Witches leaving broom closets

The witches ball included the midnight spinning of the "Wheel of the Year" and a chance to gaze into the "Fire of Transformation" before the faithful were guided into the "Underworld and our Ritual Space."

The Samhain celebration last weekend in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., also included deejay music, dancing, door prizes and fun for the children.

"No photos at rituals! Some of us are still closeted," said the online invitation from the MoonPath Chapter of the Covenant of Unitarian Universalist Pagans. "Perhaps it's time to come out of the broom closet?"

There were plenty of signs this Halloween that more witches and wizards are doing precisely that.

Are there SpiralScouts circles in your area offering pagan parents an alternative to the rigid morality of the Boy Scouts? Have teen-agers formed reading clubs at school to dig into popular books like "Wild Girls: The Path of the Young Goddess" and "The Complete Idiot's Guide to Wicca and Witchcraft"?

Many parents and mainstream religious leaders are afraid to ask these kinds of questions, said Catherine Edwards Sanders, author of a new work of Christian apologetics entitled "Wicca's Charm." Instead of freaking out, they need to pay attention to the changing religious marketplace.

"Wicca is here and we need to face that," said Sanders, a speechwriter for the U.S. Department of Justice. "We can be threatened by these trends or we can see all of this as a sign that people are hunting for something that is greater than themselves, yearning for spiritual experiences they can call their own. They want to rebel against the secular culture and find a way to get back to nature."

Sanders is convinced, based on her interviews with modern pagans, that most are fleeing from two types of organized religion -- cold, rational liberalism that shuns the supernatural or suburban brands of conservatism that substitute rigid rules for the mysteries of ancient rites, art and traditions.

"Our culture has tilled the soil, making it fertile enough for the seeds of Wicca to grow," writes Sanders. "This may be of concern to some, and for others, cause to celebrate. But to dismiss this spirituality as fringe or something practiced by an insignificant minority group would be to miss the point of what is really happening."

Conservative Christians who read this book may be offended.

Pagans who do so are more likely to be amused, according to writer Jason Pitzl-Waters. Sanders made a good-faith effort at fairness, but the lens of her Christian faith warped everything, he said.

"It is somewhat sad to see so earnest an author come so close to understanding our culture and ideas, but missing the mark," said Pitzl-Waters, at his Wildhunt.org website. The result "makes me wonder if a full and rich dialogue about each other's faith can ever be engaged between a modern Pagan and a Christian."

Modern paganism includes Wicca and other forms of earth-based spiritualities rooted in the worship of ancient gods and goddesses. Court cases rooted in what could be called the separation of coven and state now pop up on a regular basis, from family-law courts to military bases to public-school classrooms. In 1986, a federal court declared Wicca a constitutionally protected form of faith.

The key, said Sanders, is that it's impossible to lock pagans inside one doctrinal box. A witch is not a druid. A "Gardnerian" witch dedicated to the teachings of British writer Gerald Gardner, with his emphasis on nudism, scourging and the rites of high witchcraft, may rarely agree with feminist witches who worship the goddess Diana, alone. Some pagans believe drugs are a crucial part of worship. Others totally disagree.

Modern pagans are the freest of free-market believers, said Sanders. Many are striving -- quite literally -- to honor the priesthood of every believer. They may worship alone at secret altars, linked to believers near and far by the Internet and networks of witchcraft supply companies.

"This is especially true with the thousands of young girls who are experimenting with Wicca," she said. "They see something in a movie or on TV and then they hit the Web and, with a few clicks of a mouse, they're ready to try it out. ...

"This trend is so American. It's so individualistic. The neo-pagans don't want to sit in pews anymore and follow anybody else's rules."

Soulforce preaches to the Navy

ANNAPOLIS, Md. -- All the Rev. Mel White, Jacob Reitan and the rest of their Soulforce team wanted to do was talk to people. That was the good news. The bad news was that they wanted to talk about God, politics and homosexuality, although not necessarily in that order. It also didn't help that the people they wanted to talk to were midshipmen on the U.S. Naval Academy campus -- on a football-weekend Friday, no less.

"Free speech is free speech," said White, who, before going public as a gay activist, was a ghostwriter for Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson and other evangelical leaders. White is one of the founders of Soulforce, which is based in Lynchburg, Va.

"If people don't want to talk, all they have to do is say so and walk away."

Soulforce activists drifted around the academy campus in small clusters last weekend, their bright pastel t-shirts standing out among the blue uniforms and gray Chesapeake Bay mists. They attracted packs of journalists.

The 40 or so protestors -- mostly college students from nearby -- offered this greeting: "We're here to talk about the military's 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell' policy. What do you think about that?"

Most midshipmen declined to talk. Capt. Helen Dunn, deputy superintendent at the academy, had issued this memo: "Members of this group may attempt to gain access to the Yard and approach you for discussions. We ask that you carry out your normal routine, ... stay clear of our security personnel and the protestors, and to politely refer questions from media or the demonstrators to the Public Affairs Office."

These are tense days at America's military academies, which are emerging as bitter battlefields in church-state wars.

At the Air Force Academy, the hot issue is salvation. Evangelicals have been accused of going overboard as they interact with non-Christians and non-believers. Evangelical chaplains have even been attacked for delivering evangelistic messages in voluntary chapel services and other optional events. A circle of conservative lawmakers recently wrote to President Bush urging him to issue an executive order guaranteeing the free-speech rights of chaplains.

Right now, the hot issue at the Naval Academy is sexuality. Activists are trying to break what they believe is a faith-based chokehold on military policies affecting the careers and relationships of gays, lesbians, bisexuals and trans-gendered persons.

At the Air Force Academy, it's hard to speak up in favor of conservative religious doctrines.

At the Naval Academy, it's hard to speak up in opposition to them.

In both cases, believers -- on left and right -- are trying to proclaim what they believe is true. They are trying to change hearts and minds through the power of words and public witness. The problem, of course, is that one person's free speech is another's evangelism, public protest or, heaven forbid, even proselytizing.

At some point, said White, government officials must realize that people have a right to dialogue and debate. People have the right to talk and the right not to listen.

"It's like all the people who want to censor television. You keep trying to tell people like that, 'Don't censor us. Just change the channel,' " he said, while greeting visitors outside the academy bookstore. "That's what this is all about, too. We just want to talk to people and let them know what we think. What's so scary about that?"

At first, Naval Academy officials threatened to have the demonstrators arrested if they came on campus. Then both sides agreed to a shaky compromise that allowed the activists the same rights as other visitors, other than the right to talk with midshipmen. Most members of the Soulforce team went right ahead and talked, said Reitan, leader of the group's "Equality Ride" program.

In the months ahead, Soulforce teams will be traveling to a dozen or more other campuses -- including the other military academies and an array of conservative religious colleges and universities from coast to coast.

"Hopefully, people at the campuses we stop at in the future will be willing to set up forums and create other kinds of settings in which we can discuss these issues in a more adult, academic manner," said Reitan. "But we have decided that we're not going to let our free speech to be edited during any of our future stops."

Faith, doubt and Nickel Creek

NASHVILLE -- The crowd was dancing as soon as the bluegrass trio Nickel Creek went on stage, with hot-shot mandolinist Chris Thile careening around like a possessed marionette.

The opening number "When in Rome" was an edgy tale about lost souls trapped in a cold world where the doctors can't heal, people burn books for heat and no one answers distress signals. By the time Thile reached the apocalyptic last verse, he was raising questions about life, death and life after death.

"Where can a dead man go? The question with an answer only dead men know," he sang, briefly frozen in a stark white spotlight. "But I'm going to bet they never really feel at home, if they spent a lifetime learning how to live in Rome."

The crowd rocked on. There were tattooed youngsters in the aisles, dancing next to hip home-schooling parents with their children. There were bluegrass purists offering whoops of praise, sitting near some NASCAR fans wearing Birkenstock scandals.

The Nickel Creek crew -- guitarist Sean Watkins and his sister Sara on fiddle, along with Thile -- are hard to label and so are their fans. One reason for that is the band's Grammy Award-winning fusion of bluegrass roots with rock attitude. Nickel Creek often veers from Bill Monroe traditionalism to MTV Nirvana without blinking, with stops in John Coltrane and Beach Boy territory along the way.

But there was another reason the crowd in War Memorial Auditorium was unusually diverse. Nickel Creek offers a unique mix of old faith and modern doubts.

The trio has been together 16 years, beginning as children in devout Christian homes in San Diego. Early on, they recorded a gospel-bluegrass album called "Here to There" before heading into the mainstream with the help of superstar Alison Krauss.

It's crucial that bluegrass is one form of music in which artists are allowed to sing about Sunday morning as well as Saturday night. Thus, the members of Nickel Creek have been candid about their beliefs, while staying light years away from the prison called "Contemporary Christian Music."

Faith isn't an artistic curse if it stays honest, said Sean Watkins, who has written most of the trio's songs that wrestle with religious issues. It's interesting that old hymns are often more candid and searching than today's gospel pop songs.

"I'm so sick of sugar-coated songs from the Christian perspective," he said, in his online journal. "One of the most comforting and inspiring lines to me is from the last chorus of 'Come Thou Fount' where it says, 'Prone to wander, Lord I feel it. Prone to leave the God I love.' Not many un-watered-down songs make it through the filter of the Christian music industry mafia these days."

But honesty is a two-edged sword.

That's why Thile -- at the ripe old age of 24 -- was standing in a harsh spotlight singing songs about death, despair and divorce. One of his new songs is called "Doubting Thomas" and includes these poignant lines: "Can I be used to help others find truth, when I'm scared I'll find proof that it's a lie? ... I'm a doubting Thomas. I'll take your promise, though I know nothing's safe. Oh me of little faith."

Thile said he hopes to live his life as if death is not the end, struggling to "keep one foot in this world while sticking one foot out of it, just to get ready." At the same time, it's hard to avoid the kind of burned-out, shopping-mall confusion that leads so many young people to feel alone and disconnected, even while they crave relationships that will last.

Thus, this Nickel Creek concert closed with the trio sharing one microphone, gently singing this lullaby: "Why should the fire die? My mom and dad kept theirs alive."

"We are tempted to distance ourselves from the things that are truly powerful and beautiful in life," said Thile. "Faith is certainly one of those things. Faith is huge, and so are friendships and our family relationships. ...

"Anything that is truly worthwhile is both powerful and dangerous at the same time. Anything that is truly beautiful and lovely can also turn twisted and ugly. But we can't hide from all of that. That's what is real."

C.S. Lewis for children

As a World War I veteran, Oxford don C.S. Lewis was accustomed to nightmares about bloody trenches, bayonets, poison gas and the bite of shrapnel in his chest.

But the dreams that began in the late 1940s were different. Some were frightening and some were beautiful and, as he described them to family and friends, they involved lions, especially a giant lion that had a regal, yet wild personality.

Soon, Lewis began weaving these images into a story that also included a strange dream that he had at age 16. In it, he saw a faun holding an umbrella and some packages, standing in a snowy wood near a lamppost.

"He told people, 'I'd like to make a story out of that image because it has been in my head all of my life,' " said Douglas Gresham, the author's stepson. As Lewis would say, the great lion "Aslan simply leapt into the story and dragged all the rest of the Narnian Chronicles along with him. I believe that all of this was a gift from God, of course."

These dreams became "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe," the cornerstone of a seven-book fantasy franchise that has sold 90 million copies over 55 years, establishing itself as one of the most beloved works of Christian fiction of all time. Walden Media and Walt Disney Studios have turned the novel into a $150-million movie that, after its Dec. 9 release, will introduce "The Chronicles of Narnia" to millions of new children and their parents.

"Many people ask, 'Why are they coming back?' The answer is that these books never went away," said Gresham, who has served as co-producer and the spiritual conscience of the movie project.

Gresham enters this story because his mother, poet Joy Gresham of upstate New York, began corresponding with Lewis in 1950 about literary and religious matters and they struck up a long-distance friendship. This relationship grew, over time, into a marriage complicated by her battle with cancer, a poignant romance described in a play and two movies entitled "Shadowlands."

The lives of Lewis and his friends, such as J.R.R. Tolkien and others in the Oxford circle called "The Inklings," have been parsed and probed in countless books and memoirs. Gresham and his brother David witnessed many of these events and now, as an adult, Douglas has written his own biography of the stepfather he knew as "Jack," the nickname that Lewis adopted early in his life.

Unlike other Lewis biographies, "Jack's Life" does not try to dig inside his psyche or offer a detailed map of his career as a scholar or apologist for traditional faith. Gresham said he simply wanted to tell the story -- using images and language that would be accessible to children -- of the "finest man and best Christian I have ever known."

Thus, this biography begins: "If you are about eight years old, then you are the same age I was when I first met the man who wrote the Chronicles of Narnia. If you are eighteen, then you are the age I was when he died."

Like Gresham, Lewis suffered the trauma of losing his mother when he was very young. Gresham notes that, when Lewis' father died years later, Jack and his older brother Warren returned to Belfast to clean out the family home. They put all of their toys and other childhood memorabilia into a trunk and buried it in the garden.

Nevertheless, Gresham stressed that Lewis never "lost the intimate memory" if what it was like to be a child. While the scholar claimed that he was not good with children, his stories, letters and experiences late in life suggest otherwise.

"In my experience, he was excellent with children," said Gresham. "He didn't talk down to us. He may have brought himself down to out level, but he never talked down to us from above. Jack was always conscious of the fact that children are people. They may be small and unformed, mentally and emotionally as yet, but they are people with all of the same trials, tribulations, frights and foibles as other people."

Gresham paused, remembering. "In a sense, the child in him lived with him the rest of his life. For anyone who is writing for children, that is an important thing."

Seminaries, celibacy and doctrine

When it comes to nightlife in Washington, D.C., Dupont Circle is one of the places where people go to be seen.

So Amy Welborn wasn't surprised to see familiar faces while visiting the hot spots with a friend in the late 1970s. It was easy to spot the Catholic University seminarians -- with their girlfriends -- even though the future priests were not wearing clerical garb.

"It was the spirit of the times," said Welborn, now a popular Catholic writer and online apologist. "Dating was pretty normal for seminarians and some seminaries did little to discourage it. Some actually encouraged dating because that was supposed to help seminarians get in touch with their sexuality. ...

"People thought celibacy would take care of itself and, of course, some people thought the whole celibacy thing would disappear at some point in the future."

Times change. One thing is certain as teams of Catholic examiners begin a wave of confidential "Apostolic Visitations" at the 229 U.S. seminaries. While rumors swirl about a Vatican crackdown on homosexuality, the insiders who examine seminary life will follow 12 pages of guidelines that repeated focus on preparing priests for life without sex.

The celibacy issue is hot, according to the "Instrumentum Laboris."

While the document -- as posted on the World Wide Web -- contains one or two clear references to homosexuality, there are a dozen or more direct or indirect references to mandatory celibacy and its role in the training, or "formation," of priests.

Jerry Falwell, gay-rights activist?

It isn't shocking when leaders of the Human Rights Campaign praise people who have taken stands to back the civil rights of gays, lesbians and bisexuals.

But it certainly raised eyebrows when the gay-rights group publicly thanked the Rev. Jerry Falwell. The result was an odd little news story that, at first glance, made about as much sense as the Southern Baptist Convention throwing a party for its friends at the Walt Disney Co.

The story began with Falwell defending volunteer legal work that Supreme Court nominee John Roberts did during a key court battle over homosexual rights.

"I may not agree with the lifestyle. But that has nothing to do with the civil rights of that part of our constituency," said Falwell, on MSNBC's "The Situation with Tucker Carlson."

"Judge Roberts would probably have been not a good very good lawyer if he had not been willing, when asked by his partners in the law firm, to assist in guaranteeing the civil rights of employment and housing to any and all Americans."

Falwell plunged on, denying that he had changed his stance on extending "special rights" to homosexuals as a minority group. Equal access to housing and employment are basic rights, he said.

"Civil rights for all Americans, black, white, red, yellow, the rich, poor, young, old, gay, straight, etc., is not a liberal or conservative value," said Falwell. "It's an American value that I would think that we pretty much all agree on."

It was half a loaf, but gay-rights leaders grabbed it.

The Rev. Mel White of Soulforce -- a group based near Falwell's evangelical empire in Lynchburg, Va. -- immediately set out to verify if his former employer had meant to say what he had said. Before coming out as a gay activist in the early 1990s, White was a seminary professor and superstar ghostwriter who worked with the Rev. Billy Graham, Pat Robertson, Oliver North, Jim Bakker and, yes, Falwell.

How well does White know Falwell? Twenty years ago, he wrote his autobiography. The men have matched wits and sound bites ever since.

After reading Falwell's remarks, White immediately touched base with Ron Godwin, the former executive director of the Moral Majority.

"I asked him three questions," said White, during a trip last week to Washington, D.C. "I asked, 'Did Jerry say it?' He said, 'Yes.' I asked, 'Did Jerry mean it?' He said, 'Yes.' I asked, 'Will Jerry retract it?' He said, 'No.'

"I said, 'Thank Jerry for that.' "

Godwin confirmed that he talked to White on a recent Sunday morning, which isn't strange since White and his partner Gary Nixon frequently attend Thomas Road Baptist Church to monitor what Falwell says about sexuality and politics in the pulpit. They have been known to stand up in silent protest when the preacher says something that they believe is wrong.

Members of Falwell's team, said Godwin, cannot understand why White and others think the religious broadcaster has changed his tune on crucial issues linked to sexuality, marriage and civil rights. In this case, Falwell was merely restating his belief that homosexuals should not be denied civil rights they have as individual American citizens.

"We're not talking about the unique and special rights that are assigned to people in protected minority groups," said Godwin, who is now president of Jerry Falwell Ministries. "I understand that Mel has a strong desire to gain recognition for his cause. ... But Jerry Falwell is what he is and this 72-year-old Baptist was not trying to send some kind of subtle, oblique message that he has changed what he believes."

Obviously, White disagrees. He believes that, whether he wants to admit it or not, Falwell has changed some of the language that he uses to describe homosexuals and, in disputes that are theological as much as political, those words matter.

"I have known Jerry a long time and I think this was a serious change in his life," said White. "Never before has he said that he recognized us as a class -- as a protected class -- like other Americans. Now he has included us as gay and straight, right in there with black and white, man and woman, rich and poor, young and old and everybody else. That's important."

Looking for the Net Big Thing

CHICAGO -- When it comes to the digital world, David Merwin is a native.

He knows the laws and lingo. Along with his BetaChurch.org colleagues, Merwin believes the World Wide Web can bring people together and spread new ideas. But when it comes to analyzing the impact of the new "information technology" (natives say "IT") on many churches, he has some doubts.

"Lots of people are jumping into online ministry because they see that everybody else is doing it," he said, during the 2005 convention of the Gospel Communications Network, a digital coalition of 300-plus ministries.

"That isn't a very good reason. People need to stop and ask if they have the time and the talent and the energy and the resources to get into all of this. I've seen churches pour thousands of dollars into IT projects and then, when they crash and burn, it turns out that nobody was sure what they wanted to do in the first place."

If this lament sounds familiar, it should. Not that long ago, flocks of businesses and investors lost their analog shirts while riding the cyber waves that rolled across the nation. Prophets of the new order berated doubters who failed to "get it."

Everyone yearned for the next "Big Thing," said Mike Atkinson, president of uneekNet.com. The whole economy was going to change. Stores would be swallowed by online start-ups. Newspapers would vanish as "push" technology zapped personalized news -- for free -- directly to computer screens. Everyone wanted to build "portals" rich with "stickiness" and registered millions of "hits."

Many religious groups tried to copy the trends, building online sites that resembled grain silos full of information that, when users dug deeper, turned out to be tweaked content from traditional publications. The goal was to draw people into your silo and keep them there, while making sure that the contents of your silo didn't leak out into anybody else's silo. Sharing spiritual customers with others would be bad for business.

It was exciting. But ministers had to learn to be careful out there.

"The key is that all of this is about me -- me, me, me. It's about finding what works for me and then giving me what I want," said Atkinson, who is best known for his work with the Youth Specialties ministry. "That's the reality of the thing. That's what the Web is about. ... This feeds right into a consumer culture. It forces us to make instantaneous choices, whether they are the right choices or not."

Millions of people are surfing in cyberspace, looking for connections that will help them find answers, he said. But they are doing this in a marketplace that emphasizes the total freedom of the individual. Online commitments are as binding as the click of a mouse. People are looking for community, but on their own terms.

Atkinson doesn't think religious leaders should panic. He hopes that they study new forms of digital communication -- from Google to Craigslist, from MySpace to Wikipedia -- that are built on people sharing information instead of hoarding it. It's time for more ministries to cooperate, rather than compete, with each other.

"We also have to know that all of this can shape how people think," he said. "It's a buyer's market and people want what they want. ... You can end up with people online shopping around and then saying, 'Hey, that megachurch has this or that neat program and I want it. Let's move over there.' And off they go."

Eventually, this consumer mentality can soak down into the messages that ministries deliver, said Merwin.

The hot word is "postmodernism," but for many ministries the temptation is older and more fundamental than that. The bottom line is that it's hard not to give people want they want, to tell customers what they want to hear.

"It's that attitude that says, 'You have your thing and I have my thing and that's OK because it doesn't really matter what you believe anyway,' " he said. "You stay with that and you have to end up with radical individualism and isolationism. You have people leaving one hip church to go to another hip church that does some hip things better than the first one. Where does it end?"

Why God loves New Orleans

Wherever they go, preachers are asked to stand up and pray.

The Rev. Joe McKeever is the missions director for a Southern Baptist regional association, which is rather like being bishop of a flock that doesn't believe in bishops. This means that he gets asked to pray even more than the next guy with a Bible.

McKeever says yes -- on one condition. Before the prayer, he insists on delivering a mini-sermon he calls, "What New Orleans and Heaven Have In Common." McKeever, you see, leads the Baptist Association of Greater New Orleans.

"Obviously, people in heaven and in New Orleans love the saints," he said, reached by a shaky cell-phone link in Mississippi. "Both places love a party, since heaven always has a good reason to party and New Orleans doesn't need a reason." And then there's I-10, an interstate highway that will "get you to either place really quick, if you aren't careful."

But the 65-year-old McKeever always slips in something serious. There's a truth about New Orleans he wants other believers to grasp, especially as many of Hurricane Katrina's victims prepare to rebuild.

The other reason heaven and New Orleans are alike, he said, is a "simple matter of diversity. Both places are made up of people from every nation under the sun. ... Whenever I hear people say they want to reach the world for Jesus Christ, I tell them to come to New Orleans -- it's already here."

Life is a blur right now, which is understandable since McKeever's office address is 2222 Lakeshore Drive and the shore in question belongs to Lake Pontchartrain. Before Katrina, he worked with 77 congregations and 63 missions in Orleans and Jefferson parishes and the thin arc of towns south on the Mississippi River.

Many of these churches are fine since they're in the suburbs and exurbs around the flooded bowl that is New Orleans. But some of the sanctuaries are in bad shape or ruined. It's easy to imagine conditions at the Dixieland Trailer Park Mission. After the storm, McKeever's office spent hours trying to find the pastors of his 60 missions and drew a blank, since they are scattered across the nation.

McKeever said he has been overjoyed at the outpouring of support for Katrina's victims, especially from religious groups nationwide. He is convinced that most of the help and the more than $500 million in charity donations are coming from people who acted for religious motivations. He can't prove that, but he believes it.

More volunteers from a wide variety of churches and other faith groups are poised to rush into New Orleans once they get an all-clear signal to do so. Early this week, Southern Baptist Convention leaders reported that their volunteers had already served about 2 million meals along the ravaged Gulf Coast.

When all is said and done, McKeever believes that New Orleans will be flooded again -- this time with compassion. Many of the walls that have long divided church people in the region were, quite literally, ripped down, he said.

This would be remarkable since Southerners have highly mixed feelings about the Big Easy. They consider it a strange, glorious, corrupt and soulful city, a place where demons dance right out in the open and more than a few of the saints, when they do come marching in, are drunk. As former New York Times editor Howell Raines said recently, in highest praise, New Orleans is the "one Southern place where the Bible Belt came unbuckled."

McKeever has seen that side of the city. As a seminarian, he volunteered for street-preaching duty in the French Quarter. But he said he has decided that there is more to the Crescent City than revelry, voodoo, alcohol and temptation. There are the believers in a wide variety of pews who have found their place in its unique cultural gumbo.

"Someone told me before we moved here that to be a true Christian in New Orleans was different from the Bible Belt," he said. "They said that sin was so black here that believers shine like diamonds against a jeweler's black velvet. I've frequently thought the Christianity I've seen here, far from being the weak kind outsiders expect in such a city, is actually of a purer variety for this very reason."

Calling more Christian writers

It was hard for businessman Jim Russell to pick up his local newspaper without thinking about one simple church statistic.

According to the Yellow Pages, there were 400 churches in and around Lansing, Mich. That meant there were 400-plus ministers and many thousands of lay people who either read the newspaper or decided not to. Surely, he thought, these readers must have some kind of reaction to what they saw in the news.

Yet Russell kept looking -- usually without success -- for letters to the editor offering sharp, winsome Christian commentary on news events. Sometimes weeks would pass without the appearance of such a letter, or a similar point of view in the guest editorial columns.

After a few years of this ritual, Russell decided that enough was enough.

"The problem does not exist in the editorial policies of the newspaper, which has a fair, open and reasonable position toward local participation in all of its departments," wrote Russell, in one 1995 essay. "No, the problem exists in the lack of Christian understanding of biblical vision, mission and strategy required to disciple our nation."

Thinking like an entrepreneur, Russell projected his local analysis out to the national level and reached a logical conclusion. He decided that it would be good if more Christians learned how to write, rather than spending so much of their time complaining about the news media.

So Russell opened his checkbook and, in his own quiet way, tried to do something positive. Starting in the early 1990s, he began looking for writers with a knack for expressing their faith in mainstream publications and he kept at it until his death on Aug. 31 at the age of 80.

Russell started the annual Amy Awards -- with a top prize of $10,000 -- to honor writers who published newspaper commentaries that quoted scripture while wrestling with issues in public life. He started a national "Church Writing Group" network to encourage writers to learn from each other's successes and failures. I met him because of his dedication to helping college students explore their talents, through scholarships and donations to Christian campuses that emphasized mainstream media writing.

As a businessman, Russell was known as the founder of Russell Business Forms, which grew into the Lansing-based RBF Inc. In 1976, Jim and Phyllis Russell started the Amy Foundation to support efforts to spread the Christian faith and help the poor. They named it after their fifth and youngest child, who was born with Down syndrome. A spokesperson for the foundation (amyfound.org) said the family would take some time before making decisions about the future of the Amy Awards and the writing projects.

"When you stop and think about it, he had no credentials of any kind when it came to working with the mainstream media," said William R. Mattox, Jr., an Amy Award winner who is a member of USA Today's op-ed page board of contributors. "He just came up with this idea and, when it seemed like it was doing some good, he stuck with it. He never quit."

Russell knew what he was after. An early set of guidelines sent to the church-based writing circles stressed that their writers should strive to reach people who retained some interest in religious faith, but were rarely seen in pews. It wasn't enough to preach to the choir, because 60 to 80 percent of all newspaper subscribers say they read letters to the editor.

"The writing language should be contemporary secular English, not fluent evangelical or fellowship Christianese," said the brochure. A few lines later, Russell advised, "The writing will never be strident of harsh, making simple points with sledge hammers, embarrassing the body of Christ."

Russell sincerely believed that most newspaper editors are interested in reaching as wide an audience as possible. Thus, editors have a powerful incentive to allow fair, constructive debates in their editorial pages about moral issues. The question was whether religious believers had the skills to compete in the marketplace.

"Jim Russell was not the kind of man who played the heavy and came on strong," said Mattox. "He really believed that it made more sense to take a gentle approach and then stick to it. That's what he was all about, as a businessman and as a believer."