that in contrast to the peaceful death depicted in the Bible Moses had been murdered by the Jews themselves, who resented the harsh laws he had tried to impose on them? Did Freud actually intend to claim that over time guilt for the murder had enhanced Moses' status and his legacy of monotheism, creating in the Jews what Freud liked to call a "reaction formation"? Yahuda was far from being the last of such petitioners. During his early days in London, Freud received no end of entreaties to let the project go.

What did Freud do? He published of course and not just in German but, as quickly and conspicuously as possible, in English. The reviews were terrible. The private response was often bitter. And Freud was delighted. He reveled in the strong sales figures, shrugged off the nasty reviews and sang his own praises. "Quite a worthy exit," he called the Moses book.

And it was, but not chiefly because of the strange speculations about Moses' identity that worried Yahuda and scandalized the book's first readers. There is a more subtle and original dimension to the book, and perhaps it was that dimension that made Freud so determined to complete and publish it, despite all the resistance. For in "Moses and Monotheism" Freud has something truly fresh to say about religion.

About two-thirds of the way into the volume, he makes a point that is simple and rather profound the sort of point that Freud at his best excels in making. Judaism's distinction as a faith, he says, comes from its commitment to belief in an invisible God, and from this commitment, many consequential things follow. Freud argues that taking God into the mind enriches the individual immeasurably. The ability to believe in an internal, invisible God vastly improves people's capacity for abstraction. "The prohibition against making an image of God the compulsion to worship a God whom one cannot see," he says, meant that in Judaism "a sensory perception was given second place to what may be called an abstract idea a triumph of intellectuality over sensuality."

If people can worship what is not there, they can also reflect on what is not there, or on what is presented to them in symbolic and not immediate terms. So the mental labor of monotheism prepared the Jews as it would eventually prepare others in the West to achieve distinction in law, in mathematics, in science and in literary art. It gave them an advantage in all activities that involved making an abstract model of experience, in words or numbers or lines, and working with the abstraction to achieve control over nature or to bring humane order to life. Freud calls this internalizing process an "advance in intellectuality," and he credits it directly to religion.

reud speculates that one of the strongest human desires is to encounter God or the gods directly. We want to see our deities and to know them. Part of the appeal of Greek religion lay in the fact that it offered adherents direct, and often gorgeous, renderings of the immortals and also, perhaps, the possibility of meeting them on earth. With its panoply of saints, Christianity restored visual intensity to religion; it took a step back from Judaism in the direction of the pagan faiths. And that, Freud says, is one of the reasons it prospered.

Judaism, on the other hand, never let go of the great renunciation. The renunciation, according to Freud, gave the Jews remarkable strength of intellect, which he admired, but it also made them rather proud, for they felt that they, among all peoples, were the ones who could sustain such belief.

Freud's argument suggests that belief in an unseen God may prepare the ground not only for science and literature and law but also for intense introspection. Someone who can contemplate an invisible God, Freud implies, is in a strong position to take seriously the invisible, but perhaps determining, dynamics of inner life. He is in a better position to know himself. To live well, the modern individual must learn to understand himself in all his singularity. He must be able to pause and consider his own character, his desires, his inhibitions and values, his inner contradictions. And Judaism, with its commitment to one unseen God, opens the way for doing so. It gives us the gift of inwardness.

Freud was aware that there were many modes of introspection abroad in the world, but he of course thought psychoanalysis was by far the best. He said that the poets were there before him as discoverers of the inner life but that they had never been able to make their knowledge about it systematic and accessible. So throughout the Moses book, Freud subtly identifies himself with the prophet and implies that psychoanalysis may be the most consequential heir of the Jewish "advance in intellectuality." Freud believed that he had suffered for his commitment to psychoanalysis (which did not and does not lack detractors) and clearly looked to Moses as an example of a great figure who had braved resistance to his beliefs, both by Pharaoh in Egypt and by his own people. Moses hung on to his convictions much as Freud aspired to do.

Though Freud hoped that mankind would pass beyond religion, he surely took inspiration from the story of Moses, a figure with whom he had been fascinated for many years. (He published his first essay on the prophet in 1914.) Freud wanted to lead people, and he wanted to make conceptual innovations that had staying power and strength: for this there could be no higher exemplar than the prophet.

"Moses and Monotheism" indicates that Freud, irreligious as he was, could still find inspiration in a religious figure. Something similar was true about Freud's predecessor, Nietzsche. Nietzsche is famous for detesting Christianity, and by and large he did. But he did not detest Jesus Christ whose spontaneity, toughness and freedom of spirit he aspired to emulate. "There has been only one Christian," he once said, one person who truly lived up to the standards of the Gospel, "and he died on the cross."

Schopenhauer, to whom both Nietzsche and Freud were deeply indebted, was himself an unbeliever, as well as being an unrelenting pessimist. To Schopenhauer, life was pain, grief, sorrow and little else. Yet he, too, was able to take inspiration from Christianity, affirming as he did that a faith that had a man being tortured on a cross as its central emblem couldn't be entirely misleading in its overall take on life.

Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Freud were all at times able to recognize religion as being what Harold Bloom has wisely called it: not the opium of the people but the poetry of the people. They read Scripture as though it were poetry, and they learned from it accordingly. They saw that even if someone does not believe in a transcendent God, religion can still be a source of inspiration and of practical wisdom about how to live in the world. To be sure, it often takes hard intellectual work to find that wisdom. (As the proverb has it, "He who would bring home the wealth of the Indies must carry the wealth of the Indies with him.") Yet Freud's late-life turn shows us that there is too much of enduring value in religion even for nonbelievers ever to think of abandoning it cold.

Hillary's Prayer

Sat, 01 Sep 2007 00:00:00 -0500

It was an elegant example of the Clinton style, a rhetorical maneuver subtle, bold, and banal all at once. During a Democratic candidate forum in June, hosted by the liberal evangelical group Sojourners, Hillary Clinton fielded a softball query about Bill's infidelity: How had her faith gotten her through the Lewinsky scandal?

After a glancing shot at Republican "pharisees," Clinton explained that, of course, her "very serious" grounding in faith had helped her weather the affair. But she had also relied on the "extended faith family" that came to her aid, "people whom I knew who were literally praying for me in prayer chains, who were prayer warriors for me."

Such references to spiritual warfareprayer as battle against Satan, evil, and sinmight seem like heavy evangelical rhetoric for the senator from New York, but they went over well with the Sojourners audience, as did her call to "inject faith into policy." It was language that recalled Clinton's Jesus moment a year earlier, when she'd summoned the Bible to decry a Republican anti-immigrant initiative that she said would "criminalize the good Samaritan...and even Jesus himself." Liberal Christians crowed ("Hillary Clinton Shows the Way Democrats Can Use the Bible," declared a blogger at TPMCafe) while conservative pundits cried foul, accusing Clinton of scoring points with a faith not really her own.

In fact, Clinton's God talk is more complicatedand more deeply rootedthan either fans or foes would have it, a revelation not just of her determination to out-Jesus the gop, but of the powerful religious strand in her own politics. Over the past year, we've interviewed dozens of Clinton's friends, mentors, and pastors about her faith, her politics, and how each shapes the other. And while media reports tend to characterize Clinton's subtle recalibration of tone and style as part of the Democrats' broader move to recapture the terrain of "moral values," those who know her say there's far more to it than that.

Through all of her years in Washington, Clinton has been an active participant in conservative Bible study and prayer circles that are part of a secretive Capitol Hill group known as the Fellowship. Her collaborations with right-wingers such as Senator Sam Brownback (R-Kan.) and former Senator Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) grow in part from that connection. "A lot of evangelicals would see that as just cynical exploitation," says the Reverend Rob Schenck, a former leader of the militant anti-abortion group Operation Rescue who now ministers to decision makers in Washington. "I don't....there is a real good that is infected in people when they are around Jesus talk, and open Bibles, and prayer."

Clinton's faith is grounded in the Methodist beliefs she grew up with in Park Ridge, Illinois, a conservative Chicago suburb where she was active in her church's altar guild, Sunday school, and youth group. It was there, in 1961, that she met the Reverend Don Jones, a 30-year-old youth pastor; Jones, a friend of Clinton's to this day, told us he knows "more about Hillary Clinton's faith than anybody outside her family."

Because Jones introduced Clinton and her teenage peers to the civil rights movement and modern poetry and art, Clinton biographers often cast him as a proto-'60s liberal who sowed seeds of radicalism throughout Park Ridge. Jones, though, describes his theology as neoorthodox, guided by the belief that social change should come about slowly and without radical action. It emerged, he says, as a third way, a reaction against both separatist fundamentalism and the New Deal's labor-based liberalism.

Under Jones' mentorship, Clinton learned about Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillichthinkers whom liberals consider their own, but whom young Hillary Rodham encountered as theological conservatives. The Niebuhr she studied was a cold warrior, dismissive of the progressive politics of his earlier writing. "He'd thought that once we were unionized, the kingdom of God would be ushered in," Jones explains. "But the effect of those two world wars and the violence that they produced shook his faith in liberal theology. He came to believe that the achievement of justice meant a clear understanding of the limitations of the human condition." Tillich, whose sermon on grace Clinton turned to during the Lewinsky scandal, today enjoys a following among conservatives for revising the social gospelthe notion that Christians are to improve humanity's lot here on earth by fighting poverty, inequality, and exploitationto emphasize individual redemption instead of activism.

Niebuhr and Tillich's combination of aggressiveness in foreign affairs and limited domestic ambition naturally led Clinton toward the gop. She was a Goldwater Girl who, under the tutelage of her high school history teacher Paul Carlson (whom Jones describes as "to the right of the John Birchers"), attended biweekly anticommunist meetings and later served as president of Wellesley's Young Republicans chapter. Out of step with the era's radicalism, Clinton wrote Jones from college, lamenting that her fellow students didn't believe that one could be "a mind conservative and a heart liberal." To Jones, this question indicated that Clinton shared Niebuhr's notion of Christians needing to have "a dark enough view of life that they can be realistic about what's possible."

Two decades later, while Bill was campaigning for president, Clinton picked up that theme once more, displaying a theological depth that conservative believers could appreciate. In an interview with the United Methodist Reporter, she expressed regret that her church had focused too much on social gospel concerns in the '60s, '70s, and '80s, "to the exclusion of personal faith and growth." The spirit, believe theological conservatives, matters more than the flesh. Clinton added that she was happy to see her liberal denomination becoming more salvation centered in the '90s.

When Clinton first came to Washington in 1993, one of her first steps was to join a Bible study group. For the next eight years, she regularly met with a Christian "cell" whose members included Susan Baker, wife of Bush consigliere James Baker; Joanne Kemp, wife of conservative icon Jack Kemp; Eileen Bakke, wife of Dennis Bakke, a leader in the anti-union Christian management movement; and Grace Nelson, the wife of Senator Bill Nelson, a conservative Florida Democrat.

Clinton's prayer group was part of the Fellowship (or "the Family"), a network of sex-segregated cells of political, business, and military leaders dedicated to "spiritual war" on behalf of Christ, many of them recruited at the Fellowship's only public event, the annual National Prayer Breakfast. (Aside from the breakfast, the group has "made a fetish of being invisible," former Republican Senator William Armstrong has said.) The Fellowship believes that the elite win power by the will of God, who uses them for his purposes. Its mission is to help the powerful understand their role in God's plan.

Clinton declined our requests for an interview about her faith, but in Living History, she describes her first encounter with Fellowship leader Doug Coe at a 1993 lunch with her prayer cell at the Cedars, the Fellowship's majestic estate on the Potomac. Coe, she writes, "is a unique presence in Washington: a genuinely loving spiritual mentor and guide to anyone, regardless of party or faith, who wants to deepen his or her relationship with God."

The Fellowship's ideas are essentially a blend of Calvinism and Norman Vincent Peale, the 1960s preacher of positive thinking. It's a cheery faith in the "elect" chosen by a single voterGodand a devotion to Romans 13:1: "Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers....The powers that be are ordained of God." Or, as Coe has put it, "we work with power where we can, build new power where we can't."

When Time put together a list of the nation's 25 most powerful evangelicals in 2005, the heading for Coe's entry was "The Stealth Persuader." "You know what I think of when I think of Doug Coe?" the Reverend Schenck (a Coe admirer) asked us. "I think literally of the guy in the smoky back room that you can't even see his face. He sits in the corner, and you see the cigar, and you see the flame, and you hear his voicebut you never see his face. He's that shadowy figure."

Coe has been an intimate of every president since Ford, but he rarely imposes on chief executives, who see him as a slightly mystical but apolitical figure. Rather, Coe uses his access to the Oval Office as currency with lesser leaders. "If Doug Coe can get you some face time with the President of the United States," one official told the author of a Princeton study of the National Prayer Breakfast last year, "then you will take his call and seek his friendship. That's power."

"If you're going to do religion in public life," concurs Schenck, a Jewish convert to fundamentalist Christianity who's retained his sense of irony, Coe's friendship is a kind of "kosher...seal of approval."

Coe's friends include former Attorney General John Ashcroft, Reaganite Edwin Meese III, and ultraconservative Rep. Joe Pitts (R-Pa.). Under Coe's guidance, Meese has hosted weekly prayer breakfasts for politicians, businesspeople, and diplomats, and Pitts rose from obscurity to head the House Values Action Team, an off-the-record network of religious right groups and members of Congress created by Tom DeLay. The corresponding Senate Values Action Team is guided by another Coe protégé, Brownback, who also claims to have recruited King Abdullah of Jordan into a regular study of Jesus' teachings.

The Fellowship's long-term goal is "a leadership led by Godleaders of all levels of society who direct projects as they are led by the spirit." According to the Fellowship's archives, the spirit has in the past led its members in Congress to increase U.S. support for the Duvalier regime in Haiti and the Park dictatorship in South Korea. The Fellowship's God-led men have also included General Suharto of Indonesia; Honduran general and death squad organizer Gustavo Alvarez Martinez; a Deutsche Bank official disgraced by financial ties to Hitler; and dictator Siad Barre of Somalia, plus a list of other generals and dictators. Clinton, says Schenck, has become a regular visitor to Coe's Arlington, Virginia, headquarters, a former convent where Coe provides members of Congress with sex-segregated housing and spiritual guidance.

We contacted all of Clinton's Fellowship cell mates, but only one agreed to speakthough she stressed that there's much she's not "at liberty" to reveal. Grace Nelson used to be the organizer of the Florida Governor's Prayer Breakfast, which makes her a piety broker in Florida politicsshe would decide who could share the head table with Jeb Bush. Clinton's prayer cell was tight-knit, according to Nelson, who recalled that one of her conservative prayer partners was at first loath to pray for the first lady, but learned to "love Hillary as much as any of us love Hillary." Cells like these, Nelson added, exist in "parliaments all over the world," with all welcome so long as they submit to "the person of Jesus" as the source of their power.

Throughout her time at the White House, Clinton writes in Living History, she took solace from "daily scriptures" sent to her by her Fellowship prayer cell, along with Coe's assurances that she was right where God wanted her. (Clinton's sense of divine guidance has been noted by others: Bishop Richard Wilke, who presided over the United Methodist Church of Arkansas during her years in Little Rock, told us, "If I asked Hillary, 'What does the Lord want you to do?' she would say, 'I think I'm called by the Lord to be in public service at whatever level he wants me.'")

Coe counsels that Fellowship cells shouldn't engage in direct evangelical activism, but rather allow Christian causes to benefit from the bonds that develop within the cells. Former Nixon counsel Chuck Colson provides a rare illustration of the process in his 1976 Watergate memoir, Born Again. Facing prosecution in 1973, Colson allowed Coe to ensconce him in a Fellowship cell with a Nixon foe, Senator Harold Hughes. Hughes became the Nixon hatchet man's staunchest defender, voting in favor of a possible pardon for Colson and later supporting Colson as he built Prison Fellowship, now one of the most powerful organizations of the Christian right.

That's how it works: The Fellowship isn't out to turn liberals into conservatives; rather, it convinces politicians they can transcend left and right with an ecumenical faith that rises above politics. Only the faith is always evangelical, and the politics always move rightward.

This is in line with the Christian right's long-term strategy. Francis Schaeffer, late guru of the movement, coined the term "cobelligerency" to describe the alliances evangelicals must forge with conservative Catholics. Colson, his most influential disciple, has refined the concept of cobelligerency to deal with less-than-pure politicians. In this application, conservatives sit pretty and wait for liberals looking for common ground to come to them. Clinton, Colson told us, "has a lot of history" to overcome, but he sees her making the right moves.

These days, Clinton has graduated from the political wives' group into what may be Coe's most elite cell, the weekly Senate Prayer Breakfast. Though weighted Republican, the breakfastregularly attended by about 40 membersis a bipartisan opportunity for politicians to burnish their reputations, giving Clinton the chance to profess her faith with men such as Brownback as well as the twin terrors of Oklahoma, James Inhofe and Tom Coburn, and, until recently, former Senator George Allen (R-Va.). Democrats in the group include Arkansas Senator Mark Pryor, who told us that the separation of church and state has gone too far; Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) is also a regular.

Unlikely partnerships have become a Clinton trademark. Some are symbolic, such as her support for a ban on flag burning with Senator Bob Bennett (R-Utah) and funding for research on the dangers of video games with Brownback and Santorum. But Clinton has also joined the gop on legislation that redefines social justice issues in terms of conservative morality, such as an anti-human-trafficking law that withheld funding from groups working on the sex trade if they didn't condemn prostitution in the proper terms. With Santorum, Clinton co-sponsored the Workplace Religious Freedom Act; she didn't back off even after Republican senators such as Pennsylvania's Arlen Specter pulled their names from the bill citing concerns that the measure would protect those refusing to perform key aspects of their jobssay, pharmacists who won't fill birth control prescriptions, or police officers who won't guard abortion clinics.

Clinton has championed federal funding of faith-based social services, which she embraced years before George W. Bush did; Marci Hamilton, author of God vs. the Gavel, says that the Clintons' approach to faith-based initiatives "set the stage for Bush." Clinton has also long supported the Defense of Marriage Act, a measure that has become a purity test for any candidate wishing to avoid war with the Christian right.

Liberal rabbi Michael Lerner, whose "politics of meaning" Clinton made famous in a speech early in her White House tenure, sees the senator's ambivalence as both more and less than calculated opportunism. He believes she has genuine sympathy for liberal causesrights for women, gays, immigrantsbut often will not follow through. "There is something in her that pushes her toward caring about others, as long as there's no price to pay. But in politics, there is a price to pay."

In politics, those who pay tribute to the powerful also reap rewards. When Ed Klein's attack bio, The Truth About Hillary, came out in 2005, some of her most prominent defenders were Christian conservatives, among them Southern Baptist Theological Seminary President Albert Mohler. "Christians," he declared, "should repudiate this book and determine to take no pleasure in it."

Senator Brownback understood the temptation. He used to hate Clinton so much, he told us, that the hate hurt. Then came the Clintons' 1994 National Prayer Breakfast appearance with Mother Teresa, who upbraided the couple for their pro-choice views. Bill made no attempt to conceal his anger, but Hillary took it and smiled. Brownback remembers thinking, "Now, there's gotta be a great lesson here." He didn't know what it was until Clinton got to the Senate and joined him in supporting DeLay's Day of Reconciliation resolution following the 2000 election, a proposal described by its backers as a call to "pray for our leaders." Now, Brownback considers Clinton "a beautiful child of the living God."

Clinton, for her part, turned Mother Teresa's sucker punch into political opportunity. She met with the nun after the prayer breakfast, visited her orphanage in India, helped her set up another one in Washington (which has since become an apparently inoperative branch of Mother Teresa's conservative Vatican order, the Missionaries of Charity), and generally built a highly visible friendship with a figure whose moral bona fides also came with an anti-abortion imprimatur that couldn't but help Clinton on the right.

Of course, no matter how much Clinton speaks of common ground, she doesn't stand a chance of winning votes among pro-lifers. As Tom McClusky of the Family Research Council, command central for Washington's Christian right, told us, movement conservatives consider legislation like Clinton's Putting Prevention First Act, which supports greater access to birth control and sex ed, "just another condom giveaway."

But the senator's project isn't the conversion of her adversaries; it's tempering their opposition so she can court a new generation of Clinton Republicans, values voters who have grown estranged from the Christian right. And while such crossover conservatives may never agree with her on the old litmus-test issues, there is an important, and broader, common groundthe kind of faith-based politics that, under the right circumstances, will permit majority morality to trump individual rights. The libertarian Cato Institute recently observed that Clinton is "adding the paternalistic agenda of the religious right to her old-fashioned liberal paternalism." Clinton suggests as much herself in her 1996 book, It Takes a Village, where she writes approvingly of religious groups' access to schools, lessons in Scripture, and "virtue" making a return to the classroom.

Then, as now, Clinton confounded secularists who recognize public faith only when it comes wrapped in a cornpone accent. Clinton speaks instead the language of nondenominationalisma sober, eloquent appreciation of "values," the importance of prayer, and "heart" convictionswhich liberals, unfamiliar with the history of evangelical coalition building, mistake for a tidy, apolitical accommodation, a personal separation of church and state. Nor do skeptical voters looking for political opportunism recognize that, when Clinton seeks guidance among prayer partners such as Coe and Brownback, she is not so much triangulatingmuch as that may have become second natureas honoring her convictions. In her own way, she is a true believer.

What the Beatitudes Teach

Wed, 15 Aug 2007 00:00:00 -0500

THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT has long been rightly understood as both a starting-point and a summation of Jesus 's teaching. It begins with the Beatitudes (Mt. 5:3-12), in which Jesus delineates the categories of people he says enjoy special favor. The Beatitudes are all familiar to us as sayings, the best known being blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. But what, really, are they? Is Jesus merely pronouncing a blessing, offering good wishes to those whom he chooses to single out? In fact, there 's more to the story than that.

The Beatitudes provide a dizzying commentary designed to turn upside down the political and social world of the Roman Empire of Caesar Augustus and of the Jewish religious elite of Judea and Jerusalem. This is the opening move of a more drastic and fundamental reassessment of political and social affairs, applying not only to its own time but to all future times, down to our day. More still: It points to the increasing fulfillment in this world of the promise of the human condition as such and of the struggle against vast and daunting but not insurmountable obstacles that such fulfillment will require.

Jesus describes those who are truly fortunate, the lucky ones of their day. But it is not emperors, conquerors, priests, and the wealthy who enjoy this favor. Rather, it is the common people, those whom earthly success has largely passed by: the poor, the meek, the persecuted, the peacemakers. How can this be? Because though they may have been denied worldly success, what cannot be taken away from them is their potential to live rightly by one another. It is all too easy for those who enjoy the pleasures of this world to try to float above such obligations. Jesus goes on to say that so long as ordinary people stand for the right things and do not retreat in their rightness before those who seem to have more power, what 's right will prevail. It's their kingdom a kingdom organized not from the top down, but from the bottom up. In the Beatitudes, Jesus offers a description of the community of goodwill his teaching will build in this world.

EACH OF THE Beatitudes includes not only a statement about who is blessed, but also a short description of what is in store for each category of those who are blessed: The meek shall inherit the earth. Are those predictions Jesus is making? Or promises about what the future holds? If so, where? Only in the next world, or in this world as well?

In order to see the answers to these questions, we have to look at the Beatitudes not just individually, but in relation to each other. With these nine categories, Jesus offers a portrait of the ways in which it is possible to be a good person with respect to others a description of the various forms human goodness, in this social sense, can take. This description is as true today as it was in his day, and if we are looking for the ways in which it is possible to be a good person today, we really need look no farther.

As for the predictions or promises, what Jesus has done with them is to imagine the consequences of a world comprised of more and more people attuned to the social good as he has described it. He offers in these few lines a description of what the world looks like when good people prevail over bad people and he makes the bold claim that such a world will come to pass.

Jesus calls those who belong to the nine categories he specifies in Matthew "Blessed." The sense of the term here is "fortunate" or "prosperous." Who are the lucky ones? The "poor in spirit" are prosperous; "those who mourn" are fortunate; so are "the gentle"; and "those who hunger and thirst for righteousness"; and "the merciful"; and "the pure in heart"; and "the peacemakers"; and "those who have been persecuted for the sake of righteousness"; finally, says Jesus, fortunate are "you when people insult you and persecute you, and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me. "

By now, we are used to the idea of wishing well for those who are downtrodden, who are oppressed, who can't get a break, who have fallen on hard times. This is in no small measure a product of the teaching of Jesus itself, in this passage and elsewhere. Those in his time who heard him speak words such as these, however, had a different general outlook and set of expectations. Theirs was a world in which robbers could leave a man for dead on the side of a road, and it was unclear whether anyone would stop to help. 1 The exalted were truly exalted the rich, the royal, the Sadducees and Pharisees, the imperial Roman officers, the tax collectors and they often treated have-nots with undisguised contempt.

Here Jesus proposes a different hierarchy. To see whom he elevates in the Beatitudes, it may be helpful to conjure a list of qualities opposite to the ones he lists. Cumulatively, what emerges from this collection of "anti-Beatitudes" is a portrait of a privileged class, one that sees those below as essentially inferior. For "the poor in spirit," the opposite number might be someone arrogant in his righteousness and sense of superiority. For "those who mourn," we can substitute those whom the world has given cause for rejoicing. For "the gentle," the overbearing. For "those who hunger and thirst for righteousness," we may find a contrast in those who are complacent on account of their privileges and defend them vigorously. For "the merciful," the unforgiving, perhaps the cruel: those who, when they have an advantage over another, even a temporary one, don 't hesitate to exploit it.

Opposite "the pure in heart" are those who are cunning in pursuit of their private gain. Opposite "the peacemakers" are those who act to create or aggravate conflict. Opposite "those who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness" are those doing the persecuting, as opposite "you when people insult you . . . because of me" are those seeking to put down Jesus's teaching and those who follow it.

Far from feeling any sense of obligation toward those below, this elite dismisses them as irrelevant or worse, sees them as objects to be used to its own advantage. In addition, the elite seeks to perpetuate its advantages, if necessary by silencing those (such as Jesus) who speak up for the downtrodden. There was much for the elite to lose if the teachings of Jesus caught on. Indeed, from the beginning of his career, Jesus understood quite clearly the high stakes involved in his political teaching.

Perhaps privileged classes, in the plural, captures the essence a little more precisely. It is an oversimplification to see the problem as simply one of haves versus have-nots. The have-nots have in common that they are oppressed, but their oppressors come in different guises, from the elite of the Temple to the occupying Romans. And we must bear in mind how little it takes to oppress. Some who are oppressed by the powerful above them may in turn oppress those below them with yet less power. Oppression can manifest itself in as little as a declined opportunity to show mercy out of the enjoyment of one 's position of relative power one's sense of superiority.

As it turns out, though, the have-nots have more going in their favor than they realize, and this is Jesus 's message. For the poor in spirit, "theirs is the kingdom of heaven." Those who mourn "shall be comforted." The gentle "shall inherit the earth." Those who hunger and thirst for righteousness "shall be satisfied." The merciful "shall receive mercy." The pure in heart "shall see God." The peacemakers "shall be called sons of God." As for those who have been persecuted for the sake of righteousness, again, "theirs is the kingdom of heaven." And for those who are insulted, persecuted, and falsely accused because they adhere to and seek to exemplify Jesus 's teaching, he tells them "rejoice and be glad, for your reward in heaven is great."

At first, it seems that Jesus sees the rectification of the worldly troubles of those whom he has described as "blessed" coming only in the next world, referring to heaven in three of the Beatitudes and in a fourth promising the sight of God. However, it is not only the next world to which Jesus refers. Most conspicuously, "the gentle," he says, "shall inherit the earth." This statement could not be more emphatically rooted in this world. It promises no less than thisworld itself to the gentle (or meek or humble). Note that Jesus does not say the gentle will take over the world or conquer the world: The way in which the gentle come to possess the world is not by becoming something other than what they are. Rather, the world comes to them as an inheritance, a bequest. The language is striking. One obtains an inheritance upon the death of one 's benefactor. This raises the question: a bequest from whom? We will soon see the answer.

Three of the other promises or predictions of the Beatitudes are at least as grounded in this world as they are in the next: Where will those who mourn "be comforted"? Where will those who hunger and thirst for righteousness "be satisfied"? Where will the merciful "receive mercy"? Come the time that the gentle do indeed "inherit the earth" should such a world come to pass it seems plausible that those who mourn will find the comfort Jesus has promised in such a world, that those who desire righteousness will find it, that the merciful will be shown mercy there.

Furthermore, we must also ask why the "pure in heart . . . will see God" only in heaven, since perhaps the uncorrupted heart could have access to a vision of the divine on earth as well. Jesus does not speak of a "reward [explicitly] in heaven" here, as he does elsewhere. As for the peacemakers, who will be called "sons of God," will they be called this in heaven only? Or perhaps on earth, where they may be said to be doing the Lord 's work earthly emulators of Jesus with regard to the pursuit of peace.

Jesus speaks of this world prospectively: The gentle have not yet inherited it; those who desire righteousness are not yet satisfied. But whatever consolation they may draw in the present moment, listening to Jesus speak on the mountainside, that their hunger for righteousness will be satisfied in the next world, the future that Jesus describes points to a form of satisfaction in this world also.

THE BEATITUDES ARE organized according to a scale running from passivity and paralysis in this world, through increasing levels of engagement with it in accordance with what Jesus is teaching, up to a pinnacle of earthly conduct Jesus describes. The categories he delineates describe people we can recognize in our own day, from homeless shelters and nursing homes to the halls of power, at least on those occasions when people rise above their private ambitions and work for the public good.

We begin with the "poor in spirit." It is an ambiguous phrase, but one that evokes a sense of those incapable of taking care of themselves at all: the dejected, the demoralized, those in whom the spark has gone out. They have given up, resigning themselves to their lonely place at the bottom, beyond reach of all others.

Next come the mourners, whom we may think of as the temporarily incapacitated. For now, they are overwhelmed by a sense of grief and loss. They are perhaps unable to take care of themselves or to fulfill their responsibilities toward others. They once felt a connection to another or others strongly enough to be reduced to incapacity by the loss. The loss of that connection in turn imperils all their other connections. Because they were once more robust, however, now there is at least the possibility that one day they will again be so, having recovered from their mourning.

Then there are the gentle, or meek or humble. They walk softly upon the earth, seeking to impose themselves on others as little as possible. They see to their obligations as best they can, but they take nothing from others and ask for nothing from them for themselves. They are satisfied with what they have, however meager it may be. They do not strive, but accept their circumstances.

The gentle are followed by those who desire righteousness. They, unlike the gentle and still less the poor in spirit, have surveyed the world around them and are dissatisfied with it, wishing instead for a world in which their desire for righteousness is fulfilled. Here, Jesus uses metaphorical language: He speaks of those who "hunger and thirst" for righteousness. All people get hungry, all people get thirsty. Hunger and thirst are primordial and universal bodily desires.

Here, however, the desire Jesus speaks of the desire for righteousness is something whose satisfaction, unlike hunger and thirst, is not of the body. Having passed from the permanently dispirited (the poor in spirit) to the incapacitated (those who mourn) to the unstirred spirit of acquiescence (the gentle or meek), we arrive now at the moment when the human spirit becomes an active entity for the first time. People are no longer merely operated on passive objects played with by natural forces or the will of other, stronger human beings. Instead, they stir of their own will, seeking for themselves something outside themselves.

In the desire for food and drink, people are no different from other members of the animal kingdom. Jesus goes on to specify an object of desire that is distinctly human: the desire for righteousness. He invites us to take the desire for righteousness as the first stirring in all those who are not content simply to be, in the passive or debilitated senses he has already evoked.

So far, Jesus has not specifically said what this "righteousness" people desire is, but his language offers some clues. First of all, the Beatitudes categorize groups of people. He does not say "blessed is the one who is poor in spirit," but rather "blessed are the poor in spirit"; not "the mourner" but "those who mourn." From the start, Jesus's teaching is directed not merely to each solitary person who will one day stand before God for eternal judgment; instead, it includes an element that is social or political. It invites listeners including the most downtrodden and oppressed to recognize that they are not alone and to think beyond themselves. Wherever one of his listeners may fall, whether in one of his categories of the "blessed" or somewhere outside, the listener is not alone: Jesus calls people to think of themselves in relation to others like them, even if the others are people with whom they previously have felt nothing in common.

The second point concerns the specific group of "those who hunger and thirst for righteousness." This Jesusian category describes a common desire. Although this desire is felt by individuals I can feel or intuit or experience my desire in a way that I cannot feel yours, even if I know you are feeling it too it is not unique to each person who feels it. Rather, it is a desire common to all. Jesus reinforces this sense of universality by saying that those who feel the desire for righteousness will be "satisfied" that is, this universal desire will be fulfilled universally.

One person's desire for righteousness, in Jesus's teaching, doesn't necessarily bring that person into conflict with another's desire for righteousness. In fact, if two or more indeed, many more people are "blessed" in their desire for righteousness and "shall be satisfied," then the satisfaction of their respective desires for righteousness would result in their mutual satisfaction. They would be satisfied as individuals but all individuals desiring righteousness would likewise be satisfied. No individual 's satisfaction could come at the price of another individual's failure to obtain satisfaction or the denial of satisfaction to the other. If someone 's desire for righteousness necessarily conflicted with another person's desire for righteousness, then the generalization Jesus proffers, namely, that "those who hunger and thirst for righteousness . . . shall be satisfied," would not work out. Jesus holds out the prospect of reconciliation of each individual 's desire for righteousness and universal fulfillment.

But what if I, as an individual hungering and thirsting for righteousness, conclude that I can obtain satisfaction for myself only at the expense of others? Well, it is clearly no solution if others who hunger and thirst for righteousness find out that I have obtained my fulfillment at the expense of their ability to find satisfaction. Another way to put this is that I have confused an advantage I have obtained over them with the satisfaction of my desire for righteousness. The conclusion, therefore, is that what I think of as the desire for righteousness within myself is actually something else or, more simply, that I am wrong to think that what I have desired and obtained can properly be called "righteousness." Nevertheless, there is the desire, which seems like the desire for righteousness. What it needs is proper channeling.

Similarly, what if I satisfy myself at the expense of others and the others either don 't see it or don't object? What if they are, for example, so poor in spirit, so ground down by oppression, that they cannot imagine anything different? Does this acquiescence somehow vindicate my claim to righteousness in satisfying myself at their expense? Can I say that I am in the right because of my natural or otherwise-given superiority over them, as demonstrated by their acceptance of my position of privilege? Jesus 's answer is clearly "no." And the reason is simply this: They may not be able to speak up for themselves, but others can speak up for them starting, of course, with Jesus. No overlord's sense of his own vindicated righteousness stands unchallenged. Such supposed righteousness is wrong-headed. A true desire for righteousness is of the kind that can be satisfied along with everyone else 's true desire for righteousness.

AN IMPORTANT DISTINCTION that Jesus makes is that to desire righteousness is not necessarily to act on that desire. How, then should one obtain satisfaction for one 's desire? The beginning of the answer becomes clear in Jesus's next category of the blessed, the first category that specifies righteous action: In one 's relations with other people when one reaches beyond oneself toward another one should be merciful.

Mercy is a quality within reach of everyone at one time or another. All mercy requires is a position of the barest advantage over another, even for the most fleeting of moments. When someone is down whether physically, psychologically, or emotionally do you kick him or not? To show mercy is an action that doesn't necessarily require activity: In certain cases, no more than the refusal to press an advantage one has is an act of mercy.

The next deemed blessed are the "pure in heart." Such people will act out of no bad motive, but always in accordance with the purity of rightness within them. Uncorrupted inwardly, the pure in heart will act toward others without corruption, since it would not occur to such a person to cheat a friend or steal from a stranger or tell a lie.

After the "pure in heart" come "the peacemakers." Jesus's intention here is clearly broad, encompassing not only relations between nations and peoples but also all subsets of conflict, down to those between two people. Here we take another step outward. If purity of heart relates to how I govern my own conduct toward others, peacemaking has the potential to take me outside myself.

It may be that the peace I am trying to make is between me and someone else. In that case, I am seeking to remove from my own conduct the sources of conflict between me and you. But I have to go farther, to recruit another to the cause of peace to persuade another that the benefits of peace are sufficiently great to justify the other 's removal of internal impediments to it and then to provide the other with the benefits of peace once it has been made.

Clearly, the Jesusian instruction here will not be fulfilled through the imposition of the peace of the victor upon the vanquished. Nor will it be fulfilled by the purchase of peace at the cost of surrendering what is right. Neither "I win" nor "I surrender" will do. Peace must be made: At a minimum, there is a condition of mutuality involved between the parties. Along those same lines, peace making also becomes a matter of peacekeeping: ensuring that the conditions for peace remain. Here, peace is more than the (temporary) absence of conflict, and by saying that "the peacemakers" are blessed, Jesus points to the importance of aspiring toward permanent peace and universal peace.

In some instances, peacemaking of the sort Jesus endorses here will be an exercise in reaching even further beyond oneself, interposing between others in conflict to help them remove the sources of discord between them. With such peacemaking attempts, the presupposition is that such a peacemaker is already at peace with each of the two parties in conflict (otherwise the type of peacemaking described in the preceding paragraph would have to come first). But this suggests that my peace with each of them must not come at the expense of the continuation of their conflict with each other. If I perceive the conflict between them as a benefit to me, then I am failing to uphold peacemaking in its broadest, Jesusian sense. Making one 's personal peace, whatever it entails, does not fulfill the Jesusian prescription. Such a peace is insufficient if others remain in conflict, and it is incumbent upon one who is at peace with others to make peace among the others as well. As we will see later, Jesus regards the obligations of those who enjoy the benefits of living in a world shaped by his political teaching to be especially high with respect to those who are not so fortunate.

Jesus does not say specifically whether he refers to peace between and among individuals, families, tribes, societies, nations, or some other grouping. His lack of specificity invites the conclusion that he is referring to all of these levels of peacemaking. What if there is a conflict between the requirements of peace among individuals or families, for example, and the requirements of peace between nations? As an illustration, think of the American Civil War, in which, famously, brother sometimes fought against brother. Or think of Sophocles 's story of Antigone, who was caught between her obligation to obey the command of her king and her obligation to provide a proper burial for her brother. If a broad peace is truly possible, there will have to be a way of eliminating or reconciling such conflicts.

Jesus next mentions "those who have been persecuted for the sake of righteousness." In this group, we find those whose desire for right has been translated into action the pursuit in the world of what is right in some fashion that is perceptible to others in the way mere "hunger and thirst," or desire, is not. Perhaps it is by demanding right treatment for themselves or for others. In any case, persecution may follow from those whose wishes stand to be thwarted by the ones demanding what is right. The demand for righteousness comes as a threat to the advantage some enjoy over others. Those who have the advantage may take action to protect what they have what they think of, erroneously, according to the Jesusian teaching, as rightly theirs. Of course, it is quite possible that those trying to be peacemakers will find themselves in this position, their efforts having failed not for want of trying but because they have given offense to those with the power to persecute.

Last mentioned are "you when people insult you and persecute you, and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me. " Jesus reserves pride of place for the followers of his teaching. That's because he believes his teaching is true. Considered as such, his teaching is the highest possible expression of righteousness. Jesus is perfectly aware that those who take his message to heart, act on it, and espouse it to others may run great risks in doing so. After all, his teaching is based on the proposition that people 's hunger and thirst for righteousness can be universally satisfied, which in turn threatens those for whom vindication of their own, erroneous sense of right comes only at the expense of others. Such overlords are apt to resist.

Jesus promises possession of "the kingdom of heaven" to those in two of his categories: the poor in spirit and those who have been persecuted for the sake of righteousness. As for those who run afoul of the overlords because they are following his teaching, he says "Rejoice and be glad, for your reward in heaven is great; for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.

Jesus seems to be suggesting that the prophets' reward is great because they anticipated the message he brings. As for "rejoice and be glad," we must ask what the alternative is: to be ground down by the persecution one must suffer; to give up; to let go of the message of Jesus and to wallow, paralyzed, in one 's despair; to become poor in spirit. In the Beatitudes, we have before us a full circle of good conduct, a complete typology of the "good person" or "good soul" (taking soul in the this-worldly sense of the part of a person that is not merely body) from the lowest of the low (who harm no one but themselves) to the most exalted (those persecuted for their actions on behalf of what 's right).

It is no accident that the first category of the blessed, the poor in spirit, and the eighth and ninth, the persecuted, have in common the promised reward of heaven. Jesus is under no illusion about the difficulty of the advance of his message in this world. For some those who have given up and those who are persecuted he can promise no earthly reward at all (though he does promise a heavenly one). This is a harsh pronouncement, and we must not shrink from it.

Jesus's categories in the Beatitudes have in common his description of those who belong to them as "blessed." Clearly, it is good to be "blessed," and one can find favor in any of the groups. However, the amount of activity required to qualify for membership in each of them the activity of taking care of oneself and others progressively increases from one category to the next. The "poor in spirit" are indeed "blessed," but that does not mean one should emulate the poor in spirit or seek spiritual impoverishment for oneself if one is capable of doing more, first for oneself, then with others. While "theirs is the kingdom of heaven" in the case of both "the poor in spirit" and "those who have been persecuted for the sake of righteousness," that doesn't mean we have no basis for preferring to join one category over the other if we are fortunate enough to have a choice. The latter category clearly entails a higher level of activity in working for the good of others than does the former, whose members simply can 't do more.

What makes working for righteousness higher, however, is not the superiority on the part of someone who has the possibility of making such a choice over someone who is debilitated by circumstance. It is that if one can reach out and help others by the pursuit of righteousness, one should do so and not avoid it for selfish reasons. Likewise, it is good to be gentle and certainly better than to mourn inconsolably, but to be gentle alone is not quite as good as to desire righteousness or to act on behalf of righteousness if one can. One should not aspire to be "pure in heart" instead of acting as a peacemaker if one has the capability of working to end conflict.

The categories Jesus describes sometimes come into conflict with each other. It is a strain to suppose that one can always be gentle or meek while also being an activist on behalf of righteousness. Similarly, it is easy to envision someone who is less than pure in heart acting as a peacemaker. The progressively higher level of activity described as one moves from one of the categories to the next doesn 't necessarily entail incorporation of all previously specified attributes in their original form.

Moreover, there is no suggestion that motion can be in one direction only. One could revert to a lower level of activity. One could become less active in the pursuit of the Jesusian vision of righteousness. Indeed, at the highest level "you when people insult you and persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me " there is an implied warning of the danger of falling back not just a little, but to the very bottom. "Rejoice and be glad" even through persecution, Jesus instructs, because as long as you are doing so, you are reaching out to and for others in the name of righteousness. But realize this: From even the highest point in the Jesusian hierarchy of the "good person," it is but a single step to the lowest, the poor in spirit. It's the difference between bearing one's persecution gladly and breaking under its weight. And it's not necessarily within your control.

We have seen above that the character of the Beatitudes becomes clearer if we view the categories Jesus calls "blessed" in light of their opposites: the spiritually self-confident in contrast to the poor in spirit, the persecutors of those who follow the Jesus teaching in contrast to those persecuted. These opposites, too, form a hierarchy of potential activity in opposition to the Jesusian categories of good. Here, then, is the typology of the "bad person," each stage reflecting a greater degree of activity on behalf of the old political order, which Jesus seeks to overturn: those who offer the lowest of the low only their own sense of superiority; those unmoved by or contemptuous of people suffering from great loss or adversity; those whose response when they encounter the meek and gentle is to lord it over them; those who embrace a doctrine defending their position of privilege at the expense of others; those in a position of power who show no mercy to the powerless; those corruptly seeking advantage over others; those obstructing a just peace or fomenting conflict; those who persecute people who seek what 's right; those who persecute the followers of Jesus's teaching. Jesus's first message to those in any of these categories is, quite simply, stop. Stop expressing contempt for others, stop promulgating strife, stop your persecution.

Accordingly, there are also worldly repercussions for individuals who exemplify these qualities of bad conduct. Those who define themselves by their sense of superiority will live in a world governed not by justice but by persecution, one in which the tables may turn on them without a moment 's notice. Those who have contempt for the fellow-feeling that underlies mourning will be unmourned. Those who abuse the meek will lose their claim on a world they think is theirs. Those who defend their position of privilege at the expense of others will remain unsatisfied. Those who show no mercy will live their lives in fear of a world in which no mercy will be shown them. Those whose inner corruption drives them to seek ill-gotten advantage will find themselves mired in it, deprived of the ability to appreciate or apprehend anything that is good or pure. Those who obstruct peace will find their names reviled. Those who persecute the just will live in a world in which justice means nothing next to the arbitrary power of persecution, a power from which they will have no protection should it turn on them.

Except, of course, that the world of the "bad person" is the one to which Jesus is opposed and which he seeks to overturn. According to his prescription, the world will indeed come to be governed by justice what's right and not by persecution. And he offers those currently prone to the temptations of the "bad person" a chance to overcome them by embracing his teaching and stopping their own unjust conduct.

These are real-world admonitions. Anyone in a position of privilege who heard Jesus speak and thought seriously about what he had to say would find his guidance on the reform of personal conduct difficult to mistake. But whether such a person would act on these words is another question altogether.

At first glance, the main purpose of the Beatitudes seems to be to offer various consolations to the downtrodden. But while Jesus does this, he also propounds a stern standard of judgment and offers strict guidance for good behavior for those who find themselves in a position of privilege. This injunction takes the form of a warning: The days of abusive privilege are numbered. Jesus 's is not merely an ethereal threat, bound up in the afterlife and a world to come, which the nonbeliever can spurn with contempt in favor of worldly enjoyment. It is a threat based on changes coming to this world. It is a threat dangerous to ignore in the here-and-now.

Nevertheless the question remains: Is this all to be taken literally? Come the revolution, of course, heads may roll, but surely Jesus cannot be saying that all those who enjoy privilege without righteousness are going to suffer for it in this world. Surely he is aware that some will hear all of what he has to say, spurn it and get away with it scot-free for the rest of their earthly lives. Moreover, there is a potential for large-scale contradiction based on misreading here: If the point is to show mercy, even those who have themselves been unmerciful should be shown mercy, should they not?

True. Jesus says that what is right, according to the Beatitudes, "shall" come to pass; he does not say when. However, the cumulative effect of the positive, stated promises of the Beatitudes and the negative, unstated repercussions for those who oppose righteousness point to a question that will be asked in this world about those who have come before: What side were you on? Did you defend your privileges at the expense of others or work to uplift those who found themselves downtrodden? Did you act only for yourself, or did you think of others as best you could, whenever you could? Did you run risks for what 's right, or was the risk you ran that the righteous would prevail? The merciless, the persecutors, the purveyors of conflict, the defenders of privilege Jesus's point is that they live in a world governed by fear, and he invites them to reflect on what might happen if the world turned on them and they suddenly became the ones with cause to fear.

But that world is not the world Jesus is promoting. In a world ordered according to Jesusian principles, there will be no persecution, even for those who have made a transition from a world in which they were persecutors. Even those who have been unmerciful will be shown mercy. Their fear of a world in which the tables are turned on them is in fact displaced fear of a more primordial one might say existential kind: a world that has no place for them. A world in which the attributes of privilege that they believe are essential to their being have been obliterated. A world in which they, in their conception of themselves, cannot continue to be. A world in which they must change if they are to remain. Jesus confronts the "bad person" not with something so simple and easy to reject as a competing model of how to live a better life. Rather, he forces a radical confrontation within the "bad person" over the very possibility of his or her continued existence.

More than that. What would the world look like if those in a position of privilege decided to comport themselves in accordance with the implicit guidance of the Beatitudes? And how, in turn, would that affect membership in the categories Jesus has described as "blessed"? The result here is most interesting.

If no one persecutes people for following the teaching of Jesus, then the category of the "persecuted" disappears. If no one persecutes those who seek righteousness, then this category, too, disappears. And if the response to the poor in spirit is not to show contempt for them but to uplift them, to encourage them to find the value in their lives that they have somehow lost sight of, then that category, too, disappears. Thus, these three categories of the blessed for which Jesus makes promises only with regard to heaven disappear entirely wherever the Jesusian teaching takes root on earth. This explains why Jesus assigns no earthly reward for people in these three categories. His silence anticipates that once people follow his guidance there will be no one left in these conditions. His ambitious political agenda is to rid the world of both persecuted and persecutors opposite sides of the coin of persecution.

In the world, we will always have among us those in mourning and the gentle; we will always have need of those who desire righteousness, of those who are merciful, of those who act out of pure intentions, and of those who seek peace. But if or when the world is organized in accordance with the principles embedded in the lives of those Jesus here deems "blessed," we will no longer have the persecuted and the unvalued, nor their persecutors and tormentors. The Jesusian political agenda is thus organized around the pursuit of righteousness by those who are able at potential risk to their own lives for the sake of a world in which the unvalued (including they themselves when they are persecuted) are at last fully valued as human beings.

How, then, does Jesus envision that the gentle will come to inherit the earth? Because the once-mighty, under pressure of precisely this kind, will die out as a type. They will change their minds about defending their privileges at the expense of others. And the world will be their dying bequest to the gentle.

God Apparently Responds to Lawsuit

Thu, 20 Sep 2007 00:00:00 -0500

LINCOLN, Nebraska (AP) -- A legislator who filed a lawsuit against God has gotten something he might not have expected: a response.

One of two court filings from "God" came Wednesday under otherworldly circumstances, according to John Friend, clerk of the Douglas County District Court in Omaha.

"This one miraculously appeared on the counter. It just all of a sudden was here -- poof!" Friend said.

State Sen. Ernie Chambers of Omaha sued God last week, seeking a permanent injunction against the Almighty for making terroristic threats, inspiring fear and causing "widespread death, destruction and terrorization of millions upon millions of the Earth's inhabitants."

Chambers, a self-proclaimed agnostic who often criticizes Christians, said his filing was triggered by a federal lawsuit he considers frivolous. He said he's trying to make the point that anybody can sue anybody.

Not so, says "God." His response argues that the defendant is immune from some earthly laws and the court lacks jurisdiction.

It adds that blaming God for human oppression and suffering misses an important point.

"I created man and woman with free will and next to the promise of immortal life, free will is my greatest gift to you," according to the response, as read by Friend.

There was no contact information on the filing, although St. Michael the Archangel is listed as a witness, Friend said.

A second response from "God" disputing Chambers' allegations lists a phone number for a Corpus Christi law office. A message left for that office was not immediately returned Thursday.

Attempts to reach Chambers by phone and at his Capitol office Thursday were unsuccessful.

Jewish Flare of New TV Shows

Fri, 21 Sep 2007 00:00:00 -0500

The new fall television season is filled with mysticism, from stories about angels and the power to bring back the dead with the touch of a hand to a time-traveling hero.

I first read about the upcoming season which starts the week of Sept. 24 back in May during what's called "the upfronts," when networks unveil to advertisers their fall lineup. Picking up The New York Times' advertising column, Stuart Elliott's headline, I read "In a Time of High Anxiety, A Sedative of the Occult," and I wondered, "Is there something Jewish behind an upcoming season with such a banner?"

By extending my antennae a bit and reaching out, I picked up the signal from last year's hit show "Heroes" about a group of people who "thought they were like everyone else ... until they realized they have incredible abilities," such as telepathy, time travel, flight and instantaneous regeneration.

It was then I realized that if Jews were responsible for the heyday of comic book superheroes, such as Superman and Captain America, was this latest crop of prime-time players an outgrowth of that same "hero" worship, and if so, then perhaps there is something Jewish rooted underneath this new season?

While television has long been a medium for science fiction, the genre has come in waves, and we are clearly heading to a different, more supernatural world.

Part of what's allowing us to get there is technology. Long gone are the days when we were given a choice between "The Munsters" or "The Addams Family" on only three networks. From TiVo to On Demand, television has come light years. Add those forces to cable and satellite and the choices are, well, astronomical.

Out Of The Ordinary

It was cable TV that came out of the gate early this summer. While the networks were gearing up for the fall, it launched a number of new shows. One of them was "Saving Grace."

While the term grace is usually thought of in a Christian context, the word is actually derived from the Hebrew Bible as chesed. Though "Saving Chesed" doesn't quite have the same ring to it, according to the show's creator, "Saving Grace" is a show about a woman who talks to an angel.

Creator Nancy Miller explains that the angel, Earl, is non-denominational. "He speaks to Grace in the language she grew up in. Grace came from a Catholic family, so he speaks in the language that she would understand," Ms. Miller said. "As we go on, you're going to find out that Earl is a last chance angel to a Jewish guy, and speaks from that culture to him. Later on, you're going to find out that Earl is a last chance angel to someone who is Muslim. So he speaks that language to him."

In addition to the cable stations, the networks also are channeling the spiritual and confronting the eschatological.

On Monday nights, NBC will air a show called "Journeyman" about a San Francisco newspaper reporter who travels through time and gets reunited with his long-lost fiancé who died in a mysterious plane crash. Interestingly, in Zoharic and Lurianic Kabbalah, communing with the dead is an act called yichud, and is a ritual that Rabbi Isaac Luria, one of the most influential men in the history of Jewish mysticism who lived during the 16th century, often performed at the grave.

Also, on ABC this fall will be "Pushing Daisies," a show about Ned, a pie maker with a mysterious ability to make the dead live again. The gift is not without its complications, however; if he touches this being a second time, they'll be dead permanently. If they live for more than 60 seconds, somebody else nearby will die.

While that may sound like a weirdly morbid game show, Ned actually resembles a shaman, again a concept not without Jewish roots. If it seems like a lot of hocus-pocus, according to Rabbi Gershon Winkler, author of several books on the subject of Jewish mysticism, "Shamanism and sorcery are not antithetical to the Hebrew Scriptures."

In his book "Magic of the Ordinary," Rabbi Winkler writes, "The notion of Jewish shamanism may seem like an oxymoron to a lot of people, but it happens to be an integral part of the Jewish tradition that has been suppressed for centuries."

While this may seem foreign to Jews of the 21st century, the reason is that it was associated with devils and demons and suppressed by the Catholic Church.

"Christians considered the Jew as the magician par excellence, a reputation that ultimately turned against them since, as practitioners of the occult, they were regarded by the church as demonic," according to Rabbi Winkler.

In another of his books, "Dybbuk: A Glimpse of the Supernatural in Jewish Tradition," he speaks to the issue of why now we see this trend toward the occult and a resurgence of interest in the supernatural. According to Rabbi Winkler, "A major factor behind modern man's renewed flirtation with the occult is his quest for meaning in life."

He says: "Trapped, the human creature opts for the achievement of powers outside the realm of the natural world."

TV As Bible

In light of the events of the past six years, as 9/11 poked a hole between East and West, media analysts and television critics have noted the shifts in the wider cultural landscape and have remarked on its reflection through the medium of television.

David Zurawik, author of "The Jews of Prime Time" and television critic at The Sun, says, "The reason it's happening now is the post-9/11 jitters. There's this sense that in America we don't know what's going on. I think there's a tremendous uncertainty in this country, a tremendous underlying anxiety. There hasn't been this kind of anxiety since the Great Depression and World War II."

Interestingly, it was during that very time when the fantastic era of comic books was first created, and the comic book hero was born. I brought up the issue that was still unresolved for me with Mr. Zurawik, though, that 9/11 was six years ago. Why was this new metaphysical phenomenon taking shape on fall TV in 2007?

I then shared with him a book that describes the era we are living in, while depicting the period during the birth of the comic book. About halfway into Michael Chabon's Pulitzer Prize-winning "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay," there's a passage where things change. Mr. Chabon has one of the main characters, Joe, and the creator of "The Escapist" transform, from fighting the forces of the Iron Chain, in battles that were increasingly grotesque and ornate "grinding Adolf Hitler's empire into paste," to creating a creature of the Other World.

Mr. Chabon has Joe create Luna Moth, "a creature of the night and of mystic regions where evil worked by means of spells and curses instead of bullets, torpedoes, or shells. Luna fought in the wonderworld against specters and demons."

I wondered aloud, "So as we've gone from television shows like '24' and 'Rescue Me' to this new season filled with fantasy, are we seeing a similar kind of transformation take place, a tipping point a metamorphosis?"

I ran this notion and the passage from Mr. Chabon's book by Mr. Zurawik, and he agreed, summing up the point simply, "For a while, Osama bin Laden was real. Now, he's a phantom we can't catch."

That seemed to explain so much. He then added, picking up on the hero idea again, "There's something otherworldly we have to try to attach ourselves to, for strength or purpose or for a reason to go on, so as not to be defeated."

He likened our time to the Cold War of the '50s, a time like today when we lived with anxiety and a threat that wasn't fully manifested. The show that summed up the era for Mr. Zurawik was none other than "Superman," and the other was "The Lone Ranger," a variation on a theme but with a different genre the Western. "Together," he said, "they combined the two great frontiers the Space Age and the frontier."

A former colleague of Mr. Zurawik, Diane Winston, who is now a Knight chair in media and religion at the University of Southern California, lent an additional perspective.

"The popularity of Westerns in [the 1950s] spoke to the Cold War mentality of good guys/bad guys, and the Americans as heroes who were strong and tough and macho in a cowboy way," she said. "We had a more conventional view of religion than today, when we're much more interested in spirituality."

I asked her about shows like "Heroes" that tap into that sense of both the hero and the otherworldly and have led to this new slew of fall shows that portray humans with extraordinary powers.

"Everyday, people find a new reason to be overwhelmed," Ms. Winston said, "whether it's the bridge collapsing or talk about earthquakes in California. We live in what feels to be uncertain times, all with the backdrop of 9/11. These things give us a sense of our own mortality and vulnerability.

"When we look to be entertained, we want to be soothed and calmed, we want to see things that make us feel as if people can triumph over death. All these supernatural shows feature heroes who can control what's going on. They speak to our deepest needs and fears."

I asked Ms. Winston if she sees these stories having deeper roots, mythical ones that go back to the Bible. Her immediate reply was, "I think television is the contemporary equivalent of the Bible. Not that television supersedes the Bible, but at a time when biblical language sounds foreign to us, we find similar stories of heroism, suffering, sacrifice on television, and they are like biblical morality stories."

Indeed, finding pop culture's pulse in the Bible is, and has been, more prevalent than a lot of us think. For example, you may not think a show about a vampire has much to do with Judaism. But it does on a few levels.

CBS's "Moonlight" will be about a city-dwelling vampire who attempts to resist his urge to kill and drink the blood of humans, but instead decides to help them. As it turns out, the earliest reference to a vampire is in the Bible. And, of course, one who tries to help people is practicing tikkun olam, repairing the world.

Helping to tie the thread together in these particular shows was something interesting that Rabbi Winkler told me. "There are many stories about the living dead in the Zohar," he said. "As for chesed, it is the ancient act of taking care of the dead. You're not going to get a 'thank-you' from the dead. It's altruistic, unconditional love."

Why all the interest now with such notions? "The obsession with the occult is a response trying to understand the great mystery of suffering of the innocent," he replied. " ... In our own time, every human being is thirsting for something beyond what is tangible, because everything is becoming too tangible, too instant, too accessible, and the soul is searching for mystery."

Scanning over the television landscape this fall, what's coming in clearly and noticeably is we are tuning in a new frequency. It's a channel that's projecting our collective psyche with shows that are far from reality TV, but instead cable and the networks have aimed their satellite dishes toward a higher orbit, one that's closer to God, steeped in spirituality and, in many ways, grounded in Judaism.

John Edwards: Working-Class Values and a Closely Held Faith

Thu, 20 Sep 2007 00:00:00 -0500

A major address on poverty would seem an ideal place for a Democratic presidential hopeful to toss in a mention of religious faith, particularly if he was on a ticket that narrowly lost the 2004 election to so-called "values voters."

But in long speeches on his signature issue this spring and summer, John Edwards said nothing about the Christian beliefs he says help underpin his antipoverty campaign.

He instead chose the more universal language of ethics and public policy. Poverty is as much "the great moral issue of our time," he said, as a practical threat to the economy and national security.

For Mr. Edwards, a Southern Baptist-turned-United Methodist, faith is deeply felt but intensely private, a refuge after family tragedy and a daily source of wisdom, but not a platform for politics.

"It's a very dangerous business that intersection" of religion and politics, Edwards said in an interview with the Monitor. "I don't like to talk about my faith openly. I do in answer to questions, but I don't usually bring it up myself."

His reticence owes as much to a Baptist upbringing that cast faith as a private relationship with God as the belief that a politician too closely identified with one religion cannot be inclusive in a diverse America.

"My belief in Christ plays an enormous role in the way I view the world," Edwards, a former North Carolina senator, said at a presidential forum on faith in June. "But I think I also understand the distinction between [my faith and] my job as president of the United States, my responsibility to be respectful of and to embrace all faith beliefs in this country.

"One of the problems that we've gotten into," he added, in an apparent allusion to President Bush, "is some identification of the president of the United States with a particular faith belief as opposed to showing great respect for all faith beliefs."

At a recent campaign stop, he went so far as to suggest that politicians should stay out of matters like abortion that were properly between an individual and their spiritual beliefs.

"Nobody made me God about this," he said at a rally in Wolfeboro, N.H., last month, after a question from the antiabortion director of a local Catholic group. "Because nobody made me God about it, I don't believe it's right for government to tell women what to do."

His reluctance to mix religion and politics is also a product of political considerations. Edwards has said that if Democrats stung by electoral losses suddenly start talking religion on the stump, they risk charges of opportunism and insincerity.

"People are naturally skeptical of any politician who talks at length and openly about their faith, because they assume, just like with a lot of things, that they do it for political gain," Edwards told the Monitor.

Uplifting blue-collar Americans

Edwards is far more at ease to the point of overkill, some critics have said talking about a more earthly source of his values: his mill-town childhood in Georgia and the Carolinas.

The son of a factory worker and a rural letter carrier, Edwards was the first person in his family to go to college. He has portrayed his rise from millworker's son to millionaire lawyer and US senator as proof that anyone can succeed if hurdles like poverty, bad schools, and inadequate health insurance are swept out of the way.

"I am still optimistic that America can be a country where anyone who works hard is able to get ahead and create a good life for their family," he said in an antipoverty speech in New Hampshire in March. "I am optimistic we can do these things because my own life says it is possible."

Many of his campaign pledges seem aimed at improving the lives of blue-collar Americans. A centerpiece is his plan to end poverty in 30 years through a mix of a higher minimum wage, stronger unions, an expanded housing voucher program, and tougher laws against predatory lending. His proposal would also create a million government-subsidized "steppingstone" jobs, plus new work and child-support requirements for fathers of children on welfare.

Unusual for a presidential candidate, he has also pushed for a larger American role including a cabinet-level post in the fight against global poverty. He says his $5 billion plan, with its focus on preventive health measures and schooling for every child on the planet, will restore America's battered moral standing in the world.

His efforts have gone beyond campaign-trail rhetoric. After leaving the Senate in 2004, Edwards raised $3 million to found The Center on Poverty, Work & Opportunity, an arm of the University of North Carolina Law School, his alma mater, that sponsors research and public forums on poverty.

Edwards, the center's director until announcing his bid for the presidency last December, had a particular interest in the working poor how to raise their wages and rates of union membership, associates there say.

Marion Crain, the associate director under Edwards and now the director, says Edwards spoke often of the state-subsidized college education that launched his career.

"He thought it was wrong to have a country premised on equality of opportunity where everyone can live the Horatio Alger dream and pull themselves up by their bootstraps, when in fact that's not the reality" for most people, Ms. Crain says. "The reality is shaped by public policies and laws and accidents of birth that leave people really ill-equipped to do that."

Besides his plan to end poverty, Edwards also backs a universal healthcare system financed by higher taxes on wealthy Americans and fees on employers without worker health insurance, and a "College for Everyone" program that pays one year of tuition at a public college for students willing to work part time.

Edwards's embrace of working-class America is matched by sometimes sharp attacks on the country's elite. He has vowed to end Bush-era tax cuts for well-to-do Americans, refuses campaign money from lobbyists and political action committees, and has taken bare-knuckled stances against big business.

"I don't want to sit at the table and negotiate with the insurance companies I want to beat them," he said in July at a steelworkers' union hall in gritty Georgetown, S.C., to applause. "I don't want to negotiate with the drug companies I want to beat them."

"There is a huge class consciousness to John," a friend, US bankruptcy Judge Rich Leonard of Raleigh, who didn't return telephone calls from the Monitor, told a North Carolina newspaper a few years ago. "I think it plays out in so many of his political decisions. I think his primary, overriding political view is to put the starting point in the same place for everybody."

Yet little about Edwards's life now evokes images of the common man. The folksy persona that helped launch his political career has been buffeted in recent months by what pundits call "the three H's": the $400 haircuts he charged to his campaign, his new 28,000-square-foot home in North Carolina, and his high-paying consulting job for a New York hedge fund.

"It's a well-known criticism, and that's the accusation of hypocrisy," says John Green, a senior fellow at the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life. "Given his populist message, many critics have noted that his lifestyle does not seem to fit the image of someone who wants to level the playing field."

But in his interview with the Monitor, on his campaign bus here last month, Edwards insisted that his personal wealth did not undercut his populist agenda.

"I think they're wrong," he said of his critics. "You could look at anybody's life and pick out particular things and say, 'Well, that's inconsistent.'

"It is true I worked at a hedge fund," he added. "And there's no doubt that one of the reasons I worked there was to earn some income.

"But it's also true that I started a poverty center at the University of North Carolina, I did humanitarian work in Africa, I started a college program for low-income kids in eastern North Carolina, I worked to help raise the minimum wage in six different state ballot initiatives, I helped organize workers, particularly low-income workers, into unions. All those things are indications of what I care about and what my priorities are."

An evolving faith

Edwards, the eldest of three siblings, was born in 1953 in Seneca, in the northwest corner of South Carolina. By the time his family landed in Robbins, N.C., another small town, a dozen years later, his father had risen from floor worker at a cotton mill to supervisor.

"My children were well fed and well clothed, and we lived in a decent house, but we had to be very careful with money because there was no extra," his mother, Bobbie Edwards, recalled in a phone interview with the Monitor.

His father advanced to production supervisor in a textile mill, but felt that his lack of a college degree stood in the way of further promotions.

"He knows what working people go through," Wallace Edwards says of his son.

Wallace and Bobbie Edwards taught Sunday School at the First Baptist Church in Robbins. As a boy, Edwards went to services regularly and attended revivals.

"Did the pastor preach hell and damnation? That's part of it, you know the consequences of sin," Mrs. Edwards says, recalling the church's leaders in those days. "But most of it was the love of God and the promises of God."

Though now seen as a linchpin of the activist Christian right, the Southern Baptist church had very different views about the role of faith in public life in the era of Edwards's childhood.

"We think of evangelical Protestants today as being extremely politically engaged and aware, but historically that hasn't been the case," says Laura Olson, a Clemson University professor who co-edited the book "Christian Clergy in American Politics." "Southern Baptists had for a very long time been very strong advocates of church-state separation and this idea that we don't want to force anyone's religious perspective on anyone else. They saw faith as a very individual thing between you and God."

After leaving home for college and law school, Edwards says, he drifted away from Christianity.

"There was a significant period of my life where I wasn't close to the Lord," Edwards says. "I wasn't praying. I wasn't seeking His advice and counsel. I wasn't always looking to Him, saying, as I pray, to do His will and not my own. I became more interested in my own desires and will than His will."

Hard-working, ambitious, and possessed of a silver tongue, Edwards charmed law-firm colleagues and juries and soon became North Carolina's top personal injury lawyer. He won record verdicts for victims of car accidents, faulty products, and botched medical procedures.

In 1990, at age 37, he was named the youngest member of the Inner Circle of Advocates, an invitation-only group of the country's 100 winningest personal injury lawyers.

The verdicts plaintiffs' lawyers typically keep 30 percent made him a millionaire many times over. But as he entered politics, they also exposed him to charges of being an "ambulance chaser" whose cases helped drive up healthcare and insurance costs. Edwards has defended his legal work as just one more example of his embrace of powerless people against corporate interests.

In 1996, his 16-year-old son Wade was killed in a car crash, devastating Edwards and his wife, Elizabeth. Both quit their law practices to grieve and reassess their lives.

"When Wade died, I was in intense pain and trying to deal with that pain and cope with it," Edwards said in the interview. His faith, he said, "just came roaring back to me."

He joined the United Methodist Church his wife's denomination and a Bible study group and began praying every day.

The loss of his son as well as his wife's diagnosis of breast cancer convinced him that many aspects of life were beyond his control.

"It just came roaring back to me how much I was dependent on my faith, on God, and that I was not in control," he said in the Monitor interview. The idea that "we can control the things around us, we can control what's going to happen tomorrow" is "how we get through the day," he said. But in reality, he said, "it's completely fake."

He does not believe that prayer can prevent illness or tragedy. "I did pray before my son died; I prayed intensely before Elizabeth was diagnosed with cancer and then rediagnosed," he says. "God in his wisdom decides what prayers to answer and what prayers not to answer."

Foray into public life

His decision to enter politics and eventually run for president, he says, was partly rooted in the biblical injunction to serve "others and to serve Him."

"What keeps me going on these 16-hour days is my desire to serve," he says, "and I think my faith plays a huge role in that."

In 1998, Edwards spent millions of dollars of his own money to unseat an incumbent Republican senator, Lauch Faircloth, and soon built up a voting record as a moderate-to-conservative Democrat. Through sharp-elbowed brinkmanship on Capitol Hill, he won North Carolina $250 million in disaster aid after hurricane Floyd in 1999.

But his only lead role in major legislation fell short of the mark. A patients' bill of rights bill he cosponsored in 2001 with Sens. John McCain (R) of Arizona and Edward Kennedy (D) of Massachusetts died because of the sponsors' refusal to accept a cap on legal damages patients could seek against health maintenance organizations and insurers.

Edwards served quietly for two years as a co-chair of the Senate Prayer Breakfast, a group typically dominated by Republican lawmakers. When Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts, a Catholic, selected Edwards as a running mate in the 2004 presidential race, Democratic strategists hoped that Edwards's Southern roots and mainline Protestantism would help balance the ticket.

But on the campaign trail, Edwards rarely linked his faith to his talk of "Two Americas" of haves and have-nots. He told a South Carolina newspaper at the time that his religion was a "private matter."

"There was a hope that Edwards would amplify Kerry's appeal to religious voters, particularly in the South that he was a kind of a Southern Everyman and that he would know how to use religious language and imagery in a way that people could recognize," says Stephen Chapman, a professor at Duke Divinity School in Durham, N.C. "In the end, he didn't do it not to the expectations that people had for him."

A longtime friend and adviser, Ed Turlington, says Edwards's Christianity is "part of his core" but plays a nuanced role in his policy decisions.

"He doesn't think before talking or making a proposal: 'What's my faith teach me on this one?' " Mr. Turlington said in an e-mail interview. "He acts and answers based on core beliefs arrived at over years of thinking, worshiping, and contemplating."

Edwards worshiped with Turlington at the nearly 4,000-member Edenton Street United Methodist Church in Raleigh. Since moving to Chapel Hill in 2005, his campaign said, Edwards has attended several churches but has yet to find a home church. Edwards says his Christianity is most explicitly a factor in his antipoverty initiatives. "I think the Lord speaks very clearly about that and our responsibilities about" helping the poor, he says.

In other areas, like universal healthcare, civil rights, and his opposition to the war in Iraq, the influence of faith is more diffuse. "I start from a really basic place," he says, "which is that we are all created equal and God doesn't have favorites among us. And that base belief, which is both in my mind faith-based and morality-based, it's in almost everything I do."

He says his opposition to gay marriage is grounded not in religious belief, but in a "gut" feeling with which he continues to wrestle.

Edwards has been as reluctant to speak of faith as he has to cede to the demands of religious critics.

In February, the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights asked Edwards to fire two campaign bloggers who had made what the group deemed anti-Catholic remarks on their personal blogs.

The bloggers eventually quit. But Edwards, despite saying their comments troubled him, had declined to fire them.

He said the bloggers had not meant to offend and believed conservative critics were exploiting the issue for political gain. In an interview with the website beliefnet.com, he said, "I decided to forgive [the bloggers] and stand by them, knowing there would be potential political consequences for that."

Jesuits spread word of God in virtual world

Fri, 27 Jul 2007 00:00:00 -0500

ROME - Catholic missionaries have always trekked to dangerous parts of the Earth to spread the word of God now they are being encouraged to go into the virtual realm of Second Life to save virtual souls.

In an article in Rome-based Jesuit journal La Civilta Cattolica, academic Antonio Spadaro urged fellow Catholics not to be scared of entering the virtual world which may be fertile ground for new converts wishing to better themselves.

"It's not possible to close our eyes to this phenomenon or rush to judge it," Spadaro said. "Instead it needs to be understood ... the best way to understand it is to enter it."

Second Life is a simulation game where players can create a virtual version of themselves an avatar and interact with other people in the three-dimensional world.

According to its Web site, it has a population of more than 8 million residents and millions of dollars change hands there every month.

"Is there (cyber) space for God?" Spadaro aaka in his article which says there are already virtual churches and temples serving countless religions. He quotes a Swedish Muslim who says his avatar prays regularly as he prays in real life.

Spadaro warns the uninitiated that "the erotic dimension is very present" in Second Life, that people can buy genitalia for their avatars in a world that is "open to any form of erotic stimulation from prostitution to pedophilia."

While the virtual world might be a refuge for some people seeking to flee the real one, it is also full of people seeking something more from life, including, possibly, religious enlightenment, he said.

"Deep down, the digital world can be considered, in its way, mission territory," he said. "Second Life is somewhere where the opportunity to meet people and to grow should not be missed, therefore, any initiative that can inspire the residents in a positive way should be considered opportune."

Filmmakers put their faith in the Gospel

Mon, 30 Jul 2007 00:00:00 -0500

Jeff Clanagan wants to ride Tyler Perry's coattails.

So does 20th Century Fox.

They are pairing up to make several Gospel-inspired films that are much like the ones that have made Perry a sensation. Perry, a 37-year-old producer, writer, director and star, has shown Hollywood the gold to be mined from Gospel-infused entertainment.

Fox and Clanagan are pinning their initial hopes on a movie version of the popular play "Mama I Want to Sing." Scheduled to come out in March, starring R&B singers Ciara and Patty LaBelle, "Mama" is the first of several films that Clanagan will make under a deal with Fox Home Entertainment division FoxFaith.

Clanagan's goal is to build a full-fledged studio that makes, markets and distributes theatrical movies for African American and Latino audiences. His company, Codeblack Entertainment, already has seen success by making an eclectic group of low-budget movies and distributing them on DVD, such as Steve Harvey's comedy series. He's made a couple of faith-based films on DVD, including "Preaching to the Choir."

"These movies are not really recognized by the Hollywood elite," Clanagan said. " 'Mama' takes it to another level."

After "Mama," Clanagan will release "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," which has grossed $10 million as a stage play. Clanagan will begin production on several faith-inspired novels by ReShonda Tate Billingsley, such as "Let the Church Say Amen" and "Blessings in Disguise."

"Tyler was a pioneer in showing that gospel entertainment was more commercial than anyone had ever thought," Clanagan said. "Faith-based product will be our bread and butter."

Before Perry came along, few of the Hollywood majors dabbled in faith-based entertainment.

Two years ago, Fox passed up the opportunity to release Perry's film "Diary of a Mad Black Woman." "Diary," which cost about $20 million to make and market, went on to gross $50 million at the domestic box office alone. Lions Gate, the studio that snatched up Perry, estimates that over a five-year period, he will deliver gross revenue of $500 million to $600 million.

20th Century Fox created FoxFaith after Mel Gibson's success with "The Passion of the Christ." The studio was looking to capitalize on the Christian market by making lower-budget films with limited theatrical release.

The division has distributed several Christian films including the DVD of "Woman Thou Art Loosed," a film based on the popular novel by the Rev. T.D. Jakes. It envisions releasing one or two faith-based films a year.

"I would say that Jeff is more of a supplier of gospel product than a creator, as Tyler Perry is," said David Bixler, senior vice president of acquisitions for 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment. "He is able to bring us product that fits very well into our current strategy of acquiring high-profile, high-concept gospel films."

"Mama" is a contemporary version of the original stage play that was inspired by the life of Doris Troy, the singer discovered by James Brown who wrote and performed the 1963 hit "Just One Look." The play, which has traveled to Japan, Germany, Switzerland and Austria, has grossed about $25 million in ticket sales.

Clanagan got his start in the film business through an unglamorous back route: video distribution. In the late 1990s, he co-founded Urbanworks Entertainment and in his biggest coup landed video distribution rights to such classics as "The Cosby Show" and "Fat Albert" just as the DVD market was maturing.

He produced and distributed the Platinum Comedy Series, featuring comedians Dave Chappelle, D.L. Hughley, Steve Harvey and Cedric the Entertainer, right after their box-office hit "The Original Kings of Comedy." He also snagged the exclusive DVD rights to the BET Network's programming.

Clanagan heard about "Mama" during his early days as a concert promoter, when he pushed such acts as Luther Vandross and Ready for the World. The play was so popular that competing acts would seek dates that would not put them head-to-head against it.

Even before Perry released "Diary," Clanagan called "Mama" creator Vy Higgenson. After nearly four years and many conversations, Clanagan finally persuaded her to sign over the theatrical and home video rights to the play.

"Since it had been something that had been my baby for so many years, it was difficult to turn it over to someone who I didn't know," said Higgenson, the sister of the late Doris Troy. "One of the things that Jeff said, and we want to hold him to his word, is that he wanted to be the first black-owned studio. And I like that. I like wanting to help to contribute toward that."

Clanagan has had a knack for marrying concepts with pop culture trends, said his high school classmate and college roommate, Rodney Moore.

"I first noticed it in his junior year in high school, when we started doing promotions for parties and social events," said Moore, now an entertainment lawyer with the firm Greenberg Traurig. The pair paid their living expenses at the University of Washington by organizing events and parties.

"We lived comfortably in college," Moore recalled.

Clanagan says each of his feature film productions will be made for less than $7 million. Making faith-based films is not much different from promoting concerts in that he is moving to fill a niche that Hollywood has not been able to grasp, he said.

"It is hard for African Americans and Latinos to get access at the studios," Clanagan said. "I want to provide that access for up-and-coming filmmakers. This is the chance to produce family-friendly movies that don't perpetuate negative stereotypes that are often portrayed in the media."

Ayn Rand's Literature of Capitalism

Sat, 15 Sep 2007 00:00:00 -0500

One of the most influential business books ever written is a 1,200-page novel published 50 years ago, on Oct. 12, 1957. It is still drawing readers; it ranks 388th on Amazon.com's best-seller list. ("Winning," by John F. Welch Jr., at a breezy 384 pages, is No. 1,431.)

The book is "Atlas Shrugged," Ayn Rand's glorification of the right of individuals to live entirely for their own interest.

For years, Rand's message was attacked by intellectuals whom her circle labeled "do-gooders," who argued that individuals should also work in the service of others. Her book was dismissed as an homage to greed. Gore Vidal described its philosophy as "nearly perfect in its immorality."

But the book attracted a coterie of fans, some of them top corporate executives, who dared not speak of its impact except in private. When they read the book, often as college students, they now say, it gave form and substance to their inchoate thoughts, showing there is no conflict between private ambition and public benefit.

"I know from talking to a lot of Fortune 500 C.E.O.'s that 'Atlas Shrugged' has had a significant effect on their business decisions, even if they don't agree with all of Ayn Rand's ideas," said John A. Allison, the chief executive of BB&T, one of the largest banks in the United States.

"It offers something other books don't: the principles that apply to business and to life in general. I would call it complete," he said.

One of Rand's most famous devotees is Alan Greenspan, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve, whose memoir, "The Age of Turbulence," will be officially released Monday.

Mr. Greenspan met Rand when he was 25 and working as an economic forecaster. She was already renowned as the author of "The Fountainhead," a novel about an architect true to his principles. Mr. Greenspan had married a member of Rand's inner circle, known as the Collective, that met every Saturday night in her New York apartment. Rand did not pay much attention to Mr. Greenspan until he began praising drafts of "Atlas," which she read aloud to her disciples, according to Jeff Britting, the archivist of Ayn Rand's papers. He was attracted, Mr. Britting said, to "her moral defense of capitalism."

Rand's free-market philosophy was hard won. She was born in 1905 in Russia. Her life changed overnight when the Bolsheviks broke into her father's pharmacy and declared his livelihood the property of the state. She fled the Soviet Union in 1926 and arrived later that year in Hollywood, where she peered through a gate at the set where the director Cecil B. DeMille was filming a silent movie, "King of Kings."

He offered her a ride to the set, then a job as an extra on the film and later a position as a junior screenwriter. She sold several screenplays and intermittently wrote novels that were commercial failures, until 1943, when fans of "The Fountainhead" began a word-of-mouth campaign that helped sales immensely.

Shortly after "Atlas Shrugged" was published in 1957, Mr. Greenspan wrote a letter to The New York Times to counter a critic's comment that "the book was written out of hate." Mr. Greenspan wrote: " 'Atlas Shrugged' is a celebration of life and happiness. Justice is unrelenting. Creative individuals and undeviating purpose and rationality achieve joy and fulfillment. Parasites who persistently avoid either purpose or reason perish as they should."

Rand's magazine, The Objectivist, later published several essays by Mr. Greenspan, including one on the gold standard in 1966.

Rand called "Atlas" a mystery, "not about the murder of man's body, but about the murder and rebirth of man's spirit." It begins in a time of recession. To save the economy, the hero, John Galt, calls for a strike against government interference. Factories, farms and shops shut down. Riots break out as food becomes scarce.

Rand said she "set out to show how desperately the world needs prime movers and how viciously it treats them" and to portray "what happens to a world without them."

The book was released to terrible reviews. Critics faulted its length, its philosophy and its literary ambitions. Both conservatives and liberals were unstinting in disparaging the book; the right saw promotion of godlessness, and the left saw a message of "greed is good." Rand is said to have cried every day as the reviews came out.

Rand had a reputation for living for her own interest. She is said to have seduced her most serious reader, Nathaniel Branden, when he was 24 or 25 and she was at least 50. Each was married to someone else. In fact, Mr. Britting confirmed, they called their spouses to a meeting at which the pair announced their intention to make the mentor-protégé relationship a sexual one.

"She wasn't a nice person, " said Darla Moore, vice president of the private investment firm Rainwater Inc. "But what a gift she's given us."

Ms. Moore, a benefactor of the University of South Carolina, spoke of her debt to Rand in 1998, when the business school at the university was named in Ms. Moore's honor. "As a woman and a Southerner," she said, "I thrived on Rand's message that only quality work counted, not who you are."

Rand's idea of "the virtue of selfishness," Ms. Moore said, "is a harsh phrase for the Buddhist idea that you have to take care of yourself."

Some business leaders might be unsettled by the idea that the only thing members of the leadership class have in common is their success. James M. Kilts, who led turnarounds at Gillette, Nabisco and Kraft, said he encountered "Atlas" at "a time in college life when everybody was a nihilist, anti-establishment, and a collectivist." He found her writing reassuring because it made success seem rational.

"Rand believed that there is right and wrong," he said, "that excellence should be your goal."

John P. Stack is one business executive who has taken Rand's ideas to heart. He was chief executive of Springfield Remanufacturing Company, a retooler of tractor engines in Springfield, Mo., when its parent company, International Harvester, divested itself of the firm in the recession of 1982, the year Rand died.

Having lost his sole customer in a struggling Rust Belt city, Mr. Stack says, he took action like a hero out of "Atlas." He created an "open book" company in which employees were transparently working in their own interest.

Mr. Stack says that he assigned every job a bottom line value and that every salary, including his own, was posted on a company ticker daily. Workplaces, he said, are notoriously undemocratic, emotionally charged and political.

Mr. Stack says his free market replaced all that with rational behavior. A machinist knew exactly what his working hour contributed to the bottom line, and therefore the cost of slacking off. This, Mr. Stack said, was a manifestation of the philosophy of objectivism in "Atlas": people guided by reason and self-interest.

"There is something in your inner self that Rand draws out," Mr. Stack said. "You want to be a hero, you want to be right, but by the same token you have to question yourself, though you must not listen to interference thrown at you by the distracters. The lawyers told me not to open the books and share equity." He said he defied them. " 'Atlas' helped me pursue this idiot dream that became SRC."

Mr. Stack said he was 19 and working in a factory when a manager gave him a copy of the book. "It's the best business book I ever read," he said. "I didn't do well in school because I was a big dreamer. To get something that tells you to take your dreams seriously, that's an eye opener."

Mr. Stack said he gave a copy to his son, Tim Stack, 25, who was so inspired that he went to work for a railroad, just like the novel's heroine, Dagny Taggart.

Every year, 400,000 copies of Rand's novels are offered free to Advanced Placement high school programs. They are paid for by the Ayn Rand Institute, whose director, Yaron Brook, said the mission was "to keep Rand alive."

Last year, bookstores sold 150,000 copies of the book. It continues to hold appeal, even to a younger generation. Mark Cuban, the owner of the Dallas Mavericks, who was born in 1958, and John P. Mackey, the chief executive of Whole Foods, who was 3 when the book was published, have said they consider Rand crucial to their success.

The book's hero, John Galt, also continues to live on. The subcontractor hired to demolish the former Deutsche Bank building, which was damaged when the World Trade Center towers fell, was the John Galt Corporation. It was removed from the job last month after a fire at the building killed two firefighters.

In Chicago, there is John Galt Solutions, a producer of software for supply chain companies like Tastykake. The founder and chief executive of the company, Annemarie Omrod, said she considered the character an inspiration.

"We were reading the book," she said, when she and Kai Trepte were thinking of starting the company. "For us, the book symbolized the importance of growing yourself and bettering yourself without hindering other people. John Galt took all the great minds and started a new society.

"Some of our customers don't know the name, though after they meet us, they want to read the book," she went on. "Our sales reps have a problem, however. New clients usually ask: 'Hey, where is John Galt? How come I'm not important enough to rate a visit from John Galt?' "

Articles of Faith:

Thu, 13 Sep 2007 00:00:00 -0500

Religion is spreading 'like a cancer' among the armed forces of North Korea, according to this story from AsiaNews. Don't delude yourself that it couldn't happen here. Carol Sarler, writing in today's Times, is by no means a lone voice in bewailing the manifold sins and wickedness of religion in the UK. Sarler and Dawkins should take note of the apparent truth that nothing propels a religion, in particular Christianity, to success like persecution. North Korea is just one example. It is a 'closed' country and Open Doors has been running a three-year prayer campaign. 'The goal is to have at least 1,008 prayer warriors, who each pray for ten minutes a week,' the website says. The cancer warning reads like a sign the campaign is working just a little bit too effectively. Earlier this week, we reported a British Library Mori poll that showed how death inspires faith.

According to AsiaNews' Joseph Yun Li-sun, a booklet prepared by the Propaganda Department of the North Korean Army titled Saving Our Soldiers from the Threat of Religion acknowledges that religion is spreading among soldiers and orders that it be eradicated without delay.

He writes: 'Religion 'is spreading like a cancer inside North Korea's armed forces, whose mission is to defend Socialism;' for this reason it must be eradicated without delay since it comes from our enemies from around the world, this according to a booklet prepared by the Propaganda Department of the North Korean Army titled Saving Our Soldiers from the Threat of Religion. A copy reached a member of the Committee for the Democratisation of North Korea, a group of political exiles and refugees that had it translated and released.

We should not look, listen, read the documents, broadcastings and video or audio materials made by the enemy. The enemy is using radio and TV to launch false propaganda through well-made, strategic news and intrigue,' the booklet warned.

'They are placing spies within international delegations entering our borders to spread their religions and superstitious beliefs and win our citizens over to their side. [. . .]

'Religion and superstition are like poison that corrupts socialism and paralyses class consciousness. Our soldiers must, more than ever, instigate a revolutionary awakening to defy the enemies' manoeuvres.'

Religious worship is allowed in North Korea as long as it is the personality cult of Kim Jong-Il and his father, the late Kim Il-Sung.

Followers of traditional religions have obstacles to surmount, especially Buddhists and Christians, such as joining Communist Party-controlled organisations.

Those who do not join are persecuted, often brutally and violently. Anyone engaged in any kind of missionary activity is the recipient of a similar treatment.

Since the end of the Korean War in 1953 about 300,000 Christians have disappeared in North Korea - any priest or nun who was alive then has disappeared, most likely persecuted to death.

About 100,000 are surviving in labour camps with hunger and torture as their main companions and, for some, with death just around the corner.

This is corroborated by former North Korean officials and ex prisoners who have said that Christians in the camps are singled out for especially harsh treatment.'

North Korea is a true humanitarian tragedy on a massive scale. It is little known about because the Stalinist state is so closed. So much easier, isn't it, to persecute nice, open, honest, Catholic, middle-class people like the McCanns than address more complex human rights abuses elsewhere in the world. I'll be praying for them and for the suffering masses in North Korea tonight.

See more on North Korea from AsiaPundit, from which the sweet tourist pic of two North Korean children is taken.

Meanwhile, in South Korea, where Christianity is burgeoning to be Christian and from where missionaries have been targeting Muslims for evangelisation, Catholics have seen fit to pelt the car of their Cardinal Archbishop with eggs and rubbish. Catholic Online has the reason why.

Reconnecting with Israel

Sun, 16 Sep 2007 00:00:00 -0500

As the only Jewish kid in his small New Mexico hometown, Ben Rubin says he was "clueless" about Israel.

And he stayed that way. The 26-year-old Los Angeles marketing executive had never been to the Middle East. He was unfamiliar with details of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Because his family immigrated to the United States from Russia in 1916, well before the Holocaust, he felt no personal connection to the land as a safe haven for Jews.

According to a new study, the ties between Israel and young American Jews are weakening as they find unparalleled acceptance and success in mainstream U.S. society, increasingly intermarry, develop an ethnic identity more individual than collective, and form a more nuanced view of Israel than that of older generations.

But for Rubin, that all changed this summer, when he visited Israel as part of a multimillion-dollar program launched by the American Jewish community and the Israeli government to deepen connections with young Jews.

Rubin said he was transformed by the 10-day visit, during which he saw the Holocaust Museum, the battlefields of Masada and the Golan Heights, the ancient Western Wall and modern nightclubs, the Negev Desert and the Dead Sea. Now he reads the Jerusalem Post online every morning, and he has applied for a job with a Jewish community organization and went to a Rosh Hashana service last week for the first time in a few years.

"Going to Israel really opened my eyes to what the Jewish people have gone through to survive," Rubin said. "It's really made me want to do what I can to support Israel."

The program, called Taglit-birthright israel, is an unparalleled effort among ethnic communities that are working to reconnect young Americans with the lands of their ancestors. Other communities also attempt to forge ties -- the Japanese government sends a dozen or so young Japanese American leaders to Japan each year and Taiwan's government sends about 1,000 Chinese Americans to the island in an annual program dubbed "the love boat."

But the Jewish program dwarfs those numbers. Since its inception in December 1999, the birthright program has sent 150,000 young Jews, most of them from North America, to Israel. Initially funded by Jewish philanthropists Charles Bronfman, Michael Steinhardt and others, the $80-million annual program is now financed by individuals, Jewish community organizations and the Israeli government.

"I don't think there's really any community quite like American Jews in trying so hard to maintain this link," said Don Nakanishi, director of the UCLA Asian American Studies Center. "In social science literature," Nakanishi said, "there's a straight linear line, with every generation showing greater acculturation and distance from where people came from." Indeed, the decline in attachment to Israel among youths has, for some, stirred fears that the Jewish state's survival could be at stake if American Jews begin to withdraw their financial support and political firepower.

Alienation from Israel is not growing in all quarters, however. Orthodox Jews, for instance, maintain strong ties and constitute a growing segment of the American Jewish community at nearly 10%.

In the broader community, age plays a role in support. According to a study by Steven M. Cohen of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion and Ari Y. Kelman of UC Davis, two-thirds of Jews younger than 35 identified themselves as pro-Israel. Forty-eight percent of them said the destruction of Israel would be a personal tragedy and 54% were comfortable with the idea of a Jewish state. In contrast, 78% of those older than 65 said Israel's destruction would be a tragedy and 81% said they were comfortable with a Jewish state.

Younger Jews were less likely than older Jews to express pride, excitement and high emotional attachment toward Israel. They were also less likely to talk about Israel with friends, identify themselves as pro-Israel or Zionists or feel that caring about Israel is an important part of being Jewish.

Cohen said several factors explained the growing disconnect. For older Jews, memories of the Holocaust, the Jewish state's birth and victories over Arab states in 1967 and 1973 cast Israel as a heroic underdog in a treacherous region, he said. But many younger Jews don't remember those events, he said, and instead grew up to see Israel command the Mideast's largest military and engage in sometimes controversial actions in Lebanon and the Palestinian territories.

In addition, the tight communities once bound together by housing, workplace and educational discrimination have dissipated as many Jews fully integrate into the American mainstream. Other studies have found that younger Jews enjoy positive, individual ethnic identities but have little awareness of or affiliation with communal organizations, such as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.

"If this trend continues, we'll have fewer Jews passionately committed to Israel in years to come," Cohen said. "That means Israel's sense of mission as a sovereign state for the Jewish people will be diminished."

The growing evidence of youthful alienation from Israel has sparked a lively debate among American Jews on the best way to rekindle ties.

Rabbi Chaim Seidler Feller, director of the Hillel at UCLA program, said the state of Israel should demonstrate more Jewish values, such as social justice, to attract the natural idealism of youth. More proactive measures to help Darfur refugees, for instance, would help restore the state's image as a beacon of hope and refuge, he said.

Daniel Sokatch, executive director of the Los Angeles-based Progressive Jewish Alliance, argued that the organized Jewish community must begin to teach youth about Israel in a more objective way. In a recent meeting with several Jews in their 20s, he said, only one expressed a passion for Israel; others were ambivalent or not particularly interested. Their top concerns were not Israel, but labor rights, immigrant rights, the rich-poor gap and the war in Iraq, he said.

"We don't do Israel in a way that works for young people," said Sokatch, whose organization has recruited many young Jews. "We teach young Jews to whitewash the history of Israel and then they see CNN and learn Israel does right and wrong, but there's no room to have that conversation in the Jewish community. That's precisely why young people are dropping out."

The single most effective way to deepen ties, the Cohen-Kelman study found, was arranging visits to Israel.

The organized Jewish community has sponsored trips to Israel for years. In Los Angeles, about 500 students travel to Israel each year as part of exchanges involving 36 Los Angeles and Israeli schools, said John Fishel, president of the Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles.

To some, however, that number was insufficient. About a decade ago, an Israeli government official and philanthropist Steinhardt approached Bronfman, a Canada-born billionaire who made his fortune in liquor, to give high school students free vouchers for trips to Israel.

"I said that's a formula to break the Jewish world financially. It's ridiculous," Bronfman recalled in a phone interview from his New York home. "But it's a heck of an idea."

Bronfman and Steinhardt ran with the idea, collectively pitching in $16 million and collecting another $4 million to send 8,000 students to Israel in December 1999. They followed up with studies showing the trips cultivated a significant increase in attachment to Israel. After that, the Israeli government and Jewish community organizations joined the effort.

The trip is now regarded as a rite of passage for many young Jews.

An important program component, Bronfman said, is having several members of the Israeli Defense Forces accompany each group. The intent is to give young American Jews a chance to get to know their Israeli peers.

For some, the encounters ranked as among the trip's most memorable and powerful moments.

Evan Raff, a 23-year-old Los Angeles health policy analyst with the Rand Corp., said the soldiers helped him see he could be proudly Jewish without being religious, since some were agnostic or atheist.

When he landed at the Tel Aviv airport, Raff said he was greeted with signs that read "Welcome Home." A visit to the Holocaust Museum helped him reconnect with the struggle to create a homeland, he said. An encounter with a Palestinian Muslim stirred sympathy and a new understanding of the complexities of the conflict. A visit to a kibbutz showed him not religious zealots but "progressive, ambitious people" who wanted a place for Jews to live.

"I had let this sense of being Jewish in my core get a little dusty and forgotten," Raff said. "But the whole trip was an awakening that...Israel is not necessarily a place for religious people but an idea a lot of people hold on to to help define them and their Jewish identity."

What's in a Name? Parsing the 'God Particle,' the Ultimate Metaphor

Tue, 07 Aug 2007 00:00:00 -0500

We need to talk about the "God particle."

Recently in this newspaper, I reported on the attempts by various small armies of physicists to discover an elementary particle central to the modern conception of nature. Technically it's called the Higgs boson, after Peter Higgs, an English physicist who conceived of it in 1964. It is said to be responsible for endowing the other elementary particles in the universe with mass.

In a stroke of either public relations genius or disaster, Leon M. Lederman, the former director of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, or Fermilab, referred to the Higgs as "the God particle" in the book of the same name he published with the science writer Dick Teresi in 1993. To Dr. Lederman, it made metaphorical sense, he explained in the book, because the Higgs mechanism made it possible to simplify the universe, resolving many different seeming forces into one, like tearing down the Tower of Babel. Besides, his publisher complained, nobody had ever heard of the Higgs particle.

In some superficial ways, the Higgs has lived up to its name. Several Nobel Prizes have been awarded for work on the so-called Standard Model, of which the Higgs is the central cog. Billions of dollars are being spent on particle accelerators and experiments to find it, inspect it and figure out how it really works.

But physicists groan when they hear it referred to as the "God particle" in newspapers and elsewhere (and the temptation to repeat it, given science reporters' desperate need for colorful phrases in an abstract and daunting field, is irresistible). Even when these physicists approve of what you have written about their craft, they grumble that the media are engaging in sensationalism, or worse.

Last week a reader accused me of trying to attract religiously inclined readers by throwing out "God meat" for them.

It was not the first time that I had been accused of using religion to sell science. Or was it using science to sell religion?

Last year, I described the onset five billion years ago of dark energy, the mysterious force that seems to be accelerating the expansion of the cosmos, with the words "as if God had turned on an antigravity machine."

More people than I had expected wrote in wanting to know why I had ruined a perfectly good article by dragging mythical deities into it.

My guide in all of this, of course, the biggest name-dropper in science, is Albert Einstein, who mentioned God often enough that one could imagine he and the "Old One" had a standing date for coffee or tennis. To wit: "The Lord is subtle, but malicious he is not."

Or this quote regarding the pesky randomness of quantum mechanics: "The theory yields much, but it hardly brings us closer to the Old One's secrets. I, in any case, am convinced that He does not play dice."

With Einstein, we always knew where he stood in relation to "God" it was shorthand for the mystery and rationality of nature, the touchstones of the scientific experience. Cosmic mystery, Einstein said, is the most beautiful experience we can have, "the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science."

"He who does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer feel amazement," he continued, "is as good as a snuffed-out candle."

If we didn't already have a name for the object of Einstein's "cosmic religion," we would have to invent one. It's just too bad that the name has been tainted and trivialized by association with the image of a white-bearded Caucasian-looking creature who sits in the clouds attended by harp-strumming angels.

If Einstein were around today, he would likely be scolded every other time he opened his metaphor-laden mouth for giving aid and comfort to the creationists. Indeed, the architects of intelligent design have not been shy about interpreting his aversion to divine dice playing and a remark wondering if God had any choice in creating the world, as support for an intelligent designer. Einstein didn't mean it that way, of course. He was only using a metaphor to wonder if it was possible to build more than one logically consistent universe. That's a question that still provokes hot debate.

As it happened, Dr. Lederman's book came out about the time that creationism was on the rise in this country, and "my colleagues gave me hell," as he put it in a recent e-mail message.

Neither time nor criticism seems to have dimmed Dr. Lederman's taste for metaphor or sense of humor. Only two weeks ago, he titled an article about particle physics "The God Particle, Et Al." Well, O.K., he had a book to sell.

It's not easy to stand up for a moniker as over the top as the one that Dr. Lederman used one we are likely to hear again and again in the next couple of years as the generation-long hunt for the Higgs particle reaches a climax. But I have to applaud Dr. Lederman's spirit. Historians have suggested that it was a mistake for the antiwar movement of the 1960s to yield the flag a powerful symbol of patriotism to the war's supporters, and likewise I think it would be a mistake for scientists to yield such a powerful metaphor to creationists and religious fundamentalists.

The Higgs particle is not God, but as theorized it is a piece of the sublime beauty of nature that had Einstein figuratively on his knees. I can't prove it, but I can't help wondering if Einstein, a man with what the geneticist Barbara McClintock called "a feeling for the organism" in this case the universe was aided in his intuition by being able to personify nature in such a familiar and irreverent way.

Is there a God who worries about the flight of every sparrow? Einstein said that was a naïve and even abhorrent idea.

Do I believe the universe is a mystery? Absolutely. Is that mystery ultimately explicable? Intellectual empires from Plato to Einstein have been founded on that presumption, bold and optimistic as it is, and I wouldn't advise betting against it.

In the meantime, I wouldn't dream of depriving any future Einstein of his or her rhetorical or metaphorical tools.

Not to mention myself.

Fall TV season programs are out of this world

Sun, 22 Jul 2007 00:00:00 -0500

Academy Award winner Holly Hunter arrives in a weekly television series tomorrow night with the debut of cable channel TNT's Saving Grace. And while the drama about a hard-drinking police detective who is saved by a tobacco-chewing angel isn't exactly divine entertainment, it is the first in a wave of spiritually-themed TV shows about to wash over prime time - the next semi-big attempt by Hollywood to speak to the post-Sept. 11 hole in America's soul.

This fall, the networks will introduce nine new series featuring characters with supernatural, spiritual or otherworldly powers. That crew of freshmen shows will join six returning programs steeped in beyond-the-pale elements: Ghost Whisperer (CBS), Lost (ABC), Supernatural (CW), Smallville (CW), Medium (NBC) and Heroes (NBC).

The new fall program generating the most pre-air buzz is ABC's Pushing Daisies, an offbeat dramedy from Barry Sonnenfeld (Men in Black) and Bryan Fuller (Dead Like Me) about a young man with a special gift: He can bring people back from the dead just by touching them.

There is one catch: If he touches them a second time, they are dead. Life and death get very complicated when the hero (Lee Pace) brings his childhood sweetheart back to life and the two of them want nothing more than to spend the rest of their lives touching each other.

Another intriguing ABC fall series, Eli Stone, stars Jonny Lee Miller (Trainspotting) as a shark of a lawyer who suddenly gets religion after becoming personally involved in a case and seeing visions of dead relatives and pop stars (George Michael singing "Faith"). The show's producers describe Miller's character as "being on a journey" to becoming a "spiritual prophet."

Each of the networks has at least one such series premiering this fall. On CBS, Moonlight follows the exploits of a vampire that helps people instead of feasting on their blood. New Amsterdam (Fox) showcases a modern-day, New York City homicide detective who was born in the 17th century - and just won't die.

CW's Reaper features a 21-year-old whose parents sold his soul to the devil when he was a child, and now the young man is put to work collecting other souls for Satan. On NBC, Journeyman tells the story of a newspaper reporter who travels back in time to change people's lives for the better.

For a quick and easy explanation of all the prime-time prophets, angels and superhuman do-gooders, one need look no further than NBC and its hit series Heroes, the only one of more than a dozen serialized dramas to strike ratings gold last season. The series tells the story of ordinary people who discover they have extraordinary powers and come together to save New York and the world from an apocalyptic attack.

Hollywood is positively Pavlovian in the way that it consistently goes overboard in trying to imitate the latest hit. But that business-based explanation for the crush of new series raises the deeper cultural question of why Heroes was a hit in the first place.

Finding comfort
Diane Winston, Knight chair in media and religion at the University of Southern California, says the popularity of series like Heroes reflects more than just post-Sept. 11 jitters.

"The events of 9/11 have had a great cultural impact, but it's not just 9/11," Winston said. "There are a number of other things during that last six years that have also made us see how precarious life can be: Hurricane Katrina, the tsunami in southeast Asia and the mounting casualty and death toll of a catastrophic war in Iraq."

While it might be expected that such a steady drumbeat of death and destruction would have driven more people to church, Winston says that's not the case: Research consistently shows that institutional religion has not gotten "much of a bump" from all the angst.

What has grown tremendously, however, is the number of people who self-identify in surveys as "religious" but answer "none" when asked for their religion.

"That finding reflects the fact that people are less interested in organized systems of belief than in finding answers that work for them - especially in what we term supernatural and spiritual ideas," says Winston.

"People aren't necessarily getting comfort from going to a church service, but they are getting comfort from hearing that there's life after death, there's someone taking care of them, there are good people in the world and that their lives have meaning. And all of this contributes to the popularity of TV programs that tell us those sorts of reassuring stories."

Television worship
The final scene of the pilot for Saving Grace finds Hunter's character, Oklahoma City Police Detective Grace Hanadarko, and her nephew at a memorial wall at the Murrah Federal Building, where 168 people were killed by a terrorist truck bomb in 1995.

Viewers find out in the scene that the boy's mother, Detective Hanadarko's sister, was one of the victims of that attack - and that the police officer was indirectly responsible for her sister being in the building that day.

As the nephew and aunt discuss their beliefs about an afterlife and whether the bomber who was convicted and executed for the crime is in hell, the hour ends with an unmistakable and comforting sign of the angel's invisible presence at their side.

Sheri Parks, associate professor of television and popular culture at the University of Maryland, sees a connection between widely held spiritual beliefs and the arrival of characters like the angel named Earl (Leon Rippy) in Saving Grace.

"The majority of Americans say they believe in angels, and they believe in very personal angels, the kind who help them find parking spaces, win games and pass tests," Parks says.

"In some ways, people are going to their places of worship when they turn on their TV sets to watch a show like this."

Iranian president: Stone part of 'Great Satan'

Mon, 02 Jul 2007 00:00:00 -0500

TEHRAN, Iran - Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has rejected a proposal by Oscar-winning movie director Oliver Stone to make a film about him because Stone is part of the "Great Satan" cultural establishment, a semiofficial news agency reported.

"I sent a negative answer by Ahmadinejad to Oliver Stone," the Fars agency quoted Mehdi Kalhor, media adviser to the president, as saying Sunday. "It is right that this person is considered part of the opposition in the U.S., but opposition in the U.S. is a part of the Great Satan."

The term the "Great Satan" dates back to Iran's late supreme leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who first called the United States that after the 1979 Islamic Revolution overthrew the country's U.S.-supported shah.

Stone's publicist in New York said the director had not been formally notified that his proposal to make a documentary about Ahmadinejad had been turned down. But in a statement released Monday, Stone said he wished the Iranian people well.

"I have been called a lot of things, but never a great satan," Stone said in the statement. "I wish the Iranian people well, and only hope their experience with an inept, rigid ideologue president goes better than ours."

Kalhor said Stone sent his proposal more than a year ago, but Iran decided against allowing him to make the film.

"We believe that the American cinema industry lacks culture and art," Kalhor was quoted as saying by Fars, which is considered close to Iran's elite Revolutionary Guard.

Stone, who won best director Oscars for his movies "Born on the Fourth of July" and "Platoon" and a screenwriting Oscar for "Midnight Express," has made movies about former U.S. presidents Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy and a documentary about Cuban President Fidel Castro.

He has been critical of President Bush. Last year in Spain, he said he was "ashamed" of his country over the war in Iraq and U.S. policies in response to the terror attacks of Sept. 11.

It's a 'Miracle' for Minear, Holland, ABC

Tue, 28 Aug 2007 00:00:00 -0500

"Drive" creator Tim Minear and Emmy winner Todd Holland have teamed for "Miracle Man," a drama project that sparked a bidding war between ABC and Fox and landed at ABC with a put pilot commitment.

"Miracle" -- from 20th Century Fox TV, where Minear and Holland are based with overall deals -- centers on a disgraced former televangelist, a man of no faith, who finds that God is using him to perform real miracles and change lives, starting with his own.

"It's about losing everything and starting over and finding that there is a higher purpose in life," Minear said. "It's about a man who says, 'I don't know how to be good, but I'll try to be better.' "

"Miracle" was developed by Minear and Holland, who worked together on Fox's critically praised drama "Wonderfalls." Minear is writing the script, with Holland set to direct. Both are executive producing.

Televangelism is a familiar territory for Minear, who had an evangelical upbringing in Whittier, Calif., and went to evangelical schools. His father is a radio engineer for religious programming. While he was growing up, Minear often listened to preachers as they taped their programs in his dad's home studio.

"Miracle" also was influenced by the series of sex and accounting fraud scandals that rocked the televangelist industry in the 1980s and brought disgrace to such heavyweights as Jimmy Swaggart, Marvin Gorman and Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker. Others, like Peter Popoff, were exposed as a sham.

But "Miracle" "is not in any way an indictment to religion," Minear said. "It's a love letter to the religious."

What attracted him to the idea of doing a show about a disgraced televangelist was that "I love the genre, and I love stories about redemption and stories about characters that are slightly cynical and nudged by higher force," Minear said.

"Miracle" brings Minear back to ABC, where he landed his first full-time series gig on "Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman."

"I've come a full circle," Minear said. "It feels a fresh clean beginning of something."

Like the other three major networks, ABC has been an active buyer in the past several weeks. It has acquired several projects with significant commitments, including a legal dramedy from David Hemingson, which was picked up as a put pilot (HR 8/27).

There have been a few attempts in the past few years to develop a series set in the world of televangelists, including Showtime's pilot "Paradise," which starred David Strathairn.

Minear, who most recently created and executive produced Fox's drama "Drive," also has worked on such series as Fox's "The Inside" and "Firefly" and WB Network's "Angel." He is repped by Endeavor and manager Larry Shuman of the Shuman Co.

Holland has won three directing Emmys -- two for Fox's "Malcolm in the Middle" and one for HBO's "The Larry Sanders Show." On the big screen, he most recently directed "Firehouse Dog."

Holland is repped by Endeavor and attorneys Alan Wertheimer and Bob Getman.

Transgender pastor's new test of faith

Sun, 09 Sep 2007 00:00:00 -0500

BALTIMORE The Rev. Ann Gordon stood in front of her United Methodist congregation last fall and announced that she was now he.

Surgery and testosterone had transformed Ann into the Rev. Drew Phoenix -- still as liberal and laid-back as always, but now legally male. Most in the small congregation accepted their pastor's transition; they even threw him a renaming party, complete with birthday cake.

But when Phoenix, 48, was reappointed to another year of ministry this spring by his bishop, it sparked a protest in the United Methodist Church.

The denomination's highest authority, the Judicial Council, will take up the case next month, deciding whether the church should accept transgender pastors. The decision will determine Phoenix's future; it could also have political implications.

Presiding over the Judicial Council is Dr. James W. Holsinger Jr., President Bush's nominee for surgeon general and a longtime lay leader of the United Methodist church. Democrats have objected to Holsinger in large part because of work he has done for his church over the years.

In 1991, Holsinger wrote a paper for the church describing gay sex as abnormal and unhealthy. On the Judicial Council last year, he supported a pastor who would not permit a gay man to join his congregation. Holsinger has also affirmed the church's stance against openly gay and lesbian clergy.

The Senate has not yet scheduled a vote on Holsinger, though his confirmation hearing was two months ago. He has been asked to answer further questions in writing. In the meantime, Holsinger will handle several Judicial Council cases dealing with sexuality. Most prominent is the question of Phoenix's right to remain in ministry.

The United Methodist Book of Discipline, which sets out rules for the denomination, does not address the issue of gender identity. But since it bans discrimination on the basis of gender -- a point intended to ensure the equality of male and female clergy -- Phoenix argues in a legal brief: "There is no basis for prohibiting my appointment . . . based on my identification as male."

Behind that phrase -- "my identification as male" -- is a lifetime of longing.

Even as a young girl, Ann Gordon felt sure she was meant to be a boy. She played football every afternoon, clearing the snow off her yard in winter so she could practice the moves of her idol, NFL quarterback Roman Gabriel. One of her happiest moments as a teen was playing Joseph in a Christmas pageant and hearing the minister tell her: "Ann, you look handsome."

She grew up thinking of church as forbidding -- all about "obeying the big daddy in the sky." But, to her surprise, she found herself tugged toward ministry after several years abroad with the Peace Corps. Five years ago, Gordon was assigned to lead St. John's of Baltimore City.

Set on a residential street lined with brownstones -- some painted bright pink or green -- St. John's serves a diverse slice of downtown. Within a few blocks, there's a Korean newspaper, an African Braiding House, a sushi bar, and a kebab restaurant that serves meat slaughtered in accordance with Muslim law.

The church had absorbed none of that vitality when Gordon arrived. The congregation numbered fewer than a dozen. Gordon threw herself into bringing St. John's back to life with the mantra: "We worship a radically inclusive God."

She reached out to gays and lesbians, welcomed agnostics, opened the 100-year-old stone church to yoga, tai chi, antiwar lectures, even a screening of "The Rocky Horror Picture Show."

Word spread about Gordon's spirited services: how she invited questions as she spoke, making her sermons feel more like college seminars than a list of "Thou shalts." How she emphasized themes of social justice, and organized her flock to help the poor.

Weekly services now draw at least three dozen -- mostly well-educated white-collar professionals. On one recent Sunday, a check for $1,000 was tossed into the collection basket along with the usual array of rumpled bills.

Even with her success, however, Gordon felt empty, unbalanced, as if she were acting a part. In 2004, on a trip to the Alaskan coast, walking along what felt like the very edge of the Earth, she finally dared to ask herself what was missing. Then she found the courage to act on her answer.

Never during her eight-month-long transition did she question whether God would want her to renounce her femininity. She was sure God had intended her to be male; her woman's body was meant to challenge her. And, perhaps, to push her church toward a fuller understanding of Christ's love.

"Maybe this is my gift to the church. Maybe part of the reason I became pastor was this very moment," Phoenix said.

He revels in his physical changes: His knuckles are hairy! His biceps bulge! But he also finds joy in a new sense of unity with his creator. "It's like when you come back after a long trip, you collapse on the couch . . . and you just feel, 'I'm home,' " he said. "I am who I am. God doesn't make mistakes."

Boys Cast Out by Polygamists Find Help

Sun, 09 Sep 2007 00:00:00 -0500

ST. GEORGE, Utah Woodrow Johnson was 15, and by the rules of the polygamous sect in which his family lived, he had a vice that could condemn them to hell: He liked to watch movies.

When his parents discovered his secret stash of DVDs, including the "Die Hard" series and comedies, they burned them and gave him an ultimatum. Stop watching movies, they said, or leave the family and church for good.

With television and the Internet also banned as wicked, along with short-sleeve shirts a sign of immodesty and staring at girls, let alone dating them, Woodrow made the wrenching decision to go. And so 10 months ago, with only a seventh-grade education and a suitcase of clothes, he was thrown into an unfamiliar world he had been taught to fear.

Over the last six years, hundreds of teenage boys have been expelled or felt compelled to leave the polygamous settlement that straddles Colorado City, Ariz., and Hildale, Utah.

Disobedience is usually the reason given for expulsion, but former sect members and state legal officials say the exodus of males the expulsion of girls is rarer also remedies a huge imbalance in the marriage market. Members of the sect believe that to reach eternal salvation, men are supposed to have at least three wives.

State officials say efforts to help them with shelter, foster care or other services have been frustrated by the boys' distrust of government and fear of getting their parents into trouble.

But help for the teenagers is improving. In St. George, a nearby city where many of them wind up, two private groups, with state aid, have opened the first residence and center for banished boys. It will offer psychological counseling and advice on things they never learned, like how to write a check or ask a girl out politely, as well as a transitional home for eight who will attend school and work part time.

The polygamous settlement is largely controlled by the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and allies of its jailed prophet, Warren S. Jeffs, who is about to stand trial on charges of sexual exploitation.

Now 16, living with a sympathetic aunt and uncle, Woodrow is one of the luckier boys, though he rarely sees his parents and says, plaintively, "I really miss them." Some boys end up in unsupervised group rentals they call "butt huts" because of the crowded sleeping, while others live in cars or end up in jail.

Utah officials say they realized the extent of the problem only about four years ago, when they learned that hundreds of boys from the sect were roaming on their own and often in distress. While most have construction skills to help earn a living, few have more than a junior high education.

"The house is a milestone, but it's just a start," said Paul Murphy, director of communications and policy for the Utah attorney general's office who has worked with state and private agencies to muster help. "We're finally reaching out, but it's been painfully slow."

The church settlement is essentially one town crossing the border, a jumble of walled compounds, trailers and farm fields at the base of spectacular red bluffs. Nearly all of the 6,000 residents follow the dictates of Mr. Jeffs, who they believe speaks for God; women wear ankle-length dresses, and children are taught to run away from outsiders.

Mr. Jeffs, 51, is in the Purgatory jail in southern Utah, his trial scheduled to start on Sept. 10 on charges of being an accomplice to rape, for his role in forcing a 14-year-old girl to marry an older cousin. He faces several other sex-related charges in Arizona.

But his allies still control the church, former members say, and teenage boys continue to trickle out of the community, by force or by choice.

"In part it's an issue of control," Mr. Murphy said of the harsh rules. But underlying the expulsions, he added, is a mathematical reality. "If you're going to have plural marriage, you need fewer men," he said.

Andrew Chatwin, 39, the uncle who took Woodrow in, left the sect 10 years ago. He explained how the expulsions usually happen: "The leaders tell the parents they must stop this kid who is disobeying the faith and Warren Jeffs. So the parents kick him out because otherwise the father could have his wives and whole family taken away."

The sect, which has smaller outposts in other states, has no ties to the mainstream Mormon church, which outlaws polygamy.

Church leaders refuse to speak to the press, and the mayors of Colorado City and Hildale both declined to comment. Mr. Jeffs's defense lawyer did not respond to calls or e-mail messages.

With Mr. Jeffs and other polygamists, the authorities in Utah and Arizona have prosecuted sexual crimes, but they have not pursued cases involving the neglect of teenagers, in part, Mr. Murphy said, because the boys invariably refuse to testify.

In April, six banished teenagers who brought what became known as the lost boys suit against church leaders agreed to a settlement in which $250,000 will be used to promote education and emergency support for expelled youths. The money will be raised through selling some of the church's large property holdings, now in receivership because church officials never appeared in court to defend against this lawsuit and others. The court-appointed agent now controlling the properties also gave each of the plaintiffs three acres of church land.

One plaintiff was Richard Gilbert, now 22. He had to leave Colorado City at 16, he said, when he refused Mr. Jeffs's order to drop out of the public high school.

"I absolutely believed I was going to hell," Mr. Gilbert recalled.

For a time, Mr. Gilbert lived in the nearby town of Hurricane, where five boys rented a two-bedroom apartment but had as many as 19 sleeping over. Some boys, he said, had literally been dropped off with nothing but the clothes on their backs.

"A lot of guys go off the deep end," Mr. Gilbert said. "For me, it meant a ton of alcohol and partying."

Now he works in construction, has been married for a year and has a child.

Mr. Gilbert estimates that 100 boys from his school class, or 70 percent of them, have been expelled or left on their own accord; there is no way to verify the numbers. "There are a lot of broken-hearted parents, but you question this decision at the risk of your own salvation," Mr. Gilbert said.

The problem of surplus males worsened in the 1990s when the late prophet Rulon Jeffs, Warren Jeffs's father, took on dozens of young wives picking the prettiest, most talented girls, said DeLoy Bateman, a high school teacher who watched it happen.

Warren Jeffs, taking the mantle after his father's death in 2002, adopted most of his father's wives and married others, and also began assigning more wives to his trusted church leaders, former members say. Forced departures increased.

Shannon Price, director of the Diversity Foundation, an educational nonprofit group near Salt Lake City, estimates that 500 to 1,000 teenage boys and young men have left Mr. Jeffs's sect in the last six years, based on the hundreds who have contacted her group and another nonprofit, New Frontiers for Families.

Established by Dan Fischer, a wealthy former sect member, the Diversity Foundation has been a rare source of aid for ejected boys and girls who have left the sect to avoid polygamy helping many go to high school and college and raising public awareness about their plight.

The new venture, the eight-bedroom house in St. George, is being run by the two nonprofits with private grants and $95,000 from the Utah Legislature.

The one thing nearly all the boys share is a strong work ethic and experience in construction. But many, moving from total control to total freedom, get in trouble with drugs, alcohol and crime.

"These are kids, and they still need a connection with adults who can nurture them," said Michelle Benward, clinical director of New Frontiers for Families.

A 21-year-old nicknamed Marc, who is on probation for selling cocaine, has straightened out and now works as a mentor to boys leaving the sect. Marc refused to give his name because he wants to preserve relations with his father, who still believes in Mr. Jeffs despite having been expelled himself. Marc described how abruptly his world shattered in 2004, when he was 17.

"I was a good boy, working 13-hour days," he said. But he had been raising questions, especially after his father's four wives were assigned to other husbands. Then Marc got caught driving to a nearby town to watch a movie.

One evening as he was making a chicken sandwich, he recalled, "My two older brothers came and said that because I'd gone to the movies, Warren said I'm out."

"I went into my bedroom and my mother was already packing my things, and crying," he said. "That night they drove me to a relative's home in St. George."

A Pastor Finds a Way to Serve Two Disparate Flocks

Sat, 11 Aug 2007 00:00:00 -0500

The brick church, more than a century old, stands at the junction of two county roads tracing the glacial hills of southeastern Wisconsin. In the field across the way, the summer corn stretches eight feet from root to tassel. This being a Sunday morning, the Rev. Daniel Schultz greets the faithful on the front steps as they arrive for 9 a.m. worship at the Salem United Church of Christ. Pastor Dan, as he prefers to be known, is the only man in the congregation wearing a coat and tie.

Over the next hour, he leads the 70 worshipers in a round of "Happy Birthday" for Jim Maul, a longtime member. He invites a half-dozen children to the pulpit, where he crouches among them to teach them to recite "The Lord's Prayer." In the part of the service designated for "sharing joys and concerns," he listens as people rise in the pews to tell of a relative's surgery, a brother's recovery from a liver transplant.

Here is ministry at its most venerable, ministry at its most tender and intimate and finely grained. And it comes from a minister with a strikingly unlikely double-life, one part as the small-town preacher in a socially conservative spot of the Midwest, the other as an abrasive and confrontational voice of the religious left in the blogosphere.

Exactly one week after Mr. Schultz presided over Sunday worship at his home church here, he gave a sermon in the vast arena of the McCormick Convention Center in Chicago. Instead of the farmers, factory workers and tradesmen who typify his regular congregation, the audience for his denunciation of the Iraq war consisted of the self-proclaimed "netroots" attending Yearly Kos, the annual political and media convention organized by the Daily Kos Web site.

For three years, Mr. Schultz has supplied the voice of religion for Daily Kos, an epicenter of left-liberal activity with an otherwise fiercely secular bent. In 2004, Mr. Schultz began fielding prayer requests every Sunday night as part of a Daily Kos feature called "Brothers and Sisters." A year later, Daily Kos's founder, Markos Moulitsas, let Mr. Schultz spin off a formally connected online community, Street Prophets.

In 4.3 million page views since then, Mr. Schultz's readers have found comparatively little balm in Gilead. True to the take-no-prisoners style of blogosphere discourse, Street Prophets traffics more in calumny and condemnation, though with an extremely learned theological intelligence behind it.

"If Conservative Christians are looking for salvation," Mr. Schultz wrote in one characteristic post, "they ought to start looking to save themselves from themselves. They have much to repent for, like the rest of us. But unlike the rest of us, they have a unique level of judgmentalism and separation to get out of their system."

Besides decrying the religious right on issues like gay rights, abortion and intelligent design, Mr. Schultz has also disparaged even seeming allies like Jim Wallis, probably the most prominent liberal among the evangelical Christian clergy. Mr. Schultz has reviled Mr. Wallis's "patronizing lectures."

Somehow this balancing act seems to work, meeting the needs of two wildly disparate flocks and reconciling Mr. Schultz to himself. As someone who suffers from, and is medicated for, bipolar disorder, Mr. Schultz has, of necessity, become an expert on reckoning with extremes. "There's a part of me that's been angry since I was a kid," Mr. Schultz, 39, said in an interview. "Part of that is my illness, and part of it is a deep sense that the world isn't the place it was meant to be. I had to find a productive place to put that anger or it would swallow me whole. And part of my spiritual journey has been to claim that anger as spiritual."

In choosing the blogosphere as his pulpit, Mr. Schultz forms part of a trend in which liberal members of the clergy are using the Internet the way Christian conservatives used cable television and talk radio in earlier decades. Diane Winston, a professor of religion and media at the University of Southern California, points to such similar figures online as Mr. Wallis, Rabbi Michael Lerner at Tikkun, the Rev. Tim Simpson at PublicTheologian and Rachel Barenblat at Velveteen Rabbi.

"The blogosphere offers a new way to organize religious people into political communities," Ms. Winston wrote in an e-mail message. "For better or worse, it plays to traditional strengths and weaknesses of progressives."

She continued, "It's not a political movement like the religious right and there's no inkling it could be. On the other hand, the Web seems the ideal medium for the wide-ranging discussions, coalition-building and open-ended organizing that characterizes the left."

In the more prosaic part of Mr. Schultz's life, Salem United Church of Christ sought him out last year for eminently practical reasons. The congregation had released its previous pastor. Struggling to survive with about 80 active members, the church was limping along with guest preachers on a weekly basis.

Mr. Schultz embodied both familiarity and new vigor. He was a "P.K." - a preacher's kid - who had grown up in his father's church 80 miles away in Madison. After earning degrees in English and history at the University of Wisconsin, and in the process falling away from religious observance, Mr. Schultz returned to it as he earned a master's degree in divinity from Emory University in Atlanta. He had pastored a church in Georgia and substituted at several congregations in Pennsylvania before being called by Salem.

Along the way, Mr. Schultz chose as his theological heroes Reinhold Neibuhr, Martin Buber and Jack Kerouac. What impresses many congregants here far more, though, is the way Mr. Schultz and his wife, Jennifer Milazzo-Schultz, have enacted their faith by taking in two foster children. He has also managed to express his politics without imposing them.

"Over all, we're a fairly conservative congregation, but everybody loves him," said Denise Goetsch, a member of the church's governing board. "Whatever people's personal politics are, they're here because they believe in God. And Dan's been good at making friends with pretty much anybody."

Mr. Schultz's sermon here the week before Yearly Kos offered a prime example of how. Drawing on a passage from I Corinthians, Mr. Schultz preached for social justice while speaking directly to his humble church and its obscure home.

New 'Last Supper' theory crashes Web sites

Fri, 27 Jul 2007 00:00:00 -0500

MILAN, Italy - A new theory that Leonardo's "Last Supper" might hide within it a depiction of Christ blessing the bread and wine has triggered so much interest that Web sites connected to the picture have crashed.

The famous fresco is already the focus of mythical speculation after author Dan Brown based his "The Da Vinci Code" book around the painting, arguing in the novel that Jesus married his follower, Mary Magdelene, and fathered a child.

Now Slavisa Pesci, an information technologist and amateur scholar, says superimposing the "Last Supper" with its mirror-image throws up another picture containing a figure who looks like a Templar knight and another holding a small baby.

"I came across it by accident, from some of the details you can infer that we are not talking about chance but about a precise calculation," Pesci told journalists when he unveiled the theory earlier this week.

Web sites www.leonardodavinci.tv, www.codicedavinci.tv, www.cenacolo.biz and www.leonardo2007.com had 15 million hits on Thursday morning alone, organizers said, adding they were trying to provide a more powerful server for the sites.

In the superimposed version, a figure on Christ's left appears to be cradling a baby in its arms, Pesci said, but he made no suggestion this could be Christ's child.

Judas, whose imminent betrayal of Christ is the force breaking the right-hand line of the original fresco, appears in an empty space on the left in the reverse image version. And Pesci also suggests that the superimposed version shows a goblet before Christ and illustrates when Christ blessed bread and wine at a supper with his disciples for the first Eucharist.

The original Da Vinci depicts Christ when he predicts that one among them will betray him.

Evangelicals seek 'creators of culture' role

Fri, 27 Jul 2007 00:00:00 -0500

MILAN, Italy - There are no crosses in Makoto Fujimura's paintings. No images of Jesus gazing into the distance, or serene scenes of churches in a snow-cloaked wood.

Fujimura's abstract works speak to his evangelical Christian faith. But to find it takes some digging.

After the 2001 terrorist strikes on the World Trade Center, three blocks from Fujimura's home, his work explored the power of fire to both destroy and purify, themes drawn from the Christian Gospels and Dante's "The Divine Comedy."

"I am a Christian," says Fujimura, 46, who founded the nonprofit International Arts Movement to help bridge the gap between the religious and art communities. "I am also an artist and creative, and what I do is driven by my faith experience.

"But I am also a human being living in the 21st century, struggling with a lot of brokenness my own, as well as the world's. I don't want to use the term 'Christian' to shield me away from the suffering or evil that I see, or to escape in some nice ghetto where everyone thinks the same."

By making a name for himself in the secular art world, Fujimura has become a role model for creatively wired evangelicals. They believe that their churches have forsaken the visual arts for too long and that a renaissance has begun.

On the grass-roots and institutional level, evidence is mounting to support that view: Art galleries are opening in churches; prominent seminaries are investing in new centers exploring theology and the arts; and, graduates from evangelical film schools are making Hollywood movies.

These artistic evangelicals, though still relatively small in number, are striving to be creators of culture rather than imitators, said Dick Staub, a Seattle-based radio talk show host and author of "The Culturally Savvy Christian: A Manifesto for Deepening Faith and Enriching Popular Culture In an Age of Christianity-Lite." There is a desire, he said, to avoid inventing a parallel arts universe with Christian knockoffs for Christian audiences.

"They want to make art that connects to everybody," Staub said. "The call is first and foremost to make good art."

'The Bible is full of abstraction'
That doesn't necessarily mean overtly religious art, but rather art informed by faith. Fujimura, for example, shares more with abstract expressionist Jackson Pollock than with Thomas Kinkade, a self-described devout Christian whose brushwork of idyllic landscapes, crosses and churches are big sellers.

As a result, Fujimura whose work has been displayed at museums in Tokyo and Washington, D.C. gets questions from his fellow believers dubious about abstract and modern art.

"The Bible is full of abstraction," said Fujimura, an elder at a Greenwich Village church he helped start. "Think about this God who created the universe, the heavens and the earth from nothing. In order to have faith you have to reach out to something, to a mystery."

It isn't always an easy sell.

Evangelical unease with the visual arts dates to the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century. Andy Crouch, editorial director for Christianity Today's Christian Vision Project, which examines how evangelicals intersect with the broader culture, notes that Protestantism traces its origins to an era when noses were snapped off sculptures in a rejection of Catholic visual tradition while the word of God was elevated.

Attitudes began to change in the 1960s and 1970s, when Christian theologian Francis Schaeffer and Dutch art historian Hans Rookmaaker challenged believers to emerge from their cocoons and engage the culture, including in the arts.

Now, Crouch said, those ideas are resonating with a younger generation of believers who live in an image-saturated culture. They sense a disconnect worshipping in churches bare of anything that's visually arresting.

"The very parched nature of evangelical visual culture is making people who have grown up in this culture thirsty for beauty," he said.

Increasingly, that ground is being explored on seminary campuses. One of the most ambitious examples is the Brehm Center for Worship, Theology, and the Arts at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, Calif., founded in 2001 and bankrolled by a $15 million donation from a Virginia couple that earned a fortune in information technology.

The center aspires to be an evangelical arts think tank, with five stand-alone institutes focused upon worship and music, film and moving images, art and architecture, drama, journalism and creative writing, preaching and the study of the "emerging church," which incorporates painting, dance and other fine arts into worship.

Craig Detweiler, co-director of the center's Reel Spirituality Institute, said students are fascinated with finding the sacred in the mundane and exploring life's mysteries. In other words, themes with far-reaching appeal.

"Maybe 20 years ago, young filmmakers wanted to tell stories for their own audience," said Detweiler, a screenwriter. "Today's young filmmakers ... find holy moments within mainstream movies and want to create more of the same.

"For too long, Christian art has implied pale imitation," Detweiler said. "We're trying to get back to the days of the Renaissance, where the church was the patron of the finest art."

'How can I be a Christian and an artist?'
In another sign that institutional evangelicalism is taking the arts seriously, a Center for Theology and the Arts was founded last year at the flagship seminary of the nation's largest Protestant denomination: Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky. The center's work begins modestly this summer with a workshop drawing parallels between the art of drawing and Bible study, arguing both are about seeing and observing.

"If we as Christians believe that creativity and imagination is a gift from God, why have we neglected it for so many years?" said center director Steve Halla, a former Dallas Theological Seminary professor and a woodcut artist.

Already, evangelicals are exerting greater influence in the film industry.

Even before the success of Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ," Southern California was home to a Christian screenwriting factory called Act One, an on-the-rise film school at the evangelical Biola University and a film studies center sponsored by the Council for Christian Colleges & Universities.

More recently, evangelicals have turned their attention to the contemporary art world. For the past two years, students primarily from Christian colleges and universities have studied and interned at galleries and graphic-design firms through the New York Center for Art and Media Studies, a satellite of Bethel University in St. Paul, Minn.

"We are not trying to recruit missionaries into New York City or anything like that," said James Romaine, an art historian and the center's director. "We're helping young artists grow and become the best artists they can be."

Echoing others, Romaine describes an evolution in evangelical thinking about the arts.

"For people of my parents' generation, there was always a question of, 'Can you be a Christian and an artist?"' he said. "When I was a student, the question was, 'How can I be a Christian and an artist, in a philosophical sense?' Now, there's a sense of, 'Let's get to it. How can I be a part of this art world?"'

Religion in the '08 White House race

Wed, 01 Aug 2007 00:00:00 -0500

WASHINGTON - When George Romney ran for the 1968 Republican presidential nomination, his Mormon heritage was mostly a footnote. It was scarcely mentioned in news accounts of the day. But for son Mitt Romney, the family religion presents a formidable political hurdle.

The younger Romney repeatedly is called on to defend his membership in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and its teachings, encountering skepticism particularly from Christian conservatives, a key component of the GOP base.

"I believe that there are some pundits out there that are hoping I'll distance myself from my church so that'll help me politically. And that's not going to happen," Romney asserts.

Religion has not played so prominent a role in a U.S. national election since 1960, when John F. Kennedy became the first Catholic to be elected president.

And it's not only Romney under scrutiny. All the Democratic and Republican presidential hopefuls have been grilled on their religious beliefs. Most seem eager to talk publicly about their faith as they actively court religious voters.

Democratic Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton emphasizes her Methodist upbringing and says her faith helped her repair her marriage.

Chief rival Sen. Barack Obama frequently uses the language of religion and proclaims a "personal relationship" with Jesus Christ. The Illinois Democrat whose middle name is "Hussein" scoffs at suggestions of Muslim leanings because he spent part of his childhood in Indonesia. He is a member of the United Church of Christ.

In the most recent Democratic debate, a pastor in a YouTube video asked Democrat John Edwards to defend his use of religion to deny gay marriage. The former North Carolina senator a Methodist talked about his faith and his "enormous conflict" over the issue

Republican Sen. John McCain, an Episcopalian, says, "I do believe that we are unique and that God loves us." Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, an ordained Baptist minister, emphasizes his belief that "God created the heavens and the earth. To me, it's pretty simple."

Voters' attitudes toward religion
Unlike the others, former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, a divorced Roman Catholic who favors abortion rights, sidesteps such questions, claiming one's relationship with God is a private matter. But he attended Catholic schools and at one point considered being a priest.

Clearly, the religious issue is the most problematic for Romney. Polls suggest he faces continued misgivings over his faith. An ABC News-Washington Post poll conducted July 18-21 showed that 32 percent of those who said they leaned Republican described themselves as "uncomfortable" with the idea of a Mormon president.

An earlier poll by the Pew Research Center said 30 percent of respondents said they would be less likely to vote for a candidate that was Mormon. The negative sentiment rose to 46 percent for Muslim candidates and to 63 percent for a candidate who "doesn't believe in God."

Pollster Andrew Kohut, Pew's director, said that between the late 1960s, when Romney's father ran, and now there has been "one of the great transformations of our era. There is more mixing of religion and politics than there was then. As a consequence, people scrutinize Mormonism or any other religion more closely than back then."

He cites the growing influence of the Christian right, the political activism of tele-evangelists and a trend that has seen a steady migration of Christian conservatives into the GOP fold, particularly in the South.

"When the South changed, it brought the evangelicals with it," Kohut said.

'Separation between church and state'
The links between religion and governance intensified with the presidency of George W. Bush, said Joan Konner, former dean of the Columbia Journalism School. "He brought it up when he ran for office and he said his favorite philosopher, in answer to a question in a debate, was Jesus.

"And then he followed up on that by faith-based public funding and various other actions that started to erode what Americans took for granted as the separation between church and state," said Konner, who has studied the interaction between religion and politics and is the author of "The Atheist's Bible."

George W. Romney was a politically moderate former governor of Michigan and auto-industry executive when he sought the 1968 GOP presidential nomination. Scant mention was made of his Mormonism in news accounts at the time and it appeared to be a non-issue in the race.

Polls showed him as the front-runner until he stumbled by complaining to an interviewer that when he had visited Vietnam, he had been "brainwashed" by military briefers there into supporting the war. That remark generated enough controversy to cost him the nomination.

Some historians suggest more attention might have been paid to Romney's Mormonism if he hadn't torpedoed his own candidacy so early. And in those days, many Christian conservatives were southern Democrats and less interested in GOP primary contests.

Romney withdrew as a presidential candidate on Feb. 28, 1968, just ahead of the March 12 New Hampshire primary won decisively by Republican Richard Nixon.

'Differences between Kennedy and Romney'
Mitt Romney supporters point to Kennedy, who overcame questions about his religion to become the first Catholic elected president. He did that, in part, by speaking before Protestant clergymen in Houston in 1960 to dispel fears that, as a Catholic president, he would be subject to direction from the pope.

Can Romney neutralize the religion issue the same way Kennedy did by giving a major speech explaining the role his Mormon faith plays in his political life?

In an interview in Iowa with The Associated Press, Romney said he's considering dealing with the issue in a comprehensive manner, although "it's probably too early for something like that."

"At some point it's more likely than not, but we'll see how things develop," Romney said.

Kennedy had one advantage that Romney doesn't. When he ran, Catholics made up roughly 28 percent of the U.S. population. Although one of the fastest growing faiths in the world, Mormons represent less than 2 percent of the U.S. population with 5.5 million members across the country.

"The differences between Kennedy and Romney are in the nose count," said political historian Stephen Hess. "The religion issue may have hurt Kennedy, but it sure helped him at the same time" as Catholics threw their support behind him.

"There is no way that capturing the Mormon vote is going to win Romney anything," Hess said.

The Aquarians and the Evangelicals

Mon, 30 Jul 2007 00:00:00 -0500

On April 5, 1967, representatives of the San Francisco Oracle, the Diggers, the Family Dog, the Straight Theater, and other parts of the Haight-Ashbury hippie scene held a press conference to announce the formation of the Council for a Summer of Love. The event scored friendly media notices: The next day's San Francisco Chronicle described the coalition as "a group of the good hippies," defined as the ones who "wear quaint and enchanting costumes, hold peaceful rock 'n' roll concerts, and draw pretty pictures (legally) on the sidewalk, their eyes aglow all the time with the poetry of love."

Three days earlier and 1,500 miles away, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, a very different counterculture was holding its own coming-out party. About 18,000 peoplefar more than the 4,000 anticipatedgathered for the formal dedication ceremonies at Oral Roberts University. Oklahoma's governor, a U.S. senator, two members of Congress, and Tulsa's mayor were on hand. Delivering the dedication address, "Why I Believe in Christian Education," was Billy Graham, the dean of American evangelists.

The events in San Francisco and Tulsa that spring revealed an America in the throes of cultural and spiritual upheaval. The postwar liberal consensus had shattered. Vying to take its place were two sides of an enormous false dichotomy, both animated by outbursts of spiritual energy. Those two eruptions of millenarian enthusiasm, the hippies and the evangelical revival, would inspire a left/right division that persists to this day.

That split pits one set of half-truths against another. On the left gathered those who were most alive to the new possibilities created by the unprecedented mass affluence of the postwar years but at the same time were hostile to the social institutionsnamely, the market and the middle-class work ethicthat created those possibilities. On the right rallied those who staunchly supported the institutions that created prosperity but who shrank from the social dynamism they were unleashing. One side denounced capitalism but gobbled its fruits; the other cursed the fruits while defending the system that bore them. Both causes were quixotic, and consequently neither fully realized its ambitions. But out of their messy dialectic, the logic of abundance would eventually fashion, if not a reworked consensus, then at least a new modus vivendi.

The Summer of Love
By 1967 the San Francisco Bay Area hippie phenomenon had been incubating for several years. The Beat presence had been strong there from the days of Allen Ginsberg's debut reading of his famous poem "Howl" at the Six Gallery in 1955. And since October 1, 1964, when Jack Weinberg was arrested in Sproul Plaza on trespassing chargeshe was soliciting contributions for the Congress of Racial Equality without permissionstudent unrest had roiled the University of California's Berkeley campus. Romantic rebelliousness was in the air, but now it took a new twist, following the mental corkscrew turns triggered by LSD.

This cultural revolution was a largely underground affair until January 14, 1967, when "A Gathering of the Tribes for the First Human Be-In" grabbed national attention. The event was conceived as a show of unity between hippies and Berkeley radicals, just a few weeks after a glimpse of that union had been seen on the Berkeley campus. At an anti-war mass meeting, a sing-along of "Solidarity Forever" had faltered because too few knew the words. Then someone broke in with the Beatles' "Yellow Submarine," and the whole room joined in.

Held on a brilliant blue-sky Saturday at the Polo Field in Golden Gate Park, the Be-In was kicked off by Gins¬berg and fellow Beat poet Gary Snyder. As 20,000 people gradually filled the park, the Diggers, a radical community action group, distributed turkey sandwiches and White Lightning LSD (both donated by the acid magnate Augustus Owsley). All the big San Francisco bands played, while the Hells Angels guarded the P.A. system's generator. Yippie leader Jerry Rubin gave a speech, and drug gurus Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert both made the scene. Leary eventually made his way to the microphone and tried out his new mantra: "Turn on, tune in, drop out."

The Be-In served as a coming-out party for the Love Generation, a term coined by San Francisco Police Chief Thomas Cahill. The organizers of the Summer of Love were reacting to the Be-In's fallout, and in the process they transformed the publicity boomlet into a full-fledged sensation. By the end of the summer, some 50,000 to 75,000 kids had made the trek to San Francisco (with or without flowers in their hair). In the process, the Haight's anarchic innocence was destroyed, as the district was overrun by gawking tourists, crass opportunists, and criminal predators. Its special magic never returned; instead, it dispersed throughout the country, and a thousand sparks began to blaze.

Civil Rights and Psychedelics
The '60s counterculture had its roots in the '50s specifically, in Beat bohemianism and the larger youth culture of adolescent rebellion. But the Beats never imagined they were the vanguard of a mass movement. "In the wildest hipster, making a mystique of bop, drugs, and the night life, there is no desire to shatter the 'square' society in which he lives, only to elude it," wrote the Beat author John Clellon Holmes.

What begat the transformation from apolitical fringe to passionately engaged mass movement? First, a mass movement requires massin this case, a critical mass of critically minded young people. Between 1960 and 1970, the number of Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 jumped from 16.2 million to 24.4 million. Meanwhile, as capitalism's ongoing development rendered economic life ever more technologically and organizationally complex, the demand for educated managers and professionals grew. Consequently, among the swelling ranks of college-age young people, the portion who attended college ballooned from 22.3 percent to 35.2 percent during the '60s.

With their wider exposure to history, literature, philosophy, and science, recipients of higher education were more likely to see beyond the confines of their upbringingto question the values they were raised to accept, to appreciate the virtues of other cultures, to seek out the new and exotic. By triumphing over scarcity, capitalism launched the large-scale pursuit of self-realization. Now, by demanding that more and more people be trained to think for themselves, capitalism ensured that the pursuit would lead in unconventional directionsand that any obstacles on those uncharted paths would face clever and resourceful adversaries. In the culture as in the marketplace, the "creative destruction" of competitive commerce bred subversives to challenge the established order.

So the tinder was there. But what sparks would set it ablaze? The primary catalysts were an odd couple: the civil rights struggle and the psychedelic drug scene. Both inducted their participants into what can fairly be called religious experience.

By the middle of the 20th century, belief in racial equality was de rigueur for liberals in good standing. Yet notwithstanding liberalism's towering intellectual and political dominance, progress toward full civil rights for blacks was exasperatingly modest. Despite their frustration, most liberals saw no alternative but steady, gradual gains. But patient advocacy by white liberals wasn't what gave the cause of civil rights its irresistible momentum. What made the movement move was the decision by African Americans, beginning with the Montgomery bus boycott, to push past liberal nostrums and take matters into their own hands. Moral suasion was not enough; confrontation, nonviolent but deliberately provocative, was needed. And to steel themselves for the struggle, African Americans called on sources of strength more profound than Gunnar Myrdalstyle social science empiricism.

Black churches were therefore indispensable to the movement's success, not just because they provided organization and fostered solidarity but because the simple, powerful faith they propounded gave ordinary people the heart to do extraordinary things. Even those who lacked the consolation of literalist faith still found some lifeline beyond reason to cling to.

The resulting defiance was sublime in its absolute audacity. Protesters took the truly radical step of acting as if segregation did not existordering lunch, getting on the bus, signing up to vote as if Jim Crow were already gone. With a movement grounded in such extreme commitment, religiosity was always in the air. Marches, stately and solemn, were redolent of religious ritual; beatings, jailings, water-cannon dousings, tear-gassings, and killings sanctified the movement by providing it with martyrs.

For America's liberal-minded young, the prophetic grandeur of the civil rights movement was electrifying. Many joined the movement; many more were inspired to take up other causes and make their own stands. "Without the civil rights movement, the beat and Old Left and bohemian enclaves would not have opened into a revived politics," concluded Todd Gitlin, a leader of Students for a Democratic Society, the premier organization of the student New Left.

While the civil rights movement fired young mindswith the possibilities of prophetic dissent, the emerging drug scene was blowing those minds with visions of mystical experience. Marijuana, which grew in popularity with the spread of the bohemian subculture during the '50s, served as the chemical gateway. Heightening sensory pleasures and lubricating free-associative thinking, it fit perfectly with the Beat cult of intense experience. Under its influence, consciousness seemed to expand; aggression melted away, and shared wonder and laughter took its place.

Psychedelic drugs, meanwhile, took consciousness expansion to an entirely new level. The phantasmagoric hallucinations they induced frequently led people into the realm of religious experience, and many of the leading lights of psychedelic culture, including Leary and Alpert, interpreted and sold the psychedelic experience that way. (Alpert eventually changed his name to the Hindu-derived Baba Ram Dass.)

Both the civil rights movement and the drug culture were outgrowths of mass affluence. In a society devoted to self-expression and personal fulfillment, African Americans found their second-class status intolerable and latched onto resistance as their path to self-realization. Their efforts succeeded in large part because one product of technological abundancetelevisioncarried their struggle into America's living rooms. Meanwhile, the newly unrestrained pursuit of happiness led ineluctably to the pursuit of broadened experience, including the experience of altered states of consciousness. What made increasing numbers of young people eager to try drugs, and receptive to their pleasures, was the cultural shift wrought by the triumph over scarcity.

The struggle for civil rights showed that rapid social progress was possible, that entrenched evil could be uprooted, that social reality was more fluid than imagined, and that collective action could change the world. Likewise, pot and psychedelics revealed wildly different visions of reality from the "straight" one everybody took for granted. If our most basic categories of experience could be called into question, so could everything else.

Guided into those transcendent realms, many young and impressionable minds were set aflame with visions of radical change. One assault after another on conventional wisdom and authority gained momentum. Anti-war protesters, feminists, student rebels, environmentalists, and gays all took their turns marching to the solemn strains of "We Shall Overcome"; all portrayed themselves as inheritors of the legacy of Montgomery and Birmingham and Selma. And the scent of marijuana wafted around all their efforts.

The Counter-Counterculture
The quest for wider horizons and the fulfillment of higher needs, so exuberantly pursued during the '60s, relied on mass affluence, which was achieved and sustained only by a vast mobilization of social energies through an intricate division of labor. There could be no counterculture without capitalism. And capitalism requires discipline, deferred gratification, abstract loyalties, impersonal authority, and the stress of competition. With its hostility to the system that brought it into being, the counterculture created an opening for hostile worldviews that allied themselves with capitalism's titanic power. Conservative Protestantism took advantage of the opportunity and reclaimed a place on society's center stage.

The evangelical revival was the unlikeliest of comeback stories. In the middle years of the 19th century, the bourgeois Protestant worldview had enjoyed unquestioned cultural primacy and matchless self-confidence. The ensuing decades, however, hammered America's old-time religion with setback after setback. Darwin and German higher criticism shook belief in biblical inerrancy; mass immigration filled the country with rival faiths; urbanization bred cesspools of sin and temptation.

Yet the old-time religion did not die. In the South, in small towns and rural areas, among the less educated, the flame still burned. Shaking off their well-earned pessimism, a new generation of conservative religious leaders worked to rebuild dogmatic Protestantism as an active force in American life. Dissociating themselves from the now pejorative term fundamentalist, they called themselves evangelicals. On doctrine, the evangelicals toed the fundamentalist line. In their posture toward the outside world, however, they differed dramatically. Fundamentalists
hunkered down in a defensive crouch, refusing any association with mainline denominations. The new evangelicals were intent on expansion and outreach. Thus, when the National Association of Evangelicals was founded in 1942, it adopted as its motto "cooperation without compromise."

Evangelicals built up an entire parallel cultural infrastructurea counterculture by any other name. One landmark was Billy Graham's 1957 crusade in New York City's Madison Square Garden. Kicking off on May 15 and running through September 2, the campaign attracted more than 2 million attendees, with 55,000 recorded "decisions for Christ." In June, ABC began televising Graham's Saturday night services live. Millions tuned in.

Evangelicals retooled their message to appeal to the unconverted, and they constructed a robust network of churches and parachurch institutions where believers could coalesce into a thriving community. Yes, they remained outsiders, looked down upon when not ignored by the nation's metropolitan elites. Only Graham, with his immense charisma and political skills, was a fully mainstream figure. Nevertheless, evangelicals were now a mass movement on the move. Though scorned by the cultural elite, they had consolidated their position in the nation's most economically dynamic region, and therefore the fulcrum of political change in the ensuing decades: the Sunbelt.

Conservative proselytizing found a receptive audience as countercultural chaos erupted around the country. Among what became known as the "great silent majority," including many Americans who considered themselves good liberals during the '50s, Aquarius and its tumults seemed like an outbreak of mass insanity. How could the most privileged children in history reject everything their parents held dear? The mainline Protestant denominations had thrived as bulwarks of the postwar liberal ascendancy, but they faltered in the face of the Aquarian challenge. The 1964 slogan for the evangelicals' bête noire, the ecumenical and progressive World Council of Churches, summed up the situation: "The world must set the agenda for the church." People who believed the world was going to hell thought that slogan had things precisely backward.

For Americans anxious to defend their way of life against cultural upheaval, evangelicalism provided the resources with which to make a stand. It imbued believers with a fighting faith, granting them access to the same kind of energies that animated the romantic rebellion energies found only in the realms beyond reason. Exuberant worship, regular prayer, and belief in prophecy and present-day miracles were the spiritual fortifications that could stymie the radical onslaught.

Evangelicals vs. Aquarians
The audacious idea of founding a university had come to Oral Roberts in the middle of dinner with a young Pat Robertson. Roberts began scribbling on a napkinnot his own words, he believed, but words straight from God. "Raise up your students to hear My voice, to go where My light is dim," his inner voice instructed, "where My voice is small and My healing power is not known. To go even to the uttermost bounds of the earth."

In 1947 Roberts, who believed he had been healed of youthful tuberculosis directly by God via a faith healer, was a minister with his own little Pentecostal Holiness church in Enid, Oklahoma. He felt frustrated and trapped as a dirt-poor, small-town preacher with a pleasant but complacent congregation. One harried morning he picked up his copy of the Good Book, and his eyes fell on III John 1:2: "I wish above all things that thou mayest prosper and be in health, even as thy soul prospereth." It changed in an instant his whole understanding of God. God is good, Roberts now saw: God wants us to be healthy; God wants us to succeed; God wants us to be rich!

Roberts achieved great success as a revivalist and faith healerwhich is to say, he became a central figure in a marginal movement. But his ministry transcended Pentecostalism's lowly origins. Not content with success as a traveling tent preacher, he built a far-flung empire of evangelical outreach, complete with television and radio programs, magazines, newspaper columns, even comic books. In 1967, as he was being sworn in as president of the university he built from scratch, Roberts knew he had brought his upstart faith into the American mainstream. There to pay their respects were not just government officials but representatives of 120 of the nation's colleges and universities.

Roberts' rapid ascent was only one spectacular example of the larger evangelical uprising. Between 1965 and 1975, while mainline denominations were shriveling, membership in the Church of the Nazarene increased by 8 percent. The Southern Baptists grew by 18 percent, and membership in the Seventh-Day Adventists and Assemblies of God leapt by 36 percent and 37 percent, respectively. Newsweek declared 1976 "the year of the evangelical" as Jimmy Carter, who identified himself as one, took the presidency. A Gallup poll that same year asked Americans, "Would you describe yourself as a 'born-again' or evangelical Christian?" More than a third said yes.

There is no point in mincing words: The stunning advance of evangelicalism marked a dismal intellectual regress in American religion. A lapse into crude superstition and magical thinking, credulous vulnerability to charlatans, a dangerous weakness for apocalyptic prophecy (see the massive popularity of the best-selling nonfiction book of the '70s, evangelical Hal Lindsey's The Late, Great Planet Earth), and blatant denial of scientific reality, resurgent conservative Protestantism entailed a widespread surrender of believers' critical faculties. The celebration of unreason on the left had met its match on the right.

But having beat their intellectual retreat, evangelicals summoned up the fortitude to defend a cultural position that was, to a considerable extent, worth defending. In particular, they upheld values that, after the Sturm und Drang of the '60s and '70s subsided, would garner renewed appreciation across the ideological divide: committed family life, personal probity and self-restraint, the work ethic, and unembarrassed American patriotism.

By no means were the evangelicals purely reactionary. Take race relations. Although many of them hailed from the South, the leaders of the evangelical revival dissented from the reigning regional orthodoxies of white supremacy and segregation. For years Billy Graham had waffled on race, but after the Supreme Court rejected school segregation in the 1954 case Brown v. Board of Education, he refused to tolerate segregated seating at his crusades. In his breakthrough 1957 crusade at Madison Square Garden, Graham invited Martin Luther King to join him on the podium, introducing him as one of the leaders of "a great social revolution" afoot. Graham was not alone. The Southern Baptist Convention strongly endorsed Brown and called for peaceful compliance. Pentecostalism, meanwhile, had begun as an integrated movement, led by the son of slaves.

Most important, evangelicalism aligned Christian faith with the Holy Grail of the affluent society: self-realization. Unlike the classic bourgeois Protestantism of the 19th century, whose moral teachings emphasized avoidance of worldly temptation, the revitalized version promised empowerment, joy, and personal fulfillment. A godly life was once understood as grim defiance of sinful urges; now it was the key to untold blessings. "Something good is going to happen to you!" was one of Oral Roberts' favorite catchphrases.

The New Synthesis
The evangelicals' therapeutic turn, like that of the counterculture, moved with currents of psychic need sprung loose by mass affluence. Indeed, the two opposing religious revivals overlapped. The Jesus Freaks, or Jesus People, emerged out of the hippie scene in the late '60s, mixing countercultural style and communalism with evangelical orthodoxy. As the hippie phenomenon faded in the '70s, many veterans of the Jesus Movement made their way into the larger, socially conservative evangelical revival.

The peculiar career of Arthur Blessitt illustrates evangelicalism's debt to the cultural left. In the late '60s, Blessitt hosted a psychedelic nightclub called His Place on Hollywood's Sunset Strip, an establishment whose logo combined a cross and a peace sign. "Like, if you want to get high, you don't have to drop Acid. Just pray and you go all the way to Heaven," Blessitt advised in his tract Life's Greatest Trip. "You don't have to pop pills to get loaded. Just drop a little Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John." In 1969 Blessitt began his distinctive ministry of carrying a 12-foot-tall cross around the countryand, later, around the world. On one of his countless stops along the way, at an April 1984 meeting in Midland, Texas, he received word that a local oilman, the son of a prominent politician, wanted to see him privately. The businessman told Blessitt that he was not comfortable attending a public meeting but wanted to know Jesus better and learn how to follow him. Blessitt gave his witness and prayed with him. The man, George W. Bush, subsequently converted to evangelical Christianity.

Evangelicals and Aquarians were more alike than they knew. Both sought firsthand spiritual experience; both believed that such experience could set them free and change their lives; both favored emotional intensity over intellectual rigor; both saw their spiritual lives as a refuge from a corrupt and corrupting world. That last point, of course, was subject to radically different interpretations. Aquarians rejected the establishment because of its supposedly suffocating restrictions, while the evangelicals condemned its licentious, decadent anarchy. Between them, they left the social peace of the '50s in ruins.

That peace deserved to be disturbed. Its cautious, complacent liberalism was ill-suited to coping with the emerging conflicts of mass prosperity. It frustrated the aspirations of blacks, of women, and of the affluent young. It suppressed and distorted economic energies by throttling competition. Its spiritual life tended to the bland and shallow.

But no new, improved social consensus emerged to replace the one that collapsed. Instead, with the culture wars and division between "red" and "blue" America, our ideological categories and allegiances continue to perpetuate the warring half-truths of the great spiritual upheavals of the '60s. Yet despite this confusion, a new modus vivendi has managed to emerge that contains within tolerable bounds the ideological dissatisfactions of both the countercultural left and the religious right.

As liberal dominance was shaken by successive blows of social and economic turmoil in the 1960s and '70s, a New Right energized by the evangelical counter-counterculture seized the opening and established conservatism as the country's most popular political creed by the '80s. Yet the conservative triumph was steeped in irony. Capitalism's vigor was restored, and the radical assault on middle-class values was repulsed. But contrary to the hopes of the New Right's traditionalist partisans, shoring up the institutions of mass affluence did not, and could not, bring back the old cultural certainties.

Instead, a reinvigorated capitalism brought with it a blooming, buzzing economic and cultural ferment that bore scant resemblance to any nostalgic vision of the good old days. This was conservatism's curious accomplishment: Marching under the banner of old-time religion, it made the world safe for the secular, hedonistic values of Aquarius.

The resulting cultural synthesis that prevails today, this accidental by-product of ideological stalemate, remains nameless. It could be called liberal, in the larger sense of the tradition of individualism and moral egalitarianism that America has always embodied. It could also be called conservative, if that same liberal tradition is understood to be the object of conservation. But the ideologies that pass for liberalism and conservatism today are too weighed down with authoritarian elements for either to lay claim to the real American center. Since American society today is committed to a much wider scope for both economic and cultural competition than was allowed before the '60s erupted, it makes most sense to call that center libertarian.

The Whys of Mating: 237 Reasons and Counting

Tue, 31 Jul 2007 00:00:00 -0500

Scholars in antiquity began counting the ways that humans have sex, but they weren't so diligent in cataloging the reasons humans wanted to get into all those positions. Darwin and his successors offered a few explanations of mating strategies to find better genes, to gain status and resources but they neglected to produce a Kama Sutra of sexual motivations.

Perhaps you didn't lament this omission. Perhaps you thought that the motivations for sex were pretty obvious. Or maybe you never really wanted to know what was going on inside other people's minds, in which case you should stop reading immediately.

For now, thanks to psychologists at the University of Texas at Austin, we can at last count the whys. After asking nearly 2,000 people why they'd had sex, the researchers have assembled and categorized a total of 237 reasons everything from "I wanted to feel closer to God" to "I was drunk." They even found a few people who claimed to have been motivated by the desire to have a child.

The researchers, Cindy M. Meston and David M. Buss, believe their list, published in the August issue of Archives of Sexual Behavior, is the most thorough taxonomy of sexual motivation ever compiled. This seems entirely plausible.

Who knew, for instance, that a headache had any erotic significance except as an excuse for saying no? But some respondents of both sexes explained that they'd had sex "to get rid of a headache." It's No. 173 on the list.

Others said they did it to "help me fall asleep," "make my partner feel powerful," "burn calories," "return a favor," "keep warm," "hurt an enemy" or "change the topic of conversation." The lamest may have been, "It seemed like good exercise," although there is also this: "Someone dared me."

Dr. Buss has studied mating strategies around the world he's the oft-cited author of "The Evolution of Desire" and other books but even he did not expect to find such varied and Machiavellian reasons for sex. "I was truly astonished," he said, "by this richness of sexual psychology."

The researchers collected the data by first asking more than 400 people to list their reasons for having sex, and then asking more than 1,500 others to rate how important each reason was to them. Although it was a fairly homogenous sample of students at the University of Texas, nearly every one of the 237 reasons was rated by at least some people as their most important motive for having sex.

The best news is that both men and women ranked the same reason most often: "I was attracted to the person."

The rest of the top 10 for each gender were also almost all the same, including "I wanted to express my love for the person," "I was sexually aroused and wanted the release" and "It's fun."

No matter what the reason, men were more likely to cite it than women, with a couple of notable exceptions. Women were more likely to say they had sex because, "I wanted to express my love for the person" and "I realized I was in love." This jibes with conventional wisdom about women emphasizing the emotional aspects of sex, although it might also reflect the female respondents' reluctance to admit to less lofty motives.

The results contradicted another stereotype about women: their supposed tendency to use sex to gain status or resources.

"Our findings suggest that men do these things more than women," Dr. Buss said, alluding to the respondents who said they'd had sex to get things, like a promotion, a raise or a favor. Men were much more likely than women to say they'd had sex to "boost my social status" or because the partner was famous or "usually 'out of my league.' "

Dr. Buss said, "Although I knew that having sex has consequences for reputation, it surprised me that people, notably men, would be motivated to have sex solely for social status and reputation enhancement."

But then, men were also more likely than women to say they'd had sex because "I was slumming." Or simply because "the opportunity presented itself," or "the person demanded that I have sex."

If nothing else, the results seem to be a robust confirmation of the hypothesis in the old joke: How can a woman get a man to take off his clothes? Ask him.

To make sense of the 237 reasons, Dr. Buss and Dr. Meston created a taxonomy with four general categories:

¶Physical: "The person had beautiful eyes" or "a desirable body," or "was good kisser" or "too physically attractive to resist." Or "I wanted to achieve an orgasm."

¶Goal Attainment: "I wanted to even the score with a cheating partner" or "break up a rival's relationship" or "make money" or "be popular." Or "because of a bet."

¶Emotional: "I wanted to communicate at a deeper level" or "lift my partner's spirits" or "say 'Thank you.' " Or just because "the person was intelligent."

¶Insecurity: "I felt like it was my duty" or "I wanted to boost my self-esteem" or "It was the only way my partner would spend time with me."

Having sex out of a sense of duty, Dr. Buss said, showed up in a separate study as being especially frequent among older women. But both sexes seem to practice a strategy that he calls mate-guarding, as illustrated in one of the reasons given by survey respondents: "I was afraid my partner would have an affair if I didn't."

That fear seems especially reasonable after you finish reading Dr. Buss's paper and realize just how many reasons there are for infidelity. Some critics might complain that the list has some repetitions it includes "I was curious about sex" as well as "I wanted to see what all the fuss was about" but I'm more concerned about the reasons yet to be enumerated.

For instance, nowhere among the 237 reasons will you find the one attributed to the actress Joan Crawford: "I need sex for a clear complexion." (The closest is "I thought it would make me feel healthy.")Nor will you find anything about gathering rosebuds while ye may (the 17th-century exhortation to young virgins from Robert Herrick). Nor the similar hurry-before-we-die rationale ("The grave's a fine and private place/ But none I think do there embrace") from Andrew Marvell in "To His Coy Mistress."

From even a cursory survey of literature or the modern mass market in sex fantasies, it seems clear that this new taxonomy may not be any more complete than the original periodic table of the elements.

When I mentioned Ms. Crawford's complexion and the poets' rationales to Dr. Buss, he promised to consider them and all other candidates for Reason 238.

You can nominate your own reasons at TierneyLab. You can also submit nominations for a brand new taxonomy: reasons for just saying "No way!" Somehow, though, I don't think this list will be as long.

Religion and the Arts in America

Wed, 15 Aug 2007 00:00:00 -0500

At this moment in America, religion and politics are at a flash point. Conservative Christians deplore the left-wing bias of the mainstream media and the saturation of popular culture by sex and violence and are promoting strategies such as faith-based home-schooling to protect children from the chaotic moral relativism of a secular society. Liberals in turn condemn the meddling by Christian fundamentalists in politics, notably in regard to abortion and gay civil rights or the Mideast, where biblical assumptions, it is claimed, have shaped US policy. There is vicious mutual recrimination, with believers caricatured as paranoid, apocalyptic crusaders who view America's global mission as divinely inspired, while liberals are portrayed as narcissistic hedonists and godless elitists, relics of the unpatriotic, permissive 1960s.

A primary arena for the conservative-liberal wars has been the arts. While leading conservative voices defend the traditional Anglo-American literary canon, which has been under challenge and in flux for forty years, American conservatives on the whole, outside of the New Criterion magazine, have shown little interest in the arts, except to promulgate a didactic theory of art as moral improvement that was discarded with the Victorian era at the birth of modernism. Liberals, on the other hand, have been too content with the high visibility of the arts in metropolitan centers, which comprise only a fraction of America. Furthermore, liberals have been complacent about the viability of secular humanism as a sustaining creed for the young. And liberals have done little to reverse the scandalous decline in urban public education or to protest the crazed system of our grotesquely overpriced, cafeteria-style higher education, which for thirty years was infested by sterile and now fading poststructuralism and postmodernism. The state of the humanities in the US can be measured by present achievement: would anyone seriously argue that the fine arts or even popular culture is enjoying a period of high originality and creativity? American genius currently resides in technology and design. The younger generation, with its mastery of video games and its facility for ever-evolving gadgetry like video cell phones and iPods, has massively shifted to the Web for information and entertainment.

I would argue that the route to a renaissance of the American fine arts lies through religion. Let me make my premises clear: I am a professed atheist and a pro-choice libertarian Democrat. But based on my college experiences in the 1960s, when interest in Hinduism and Buddhism was intense, I have been calling for nearly two decades for massive educational reform that would put the study of comparative religion at the center of the university curriculum. Though I shared the exasperation of my generation with the moralism and prudery of organized religion, I view each world religion, including Judeo-Christianity and Islam, as a complex symbol system, a metaphysical lens through which we can see the vastness and sublimity of the universe. Knowledge of the Bible, one of the West's foundational texts, is dangerously waning among aspiring young artists and writers. When a society becomes all-consumed in the provincial minutiae of partisan politics (as has happened in the US over the past twenty years), all perspective is lost. Great art can be made out of love for religion as well as rebellion against it. But a totally secularized society with contempt for religion sinks into materialism and self-absorption and gradually goes slack, without leaving an artistic legacy.

The position of the fine arts in America has rarely been secure. This is a practical, commercial nation where the arts have often been seen as wasteful, frivolous, or unmanly. In Europe, the arts are heavily subsidized by the government because art literally embodies the history of the people and the nation, whose roots are pre-modern and in some cases ancient. Even in the old Soviet Union, the Communist regime supported classical ballet. America is relatively young, and it has never had an aristocracythe elite class that typically commissions the fine arts and dictates taste. In Europe, the Catholic Church was also a major patron of the arts from the Middle Ages through the Renaissance and Counter-Reformation. Partly because of the omnipresent Greco-Roman heritage, furthermore, continental European attitudes toward nudity in art are far more relaxed. In Europe, voluptuous nudes in painting and sculpture and on public buildings, fountains, and bridges are a mundane fact of life.

Conservatives often speak of the US as a Judeo-Christian nation, a formulation that many people, including myself, find troublesome because of the absorption by our population, over the past century and a half, of so many immigrants of other faiths. The earliest colonization of America by Europeans was certainly Christian, and in New England specifically Protestant. The Spanish Catholic settlements in Florida and California, as well as the French missions in the Great Lakes and central New York, were eventually abandoned. Maryland, established in 1634 as a refuge for English Catholics, was the exception, and out of it would come the dominance of the bishops of Baltimore on American Catholic doctrine.

The Puritans who arrived in New England in the early seventeenth century brought with them the Calvinist hostility or indifference to the visual arts. A motivating principle of the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation was its correction of Roman Catholicism's heavy use of images in medieval churchesin statues, paintings, and stained-glass windows. The Protestant reformers reasserted the Ten Commandments' ban on graven images, idolatrous objects that seduce the soul away from the immaterial divine. The Puritans, a separatist sect that seceded from the tooCatholic Church of England, followed the Reformation imperative of putting the Bible at the center of their faith. Through direct study of the Bible, made possible by Gutenberg's invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century, believers opened a personal dialogue with God. This focus on text and close reading helped inspire the American literary tradition. Both poetry and prose, in the form of diaries, were stimulated by the Puritan practice of introspection: a Puritan had to constantly scrutinize his or her conscience and look for God's hand in the common and uncommon events of life. Oratory, embodied in Sunday sermons, was very strong. Literary historian Perry Miller identified the jeremiad or hellfire sermon as an innately American form, the most famous example of which is Jonathan Edwards' sermon "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," which was delivered in Connecticut in 1741 during the religious revival called the Great Awakening. This enthusiastic style of denunciation and call to repentance can still be heard on evangelical television programs, and it is echoed in the fulminations of politically conservative talk radio (which I have been listening to with alternating admiration and consternation for over fifteen years).

The visual arts, on the other hand, were neglected and suppressed under the Puritans. The Puritan suspicion of ornamentation is symbolized in the sober black dress of the Pilgrim Fathers depicted every year in the Thanksgiving decorations of American schools and shops. The Puritans' attitude toward art was conditioned by utilitarian principles of frugality and propriety: art had no inherent purpose except as entertainment, a distraction from duty and ethical action. The Puritans did appreciate beauty in nature, which was "read" like a book for signs of God's providence. The social environment in England from which the Puritans had emigrated to America (either directly or indirectly via the Netherlands ) was overtly iconoclastic. Destruction of church art was massive during the Reformation in Switzerland and Germany as well as England, where destruction of churches, priories, and abbeys followed Henry VIII's severance of the English church from control by the Roman Catholic hierarchy in the 1530s. Crowds smashed medieval stained-glass windows and intricately carved wooden altar screens and decapitated the statues of saints carved on church facades. Walls were whitewashed to cover sacred murals. Politically incited damage to churches was even more severe during the English Civil Wars (164251), when Puritan soldiers dispatched by Parliament attacked even the cathedral at Canterbury, which Richard Culmer, Cromwell's general and the leader of the ravagers, called "a stable for idols." Puritan iconoclasm was a pointed contrast to the image mania of the contemporary Counter-Reformation, the Vatican's campaign to defeat Protestantism that would fill Southern Europe with grandiose Baroque art.

The first serious body of painting in America was eighteenth-century portraiture, documentary works commissioned to mark social status. Professional theater also began in the eighteenth century in the Southern colonies and New York City, although a vestige of the battles waged by the English Puritans against the theater world in Shakespeare's time survived in the laws prohibiting stage plays that were passed during the two decades before the American Revolution in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Pennsylvania. Though American drama and the visual arts may have languished in the wake of Puritanism, music was tremendously energized. The first book published in the American colonies was the Bay Psalm Book, which was released in 1640 in Massachusetts and went through twenty-seven editions. As a collection of psalms for singing in church, it belonged to a century-long line of British and Scottish psalters. Before the Reformation, hymns for the Catholic Mass were in Latin and were sung only by the clergy, not the laity. But Martin Luther, a priest and poet who admired German folk song, felt that hymns should be couched in the vernacular and should be sung by the entire congregation of worshippers. This emphasis on congregational singing is one of Protestantism's defining featuresimitated in recent decades, with varying success, by American Catholic parishes. Through its defiance of medieval religious authority, Protestantism helped produce modern individualism. Yet Protestant church services also promoted community and social cohesion. The intertwining of capitalism and Protestantism since the Renaissance has been extensively studied. But perhaps the congregational esprit of church-going may also have been a factor in the Protestant success in shaping modern business practices and corporate culture.

The Protestant reformers were bitterly split, however, over the issue of music in church. Luther encouraged the composition of new hymns and was the author of a famous one"A Mighty Fortress Is Our God" ("Ein' Feste Burg Ist Unser Gott"). In contrast, John Calvin, the father of American Puritanism, maintained that only the word of God should be heard in church; hence songs had to strictly follow the biblical psalms. Like his fellow reformer, Ulrich Zwingli, Calvin opposed the use of organs or any instruments in church: organs were systematically destroyed by Protestant radicals. Furthermore, Calvin condemned the complex polyphonic music endorsed by the more artistic Luther. Calvin rejected harmony or part-singing, so that the Holy Scripture could be heard with perfect clarity. Thus the American style of Protestant church song, based on Calvin's principles, was simple, slow, serious, and cast in unaccompanied unison. That intense, focused group sound has descended through the centuries and can be heard in the majestic hymns that have been adopted as stirring anthems by American civil rights groups, such as "Amazing Grace" and "We Shall Overcome."

The Quakers, who were pivotal to the abolitionist movement against slavery, were even more restrictive about such matters: they frowned on music altogether, even at home, because they believed it encouraged thoughtlessness and frivolity. But the German and Dutch who emigrated to America from the late seventeenth to the mid-eighteenth centuries held the more expansive Lutheran view of church music. The German influence was especially strong in Philadelphia, to which German Pietists imported a church organ in 1694. By the start of the nineteenth century, hymn writing exploded in America. Over the next hundred years, hymns of tremendous quality poured out from both men and women writers. In many cases, they were simply lyricspure poetry that was attached to old melodies. A famous example from the Civil War is Julia Ward Howe's "Battle Hymn of the Republic," which Howe wrote overnight in a fever of inspiration after visiting a Union Army camp near Washington, where she heard the soldiers singing "John Brown's Body," a tribute to the executed abolitionist rebel. Several other songs would become political hymns to the nation, such as "My Country 'Tis of Thee," written in 1832 by a Baptist minister, Samuel Francis Smith, and "America the Beautiful," a lyric written by Katharine Lee Bates, a native of Massachusetts whose father was a Congregationalist pastor. Bates saw the Rockies for the first time when she taught here at Colorado College in 1893. She wrote "America the Beautiful" after a wagon trip to the top of Pike's Peak. When it was published in 1899, it became instantly famous and has often been described as America's true national anthem. The huge nineteenth-century corpus of Protestant songs became part of common American culture for people of all faithsthus the tragic power of that final scene on the sinking Titanic in 1912, when the ship's band struck up the hymn, "Nearer My God to Thee."

Hymnody should be viewed as a genre of the fine arts and be added to the basic college curriculum. One of the most brilliant products of American creative imagination, hymnody has had a massive global impact through popular music. Wherever rock 'n' roll is played, a shadow of its gospel roots remains. Rock, which emerged in the 1950s from urban black rhythm and blues of the late 1940s, had several sources, including percussive West African polyrhythms and British and Scots-Irish folk ballads. But a principal influence was the ecstatic, prophesying, body-shaking style of congregational singing in the camp meetings of religious revivalists from the late eighteenth century on. All gospel music, including Negro spirituals, descends from those extravaganzas, which drew thousands of people to open-air worship services in woods and groves.

The most influential camp meeting occurred at Cane Ridge in Bourbon County, Kentucky, in 1804. For three days and well past midnight, a crowd estimated to be between twenty and thirty thousand sang and shouted with a great noise that was heard for miles around. Worshippers transported by extreme emotion jerked, writhed, fell to the ground in convulsions or went catatonic. This Kentucky Revival, called the Second Great Awakening, spread through the inland regions of the South and eventually reached western Pennsylvania. But the movement never flourished in the North because of its harsher weather.

Collections of gospel music for use in revivals were published to huge success throughout the nineteenth centuryfrom Gospel Melodies (1821) and Spiritual Songs for Social Worship (1832) to Ira D. Sankey's volumes of Gospel Hymns and Sacred Songs (187591). A defining characteristic of such songs is their subjectivitythat is, their use of the first-person pronoun to assert an intimate relationship with Jesusas in "Abide with Me," "I Need Thee Every Hour," "Jesus Loves Me," "He Leadeth Me," "I Love to Tell the Story," or the rousing "Give Me That Old-Time Religion." Out of this gospel tradition also came Negro spirituals, which would powerfully counter the degraded stereotypes of African Americans circulated by minstrel shows. Spirituals began on the antebellum plantations, where Bible stories were ingeniously adapted to carry coded political messages, as in "Go Down, Moses," a dream of liberation where Pharaoh represents the white slave-owner in collusion with American law. A major addition to the gospel repertory was Slave Songs of the United States, published in 1867. In the 1870s, an African American choir, the Jubilee Singers of Fisk University in Tennessee, traveled the country performing Negro spirituals in a concert setting to help endow black educational institutions. The songs made a sensation, not only for their melodious beauty and religious fervor but for their residual African elements, such as bluesy flat notes and off-beats, the syncopation that would later surface in jazz.

The brilliant folk hymns of nineteenth-century camp meetings were inherited by modern revivals, such as the Billy Graham Crusade. In popular music, the spasmodic undulations and ecstatic cries of camp-meeting worshippers were borrowed by performers like Little Richard, Elvis Presley, and the late, great James Brown, whose career began in gospel and who became the "godfather of soul" as well as of funk, reggae, and rap. Gospel music, passionate and histrionic, with its electrifying dynamics, is America 's grand opera. The omnipresence of gospel here partly explains the weakness of rock music composed in other nationsexcept where there has been direct influence by American rhythm and blues, as in Great Britain and Australia. The continuing impact of gospel music on young African Americans in church may also account for the current greater vitality of hip hop as opposed to hard rock, which has been in creative crisis for well over a decade.

There was a second great confluence of religion with the arts in nineteenth-century America. The Bible, in its poetic and indeed Shakespearean King James translation rather than in today's flat, pedestrian versions, had a huge formative influence on the language, imagery, symbolism, and allegory of such major writers as James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, and Herman Melville. The American literary renaissance was produced by the intersection of the nation's residual Calvinism with British Romanticism, which was hostile to organized religion but which had transferred its concept of spirituality to nature. Pantheism helped inspire transcendentalism, which was suffused with aspects of Hinduism by Ralph Waldo Emerson (a refugee from strict Unitarianism). This view of nature, which saw God as immanent in creation, was spectacularly embodied in the nineteenth-century Hudson River School of landscape painting. In such works as Thomas Cole's "River in the Catskills" or Frederic Church's "Niagara," these artists showed America 's mountains and monumental cataracts glowing with the numinous.

Catholic immigration in the nineteenth century brought a radically different aesthetic to church architecture and decor. The typical American church had been in the Protestant plain style, white and rectangular with a steeple that formed the picturesque apex of countless villagesa design bequeathed by the British architects Sir Christopher Wren and James Gibbs. Originally, American churches were often simply a meeting house (a word still retained in Quaker practice). Also used for local government, the meeting house was a boxy space with exposed timbers and benches but no ornamentationa template that was borrowed by town halls across the nation. Catholic taste was far more lavish. The influx of Irish immigrants in the 1830s and '40swhich caused anti-Catholic violence (including the burning of churches in Philadelphia)was soon registered in New York's St. Patrick's Cathedral, designed by James Renwick and constructed from 1850 to 1877. With its soaring spires, delicate stonework, and stained-glass windows, it exemplified the current Gothic Revivala grand style that was also adopted by Episcopalian churches in America.

Polish and Italian Catholics arrived en masse in the closing decades of the nineteenth century. Eastern European parish churches followed the ornate Byzantine model. Italian American churches, as was customary in the old country, installed a profusion of polychrome statuary. That flamboyant style continued until after World War II, when the German branch of the Liturgical Movement for Catholic reform introduced a stripped-down modernist design, with concrete construction, open spaces, and little imagery except for abstract crucifixes. This development (blandly formulaic at its worst) resulted in a genteel Protestantizing of American Catholicism, which erased all traces of working-class ethnicity. When aging Catholic churches were renovated in the 1950s and '60s, the saints' statues were displaced or banished altogether. I mourn this loss, which has impoverished the cultural environment for young people: my interest in the arts was first kindled in childhood by the gorgeous stained-glass windows and theatrical statuary of my baptismal church, St. Antony of Padua in Endicott, New York. Perhaps America 's rising Hispanic population will restore the great imagistic style of Latin Catholicism.

Though there was a long tradition of censorship in Roman Catholicism, typified by its voluminous Index Librorum Prohibitorum ("Index of Prohibited Books"), American Catholics made few attempts to influence public policy during the nineteenth century. That role was taken up with gusto by the Protestant-led temperance movement, which called for a ban on the public sale of alcohola long campaign that finally succeeded with the ratification in 1920 of the eighteenth amendment to the US Constitution, which began thirteen years of Prohibition. Major groups in the temperance movement, which included leading feminists like Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, were the Women's Christian Temperance Union and the Anti-Saloon League, which was heavily financially subsidized by Methodists and Baptists. Episcopalians, in contrast, kept their distance from the temperance crusade.

Catholic surveillance of American public life would come with the rise of Hollywood. At the start of the studio era, movies were still viewed as vulgar. In the Roaring Twenties, the Jazz Age, there was a new rule-breaking energy and sexual adventurism in urban areas. Responding to audience demand, movies began pushing the limits with bare flesh and sexual innuendo. Small communities across the US felt they were being invaded by an alien cultural force. Resistance came from a collaboration between the Catholic Church and local Protestant women's groups, speaking from the perspective of concerned mothers. There were tinges of anti-Semitism in this protest, because so many of Hollywood's early producers and financiers were Jewish. A series of guidelines was instituted in moviemaking throughout the 1920s, but compliance remained uneven. The Motion Picture Production Code, written by a Jesuit priest, was adopted by Hollywood in 1930 but laxly enforced by the Hays Office. Finally, in 1933, a conference of US bishops created the Catholic League of Decency (later renamed the National League of Decency) and threatened a nationwide boycott. Hollywood responded by appointing a tough Irish Catholic, Joseph Ignatius Breen, to administer the Code, which he did through the Breen Office for the next twenty years. The Code, which wasn't officially abandoned until 1967, required scripts to follow a moral formula: crime had to be punished and marriage respected, with homosexuality and miscegenation forbidden.

Though long disbanded, the Legion of Decency lingers on today in our lettered rating system for moviesG, PG, PG-13, R, NC-17. The Legion attached descending grades of A, B, or C to each film released in the US. When I was a child, the group was still a formidable force. After Mass one Sunday, I was transfixed by the official list, posted in the church foyer, that showed the Legion of Decency had slapped a C on the 1956 film, Baby Doll, meaning it was "Condemned" and that no Catholic could see it without pain of sin. The title, Baby Doll, seemed inscribed in smoking, red-hot letters from hell! The film, based on an over-the-top Tennessee Williams tale about Southern decadence, was being provocatively advertised by kiddy-porn images of blonde Carroll Baker lounging in a nightie and sucking her thumb. It was forty years before I finally had a chance to see Baby Doll on cable TV in the 1990s. It still retains its mythic, subversive significance for me. Indeed, Baby Doll is emblematic of the quarrel between religion and the arts in America.

As avant-garde modernism triumphed in the first half of the twentieth century, it was only the movies that addressed or expressed the religious convictions of the mass audience. With few exceptions, most modern artists and intellectuals were agnostics or atheists, above all in Europe, where anti-clericalism has raged since the Enlightenment. In its search for ticket sales, Hollywood returned again and again to the spectacular bible epic, one of my favorite genres. Cecil B. DeMille, for example, made The Ten Commandments twice, in 1923 as a silent film and then as a wide-screen Technicolor extravaganza released in 1956. The latter is regularly broadcast on religious holidays and remains a masterpiece of heroic narrative and archaeological recreation of upper-class Egyptian life. The best-selling American religious novel of the nineteenth century was General Lew Wallace's Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ, published in 1880 and widely imitated. Ben-Hur was also made into two films, the first a 1925 silent and the second yet another wide-screen masterpiece, released in 1959. The dynamic star of both The Ten Commandments and Ben-Hur was Charlton Heston, who afterward became a conservative activist and president of the National Rifle Association.

Because of the divergence between religion and the prestige fine arts in the twentieth century, overtly religious art became weaker and weaker. One of the most disseminated images of the twentieth century was William Sallman's Head of Christ, a 1940 American oil painting inspired by Victorian precedents that showed a long-haired Jesus bathed in light and gazing raptly toward heaven. In his intriguing 1996 book, Icons of American Protestantism, David Morgan notes that Head of Christ was reproduced five hundred million times over the next four decades. The image was beloved among evangelicals but not mainline Protestants. Many critics, even believers, rejected the painting as sentimental kitsch and denounced its portrayal of Christ as "effeminate" as well as overly Nordic Caucasian. (Sallman was in fact the son of Scandinavian immigrants.) Head of Christ shows Jesus as the gentle, benevolent Good Shepherdthe forgiving friend with whom born-again Christians, such as President Jimmy Carter, claim to walk and talk.

If there were few open conflicts in America between religion and the fine arts through most of the twentieth century, it was simply because the two realms rarely overlapped. But that uneasy truce ended with the culture wars of the 1980s and '90s. Under the conservative presidencies of Ronald Reagan, whose goal was to reduce big government, there was close scrutiny of cultural agencies. Considerable impetus came from William Bennett, the new director of the National Endowment for the Humanities, whose budget he cut; when Bennett was appointed Secretary of Education, he was succeeded as Director of the NEH by Lynne Cheney, wife of the future Vice President, Richard B. Cheney. She targeted deconstruction on campus and liberal bias in government-funded public broadcasting programs. A focus of controversy soon became the National Endowment for the Arts, whose authorization was approved in 1964 by President Lyndon Johnson but which had to struggle for congressional funding from the start, with vehement opposition even to its creation coming from Strom Thurmond, the conservative senator from South Carolina.

A variety of groups mobilized outside government in the 1980s to counter what was perceived as a moral degeneration in the media environment. These included Dr. James Dobson's Focus on the Family, the Rev. Louis Sheldon's Coalition for Traditional Values, and Pat Robertson's Christian Coalition. In 1985, the Parents Music Resource Center, led by Tipper Gore (wife of then-Senator Al Gore of Tennessee ), lobbied in Senate hearings for content labeling of popular music because of concerns about sex and violence. In 1985, evangelical Protestant organizations, led by the Rev. Jerry Falwell, founder of the Moral Majority, and the Rev. Donald Wildmon, founder of the National Federation for Decency (renamed the American Family Association), allied with anti-pornography feminists (whom I strongly opposed) to pressure 7-11 and other national chains of convenience stores, to ban the sale of Playboy and Penthouse magazines. That effort succeeded but may have been a pyrrhic victory insofar as it immediately stimulated the market for pornographic videos, introduced into homes by the then-new technology of the VCR. In 1988, Wildmon's lobbying led to the introduction in the US House of Representatives of a resolution (sponsored by conservative Southern California Congressman William E. Dannemeyer) calling for Universal Studios to cancel the release of Martin Scorsese's "morally objectionable" film, The Last Temptation of Christ. The resolution was referred to committee and never reached the floor for a vote.

Wildmon's activities expanded to the fine arts when, in 1989, his group publicized an apparent example of blasphemy in an exhibition that had been partly funded (in the amount of seventy thousand dollars) by the National Endowment for the Arts. The show had opened at the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, in conservative Senator Jesse Helms' home state, and after a short tour closed in Richmond, Virginia. The point of contention was New York artist Andres Serrano's "Piss Christ"a five-foot-high blow-up of a misty photograph of a back-lit plastic crucifix immersed in a Plexiglas vat of the artist's urine. Without that slangy and perhaps gratuitously confrontational title, of course, no one would have known how the photo's golden glow had been produced. The outcry over "Piss Christ" began with local letters to the editor and spread to Congress, where New York Senator Alphonse D'Amato called Serrano's photo "filth" and "garbage" and punctuated his remarks by tearing up the exhibit catalog and flinging the pieces to the Senate floor.

Another bitter controversy broke out that year over an exhibit of Robert Mapplethorpe's openly gay and sadomasochistic photographs: this show was assembled by the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia and was partly funded (in the amount of thirty thousand dollars) by the National Endowment for the Arts. There were no problems in Philadelphia, but negative publicity exploded just before the Mapplethorpe show was to open in Washington 's venerable Corcoran Gallery of Art, located only a block from the White House. The director preemptively cancelled the exhibit, an arbitrary move that caused outrage in the art world (she resigned under fire by the end of the year). The Mapplethorpe show was quickly taken by a local progressive venue, the Washington Project for the Arts, where it drew huge crowds. When it moved to the Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center, however, there were serious repercussions: police entered the gallery, and the director was charged with obscenity. He was put on trial but later acquitted by a jury.

Political activism on the left was unusually intense in the 1980s because of the AIDS epidemic, which the Reagan administration was accused of having initially ignored. Mapplethorpe, who had died of AIDS at age forty-two in 1989, was viewed as an apostle of sexual liberation. As an admirer of Mapplethorpe, I argued at the time that this was a sentimental misreading of his work, whose dark, punitive hierarchies were partly a residue of his childhood Catholicism. Another seething ex-Catholic, Madonna, was also challenging taboos at the time: in 1989, her music video for "Like a Prayer," which showed her receiving the stigmata, making love to the animated statue of a black saint, and dancing in her slip in front of a field of burning crosses, caused Pepsi-Cola to cancel her five million dollar endorsement contract.

Though work offensive to organized religion constituted only a fraction of the projects annually supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, conservative demands for the total abolition of that agency escalated. The NEA's administrators and peer-review panels were denounced for left-wing bias and anti-Americanism. As a career teacher at arts colleges, I was very concerned about the stereotyping of artists as parasitic nihilists that was beginning to take hold in the popular mind in America. While most people in the arts community viewed the Serrano and Mapplethorpe controversies as assaults on free speech, I saw them as primarily an argument about public funding. I feel that no genuinely avant-garde artist should be taking money from the governmenta view also expressed at the time by the legendary Beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti (another Italian American). Mapplethorpe, certainly, was no struggling artisthe was rich and famous by the time of his death. And I would question whether Mapplethorpe's cool, elegant torture and mutilation scenarios were an ideal advertisement for gay male life.

After acrimonious Congressional debate, the National Endowment for the Arts managed to survive, but it was now regulated by an obscenity clause; grants to individual artists also decreased. Though controversy has subsided, the NEA disturbingly remains at the top of every list of government agencies that many citizens across the nation want abolished. What I found agonizing about the Serrano-Mapplethorpe episodes was that they ruined any prospect for vastly increased federal support for the arts in this country and furthermore that they would inevitably undermine arts funding at the state and local levels, where budgets are limited. Dance companies are particularly vulnerable, because they require high-quality rehearsal space and depend on a sustained continuity of teacher and student.

Almost a decade passed in America without a major conflict between government and the arts. In 1999, however, the Brooklyn Museum of Art mounted an exhibit called "Sensation: Emerging British Artists from the Saatchi Collection." When this show had appeared two years earlier at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, controversy had mainly focused on a large image of an infamous child murderess, which was vandalized with ink and eggs. The work that caused trouble in the US, however, was the British-Nigerian artist Chris Ofili's mixed-media painting, "The Holy Virgin Mary": it depicted a black-skinned Madonna with a protruding breast sculpted of lacquered elephant dung from the London zoo; two other lumps of dung supported the painting's base. In England, no one objected to the Ofili work. But in New York City, with its huge constituency of ethnic Catholics, there was an immediate reaction, fomented by the New Yorkbased Catholic League for Religious and Civil Liberties, whose vocal president is William A. Donohue. Yet another Italian American Catholic politician, Mayor Rudy Giuliani, expressed outragebefore the show had even opened. At a fiery press conference, Giuliani, who had not yet seen the Ofili painting, called it "sick" and "disgusting." The mayor unilaterally impounded the Brooklyn Museum 's city funding and threatened to evict it from its century-old lease. This extreme political intrusion diverted the discussion from one of art to that of censorship.

While the director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Philippe de Montebello, wrote a New York Times op-ed criticizing the handling of the show by Arnold Lehman, the director of the Brooklyn Museum, most people in the arts community instantly rallied to the latter's side. But unease remained, especially after Lehman openly lied to the press about the pivotal financial role played in the show by Charles Saatchi, a British advertising executive notorious for his speculation in the art market. A direct intervention was made at the Brooklyn Museum by a seventy-two-year-old devout Catholic, who evaded security guards to squeeze washable white paint all over Ofili's paintingan act that some viewed as racist but that oddly paralleled the whitewashing of Catholic images by early Protestant iconoclasts. The man, who told police he had attacked the painting because it was "blasphemous," was charged with violating the city's ordinance against graffiti.

When the controversy first erupted, I publicly questioned the double standard operative in the art world in regard to artists' manipulation of religious iconography: desecration of Catholic symbols was tolerated in American museums in ways that would never be permitted if the themes were Jewish or Muslim. Second, I denounced the total failure of curatorial support of "Sensation" at the Brooklyn Museum, which simply passively mounted the London show. Much of the misunderstanding of the Ofili painting might have been avoided if the museum had framed it with historical context about, first, African Christian and particularly Ethiopian art; second, tribal African fertility cults; third, the Catholic doctrine of the Virgin Birth; and fourth, the long Southern European tradition of black Madonnas. Commentary by the tabloid press and furious conservatives who had never seen the painting referred to dung being "thrown" or "flung" at the Madonna, which was completely false. But with all candor, no defense of this painting could have totally exonerated it from scandal, since Ofili had provocatively pasted around Mary a cloud of small cutouts of female genitalia culled from pornography magazines. From a distance, they looked like butterflies or hovering angels, emissaries of nature rather than the Christian God. That there was indeed unprofessional indifference to curatorship in this case would be confirmed just last year [in 2006] when Arnold Lehman shockingly demoted his principal curators in a reorganization of the Brooklyn Museum that demonstrated the unscholarly diversion of the institution from public education toward commercial buzz.

The automatic defense of the Brooklyn Museum during the "Sensation" imbroglio sometimes betrayed a dismaying snobbery by liberal middle-class professionals who were openly disdainful of the religious values of the working class whom liberals always claim to protect. Supporters of the arts who gleefully cheer when a religious symbol is maltreated act as if that response authenticates their avant-garde credentials. But here's the bad news: the avant-garde is dead. It was killed over forty years ago by Pop Art and by one of my heroes, Andy Warhol, a decadent Catholic. The era of vigorous oppositional art inaugurated two hundred years ago by Romanticism is long gone. The controversies over Andres Serrano, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Chris Ofili were just fading sparks of an old cause. It is presumptuous and even delusional to imagine that goading a squawk out of the Catholic League permits anyone to borrow the glory of the great avant-garde rebels of the past, whose transgressions were personally costly. It's time to move on.

For the fine arts to revive, they must recover their spiritual center. Profaning the iconography of other people's faiths is boring and adolescent. The New Age movement, to which I belong, was a distillation of the 1960s' multicultural attraction to world religions, but it has failed thus far to produce important work in the visual arts.¹ The search for spiritual meaning has been registering in popular culture instead through science fiction, as in George Lucas' six-film Star Wars saga, with its evocative master myth of the "Force." But technology for its own sake is never enough. It will always require supplementation through cultivation in the arts.

To fully appreciate world art, one must learn how to respond to religious expression in all its forms. Art began as religion in prehistory. It does not require belief to be moved by a sacred shrine, icon, or scripture. Hence art lovers, even when as citizens they stoutly defend democratic institutions against religious intrusion, should always speak with respect of religion. Conservatives, on the other hand, need to expand their parched and narrow view of culture. Every vibrant civilization welcomes and nurtures the arts.

Progressives must start recognizing the spiritual poverty of contemporary secular humanism and reexamine the way that liberalism too often now automatically defines human aspiration and human happiness in reductively economic terms. If conservatives are serious about educational standards, they must support the teaching of art history in primary schoolwhich means conservatives have to get over their phobia about the nude, which has been a symbol of Western art and Western individualism and freedom since the Greeks invented democracy. Without compromise, we are heading for a soulless future. But when set against the vast historical panorama, religion and artwhether in marriage or divorcecan reinvigorate American culture.

The Parent Trap

Tue, 14 Aug 2007 00:00:00 -0500

"Woke up this morning, heard the words to your song/Never meant to hurt you, but know where I went wrong "

Michael Lohan was singing me a song he wrote for his daughter Lindsay during his most recent stay in prison. It was the afternoon of Sunday, Aug. 12, and we were sitting in a black Ford Explorer in the sun-drenched parking lot of Belmont Park in Long Island.

Mr. Lohan's ballad was titled "A Father's Love." He had popped in a CD recording of the songreplete with 80's keyboard backupand was singing along softly. He said he had written the song in response to Lindsay's song, "Confessions of Broken Heart," which he interprets to have been written to him.

He wore a faded blue T-shirtsleeves cut off, exposing a tattoo of a celtic cross emblazoned with the names of his childrenand jeans. His sparse hair was gelled back. A resemblance to his actress daughterwho recently entered a rehab facility for the third time this yearwas apparent in his eyes and freckly complexion.

The song continued: "Raised you to understand all the good in life, somehow I lost my way, should have taken my advice."

Outside a picnichosted by the faith-based sobriety program Teen Challengewas getting under way. While in prison, along with singing and songwriting, Mr. Lohan took Teen Challenge correspondence courses. Since his release in March, he has been a resident of a Teen Challenge center in West Babylon, L.I., and is in training to become a minister, though to be ordained he'll have to wait until he's off parole. Mr. Lohan cocked his head back in anticipation of the song's chorus and crooned, "I love you so much, just one chance to make it up, causea father's love will never die."

Earlier that morning we had been in church.

"Freedom does not come easyamen," Pastor Jimmy Jack said from the pulpit, wrapping up his service at the Freedom Chapel, a small, nondescript church on the side of a highway in Amityville.

"Freedom does not come easy," the pastor repeated.

"No, it doesn't," intoned Mr.Lohan. For church, he had worn black slacks and a yellow button-down shirt. He was one of 40 or so congregants standing before the stage, his palms raised toward the ceiling. The father of the embattled 21-year-old actresswho the country has watched chase death at the wheel of her Mercedes this summernodded knowingly at the man standing next to him, then reached down and took a Kleenex from a handy communal box and damped his eyes.

A synthesizer began to play. The day's message was projected in white cursive against a purple backdrop on a hanging screen: "Freedom to find yourself in Christ." The pastortall, broad, bronzed and mustachioed, wearing a tan polyester leisure suitsaid he hoped to see everyone at the picnic.

Both Teen Challenge's West Babylon center and the Freedom Chapel were founded by Mr. Jack"Pastor Jimmy" to those who know himwho has spent the past three months mentoring Mr. Lohan. The two men invited me on an exclusive tour of Mr. Lohan's current home, before heading over to the family picnic.

"Here's the dining hall where we have breakfast, lunch and dinner," said Mr. Lohan, gesturing to a dimly lit, cramped room with a long table and chairs stacked atop it, as he made his way through a no-frills boarding house. Upstairs, he noted that his floor is currently under construction, as we passed an area of unfinished plywood frames en route to his room. "This my room," he said. He was standing between two twin beds in a room that resembled a college dorm. A pastel drawing of what looked like an angel rested on his head board.

"And this is Orlando," he said, introducing me to his roommate.

In the yard outside his dorm, Mr. Lohan, 47, explained how he viewed his current situation. "It's like Corinthians 5:17, 'When the Lord Jesus Christ comes into your life, the old is passed and the new is upon you,'" he said.

"It says therefore if any man is in Christ, he's a new creation," said Pastor Jimmy, who sat nearby. "'All things pass away, behold, all things become new.' That's kind of like our theme scripture."

Pastor Jimmy himself graduated from the Brooklyn Teen Challenge program more than 20 years ago, before founding Long Island Teen Challenge in 1989.

"It's the same thing as in Luke 9:24," said Mr. Lohan. "'If you want to be savedif a man wants to save his life, a man has to lose his life.' And, basically, that's what happened to me, I lost my life when I hit that pole, and I found a new life," he said, referring to the car accident on Feb. 23, 2005, which led to his incarceration for driving under the influence, among other things.

The pastor clearly sees an able protégé in Mr. Lohan. The two, along with the actor Stephen Baldwina recovered addict turned Christianare planning a Christian radio show. And in September, the three men are joining forces on a new Teen Challenge center in Southampton, which will be called the Sanctuary.

On the drive to Belmont Park, Mr. Lohan explainedto borrow the title of the biography he's currently shopping"How It All Went Down."

He grew up in Cold Spring Harbor, the posh hamlet in Suffolk County where John Lennon spent much of his time from the mid-1970's up to his death.

"My grandfather owned the largest spaghetti company in the world at one time," said Mr. Lohan, referring to his maternal family's involvement in Prince Spaghetti and DeBoles Macaroni. Nonetheless: "We worked at the age of 15. We got our due when we worked. I was raised in a Catholic household, they were very good people." Mr. Lohan stipulated that his father was an alcoholic, but said no one else in his family drank. "Everyone in my family are pillars of the Cold Spring Harbor community," he said, drawing a distinction between his pedigree and that of his wife, Dina.

"Her brother Paul, the middle one, is going to jail for 9/11 fraud," he said. "For a million-dollar 9/11 fraud."

"Jesus," I blurted and quickly apologized.

"No, that's okay," said Pastor Jimmy, who was sitting in the driver's seat. "He needs Jesus."

Mr. Lohan came around to how he first ran afoul of the law. At the age of 20, after chasing his dream to be an actor, he took a job on Wall Street.

"I was the youngest trader on the floor of the commodity exchange," he said. "And by the time I was 25 I had four seats on the exchange."

He owned a Ferrari 308 GTSI inspired by Magnum, P.I., which he said he drove off a 26-foot cliff in Massachusetts; he suffered only a concussion. And yes, he did some blow on weekends; it was the 80's.

In December 1984, he met Dina, who was working as a salesperson at the Bloomingdale's cosmetics department. On November 2, 1985, they married and started a family.

In 1990, when Lindsay was five years old, Mr. Lohan was investigated for insider trading and convicted of criminal contempt of court because, he said, he wouldn't testify about the trading of other brokers. He was sentenced to three years in Nassau County jail. In 1993 he was released on five years probation. He cherished the time with the kids, he says.

"I read the Bible to the kids every day," he said, "and we'd pray on the way to school every morning. I had a Lotus, and Michael and Lindsay would cram in the front seat, sit on each other's lap with the seat belt on, and we would pray. And they were only in junior high school."

But he wasn't done with prison. His daughter's acting career began taking her around the country, and Mr. Lohan found himself behind bars again in 1997he had violated his parole to visit Lindsay in Los Angeles after she had been hospitalized with asthma. The trip cost the concerned father another year away from his family.

From 1998 to 2005, Mr. Lohan was a free man. His daughter's career was flourishing, but his marriage to Dina was not. Mr. Lohan said that his daughter's success, which had been solidified with Freaky Friday, attracted hangers-on to the Lindsay gravy train, including members of Dina's family. He is convinced that his wife's friends and family conspired to split the couple apart, especially after he voiced concern that Lindsay affairs should be handled by professionals, not family.

Long story short: Tension between Mr. Lohan and his wife's family came to a head when Mr. Lohan and Dina's youngest brother, Matt Sullivan, got into a fistfight outside Mr. Lohan's Long Island home, during a communion party for Mr. Lohan's son, Dakota.

Mr. Lohan was charged with attempted assault. He says he was defending himself. While awaiting sentencing, he had the aforementioned vehicular run-in with the pole. He was charged with driving while intoxicated and aggravated unlicensed operation of a motor vehicle.

He says his third trip to the clink was the hardest. His daughter's new role as America's favorite girl-gone-wild was a difficult burden to bear. On prison bulletin boards, inmates would tack up sultry pictures of Lindsay from Maxim magazine, or whatever they could get their hands on, and write nasty words like "bitch," "slut," "whore" and "drunk whore."

One inmate even tried to put glass in his food, he said.

It was a tough stretch. Yet, he's quick to point out, it was during this time in the joint that he found what gives him so much peace and joy today.

"I'm in Nassau County jail," Mr. Lohan recalled. "I'm walking in the dormI walked about three miles a day in the dorm, like One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest or somethingso I come back to my bunk and there's a number on my bunk and it says 'Teen Challenge' on it. And I look at it and I'm like, 'What's this Teen Challenge thing?' And I called my attorney and I'm told to call the number, and I called the number and found out it was a faith-based rehabilitation program."

He recalled the day in jail when he was reborn. "I was in the middle of the dorm, and everyone is looking at Michael Lohan, on his knees, crying, and I accepted the Lord. And from that point on, Teen Challenge became the focus of my life."

Mr. Lohan began corresponding daily with Pastor Jimmy, who installed a special phone in his house for him to call collect on.

"What Mike is experiencing is what we call the transformation," said the pastor. Before leaving us for the picnic, he cited Romans Chapter 12. "'Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind that you might know the perfect and acceptable will of God,'" he said. "And the word transformed in Greek means metamorphosis, and that is what he is experiencing. The metamorphosis, where the caterpillarwho's very limitedbecomes a butterfly. It's the heart and the nature. And that's what born again really means: regeneration." Mr. Lohan said that as a butterfly, he hopes to spread freedom through Christ.

Later that afternoon, seated at one of the picnic tables, he spoke of another caterpillar that was poised to become an even bigger, more splendid butterflyhis daughter.

"Can you imaginePastor Jimmy keeps telling me this'Mike, can you imagine if Lindsay or Paris Hilton or Nicole Richie, or all of them, or one of themespecially Lindsayturned it all around?' Lindsay's example could be the greatest sermon to millions of people across the world. A story of redemption, a real Cinderella story."

Does he think she'll come through her current troubles?

"Absolutely," he said. "And how many lives would she affect? And what does it say about just one lost sheep coming to the Lord?" he asked of Pastor Jimmy, who was sitting nearby. "How many angels rejoice in heaven?"

"A host, it says," said the pastor.

Mr. Lohan declined to comment on what, if any, communication he has had with Lindsay since she entered rehab. The two have been estranged for some time, but Mr. Lohan did say there's been progress in recent days.

"If I did tell you, it would ruin any future contact with my daughter," he said. "My contact and communication with Lindsay, I don't find it necessary to make public."

He said that it has been particularly hard to watch from afar as his daughter battled demons he knows so well.

"All these people who don't know what she's going through are trying to help her," he said. "It's hard to help someone get through something, unless you been through it yourself. These young kids from Promises, which is a fine program, but I don't think they know what she's going through. I've been there.

"You know what hurt the most?" he added. "I wanted to be there for her, and everyone who caused the division in our family kept me away; they were afraid that, because I've come back to be the person the Lord wants me to be and that everyone loves, that if I become a part of Lindsay's life and it turns around, everbody is going to say, 'She just she needed a father all along.'"

Mr. Lohan and his estranged wife, Dina, are reportedly near a divorce settlement, which has been delayed in part by Mr. Lohan's being in jail. As the two exited the Mineola courthouse on Friday, Aug. 10, lawyers told reporters that it was a matter of "minor points."

Mr. Lohan said he had only one sticking point. In the closed-door meeting that Friday, he said, he put it to Dina this way:

"I said, 'Look in my eyes and tell me what you want.' And she told me what she wanted. And I said, 'Fine. Whatever you want.' All I asked was to see the kids once a week, with Dina's brother, Chris, or Pastor Jimmy, or both, and to have access to all my kid's sportsto watch them. And I asked for one thing: To keep Jim McMillan out of my kids' lives. But that's the turning point. If you can't agree to that, it's dead."

Mr. Lohan does not like his soon-to-be ex-wife's new boyfriend, Mr. McMillan.

He has also dropped his request to have Dina drug-tested, he said, for the sake of his children. He says he's interested in forgiveness and taking responsibility for his mistakes.

That said, Mr. Lohan does not accept blame for certain things.

Does he feel responsible for forcing his famous daughter into the limelight at a young age (she began doing commercial work at three)?

"Lindsay was never put into anything, Lindsay wanted to do it."

In fact, he said, he's had the solution all along.

"At the beginning of the things, I suggested a reality show called Living With the Lohans: Over or Starting Over?" he said. "When Dina served me the divorce papers, I said instead of going trial, why don't we work this out in an amicable wayjust show everyone we could end it the right way, and/or start over the right way. There would have been cameras on us the whole time. It would have guided us in the right way."

Mr. Lohan thinks such a show would not only be a smash hitnow more than everhe thinks it might be the only way to restore what once was.

"When we were a family, no matter what we were up against we stuck by each other and we overcame," he said. "But then people came between us and everything has fallen apart. Right now, I look at things and I pray."

"It's a daily thing," he'd said earlier, of the negative news reports that have haunted him and his family for the past several months. He produced a recent issue of InTouch magazine that included claims by a former bodyguard that Lindsay had been drunk at her 16th birthday party. Mr. Lohan vigorously refuted the accusation.

"It's a horrible thing that people would live off people's misery," he said. "Wouldn't the world be a different place if people wrote about all the good things people do?"

Queer Tribalism

Thu, 30 Nov 2006 00:00:00 -0600

It wasn't until my girlfriend and I were scanning the catalogs of sperm banks that I became aware of my Jewish identity. Suddenly it mattered, the fact that I was Jewish and my girlfriend was Jewish, andmost importantlythat the sperm with which we would merge first one of my eggs, and later one of hers, be Jewish. It didn't have to do with Hebrew classes, Bat Mitzvahs, or Israel. Not being able to see or speak to our future children's biological father, we told ourselves that our donor's Jewishness would create a smidgen of connection in the artificial, anonymous insemination process. You might not otherwise mingle with your own, but in matters as dramatic as birth and death, there's comfort in sticking close to the bloodline. If I were to awaken one morning single, lonely, and straight, I know I would register with JDate.

Zeroing in on Jewish sperm was also a way to mimic our heterosexual peers, which helped normalize the process for our families. We found ourselves publicly declaring our desire for Jewish sperm the way some women announce they want to meet a nice Jewish man. Our parents' preference for Jew-on-Jew mating likely had more to do with eugenics than our own. But when my partner Faith and I forced ourselves to imagine having a baby with one of our male friends, we always preferred the scenarios that involved Jews. Even the ickiest of our own kind was in some way warm, fuzzy, and familiar. Maybe our parents were right; we were probably better off taking a chance with one of our own.

To satisfy this hunch, we paid a hundred dollars to register with a sperm bank in Georgia that featured photos of each of their donors. First we read the essays the men had written about why they wanted to donate sperm, making a list of the best. Next we looked at pictures of all the men and made a new list of those we thought were the most physically appealing. Mind you, it was not drop-dead handsome we were after, just a friendly, benign-enough face we could bear melding with our own and then have reflected back to us over breakfast each morning for the next eighteen years, or the rest of our lives, whichever came first.

After three hours of strenuous research, we were ready for the climactic unveiling, the cross-referencing of language-arts skills and ethno-religious identification.

While not every articulate essay had been written by a Jewish man, every Jewish man, indeed, had written an articulate essay! We yelped with joy, if not for having validated our sperm-shopping approach, then for being Jews ourselvesdaughters of an enterprising people who valued education and could write so well.

Now trusting fully that our Jewish donor would be a decent chap who could pen an essay, all we had to do now was find one with a clean medical history. This decision narrowed the sperm-shopping field dramatically. Out of hundreds of possible sperm donors nationwide, we were left with approximately twenty. We found three identity-release Jewish sperm donors who fit the medical bill and numbered them in order of preference: (1) Tall, Dark, and Handsome; (2) Unibrow; and (3) Baldie. Numbers one and two were no longer available. And so, $3,000 later, Baldie was granted the gift of fathering our Jewish children.

Faith and I began inseminating the romantic wayat home with a syringe and a smoking cauldron of liquid nitrogen. When that failed, we decided to enlist a professional sperm handler to inject Baldie's donation intracervically. When that also didn't work, we moved on to intrauterine inseminations, the insertion of chemically washed vials of Baldie's semen directly into my uterus. When four months' worth of intrauterine inseminations proved unsuccessful, my fertility was called into question, invasive medical procedures were initiated, and a treatment with synthetic hormones was kindly but firmly suggested.

Baldie let us down six months in a row. Finally, I called the sperm bank and asked if Baldie had gotten anybody else pregnant. Their answer: No. It seemed that at least three other women had failed to conceive via Baldie, that Baldie had chosen to donate sperm because his spouse could not get pregnant and he wanted to get his genes into the next generation, and that the sperm bank now doubted Baldie's fertility and was taking him off the market.

Back at the drawing board, everything had changed. The days of looking for a Jewish donor were over. It wasn't just that there was not a decent Jew to be found (the other identity-release provider seemed to be running a special on Jews with mental illnesses). But another factor had begun to assert itselfsomething deep, primordial, and blindly determined. My biological clock was ticking loudly.

Demanding nothing less than pregnancy by the time I was forty (two months from the news of Baldie's infertility), I suddenly found myself wanting the seed of someone entirely differentfrom Baldie, from me, from our people. I imagined Baldie was so genetically similar as to be almost invisible, as if my eggs didn't even notice his passive little sperm, which slouched into my womb like spoiled, familiar brats. Now I wanted foreign sperm, sperm that shouted, "I'm here!" and looked so utterly different from my Ashkenazi eggs that they perked up and took heed. Raising children with our Jewish hearts and Jewish souls would have to be Jewishness enough. We were inseminating with the first medically sound identity-release donor we could find, religious background be damned.

As it turned out, the future grandparents agreed. Their new overriding wish: Do whatever you must to give us a grandchild! I'd like to think that watching us go through the trials of trying to get pregnant had made them see us not only as parents, but as an independent couple. My guess is that once the idea of a Jewish donor pried open their hearts, the gap just kept widening. Would they have preferred we found a Jewish donor? Maybe. Would they have preferred we were two married women impregnating with husbands? Definitely. But what mattered most of all was that the next generation got here as soon as possible.

Nine months before Faith and I became doting Jewish mothers to a beautiful baby girl, I closed my eyes and imagined a school of uncircumcised spermatozoa crossing themselves before swimming toward my little Jewish egg. I hoped they were not anti-Semitic, those microscopic Catholic/Buddhist sperm, and wished that they would treat my egg with respect and roll back their foreskin before doing the deed.

The insemination was the first time I ever had non-Jewish sperm inside me. Lying back on an exam table, feet in stirrups, it struck me any man or woman I ever had fallen for, dreamt of spending my life with, and regularly shared bed and bodily fluids with, had been Jewish. Without ever joining a temple, learning to count to ten in Hebrew, or comprehending the meaning of Purim, being Jewish had informed everything about mefrom my sense of humor and taste in food to the process by which I finally found a donor. Jewish law aside, there was no way a child of ours could be anything but Jewishat least in the way that it mattered to Faith and me.

Jaron's World: Peace Through God

Mon, 13 Aug 2007 00:00:00 -0500

Nine years ago, a Brazilian student in the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University, where I used to lecture, came to me with what I initially took to be a tall tale. She described an obscure new cult that prayed in binary numbers (strings of ones and zeros), the fundamental elements of computer programs. The cult's founder apparently believed that the universe was a giant computer.

After a summer vacation back home, the student reappeared with a videotape to prove her case. Cult members were dressed in voluptuous, kitschy robes that aliens might have worn in the original Star Trek. They chanted in Portuguese: Zero, um, um, zero, zero, um. . . . The video looks authentic, though I haven't been able to come up with any independent confirmation, and if anyone could pull off a hoax of this magnitude, it would be a wily ITP student.

The first thought that came into my mind was that this cult had better be mistaken: If they were right, the universe might crash as a result of the slightest mistake in their recitations. (At the binary level, even a single wrong bit can cause a computer crash.)

My second thought was that these chanters, weird as they were, appeared to be sincere, serene, and harmless. Everyone probably believes in some nonsense, so why not this winsome nonsense? But then, wouldn't it be better if these people, who didn't look very well-off, got rich from learning to program real computers? Wouldn't it ultimately be kinder to challenge their faith? It's rude to tell other people what to believe, but it can also be derelict, even cruel, not to challenge ridiculous beliefs.

I've kept quiet during the past year or so of high-profile science/religion bickering because I assumed there would be no use for yet another voice in the agitated crowd. As it happens, though, the approach to science/religion questions that I prefer has remained almost entirely unrepresented, so now I will join in.

Sadly, the first question to ask about any religious practice these days is whether it's likely to turn violent. Sure, binary cultists look cute on video, but will they be storming a data center in São Paulo in a few years?

Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and Daniel Dennett have recently led a charge against religion, and one of their main accusations is that religion encourages violence. This claim recalls similar ones that violent video games or pornography cause criminal behavior. Sometimes they might, but sometimes they clearly don't. It's hard to isolate causes of human violence because violence is so common.

What if religion can serve either to incite or reduce violence, depending on some details that we have the good fortune to be able to influence? Here is how I think that can work: The human species is clan-oriented. We are exceedingly concerned with who is a member of our clan or a competing clan. Democrat or Republican? Windows or Linux? It's almost impossible for us to ignore clan passions. We are also hopelessly obsessed with the hierarchy within our clan. Listen to teenagers, or anyone else, talk about who ranks to date whom, or who deserves scorn. We care immensely about tiny differentiations in status. Gossip grabs our attention, no matter how banal it is.

Violence between people often comes about when they fight over limited resources, but sometimes there is no such "rational" explanation. In those cases, clan dynamics are almost always to blame. Intellectuals like to think that ideas are what matter most, but listen to what average murderers say. Kids who shoot other kids in the streets of Oakland, California, near where I live, usually report that it was either gang retribution or a response to being "disrespected." The latter often involves the nasty business of sexual selection. These are the universal and tragic themes you find in the literatures of all peoples.

Religion placed immortal supernatural beings at the top of the clan, thereby reducing everyday violence between adherents. Crusades, jihads, and bloody schisms were the price paid for this improvement, though in the grim context of human behavioral history, that was probably a bargain.

The idea of God (or gods) also served in ancient times as a way to apply the clan-centric cognition of the human species to the problem of comprehending the dynamics of the world. In the Hebrew Bible, for instance, God is the "King of the universe," so God served at least two duties: as clan leader and as explanation of reality. Thus when scientists tell believers they're flat-out wrong, we think we're making a point about nature, but I think we're often heard as giving the primal message, "We elite persons reject your clan status."

A more recent violence-avoiding arrangement, which has a promising track record so far, is for a society to support so many overlapping, ambiguous clan hierarchies that clannish perception becomes confused. This is what democratic capitalism achieves. There are many ways to achieve status and identity in modern America. You can be a Web video prankster, academic, and entrepreneur, with lots of prestige but not much money, all at once. (I know people like this.) Under this regime, it no longer feels as if each person has just one status or belongs in just one clan.

+++

Why not approach the idea of God in the expansive way that democratic capitalism harnesses clannishness? Einstein did something like that when he spoke about God not playing dice with the universe and when he pledged allegiance to the God of Spinoza. It isn't disrespectful to embrace God in a confusing way; to do otherwise could be seen as showing a lack of humility. A complex God is less likely to rally violent mobs. That's why I felt comfortable mentioning God in these pages, pissing off more than a few atheist readers (see Jaron's World: Raft to the Future), and why I think the advent of binary worship is potentially a healthy thing. When scientists absolutely reject God, we leave behind only a simpler and more dangerous God.

This optimistic assessment makes sense only so long as God is a truly big idea, not an idea small enough to be threatened by the results of experiments; not a "God of the gaps" but a God that is bigger than the cosmos. If the binary chants are expected to run as literal computer programs, then the cult is in trouble, just as it would be if it believed Earth is at the center of the solar system or that evolution does not exist.

'people find hope in the unresolved status of the biggest questions. take away that hope and you hand victory to whatever creep can give it back.'

Scientific experimentation needn't be a source of constraints that reduce God over time. There are well-established streams of religious thought that treat science as elevating God so as to be concerned only with things too big to be framed by science. But why should a scientist show any degree of acknowledgment, much less friendliness, toward topics that are so big or mysterious that they can almost certainly never be addressed experimentally?

Some answers are: Because to pretend to be certain that such big questions don't exist is to be dishonest. Because noticing what I'll call "permanent mysteries" evokes wonder. And most important, because people are afraid to die, and they sometimes find hope in the unresolved status of the biggest questions. Take away that hope and you hand victory to whatever creep can give it back.

It's mean-spirited to fight against that kind of hope. It also reinforces fears that scientists are claiming to be an immaculate, elite population. After all, scientists are also afraid to die, and we haven't necessarily achieved some hypothetical level of perfect rationality inside our own heads. Instead of telling other people what not to hope, a more constructive approach is to learn how to be more articulate about the limits of experimentation.

My favorite example of a potential permanent mystery is consciousness. Another is the source of mathematical truth. Yet another example is the question of what happened before the Big Bang, when time had not yet come into existence. (That last one might not belong on the list, since it's about a phenomenon that can be measured: the universe. Indeed, in Raft to the Future I described a possible new kind of explanation for the origin of time that my friend Lee Smolin and I have been considering.)

Reasonable people can disagree about whether a particular question belongs in the ranks of the permanent mysteries, but I've found it is hard to empty the list completely. Often, when you try to remove a particular question, it will pop up again in a different form, as if you were playing a cosmic whack-a-mole game. I've examined how this happens when you try to get rid of a sense of permanent mystery regarding the existence of consciousness (Jaron's World: The Soul of the Machine). If you think of the brain as a computer, all of a sudden computation takes on a mysterious quality. Maybe the binary cult appreciates this line of thinking. After all, they could just as easily have chosen to worship an operating system like Linux, which would have put them in a lower league.

Science can declare the approximate limits of its territorial ambitions and be stronger for it. My dearly missed old friend Stephen Jay Gould framed this possibility beautifully with his proposal for "nonoverlapping magisteria." I'll go further and suggest that scientists should not only refrain from ridiculing people who find hope on the other side of the border but should also actively delight in a cacophonous, multicultural colonization of that far frontier so that it can't be monopolized by fundamentalists. A workable definition of spirituality is "one's emotional relationship with unanswerable questions." It's possible to find joy in them.

Of course, it's not always easy to do this in practice. Where I live, in the Bay Area, you're as likely to run into New Age superstition as Christian fundamentalism. In either case, the believer will often take the uncertainty of a big, genuinely mysterious question like consciousness as license to believe in something smaller like astrology, which can be disproved by experiment. Then I end up on the spot, once again telling someone else what not to believe.

And what of the binary cult? If they truly exist, they seem to have taken on the idea of a computational universe in the spirit of a "Big Mystery" instead of the kind you can study scientifically. I didn't see anyone trying to cure a disability with a binary prayer. Therefore, I hope they thrive.

Hezbollah Game Celebrates War Vs. Israel

Thu, 16 Aug 2007 00:00:00 -0500

It was a launch party that would have made Microsoft proud, if Microsoft were an anti-Israeli militant group.

Hezbollah held on Thursday what was basically a giant garden party to announce the release of its latest video game, "Special Force II," in which players destroy Israeli tanks, shoot down helicopters and destroy warships; killing Israeli soldiers earns bonus points.

Under a giant marquee in Beirut's dusty southern suburbs, Hezbollah displayed captured Israeli helmets, rifles and ammunition in glass trophy cases. The turret of an Israeli tank and jeep Hezbollah captured during its 34-day war with Israel last summer were set on mounds like garden statues, artistically lit by red and green spotlights. Families took pictures of the Israeli weapons as their children paid $10 for a copy of Special Force II, designed by Hezbollah's "Internet Division."

Victory party
All week, Hezbollah has been holding victory celebrations to coincide with the end of the conflict in August 2006, which Hezbollah considers a major victory. It's a war Hezbollah says is not over.

In a speech earlier this week, Hezbollah leader Sayid Hassan Nasrallah declared there is "no ceasefire" with Israel, but only a "halt of offensive operations." Nasrallah also claimed his forces are fully rearmed with rockets that can reach "anywhere" in Israel, but added that he does not want another war.

Until there is a new war many Lebanese fear it could happen at anytime young people here can now relive the fighting on their computers.

Hezbollah's celebrations and new video game may also have a domestic political goal. Many Lebanese now question if the nation gained anything from what Nasrallah calls his "Divine Victory" over Israel.

During the war, as Israel targeted Lebanese say indiscriminately the country's infrastructure, most people here were united behind Hezbollah. But today, Lebanon remains in tatters, and on-going Hezbollah-led protests against the U.S.-backed Prime Minister Fouad Siniora have closed most of the businesses in downtown Beirut and scared away tourists. Lebanon has not moved forward since the war. Lebanon has turned on itself. But that's not part of the video game.

Fuelling Fury

Thu, 16 Aug 2007 00:00:00 -0500

I was horrified to read reports of a brutal attack last Friday on one of the imams in London's most prestigious Regents Park Mosque. It was said that a white male wearing a cross entered the mosque and sought to speak to an imam. The imam who greeted him and welcomed him to the mosque with sweets and tea was allegedly brutally attacked by the man, punching him on the face repeatedly and then attempted to pull his eyes out.

This would be only one example of many attacks against British Muslim communities and mosques. As an imam myself I often wonder when, and not if, I could be attacked. Unfortunately, most attacks similar to this are neither reported to the police nor are they covered by the media.

My question is who is responsible for the recent increased Islamophobic attacks on Britain's Muslim communities? Who is fuelling the anti-Islamic and anti-Muslim sentiments in this country? The finger is being pointed at the media - especially tabloid newspapers and rightwing media organisations.

According to the director of Regents Park mosque, the imam was the victim of an Islamophobic attack. He accused the media of creating "an atmosphere of Islamophobia" that led to this and other similar attacks on mosques. This is echoed by many Muslim organisations including the Muslim Council of Britain. I also blame a certain type of media for hatemongering and portraying Muslim communities as an enemy within.

I fully understand the role of the media as an objective and neutral storyteller but what I do not understand is how spreading hate and hyping up hysteria is beneficial to any communities or serving of its objective neutral role?

Take the example of the tabloid newspapers that are swift in making headlines such as "the Forest Gate bombers" with pictures of two brothers in their long beards and traditional garb. But when the brothers were exonerated their vindication did not make the headlines in the same papers. Or what about the Scottish girl Molly Campbell who went to Pakistan to be with her father, leaving her estranged mother? The media was very quick to make headlines that her father had arranged to kidnap her, but when the story was found to be false the same media did not bother to make it a headline.

Headlines such as "Islamic shoe bomber", "Islamist terrorists" and "Mosques breeding terrorism" only lead the masses to believe that Islam, Muslims and terrorism are all synonymous. When masses are led to believe such lies the potential for disasters is glaringly obvious.

I have a stark warning for those hatemongering and irresponsible media agencies: if your biased and unfair reporting leads to breakdown of community cohesion, violence and death, history will not forgive you - for you would be no different than those who preach and promote hate.

We learn from history that vilification of a community by the media has resulted in genocides in some parts of the world. We should not forget what happened to former Yugoslavia when the Christian Serbs vilified their Bosnian Muslim neighbours. Thousands of people lost their lives from both Muslim and Christian communities. It was the media in that country that fuelled the fire of hate. The net result was genocide.

In a civilised world we must not abuse freedom of speech, we must not allow anyone to spread community discord or be bystanders to the vilification of a community. How many more imams and Muslims would have to be attacked before we all stood up against those who perpetrate such attacks and those who fuel the fire of hate?

Premature Education

Thu, 26 Jul 2007 00:00:00 -0500

Last week Democratic Senator Barack Obama made headlines by suggesting [1] that public schools teach "age-appropriate," "science-based" sexuality lessons to kindergarteners. He later clarified that "age-appropriate" means teaching children how to avoid predators, not how to unroll condoms. Former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney tried to sensationalize Obama's position formerly Romney's own position, but what isn't?saying, "We should be working to clean up the filthy waters our kids are swimming in."

There are few statistics for how many of America's young people are hooking up in filthy wateralthough as a teenager I did manage to get laid in a bathtub once or twice, which always leads to more pulled neck muscles than orgasms. Still, there's just enough data for the government to consider itself a failure when it comes to horny teens. In Congress' decade-long study on the efficacy of its own $1 billion pro-abstinence program, it concluded that the money was completely wasted. U.S. teen pregnancy rate remains worse [2] than much of the Third World's.

Obama tried to take a middle ground position on sex ed, but extremists both left and right have for their own reasons complicated an issue that demands pragmatism. Between religious injunctions to teach adolescents about the perils of premarital copulation and creepy, Boomer-esque homilies about loving your body, America's current sexual lesson plan is tailored for either a nation of pious eunuchs or Bonobo monkeys.

Nothing besides the teaching of evolution, art, climatology and literature makes right-wingers nuttier than teaching how to not need an abortion. According [3] to the American Medical Association, there is "no evidence" that communities with anti-sex education have lower rates of teen pregnancy and STD transmission. And a 2004 Congressional investigation discovered [4] that pro-abstinence curricula in 25 states erroneously claimed that "half the gay male teenagers in the United States have tested positive for the AIDS virus," fingering "can result in pregnancy," a six-week-old fetus is a "thinking person," "the virus that causes AIDS, can be spread via sweat and tears," and "[c]ondoms fail to prevent HIV transmission as often as 31 percent of the time in heterosexual intercourse." Never mind that condoms, when used properly, reduce by almost 100% the transmission of HIV, or that the actual number of HIV-positive gay male teenagers, while unknowable, is very likely less than 50%.

Federally funded abstinence curricula further inform [5] teenagers:

"We actively seek to eliminate terrorism from our land; please help us actively seek to eliminate this corruptive terrorism that is stealing our children's future." (Weapons of Mass Dick-Suction?)
"While a man needs little or no preparation for sex, a woman often needs hours of emotional and mental preparation." (Before sex? No. Before dinner? Yes.)
"Sexual relationships often lower the self-respect of both partnersone feeling used, the other feeling like the user. This depression may lead to attempted, or successful, suicide." (That's strange, I wanted to kill myself in high school because I couldn't get laid.)

Even in the God-fearing red states, a zippered approach to sex ed has proved useless. In the president's own home state of Texas, the Board of Education rejected textbooks for mentioning condoms and breast cancer, opting instead to tell [6] students that the best way to avoid STDs was to "get plenty of rest," "respect yourself," and "go out as a group." (Because group sex never leads to herpes.) Incidentally Texas has one of the five highest teenage birthrates in America, twice as many per capita [7] as Heathen Massachusetts, although many Bay Staters do prefer the kind of sex that doesn't lead to birthrates.

Muddling the sex ed debate isn't the sole province of religious reactionaries; there are the zealous bourgeois bohemians who would have kindergarteners savvy in the ways of the flesh. The Sex Information and Education Council of the United States, a liberal organization that wants five year-olds to learn:

"Sexuality is a fundamental part of being human." (And it's more fun than fundamentalism.)
"Both boys and girls have body parts that feel good when touched." (Or whipped, shocked, clamped, etc.)
"Vaginal intercourse occurs when a man and a woman place the penis inside the vagina." (Anal intercourse [8] is when the woman wants something expensive.)
"Touching and rubbing one's own genitals to feel good is called masturbation," which is something people do in "private." (It doesn't feel good if you rub too much, kids.)

Older students would learn, "Some sexual fantasies involve mysterious or forbidden things." (Like masturbating in public!)

Another SIECUS publication suggests that nine-year-olds learn "[t]eenagers and adults often have several romantic relationships" and "[a] legal abortion is very safe." Even more extreme, according [11] to Floyd M. Martinson, author of The Sexual Life of Children, Scandinavian "preschool teachers... have on occasion instructed children in better masturbatory techniques." (Who needs the alphabet or coloring books anyway?)

Obama says that he "does not support teaching explicit sex education to children in kindergarten," but "[i]f they ask a teacher 'where do babies come from,' [then] providing information that it's not a stork is probably not an unhealthy thing." (Correct Answer: they come from hell.) Parents should have the right, Obama believes, to opt their offspring out of sex education, which raises an uncomfortable but necessary question for Americans: should they?

Sweden mandated sex education in 1955when rubbers were still illegal [12] in parts of the United Statesand currently has the second lowest teenage birthrate in the world with five times fewer [13] babies (and 600 times less gonorrhea) than the U.S. After Sweden ditched [14] abstinence education and distributed contraceptives instead, "its teenage birth rate fell by 80 per cent," according to the Guardian. (Taxpayer-funded abortionwhich Obama supports [15] for U.S. clinicsdidn't hurt either, unless you happened to be a Swedish fetus, which you didn't.)

The conservative philosophy "if you don't teach it, they'll never learn" is clearly dangerous and absurd. However, the SIECUS guidelines are crazy for two reasons: 1) puberty, not pre-school, seems like an appropriate time to discuss pubescent sexuality, and 2) we all know that sex isn't for children; it's for churchgoing Republican congressmen [16]. It certainly makes no sense to teach the ins and outs of intercourse before students hit puberty, and Nordic-style educational totalitarianism is anathema to many Americans.

Obama is brave and foolish to search for a shade of gray on such a partisan, black-and-white issue. (If I were brave I would make a mulatto joke here, but I don't want to appear foolish.) As the rhetoric from extremists on both sides fills the airwaves and litters the blogosphere, Americans should remember that whatever students learn in the classroom, no human being is either predictable or programmable, especially when gallons of hormones are added to the equation. Making our own mistakes is often the only way to learn the hardest lessons; that's both a play on words and a fact of life.

Mon, 13 Aug 2007 00:00:00 -0500

"Each character has the opportunity to generate God by his or her behavior. All of us are the mother and father of God, to the extent we accept the limits of our humanity."

David Milch, the Oracle of Imperial Beach, the co-creator with Kem Nunn of HBO's strange and wondrous "John from Cincinnati," was kind enough to indulge me in a few (but only a few) "what'd that mean" questions this morning as the hangover in the cerebral cortex from last night's season finale was really settling in. In this viewer's humble opinion, "JFC" wrapped on a high note -- high as the "whoooooos" that Little Richard vocalizes in "Long Tall Sally," the ecstatic R&B hit that was used to great effect in the final scenes.

The above quote is from Milch in response to my question about the very very last scene of Kai on the water. The shot of Kai expertly turning her body into a wave would've seemed to have stood alone, but then just as she turned her face to the camera to show a sly smile came the maddeningly intriguing voice-over from the John character: "Mother of God, Cass-Kai."

What!? After a second viewing of the episode, I was almost confident in my interpretation of nearly everything else that transpired in the previous 47 minutes -- even the pigeon-English scene between the two visiting Hawaiian drug dealers. But that voiceover clip at the very-very end threw me.

I should've known better than to think that Milch would've talked me through it frame by frame, explaining every syllable. That's just not how he works. But he was generous enough to give me the above quote as a hint as to what he was getting at with that "mother of God" business.

(Pictured above: Milch in the center of a crowd scene from the "JFC" finale seg.)

We talked a lot about how at its core "JFC" has a hopeful message of salvation and even redemption. It may have seemed gritty on the surface -- you can just smell the fetid-ness of Butchie's motel room, a credit to the show's set designers/decorators -- but it's a tale of the power of community, faith and the ability of even the most seemingly hopeful characters to find something to hang on to as they claw their way back.

Milch set out to challenge the conventions of TV storytelling with "JFC," even more so than he did on his last HBO series, "Deadwood," and in so doing he knew it would not be an easy sell in the climate of the smallscreen today. For sure, there was linear storytelling in "JFC" -- the saga of the Yost clan and their supporting troupe had a beginning, middle and climax in last night's finale, episode 10 -- but within each scene and within each character, there was no convention of having beat A lead neatly to beat B and then beat C and then the next act. Oh no, no, no. This is the hand of Milch, a guy who's thought a lot about the "tactics of fictive argument, generally."

To wit, he explained, sounding very much like the Yale university lit lecturer that he once was in a previous life:

"My understanding of the way the mechanism of storytelling works is ...whether or not the audience is conscious of the process, apart from the audience awareness that there is a process, any story is constantly appending specific values to the meanings of words, and of the actions of characters. And the fact that story uses as its building blocks words or characters that the audience believes it has some prior recognition or understanding of, is really simply the beginning of the story, but not its end.

For example, to take a less controversial instance of stuff that I've worked on before: ("NYPD Blue" protagonist Andy) Sipowicz. We know him in the first episode (of "Blue") to be a racist, alcoholic. A slob and a fat bastard. Over the course of time, we come to attach different associations to him, based on our experiences....I think that's the case at every level of storytelling. Not just in terms of character but literally with every word, every sound that's made in a story."

Deep breath, on both sides of the telephone connection. Then Milch gets specific about the titular character whose parrot-like dialogue makes little-to-no sense to any of the other characters for most of the series:

(Pictured right, Milch with stars Brian Van Holt, center, and Austin Nichols)

"When when John says 'Did you dump out? (to the Butchie character in the first episode of "JFC") He takes it to mean, 'How can I help you? The reason he means that the first time any human tries to help him, it's Butchie saying, 'Did you dump out? When he sees the boy (Shaun) is about to die (after a surfing accident), he says to Kai, 'Did you dump out.' He rouses that in an effort to be helpful to Kai. That is a demonstration pretty early on that words mean something absolutely different to John. She takes him to the bathroom thinking that he needs to use the bathroom. When he mimics the same sounds coming from the next stall, that really contains in miniature everything that an audience member needs to know about the in which the story takes place. Any action generates its meaning not from a preexisting idea, but absolutely from which the context in which its expressed....so that the frustrations people feel are meant to erode the senses that to the extent you are going to be part of the ("JFC") experience (as a body of work, episodes 1-10), you're not going to find gratification in terms of 'I know what this means.' It simply has to be working on its on its own terms. The story we tell erodes the idea that there is any one answer, or that even a single word means the same thing two seconds after its been said."

Indeed. Milch set out to use the literary device of magical realism (you could totally see the Yosts popping up as a weird family of Basque surfers in Gabriel Garcia Marquez's "100 Years of Solitude," no?) in his "JFC" tapestry, and there'd be no sticking to the conventions of fantasy storytelling that "you can always count on, like you're going to know that because characters have wings and certain kind of music is playing you can count on that people will fly in a this particular way."

He knew from the get-go that "JFC" would be a tough sell to the audience, but in the light of Monday morning-after-the-finale, he admits "to a minor disappointment that people have used the specific intentions of the piece to condemn it....As we say that's show business."

There's no official word yet from HBO as to whether the show is picked up, but like the stick figures above the Snug Harbor's decrepit bar, the writing is on the wall. Milch says he had more stories to tell in the construct of the Yosts and Imperial Beach. But he didn't have a harsh word for HBO, only that he is "grateful for the experience...My feeling is that you can't waste a second on remorse."

Among other the clues and insights into "JFC" gleaned from the roughly 30-minute discourse:

**Don't overlook the significance of the used car dealer at Cherry Oldies Auto Sales where Linc, Jake and John buy the Camino. Milch during our conversation flatly called the dealer "John's father." And after watching that scene again post-interview, it's pretty clear that the silver-haired dude (a great guest shot by Peter Jason of "Deadwood") is someone who's a little higher up on the org chart of the same firm that John's working for. It's especially obvious as the dealer keeps telling John "you're off-line now, country," and "country, I took you off-line" (I'm wondering if 'country' has anything to do with John's hair, or the plaid shirt of Butchie's that he's wearing in the scene?) Dealer-dude further indicates that he's probably middle-management, to John's entry-level grunt status, with his memorable monologue:

"Intrusions! Evanescences!...I'm a shepherd without crook (a sheep herding-type stick, not a thief, per Milch) or understanding....Fits and stops and starts!...Waves and ripples and ramifications!...Jesus Christ! Jesus Christ! Jesus Christ!"

That's the kind of writing that keeps on giving. And all this business about buying an El Camino can't help but invoke El Camino Real, or California's fabled"royal road" that ran a few hundred miles along the old mission trail from San Diego to San Francisco.

**Don't read too much into the characters' names. When I mentioned that Linc's pivotal role in the finale made it clear that Luke Perry's character was "aptly named," Milch said think again. "I don't work that way. I give characters a chance to pick their names."

**Milch cited as one of his influences in "the piece," as he called the series, a quote by William James, American psychologist and philosopher and brother of novelist Henry James (click here for further enlightenment). Milch rattled it off too quickly for me to catch all but it went something like this:

"I'm going to make a world not certain to be saved, a world the perfection of which shall be conditional merely, the condition that each several agent does its own 'level best.' I offer you the chance of taking part in such a world....Will you join the procession? Will you trust yourself and trust the other agents enough to face the risk?" (Apologies to James if I've screwed it up.) This is apropos of John's oft-repeated: "Some things I know; some things I don't."

**Yes, having "JFC" premiere on the heels of "The Sopranos" closer was probably a tough thing for the show. Any show, but particularly this one.

"One of the ideas of the piece is that truth is not a stable thing, that it's carried on waves of association. The wave of association in which 'John' was encountered was the show that had just come before it. When we grieve something we stake something as the object of our grief to a third party. To some extent that happened with 'John.' This is material that depends on you being able to sign on for the ride, what (William) James was saying that the universe invites us to do."

**Why the references throughout "JFC" to "ragheads," "towelheads," and "9/11 is big?" This I never would have put together but in Milch's view:

"People's expectations have been so infantilized by television that the infantilation has itself disposed us to a genocide...My belief is that the constant exposure to news, the constant exposure of the viewer sensibilities to those planes flying into those buildings explains our involvement in Iraq. We wanted to be exposed to an absolutely different show (than the World Trade Center towers falling)...But we were promised a 12-episode miniseries. We'd go in, pull down a statue and it'd be over. Now we want to get out because we want the series to be over...It's the reason I believe the argument that the next time such a (terrorist) event takes place, we'll commit a genocide. We'll sanction the murder of men, women and children, the incarceration of Muslims the way we did the Japanese (during World War II.)

**Who knew? As I kept raving about how good the "JFC" troupe was, particularly Brian Van Holt, Rebecca De Mornay and Ed O'Neill (pictured above with Milch), Milch chimed in with an intriguing tidbit.

"I wrote ("Deadwood's") Al Swearingen for Ed...If he'd had that part the show would still be running." I was dying to ask him to explain what he meant by that, but by this time Milch had that sound in his voice of a man who's ready to end the call, and I didn't want to wear out my welcome.

A Movement Takes a Hit

Thu, 23 Aug 2007 00:00:00 -0500

Aug. 23, 2007 - It has been three and a half months since Juan "Santuario" stopped using his real last name and moved from the home he owns, the young daughters he loves and the business he runs to live in a cramped room on the second floor of a Lutheran church in North Hollywood, a suburban neighborhood in Los Angeles. Some weeks pass slowlythe 38-year-old illegal immigrant from Guatemala tries to keep busy reading the Bible, cleaning and doing odd jobs within the church's gates. Other weeks, a steady stream of camera crews and reporters show up, eager to find out how he's holding up in his self-imposed exile.

This has been one of the busy weeks. On Sunday, Elvira Arellano, an illegal immigrant who for the last year has been holed up in a Chicago church, was arrested and subsequently deported to her native Mexico after she traveled to Los Angeles to attend several speaking engagements. Like Arellano, Juan is one of 22 carefully chosen illegal immigrants living on the grounds of various churches as part of what's being called the New Sanctuary Movement. It's a group vetted by a team of lawyers working with the religious congregations involved in the movement, which range from Roman Catholic to Jewish to Mennonite. To be the face of the estimated 12 million illegal aliens now living in the United States, as organizers call them, the small crew now in sanctuary have either overstayed their visas or never had one in the first place. They are men and women with steady work histories, who pay taxes and are parents to children born in the United Statesa profile designed to help mitigate the fact that each had broken the law in various ways to establish their lives in the United States, including using fake Social Security numbers. And like Arellano, they now face the prospect of immediate deportation.

For supporters of the movement, the arrest is a mixed blessing. In the days since immigration authorities escorted Arellano across the border to Tijuana, they've organized rallies and news conferences around the woman they call a martyr for the cause. A "unity march" to demand her return to the United States is planned in Los Angeles this weekend. Immigrant-rights leaders announced a three-week campaign of vigils and lobbying for Arellano's return, with more protests scheduled for next month. Juan, for his part, is putting on a brave face. "This gives me courage to go forward," he says, adding that his resolve to remain hiding in plain sight is stronger this week than last. Since the arrest, no one in sanctuary has left church protection, although organizers concede that as the months progress, that could change. "Immigrant activists, while some feel this was a setback, aren't letting go," says Grace Dyrness, who studies the sanctuary movement at the Center for Religious and Civic Culture at University of Southern California. "The arrest has mobilized people. More people will declare themselves willing to come into sanctuary, especially if there are more [immigration] raids. Whether this has an impact on policy I think a lot may depend on the [2008 presidential] election and how much the candidates want the immigrant vote."

The sanctuary movement is essentially no more than a demanding-publicity campaign. The effort has its roots in the 1980s, when churches took in illegal immigrants who came to the U.S. to escape wars in Central America, eventually winning significant reform in immigration policies. Many illegal immigrants now in the United States support less-restrictive policiesdecrying the fact that current law allows parents to be deported to their native countries, separating them from their U.S.-born children and leaving a long trail of broken families. The sanctuary movement hopes to draw attention to their protests of these policies by publicizing illegals living in churcheswhere they are presumably be safe from the long arm of the law. Anti-illegal-immigration groups and the federal government aren't so sentimental. By flouting U.S. law, including using a fake Social Security number to get work, Arellano is a "criminal fugitive," says Jim Hays, Los Angeles field office director for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, adding that her arrest was intended to send "a message to criminal illegal aliens who are fugitives, that we are going to continue to target them." (No one at ICE has definitively ruled out making arrests on church grounds, although it has not yet happened.)

The movement's leaders view Arellano's arrest as her taking one for the team. Having lived on church grounds for a year, the 32-year-old single mother feared that immigration reform, all the rage last spring, had dropped off the country's political agenda. The failure in June of a bill in the U.S. Senate that would have given undocumented immigrants provisional visas put the issue on ice, likely until 2009. By getting the issue back in the headlines, the arrest "is a good thing for us," says Cesar Arroyo, pastor of San Pablo's Lutheran Church, where Juan now lives. Father Richard Zanotti, of Our Lady of the Holy Rosary, a neighboring church that has been working with Juan to facilitate his time in sanctuary, is less sanguine. "All of us are kind of sad. We thought that ICE was not going to go after [Arellano] because she was so much in the public eye," Zanotti says. "And Juan, of course, is concerned. He loves his two daughters and doesn't want to be taken away from them. We don't know if ICE has been emboldened. If they are going to come into churches now. Nobody wants to be in sanctuary. It's not a good situation."

But neither is the alternative, Juan says. When he crossed the border on Oct. 25, 1993, "it was out of desperation," he says. "In my country I had no future." The meager income he earned farming bananas in his small village had all but dried up. There was no other work, and like his mother a decade earlier, the potential costs of crossing the border illegally seemed to pale against the potential benefits. Before long, Juan started his own landscaping business, paying income tax each year. He fell in love, bought a house, had kids. His business grew and soon he managed a crew of workers. Eventually, he saved enough money to hire an immigration lawyer in hopes applying for a green card. He got a court date but missed it, he says, when it was changed and his lawyer was not notified in time. As a no-show, the court issued an order for immediate deportation.

That was three years agostressful years always wondering if the next knock on the door would come from immigration officials. When Juan learned about the sanctuary movement last spring, he prayed about it, and then raised his hand. "He's an entrepreneur, like so many people in this country," says Zanotti, who, like others involved in the sanctuary movement, is calling for a moratorium on deportation until immigration laws are adopted. Sanctuary, meanwhile, has put a strain on Juan's business and family life. Since Juan is the only member of his landscaping crew with a driver's license, Zanotti has to drive the employees to their work sites. Family members visit Juan frequently; he has not been home since May. His world now is a small spare office on the second floor of the church's modest administrative building. There is a bed and an old television. Pictures of his family adorn the bulletin board on one wall. On the opposite wall a blackboard displays his 6-year-old daughter's chalk drawings. "What else am I going to do?" he says, nodding to the scribbles. "Leave my children alone?"

The Gospel and hate crimes

Thu, 23 Aug 2007 00:00:00 -0500

On May 3, the House voted to pass the Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2007. The Senate will take up a companion bill, known as the Matthew Shepard Act, when it returns from its summer recess. If enacted, this law would authorize the Justice Department, in certain narrowly defined circumstances, to criminally prosecute an individual who "willfully" causes bodily injury to another person or "through the use of fire, a firearm or an explosive . . . attempts to cause bodily injury" to another person because of that person's race, color, religion, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or disability.

A coalition of conservative African American pastors has aggressively lobbied against this legislation on the premise that it would make it unlawful for them to preach that homosexuality is a sin. Bishop Harry R. Jackson Jr., pastor of the Hope Christian Church in College Park, Md., for example, has asserted that the act would "keep the church from preaching the Gospel."

This objection to the legislation is fanciful. To begin with, there is no doubt of the act's constitutionality. In 1993, the Supreme Court unanimously upheld a virtually identical state law in Wisconsin vs. Mitchell. The court made clear that "a physical assault is not by any stretch of the imagination expressive conduct protected by the 1st Amendment." Moreover, the court emphasized that the government has a perfectly legitimate interest in punishing "bias-motivated crimes" because such crimes are especially likely to inflict emotional harm on their victims, incite community unrest and provoke retaliatory violence.

Of course, the pastors do not intend to assault anyone physically. Their claim, rather, is that they could be prosecuted merely for preaching against homosexuality. They fear that such sermonizing might be transmogrified by the law into an attempt to incite members of their congregations to lynch gays because of their sexual orientation.

For at least three reasons, this argument is completely unfounded. First, the Matthew Shepard Act would not prohibit "attempts to incite." It would prohibit only the infliction of bodily harm and attempts to cause bodily harm. The latter refers to firing a gun and missing, not giving a sermon.

Second, it is settled 1st Amendment law that an individual cannot constitutionally be punished for attempting to incite others to commit crimes unless the speaker expressly incites unlawful conduct and such conduct is likely to occur imminently. The last time the Supreme Court upheld a criminal conviction for incitement was more than half a century ago, in the case of Dennis vs. U.S., and that involved incitement to violent overthrow of the government. Unless the pastors intend to expressly incite wild-eyed mobs to beat up gays because of their sexual orientation, they are in no danger from this law.

Third, the legislation expressly provides that "nothing in this act . . . shall be construed to prohibit any expressive conduct protected" by the 1st Amendment. In other words -- indeed, in the most explicit words possible -- the act could not be applied to the pastors unless their sermons are unprotected by the 1st Amendment, a concept that is impossible to imagine.

The 1st Amendment protects the right of Nazis to march in Skokie, the right of racists to assert that blacks are inferior, the right of atheists to denounce Christianity and the right of homophobes to condemn homosexuality. The argument of the pastors that the proposed legislation in any way threatens their right to preach their version of the Gospel is, to be frank, ridiculous.

There might be rational reasons to question the wisdom of this legislation. But the argument that it endangers the 1st Amendment rights of these pastors is certainly not one of them.

The False Modesty Movement

Tue, 21 Aug 2007 00:00:00 -0500

What is it about the growing "modesty movement" that makes me so nervous? On the face of it, there's a lot to like about a girl-driven "revolution" that offers an alternative to the in-your-face fashion popularized by the Britneys and Bratz of the world. When a statement T-shirt can turn a girl from a subject to an object -- "I'm blond. I don't need to be good at math" -- in no time flat, who could argue that a return to sartorial decency is in order?

Enter the modesty movement. On websites such as Modestly Yours, Modesty Zone and DressModestly.com, its adherents argue for curfews on college campuses, decry coed bathrooms and advocate a "chaste but chic" dress code for teens and young women. They call themselves sexual revolutionaries, but that might be something of a misnomer: In their world, abstinence is the order of the day and female virtue is the best way to ensure female safety.

The faith-based website purefashion.com, which encourages teen girls to "live the virtues of modesty and purity," instructs young women to be "helpful at home . . . obedient and happy." What's troubling about this language is how neatly it anticipates the findings of a Yale University study showing that men who get angry in the workplace are admired, while women who express displeasure are seen as "out of control." So much for the idea that well-behaved women rarely make history. Apparently, it's far more important for girls to make nice.

Marketers are getting modest too. Macy's now carries "Shade" clothing, created by a team of Mormon women devoted to demure dress, and Nordstrom features "Modern and Modest" apparel.

The mother of the modesty movement is Wendy Shalit, whose 1999 book, "A Return to Modesty: Discovering the Lost Virtue," argues that today's young women have reverted to an earlier mode of femininity, deciding that in the face of sexual excess, chastity is the ultimate 21st century rebellion.

No one would argue that the right to say no to sex isn't a good thing. And surely we can agree that talking to girls about the value of their bodies, and their selves, is a welcome cultural shift. But when Shalit argues that "many of the problems we hear about today -- sexual harassment, date rape . . . are connected to our culture's attack on modesty," she is making a dangerous leap.

It's not a lack of female modesty but a sense of male entitlement that leads to sexual violence. And the idea that we women can change men's behavior by changing our clothes is not only disconcerting, it has been debunked. As millions of women know all too well, no one ever avoided a rape by wearing a longer skirt.

One of the most vocal advocates for a return to female modesty is, perhaps not surprisingly, a man. In his book, "Manliness," Harvard University professor Harvey Mansfield argues that women, in demanding equality inside and outside the home, have created a crisis for men. According to Mansfield, modesty is one way to set right what the feminists have wrought: "Women play the men's game, which they are bound to lose. Without modesty, there is no romance -- it isn't so attractive or so erotic [to men]."

And therein lies the problem with so much of the modesty movement. Scratch the surface, and what's supposed to be good for girls reveals itself to be all about the boys: dressing in a way that doesn't over-excite them, demurring so that their manhood remains intact and holding tight to our sexuality until we find a husband who is worthy of that ultimate "prize."

What's lost in this view of the world is the power of female desire: not just sexual and sartorial but professional and intellectual. There is something liberating about a girlhood (and womanhood) that is not lived solely in anticipation of, or in response to, a man. There's something freeing about a world in which women have the right to take risks (and to get mad).

I suppose I'd feel better about the modesty movement if it had its parallel in the world of men. But quite the opposite is true. At the top of the bestseller list is "The Dangerous Book for Boys," a celebration of male derring-do that encourages boys to dive into life headfirst, taking and embracing risks along the way. The authors and publisher have made clear that no parallel book for young women is in the offing. I guess the fairer sex will have to satisfy itself with Shalit's latest tome: "Girls Gone Mild."

The Out-of-Body Electric

Thu, 23 Aug 2007 00:00:00 -0500

Two teams of neuroscientists have made a breakthrough in the study of "out-of-body experiences," according to this week's issue of Science. About one in 10 people report having had the strange sensation of floating away from their bodies at some point in their lives. According to the new studies, it's now possible to induce that feeling of astral projection in the lab.

There have been similar claims in the past: At Laurentian University in Canada, Michael Persinger has used a helmet studded with magnets to create quasi-mystical experiences, includingfor some subjects, at leastthe sensation of drifting outside the body. But the authors of the new research manage the feat without any neural poking or zapping. Instead, they use little more than a pair of virtual-reality goggles.

The new approach seems to work as advertisedtest subjects said the experiment made them feel like they were outside of their own bodies. But that's where the story ends. The out-of-body VR setup does a great job of mimicking the superficial aspects of the out-of-body experience. But it teaches us very little about how or why it happens in real life.

The first of these studies, titled "The Experimental Induction of Out-of-Body Experiences" and conducted by Henrik Ehrsson, shows that you can create something like an OBE using special effects. First, you sit in a chair and don a pair of virtual-reality goggles that are connected to a 3-D camera that's pointed at the back of your head. Looking through these goggles already makes you feel, at least to some extent, as though you're where the camera is, sitting a few feet behind your own body. (It's possible to create a similar feeling of displacement without looking at your own head: If the goggles were showing a three-dimensional video feed of the bathroom, you might feel a bit like you were in the bathroom.)

Now, Ehrsson tries to make the effect more realistic. He starts rubbing your chest, while at the same time reaching a hand toward the camera that's providing the video feed. As you feel the touch on your chest, you're also seeing an arm reach below your video "eyes." This combination, it turns out, makes you feel even more like you're sitting behind yourself. (Likewise, if you were watching a video feed of the bathroom and the experimenter flushed a toilet, it would make you feel even more like you were in the bathroom.)

To measure the strength of this illusion, Ehrsson conducts one more test. About a minute into the experiment, he suddenly picks up a hammer and swings it toward the empty space just below your camera "eyes." At the same time, he measures your emotional arousal using skin conductance electrodes: The more realistic the experience, the more charged up you'll get at the sight of the hammer coming toward your virtual nose.

The study confirmed that synchronized touching makes the illusion more vivid. ("Wow!" giggled one subject. "I felt as though I was outside my body and looking at myself from the back!") If you saw Ehrsson rub your imaginary chest at the same time that you felt it happening, you'd be more startled when he swung the hammer. In fact, this "multisensory correlation" of vision and touch helps you figure out your position in spaceand decide whether you're in body or out of body. (The second paper, by Bigna Lenggenhager and Olaf Blanke, uses a different setup to arrive at the same conclusion; click here for more details.)

This result seems to corroborate previous work on out-of-body experiences. In 2004, Blanke's group showed that damage to the brain's temporo-parietal junction can make patients feel like they're floating above themselves and looking down. That patch of cortex is thought to be important for combining different kinds of sensory input, like vision and touch. If your temporo-parietal junction malfunctions, you might lose your ability to correlate your senses and forget where you are.

But the new studies don't provide much new insight into how a brain malfunction might create the out-of-body experience. The correlation of multiple senses improves all sorts of illusionsnot just the mystical, floaty ones. Let's say I showed you a photograph of a poisonous snake baring its fangs. You'd know it's not going to bite you, but your skin conductance response might show a modest increase in arousal. A movie of a rattlesnake shaking its tail or snapping its jaws would elicit a more pronounced response, and a three-dimensional projection complete with hissing sound effects would be scarier still. And if you could also feel the snake slithering against your legs, you'd be terrifiedafter all, better feedback always makes for a more realistic experience. (This is why vibrating controllers make video games more fun: You connect the jolt in your hand with the image on the screen.)

There's no out-of-body experience in our snake example, just the illusion of a dangerous animal. Multisensory correlationi.e., seeing, hearing, feelingstill enriches the effect. By that token, Ehrsson could have written a paper called "The Experimental Induction of Snake Hallucinations" and concluded that multisensory correlation underlies the perception of reptiles. But it's more tempting, and more interesting, to explain out-of-body experiences than reptile mirages. By pointing the cameras at the subjects' own heads, the researchers can create a nifty illusion while appealing to grandiose existential questions about consciousness: How do our brains combine our senses to decide where and what we are?

Those questions have been studied extensively on a smaller scale. The "rubber hand illusion," for example, can trick you into losing track of a single body part. Someone strokes a rubber hand in front of you while at the same time stroking your real hand out of view. After a while, you start to think the rubber hand is your own. You can also induce a simple out-of-hand experience for yourself with the "crossed-hand illusion." Our susceptibility to these sorts of illusions turns out to be very useful. When you're wielding a hammer, your brain can extend your body image to include the tool. It may even take a mild sort of out-of-hand illusion to use a computer mouse or trackpadthe cursor becomes a proxy for your hand or fingertip.

The new studies in Science show that these hand and limb illusions can be extended to the whole personthey've replaced the rubber hand with a rubber body. By creating vivid multisensory feedback, the experimenters show that you can make someone feel like they've been shifted in space, from head to toe. That's interesting on its own terms, and it could lead to improved virtual-reality interfaces (not to mention awesome video games).

But it's not clear how the full-body illusions relate to the out-of-body experiences that occur by accident, the ones we're inclined to associate with celestial lights, silver cords, and other mystical phenomena. After all, Ehrsson has created an illusion to match a definition; for him, an out-of-body experience is one in which "a person who is awake sees his or her body from a location outside the physical body." If that's all there is to it, then all you need is a mirror! Watching a video of the back of your head may give you an uncanny feeling of being disembodied, but it doesn't get at the bigger question of how a mental hiccup can cause this experience in the real world. The lab-induced sensation might tweak a totally different part of the brain. We're not any closer, in the end, to answering the most interesting question of all: When I float above my bed and drift into the stars above, what the hell is going on?

In the Lenggenhager-Blanke study, the subject also wears a pair of goggles and views a video image of the back of his own body. Then an experimenter rubs his back, which he can clearly see in the goggles as he feels it. This combination helps to convince him that the video projection really does represent his body, projected in front of him.

This manipulation doesn't trick anyone into thinking that their consciousness is floating behind their corporeal body (as Ehrsson's did). But it can get them a bit confused about where exactly they're standingin general, the synchronized touching makes the subject feel like he's a bit closer to the projection in space than he really is.

Mormons Who Massacre

Fri, 24 Aug 2007 00:00:00 -0500

The maudlin, grotesque western "September Dawn," about the massacre on Sept. 11, 1857, of about 120 settlers by Mormons (and their Paiute Indian mercenaries), apes "Schindler's List" in hopes of creating a Christian Holocaust picture.

Directed by Christopher Cain ("Young Guns") and written by Mr. Cain and Carole Whang Schutter (after Ms. Schutter's novel), "Dawn" commemorates the mass murder of horse-traders and their families traveling through Utah Territory on their way to California from Arkansas. The Mormons already wish ill upon the sugar-sweet settlers, but their ire blossoms when a teenage Mormon named Jonathan Samuelson (Trent Ford), son of the glowering Mormon bishop Jacob Samuelson (Jon Voight), falls for one of the wagon-train party, a kindly gal (Tamara Hope).

In flashbacks and framing devices that feature a bewigged Terence Stamp as Brigham Young and Dean Cain as Joseph Smith, founder of Mormonism, "Dawn" alludes to the persecution that the insular, polygamist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints endured in the early 19th century.

But these aspects are eclipsed in the film by the Mormons' Snidely Whiplash-like treachery. Their evil is established in an early sequence that cross-cuts between two dinner-table prayers: the travelers wishing the Mormons well, and Jacob urging God to please send Satan's children to hell, amen in a grimly righteous tone that begs for the punch line, "Now please pass the ham."

Movie website.

Hebrew Charter School Spurs Dispute in Florida

Fri, 24 Aug 2007 00:00:00 -0500

HOLLYWOOD, Fla., Aug. 23 The new public school at 2620 Hollywood Boulevard stands out despite its plain gray facade. Called the Ben Gamla Charter School, it is run by an Orthodox rabbi, serves kosher lunches and concentrates on teaching Hebrew.

About 400 students started classes at Ben Gamla this week amid caustic debate over whether a public school can teach Hebrew without touching Judaism and the unconstitutional side of the church-state divide. The conflict intensified Wednesday, when the Broward County School Board ordered Ben Gamla to suspend Hebrew lessons because its curriculum the third proposed by the school referred to a Web site that mentioned religion.

Opponents say that it is impossible to teach Hebrew and aspects of Jewish culture outside a religious context, and that Ben Gamla, billed as the nation's first Hebrew-English charter school, violates one of its paramount legal and political boundaries.

But supporters say the school is no different from hundreds of others around the country with dual-language programs, whose popularity has soared in ethnically diverse states like Florida.

"It's not a religious school," said Peter Deutsch, a former Democratic member of Congress from Florida who started Ben Gamla and hopes to replicate it in Los Angeles, Miami and New York. "South Florida is one of the largest Hebrew-speaking communities in the world outside Israel, so there are lots of really good reasons to try to create a program like this here."

The battle over Ben Gamla parallels one in New York over Khalil Gibran International Academy, a new public school that will focus on Arabic language and culture. But some who have followed the evolution of both schools say Ben Gamla could prove more problematic. As a charter school that receives public money but is exempt from certain rules, they say, it is subject to less oversight.

"Charter schools have greater autonomy than a school being run by the Board of Education," said Abraham H. Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League. "Let's give it a shot, but let's watch it very, very carefully."

Mr. Deutsch said Ben Gamla, named for a Jewish high priest who established free universal schooling in ancient Israel, received 800 applications in one week this summer. About half of the applications were from adjacent Miami-Dade County, but the school admitted only Broward County residents, ensuring that almost everyone from the county who wanted to attend could do so.

The students are in kindergarten through eighth grade. About 80 percent transferred from other public schools, Mr. Deutsch said, and many, if not most, of the rest came from private Jewish day schools.

"I just didn't appreciate the demand at all," said Mr. Deutsch, who splits his time between South Florida and Israel. "If I had 5,000, maybe 10,000 desks available in South Florida today, I think I could fill them."

Under the school's charter agreement, students are to spend one period a day learning Hebrew. They will have a second daily class math or science, for example conducted in a mix of Hebrew and English.

There are no separate classes on Jewish culture, but Rabbi Adam Siegel, the school's director, said it would come up during Hebrew instruction. Teachers might also do special units on aspects of Jewish culture, he said, like Israeli folk dancing.

School officials have not asked students whether they are Jewish, Rabbi Siegel said, but 37 percent of parents identified Hebrew as their first language. Seventeen percent said Spanish was their primary language, he said, while 5 percent said Russian and 5 percent said French.

The school has a handful of black students, including members of a Baptist church that provides their transportation to and from the school.

Mr. Deutsch and Rabbi Siegel, a former Jewish day school director, said their critics were mostly defenders of Jewish day schools that stand to lose students and tuition money. No one has sued to stop the school, but Howard Simon, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida, said a lawsuit was possible.

"Whether this is going to cross the line or not will depend on what goes on in the classroom," Mr. Simon said. "Will they neutrally and academically address religious topics, or will there be more preaching than teaching going on in the classroom? It is too early to tell."

Rabbi Siegel said the school was proceeding with such extreme caution that even a neutral mention of religion was unlikely. The sign outside Ben Gamla was going to include a Hebrew phrase for "welcome," Rabbi Siegel said, but because the literal translation is "blessed are those who come," he decided against it.

"Even basic things, like if there was a page that had a picture of a shofar, I pulled it out," Rabbi Siegel said, referring to the ram's horn used in High Holy Day services. "We went so far overboard, it's crazy."

The school board rejected Ben Gamla's first two Hebrew curriculum proposals after finding they included religious references. The second, which relied on a textbook titled "Ha-Yesod," asked students to translate phrases like "Our Holy Torah is dear to us" and "Man is redeemed from his sins through repentance."

Rabbi Siegel said the school would have omitted such phrases from lessons. On Tuesday, the school board hired Nathan Katz, a religious studies professor at Florida International University, to vet the latest curriculum proposal before its next meeting on Sept. 11. The school cannot teach Hebrew before then, a school board spokesman said.

Rabbi Siegel was originally the school's principal, but he hired someone else after people said it was inappropriate for a rabbi to oversee instruction. Rabbi Siegel, who does not have a congregation, said it should not have mattered.

"One of the most ridiculous complaints is that the line between culture and religion is so thin," he said. "Who better to make that distinction than a rabbi?"

Wryly, he added, "I don't envision myself doing bar mitzvahs for the middle school kids."

Eleanor Sobel, a school board member who is among Ben Gamla's most vocal critics, said making sure the school did not stray from constitutional rules would take a near-impossible level of supervision.

"I don't know how to monitor this, and that's why I have great concern," Ms. Sobel said. "Accountability is real important when you're dealing with taxpayers' money."

Allan Tuffs, the rabbi at Temple Beth El in Hollywood, said he, too, was worried about the school and what it could lead to. "Jews have thrived in America as in no other nation," Rabbi Tuffs said, "in large measure due to this concept of separation of church and state."

He added, "Once a Jewish school like Ben Gamla is established, you know that fundamentalist Christian groups throughout America will be lining up to replicate this model according to their religious tradition."

Undeterred, Mr. Deutsch is seeking four more charters for Ben Gamla schools in Broward and Palm Beach Counties, he said, and has already received one for a school in Miami.

He said he hoped to eventually open 100 Hebrew-English charter schools around the country. The school here is managed by Academica, a private company on whose board Mr. Deutsch has served, which manages 35 of Florida's roughly 350 charter schools.

Tzipora Nurieli, the mother of three Ben Gamla students, said she had spent more than $40,000 a year in tuition at a private Jewish day school. Ms. Nurieli, who immigrated from Israel, said that while her children could learn religion at home, they needed formal schooling in Hebrew.

"I believe we are creating a better world at this school because language is a bridge," she said. "I see all different kids in this school, and I know my children are becoming part of the universe."