Rosenthal refused to remain silent

During his decades as a New York Times correspondent, the late A.M. Rosenthal saw lots of dead bodies in Pakistan, Nepal, Afghanistan, Kashmir, India and other troubled lands.

One day in Calcutta he started asking questions: What if some of these people are dying, but not yet dead? Was he supposed to help them? These questions stayed with him when he returned home to become an editor.

"I devoted a great deal of my time and thinking to wondering: When is it a sin to walk past a dying person? What number does God have? Is it one? Is it two?", asked Rosenthal, in a BreakPoint radio interview after receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2002.

What if we know that torture is taking place, but cannot see the evidence with our own eyes or hear it with our own ears? Does God forgive those who don't act? "Is that what God is saying: 'If you can't see them, it's OK to walk away from them?' Or is he saying, 'If you can't hear them?' Suppose you can hear them, but not see them, or they're around the corner. When is apathy a sin?"

Rosenthal kept these questions to himself as his career soared. As a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter he covered the world and, as editor, he caused a journalistic earthquake when he pushed for the publication of the Pentagon Papers. For 56 years Abe Rosenthal helped change the New York Times and, thus, helped shape his times.

After leaving the editor's desk in 1986, he began writing his “On My Mind” op-ed columns in which he championed the human-rights causes that dominated his life -- free speech and freedom of conscience. Rosenthal was a secular Jew and an old-fashioned liberal from the Bronx, but many of his old questions about liberty, sin and apathy began to break into the open and affect his work.

"Abe fought to cure our blind spots and it worked," said Pulitzer Prize-winner Nicholas Kristof, speaking at Rosenthal's May 14 funeral at Manhattan's Central Synagogue. "He did indeed teach us to see."

The healing process wasn't painless, especially when Rosenthal latched onto one particular religious issue. Some human-rights activists are convinced that one of the reasons he lost his column and was forced to leave the Times was because he wouldn't stop writing about the persecution of religious minorities around the world.

Rosenthal couldn't understand why so many journalists just didn't "get" that story. I talked to him several times about this issue, in part because Jewish conservative Michael Horowitz sent him a copy of a 1996 column that I wrote about the slaughter of Christians and animists in South Sudan and the rebirth of the slave trade.

Rosenthal said he asked some newsroom colleagues this wasn?t a big news story. No one had a good answer. He ended up writing -- in one year alone -- 20 columns about the persecution of Christians, Buddhists, moderate Muslims and other religious minorities in human-rights hot spots around the world.

"You don't need to be a rabbi or a minister to get this story. You just need to be a journalist. You just have to be able to look at the numbers of people involved and then look at all the other stories that were linked to it," he told me, at the end of that year. "Why are journalists missing this? ... I am inclined to believe that they just can't grasp the concept of a movement that includes conservatives, middle-of-the-road people and even some liberals. Their distrust of religious people -- especially conservatives -- is simply too strong for them to see what is happening."

With his columns, Rosenthal helped pave the way for the passage of the Freedom From Religious Persecution Act of 1997 and the creation of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom. Now, that hard-to-label coalition that fought for justice in South Sudan is, with a jolt of Hollywood star power, rallying support for the peace process in Darfur, where Islamists are attacking other Muslims.

Rosenthal refused to keep quiet. After his death, a Time editorial underlined the importance of a key Rosenthal statement about the Pentagon Papers: "When something important is going on, silence is a lie."

That's a great quote, one that perfectly explains why Rosenthal was so driven to write about religious persecution.

When believers are dying, silence is a lie.

So who is Dan Brown?

There was no way to film "The Lord of the Rings" without dealing with the author and producer Peter Jackson knew it.

Who was J.R.R. Tolkien? Luckily, the Oxford don left behind letters and essays about his Catholic faith and its impact on his heart, mind and soul.

"What we tried to do was honor the things that were important to Tolkien," said Jackson, after screening "The Two Towers" for the press. "We didn't want to make it a religious film. But he was very religious and some of the messages and some of the themes are based on his beliefs."

When artists turn a novel into a movie, they need to understand the author and it helps if he has, in the past, been candid about his beliefs and values. It helps to know something about the worldview that shaped the fiction.

So who is novelist Dan Brown? How will his beliefs affect "The Da Vinci Code" movie that will roll -- tsunami style -- into thousands of theaters next weekend?

It's hard to answer these questions, because Brown rarely agrees to serious interviews. Entertainment Weekly recently resorted to running a feature entitled "10 Things We Learned About Dan Brown From His Recent Trial."

Who is Dan Brown? He grew up in the Episcopal Church and was a regular at church camps. His mother was a church musician. His father taught mathematics at Phillips Exeter Academy, so Brown lived and studied there before going to Amherst College. During his college years, as often happens, Brown veered away from faith.

We know that he tried teaching English, failed as a songwriter and, early on, struggled as a writer. His wife, Blythe, is a painter who has played a major role in his work with her research skills and anger at traditional Catholicism. We know that Brown says he outlined "The Da Vinci Code" before he -- or his wife -- read the conspiracy theory classic "Holy Blood, Holy Grail." We know that Brown beat claims of plagiarism in that recent trial in London.

Interviewing himself at DanBrown.com, he argues that his book is a godsend for those open to debating religious questions and a challenge to anyone clinging to ancient doctrines. In other words, anyone who thinks his book is an attack on his or her faith is probably the kind of person whose faith deserves to be attacked.

"This book is not anti-anything. It's a novel," said Brown. "I wrote this story in an effort to explore certain aspects of Christian history that interest me. The vast majority of devout Christians understand this fact and consider 'The Da Vinci Code' an entertaining story that promotes spiritual discussion and debate. Even so, a small but vocal group of individuals has proclaimed the story dangerous, heretical and anti-Christian."

The problem is the novel's opening statement: "All descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents and secret rituals in this novel are accurate." After that, Brown proceeds to argue that Jesus was a charismatic man who married, had a child and created a goddess-friendly faith. The early church, however, twisted his teachings. Thus, as a brilliant skeptic says in the novel, "almost everything our fathers taught us about Christ is false."

Still, it's crucial to note that Brown is not opposed to Christianity, per se. In the online interview he stresses that he considers himself a Christian, but one who is seeking his own path of enlightenment. Brown sees himself as someone who is searching for a crossroads where science, sacred sex and all the world religions meet and work out their differences in the embrace of an all-embracing goddess, god or pantheon of gods to be negotiated at some point in the future.

"If you ask three people what it means to be Christian, you will get three different answers," he said. "Some feel being baptized is sufficient. Others feel you must accept the Bible as absolute historical fact. Still others require a belief that all those who do not accept Christ as their personal savior are doomed to hell. Faith is a continuum, and we each fall on that line where we may."

Who is Dan Brown? He is an evangelist proclaiming the message that there is no orthodoxy other than his liberating orthodoxy that says traditional Christianity is heresy. His goal is to liberate Jesus from all those picky ancient creeds.

Catholic choirs, alive or dead?

Lucy E. Carroll has never actually attended a Catholic Mass in which a cantor belted out, "He'll be coming 'round the altar when he comes! He'll be coming 'round the altar when he comes!" At least, that hasn't happened yet.

"I know that some people have used Stephen Foster music in a Mass," said the musical director at the Carmelite monastery in Philadelphia. "I've heard about people using the melody from the waltz scene in 'Beauty and the Beast' for the 'Gloria.' And I've heard more than one report about people singing the 'Agnus Dei,' which means 'Lamb of God,' to that old song 'Send in the Clowns.' "

In many parishes, she said, pop songs and the modern hymnody inspired by them have all but replaced traditional hymns and, heaven forbid, ancient chants and actual Catholic anthems.

This is old news. What many outsiders may not realize is that many Catholic parishes have, in the past decade or two, followed the lead of Protestant megachurches and now feature plugged-in "praise bands" and worship-team singers -- complete with solo microphones -- who sway in the Sunday-morning spotlights.

Legions of Catholics like this music, admitted Carroll. But many do not, including some younger Catholics who are drawn to candles, incense, sacred art and the mysterious melodies of ancient chants. In many parishes, she said, it may be time -- as shocking as this may sound -- to start a choir.

Carroll is an unrepentant choir director. She believes there is more to being a Catholic musician than the ability to play some guitar chords while singing, "Here I am Lord, Is it I Lord? I have heard You calling in the night." She can speak words like "Victoria" and "Palestrina" without flinching.

"Most people who lead music in our churches today are not trained to be liturgical musicians," said Carroll, an adjunct professor at the Westminster Choir College at Princeton University. "They do not understand that there is music that is sacred in nature and then there is music that is secular in nature. There is Christian music that would be totally acceptable at a revival service or a youth rally, but it is not ... acceptable in a Catholic Mass."

What should someone do if they want to start a choir? Carroll recently published a list of tips in the conservative Adoremus Bulletin (www.adoremus.org) that included:

* Obtain the full support of the priest, including a pledge that he will praise the choir from the pulpit and cooperate with its efforts.

* Find a choir director and an accompanist. It helps to have money to hire someone and the person must understand worship as well as musical notes on a page. Carroll suggests that parish leaders search at local high schools and colleges, perhaps even seeking out talented students seeking practical experience.

* The best way to find singers is by personal contact. Do not, she emphasized, advertise with phrases such as "Do you like to sing in the shower?" The goal is to find choir singers, not soloists whose volume control is cranked up to "water buffalo." Avoid people who say, "I'll be there for Mass, but not rehearsals."

* Start slow, perhaps singing at the same Mass once a month. Resist the temptation to hide your fledgling choir under a wave of instrumental sound. Train the singers to handle some traditional, a cappella (voices alone) music.

* Start with unison music then let the choir sing "antiphonally," with women singing one line and men the next. Then attempt canons and rounds, such as the anonymous "Dona Nobis Pacem" that congregations have enjoyed for generations. Eventually, the director will learn who can sing soprano, alto, tenor and bass. At that point, the choir can try two-part chants and then easy anthems from a traditional Catholic hymnbook or by modern composers who write sacred music for use in Mass.

The goal is for the choir to become a close-knit family of musicians who lead the church family in worship, said Carroll. She is convinced that soloists with microphones inevitably turn into performers.

"We have to get away from the rock bands and the folks groups and the polka players and everybody else," she said. "We need to stop entertaining our people and get back to our own worship tradition -- which is leading our people in the worship of God."

Rushdie says, 'Get religion'

It remains Salman Rushdie's fervent conviction that it's wrong for clergy, jurists or politicos to threaten writers' lives simply because they think their books are terrible.

Not even the shocking success of "The Da Vinci Code" has weakened his pro-novelist stance, he said, drawing laughter at Calvin College's recent Festival of Faith and Writing in Grand Rapids, Mich.

This faith in free speech isn't surprising since the apostate Muslim has lived in hiding ever since his 1988 novel "The Satanic Verses" inspired Iran's top ayatollah to issue a fatwa calling for his death. No one knows better than Rushdie -- who calls himself a "dreadful old atheist" -- that faith, ink and blood can be stirred into a deadly brew.

Nevertheless, he also believes that writers who refuse to wrestle with the power of faith and the supernatural are refusing to deal with real people in the real world. Consider, he said, the daily lives of the gods and believers in his homeland -- India.

"The people in India do not think of the gods as abstractions," said Rushdie. "They think of them as real beings who move amongst them and work upon their lives every day. If you have something that you need, if somebody is sick, if a child needs to get into college or whatever it may be, you would go and find the relevant deity to make the offering to and you would believe that that would increase your chances of getting what you needed in life."

Rushdie, 58, understands India -- with its tense mix of Hinduism, Islam and Christianity -- from the inside out. As a child, he enjoyed asking his Muslim grandfather why he practiced a faith in which the prayer regime required him to spend so much time with his rear end higher than his head. Meanwhile, Rushdie's father was both an unbeliever and a Muslim historian.

After years of airing his doubts, the pre-teen iconoclast celebrated his own loss of faith with a symbolic culinary sin -- a ham sandwich. The fact that God did not strike him dead with a thunderbolt confirmed his newborn atheism.

As a writer, Rushdie said that he has always insisted on treating religion as a "normal part of life." Thus, his goal was "not to give it special treatment, not to hedge it around with the language of taboo and respect because that has always seemed, to me, to be anti-intellectual."

However, skeptics have their own way of avoiding the truth when dealing with intensely religious cultures, he said. Even writers who are unbelievers must realize that almost everyone in a land like India believes in one god or another and views life through the lens of that faith. Skeptical writers who refuse to accept this reality are practicing another form of intellectually dishonesty.

Rushdie does not, of course, believe writers should surrender their right to deal with religion in an irreverent or critical manner. However, he stressed that skeptics must be willing to doubt their own doubts and remain open to the possibility that the believers may, in some mysterious way, be right.

After all, he said, the real world is not completely realistic. Ordinary people believe in miracles and their beliefs are considered normal. Even in modern America, real life contains moments that are utterly surreal.

"So the sense that the miraculous and the mundane, that the supernatural and the everyday, coexist in a completely natural way, is everywhere," he said. "The idea that, somehow, these are separate categories of thing is quite alien. So if you are going to write about that world, you have to take cognizance of that fact. You have to recognize that this is how people think."

Ultimately, religious faith is one of the most powerful forces shaping the myths and stories that bind together families, nations and cultures, said Rushdie. In a free society, people are free to tell and interpret their own stories. Tyranny is when other people have the right to censure or kill the storytellers who get out of line.

"We are, as human beings, storytelling animals," he insisted. "We are the only creature on the earth that tells itself stories in order to understand what it is and what its life means. Therefore the story is of unusual importance to us, whether we are writers or not. It is something unusually important to human nature."

Sacred meals, Baptist and Orthodox

It's hard to hold a proper Southern Baptist dinner on the grounds without someone bringing a lemon pound cake.

The recipe John David Finley grew up with was as down to earth as cooking can get, with one cup of butter, four eggs, the grated peel of half a lemon and the right amounts of flour, sugar, baking powder, vanilla, salt and nutmeg.

But somewhere between the lines is the joy of his paternal grandmother, Lula Mae Finley. And those black-eyed peas -- you'll need a ham bone -- are just black-eyed peas, unless you have the chopped bell pepper and jalapenos in there. Then you're talking about New Year's dinner with Owen Jefferson "Popo" Finley, Sr. That homemade vanilla ice cream? That's part of the legacy of the Rev. Owen Jefferson Finley, Jr., who survived the hell of Omaha Beach on D-Day before spending 38 years as pastor of the Trinity Baptist Church in McAlester, Okla. The list goes on and on.

People used to teach old recipes to their children back in the days before interstate highways, fast-food empires and televisions ate the family dinner hour, said Father John David Finley, author of "Sacred Meals: From Our Family Table." It's a book about cooking, of course, but it's also a memoir about the ties that bind his past as a Southern Baptist preacher's kid to his adult life as an Eastern Orthodox priest, composer and evangelist in Southern California.

"One of the most important things I've learned in life is that food isn't just food," he said. "At some point, I realized that I was preparing and serving certain foods at certain times of the year not just to honor or remember my grandparents and my parents, but to enter into a kind of communion with them. ...

"Suddenly I saw the Communion of the Saints in a whole different way. I realized why food has been so important to the church's theology since the very beginning."

At the deepest level, there is the bread and wine consecrated in the altar rites of the Divine Liturgy. But the ordinary foods of life play key roles in the Eastern fasting traditions of Great Lent, the six-week season in which observant Orthodox believers strive not to eat meat and dairy products. The fasting traditions of Great Lent lead to Holy Week and the great feast of Pascha, or Easter. The Orthodox feast this year is on April 23, using the ancient Julian calendar.

Father Finley said the goal, through the church's feasts and fasts, is for families to realize that the meals they share together are also sacred. Thus, the altar table and the family table are linked. Both are "manifestations of the ways that God feeds us throughout our lives," he said.

It's hard to grasp this in an age in which food is surrounded by golden arches and plastic toys more often than golden vestments, incense and icons.

"There's no room for fellowship in a McDonald's culture," he said. "Every now and then people realize this. They feel isolated and rushed and cheated. They know something is wrong."

"Sacred Meals" features commentary on this subject from an Eastern Orthodox pioneer in North America, the late theologian Father Alexander Schmemann.

"Centuries of secularism have failed to transform eating into something strictly utilitarian," he wrote. "A meal is still a rite -- the last 'natural sacrament' of family and friendship, of life that is more than 'eating' and 'drinking.' To eat is still something more than to maintain bodily functions. People may not understand what that 'something more' is, but they nevertheless desire to celebrate it."

This is precisely what Finley and his family will celebrate Sunday when the midnight rites of Holy Pascha give way to a communal feast -- rich in meats, cheeses, eggs and non-Lenten treats -- that will last into the hours just before dawn.

"Our basket will have to include ham, because I can't imagine a Finley feast without ham," said the priest. "Then there is that great Pascha cheese that the Russians make. It's almost like cheesecake that you spread with a knife. They eat it with that wonderful bread called 'Kulich.'

"I have to make that for the children. You know a food has become a family tradition when the children yell at you if you don't make it."

Year 17 -- Reporters, crow's ears, Karma Light nuns

The Vatican is known its complex rituals, rich in ancient symbols and mysterious details. Take, for example, the funeral of Pope John Paul II, as described by the International Herald Tribune.

"The 84-year-old John Paul was laid out in Clementine Hall, dressed in white and red vestments, his head covered with a white bishop's miter and propped up on three dark gold pillows," wrote Ian Fisher of the New York Times. "Tucked under his left arm was the silver staff, called the crow's ear, that he had carried in public."

Get the joke?

You see, that ornate silver shepherd's crook is actually called a crosier (or "crozier"), not a "crow's ear."

This is the kind of error that believers love to cite as evidence that too many journalists don't know which way is up when it comes to religion. Believe me, I receive more than my share of emails offering other examples. Did a BBC producer really write a subtitle saying that "Karma Light" nuns had gathered to mourn the pope?

Part of the problem is that religious people often speak in unknown tongues and it's hard for journalists to tell what they're saying. Thus, mistakes happen. It's a bad thing to mess up the words when many of the words are sacred.

Sometimes, it helps to laugh.

Once a year, I mark this column's anniversary -- this is No. 18 -- by collecting some of the strange words and events from the previous 12 months that just didn't fit anywhere in particular. Obviously, I know that journalists make mistakes on the "God beat." But, believe me, the folks in the pulpits and pews can get pretty strange, too.

* Pope John Paul II made headlines in 1986 when he visited a synagogue. Thus, a BBC writer said that the new Pope Benedict XVI's "visit to the Cologne synagogue ? will mark only the second time in history that a head of the Catholic Church has entered a Jewish place of worship." A reader sent me that item with this postscript: "Not counting the apostle Peter, obviously."

* I thought this was a hoax. But it does appear that South Bronx Episcopalians have created a hip-hop Book of Common Prayer. Thus saith Bishop Catherine Roskam: "If Jesus were alive today, he would have been a rapper."

I also love that the Episcopal Network for Animal Welfare is selling its own barbecue apron. Grill on.

* Anyone seeking information on the year's hottest musical trend should visit www.hasidicreggae.com. Yes, you read that right.

* Back to Pope Benedict XVI. It seems that someone at the Associated Press needs to bone up on church history. A story from Vatican City on Nov. 27 began this way: "Pope Benedict XVI ushered in the Christmas season Sunday, calling it a time for joy when Christians should find it within themselves to hope that they can change the world." Actually, the pope was marking the start of Advent, the penitential season that precedes Christmas. The 12-day Christmas season begins on Dec. 25.

* Speaking of the Christmas wars, a journalist sent me this rather understated headline from Miami Beach: "Blindfolded Santa Hanging From Noose At Home Upsets Neighborhood." I can understand that. What I cannot understand is why some schools allow students to sing "Feliz Navidad (happy Christmas)," but not "White Christmas" and other songs that contain the C-word.

* You knew this was coming. The truly devoted can now buy an "iBelieve" device that clicks on to the top of an Apple iPod Shuffle and turns it -- yes -- into a large white cross that can be worn around the neck.

I believe that has a bit more class than those gym shorts with the words "Left Behind" printed, well, you can imagine where.

* The publication of 12 caricatures of the Prophet Mohammad upset many readers. However, other readers were just as upset when newspapers declined to publish them, with editors saying -- to a chorus of snickers in many pews -- that they did not want to offend religious believers.

Thus, one Bob Flavell wrote to the Boston Globe and said: "I find all of your editorial cartoons deeply offensive, morally, religiously, philosophically and spiritually. In fact, I don't like your editorials, either. And the editorializing in your news coverage is annoying as well. In keeping with your cowardly policy not to offend anyone, kindly cease publication at once."

God and the intellect

It's hard to laugh about religion in Northern Ireland, but Oxford theologian Alister McGrath likes to tell the following joke that hints at the challenges he faced as a young skeptic in that troubled land.

While visiting Belfast, an Englishman was cornered by three thugs. The leader asked one question: "Are you a Protestant or are you a Catholic?"

After a diplomatic pause, the Englishman said: "I am an atheist."

Confused, his attacker asked: "Are you a Protestant atheist or a Catholic atheist?"

The tough religion questions continued when McGrath entered Oxford University, where he became the rare student who traded his Marxist atheism for Christianity while studying science. He would eventually earn two doctorates -- in molecular biology and theology.

Today, McGrath teaches at his alma mater and is admired by academic leaders around the world who are tired of being cornered and asked: Are you a Christian or are you an intellectual?

This was a big question during the 1960s when most secular educators believed that "religion was evil" and "on the way out," said McGrath, speaking last week in Grapevine, Texas, at a global forum sponsored by the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities.

According to the "received wisdom" of that era, a "new secular age was about to dawn," he said. "The future was all about a godless culture and the church would just have to adapt to it and that was that."

These days, even the most skeptical of scholars admit that traditional forms of religion are on the rise and that millions of spiritually hungry students are questioning the chilly, strictly rational creeds of secular modernity. Faith is making a comeback and the high priests of mainstream academia cannot understand why, said McGrath. Thus, many are getting angry and, on occasion, shrill.

These tensions are even beginning to affect the bottom line.

A small wave of mainstream news reports have noted that enrollments are up 70.6 percent during the past 14 years at the 102 schools in the Council of Christian Colleges and Universities, the mostly evangelical Protestant network in which I teach journalism. Over the same period of time, enrollments rose 28 percent at secular private colleges and 12.8 percent at public colleges and universities.

Meanwhile, a national survey conducted by UCLA's Higher Education Research Institute found that four in five students said they are interested in spiritual issues and 75 percent said they are searching for the meaning or purpose of life.

In this environment, said McGrath, it is crucial for leaders of religious colleges to know that they have two objectives instead of one. They must help students grow in their faith while also growing intellectually.

Failure on either side of this equation is failure in the whole process. This is tricky, because many educators believe that any affirmation of orthodoxy equals fundamentalism. Meanwhile, parents often question efforts to debate religious issues.

The goal, said McGrath, is to help young roots go deeper. Christian educators have a God-given responsibility to help the plants grow.

"We are not simply reassuring students that their faith is right, that it makes sense, ... that it connects up with reality," he told the forum. "One of the big distinctives between a more secular education and what you offer is the mirroring of this love of God for every individual, of helping them to dream dreams, to see visions of where they might be, of what God might do in them and through them."

This means that professors must accept that Christianity has, over the centuries, built up an unavoidable tradition of history, art, philosophy, ethics and theology that has implications all of life. Thus, McGrath stressed that education affects both the head and the heart and that it is unwise to create two zones on campus -- one spiritual and one academic.

In other words, the Christian faith has intellectual content that cannot be locked inside the chapel.

"We need a generation of economists, of lawyers, of politicians who intentionally set out to connect their faith and what they will be doing in the world, not doing it by accident or an afterthought, but rather seeing this as a God-given calling," said McGrath. Professors want their students to ask, "If I were to enter politics, how could my values and beliefs be reflected in what I say and do? And likewise with chemistry, biology, psychology, you name it."

God wants R-E-S-P-E-C-T

Ask most people what God looks like and they'll immediately start thinking about Michelangelo, the Sistine Chapel and an old man with a white beard sitting on a cloud.

Eric Metaxas thinks that anyone who truly wants to understand the righteous and jealous God of the Bible should try meditating on a different image. Metaxas is thinking about Motown, rather than Vatican City.

"I admit that the Bible does not specifically mention Aretha Franklin," said Metaxas, a humor writer and speaker best known for his work with the Manhattan-based "Socrates in the City" lecture series. "But when it comes to thinking about God, most people's minds are full of all those familiar images and they just get stuck. ... So why not Aretha? She's big, she's bold and you're going to have to listen to what she's saying."

And everybody knows what the Queen of Soul is going to say: "What you want, baby I got it. What you need, do you know I got it? All I'm askin' is for a little respect when you come home (just a little bit). ? R-E-S-P-E-C-T, find out what it means to me."

Hold on to that image for a minute, because there is a method to his madness and it's at the heart of his quirky book "Everything You Always Wanted to Know About God (but were afraid to ask)." Metaxas is a friend of mine and the best way I can explain where he's coming from is to say that he's a former editor of The Record at Yale University, America's oldest college humor magazine, and he's written for thinkers as diverse as Chuck Colson of Watergate fame and Bob the Tomato of VeggieTales.

The key is that Metaxas (www.ericmetaxas.com) thinks humor is serious stuff and that most religious leaders haven't grasped this basic fact about modern life. He is convinced that Americans are not going to listen if theologians and clergy keep offering dense doctrinal arguments when making a case for a traditional faith. Instead of talking about how many angels can dance on a copy of the Summa Theologiae, modern missionaries and apologists need to consider the strategies they would use to talk to Comedy Central fans over a few beers and a bowl of mixed nuts.

Which brings us back to Aretha Franklin.

Many modern seekers, said Metaxas, are curious about God and they wish they could find some answers to their tough spiritual questions. But, at the same time, they have trouble accepting the traditional Christian belief that God is God and that there is only one way to find salvation. These claims sound petty and intolerant.

"Here's a comparison that might make sense," argues Metaxas, in a book chapter entitled "How Can Anyone Take the Bible Seriously?"

"If a guy is married and he tries to persuade his wife that he needs to have a few other women on the side, his wife will likely say, 'Sorry, Romeo, but that's not going to fly. If you want to be married to me, you have to forego those other women. Period.' It's just like that with God. He doesn't force us to pick him, but he does force us to choose between him and the others. We can't have both."

In other words, God demands R-E-S-P-E-C-T.

Metaxas has other skewed takes on big issues. He thinks that using sex for self-gratification makes as much sense as using Rembrandt paintings to line birdcages. He's interested in life's big questions, questions like how the universe -- including all those Chevy Camaros in Queens and Staten Island -- exploded out of something smaller than the period at the end of a sentence.

Is this theology? No, it isn't the way that intellectuals talk in cathedral pulpits and faculty clubs, said Metaxas. But it is the way that ordinary people talk on Friday nights while hanging out with their friends.

"At some point Christians are going to have to use humor and parody because that's the language of the culture," he said. "That's what people consider sharp and entertaining and real. ? You can keep serving up tea-and-crumpets moralism and logical arguments and it's not going to matter because people aren't going to listen.

"You may as well be speaking Ukrainian. That isn't going to work, unless you happen to be speaking to Ukrainians."

The New York Times tweaks its credo

NEW YORK -- The New York Times has for generations printed its credo on Page 1 to inspire the faithful: "All the News That's Fit to Print."

But times changed and the high church of journalism was challenged by radio and television news, which was followed by a tsunami of news, rumors, opinions and criticism on 24-7 cable news networks and the Internet. The result has been a subtle change in doctrine at the Times, although the Gray Lady's motto has stayed the same.

Around-the-clock competition has "caused us to shift our emphasis from information as a commodity and play to different strengths -- emphasizing less the breaking facts than the news behind the news, writing more analytically," said executive editor Bill Keller, speaking at last week's National College Media Convention.

"We long ago moved from 'All the News That's Fit to Print,' to 'All the News You Need to Know, and What It Means.' "

Keller's address blended confessions about the newspaper industry's sins with a litany of praise for journalistic virtues. Journalists at the Times, he insisted, still practice what they preach, remaining "agnostic as to where a story may lead" and maintaining standards of accuracy and fairness that prevent the "opinions of our writers and editors from leaching into our news pages."

However, he also said he believes that "information is not what people crave. What they crave, and need, is judgment -- someone they can trust to vouch for the information, dig behind it, and make sense of it."

The question is whether critics, especially those in religious sanctuaries, will trust Keller's team to provide an unbiased take on the news and then, as a finale, pass judgment on "what it means," said former New York Daily News reporter William Proctor, author of "The Gospel According to the New York Times."

"This intentional change in the motto -- even if it won't be printed by the newspaper -- suggests to me that editorializing is being placed on an equal footing with straight news," he said. The new motto seems "to be saying, 'We're recognizing that opinion has a larger role than the editorial or op-ed pages. In fact, opinion now has a place in the news itself.' "

Meanwhile, critics may remember Keller -- who won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting in the Soviet Union -- as the Times columnist who once called himself a "collapsed Catholic" and lashed out at Pope John Paul II and the Vatican for rejecting female priests, gay rights, legalized abortion and the sexual revolution in general.

The struggle within Catholicism, he wrote, is "part of a larger struggle within the human race, between the forces of tolerance and absolutism. ... This is, after all, the church that gave us the Crusades and the Inquisition."

However, as executive editor, Keller produced a 2005 manifesto urging his staff to improve religion coverage, avoid the misuse of loaded labels such as "religious fundamentalists" and hire qualified journalists who offer a diversity of "religious upbringing and military experience, of region and class."

Journalists at the Times, he said, must strive to escape "our predominantly urban, culturally liberal orientation, to cover the full range of our national conversation. ... This is important to us not because we want to appease believers or pander to conservatives, but because good journalism entails understanding more than just the neighborhood you grew up in."

This candor is refreshing, said Jay Rosen, who leads New York University's journalism program and has written a provocative essay entitled "Journalism is Itself a Religion." The problem is that many journalists want to escape old-fashioned straight news, but they don't know what to call their new product. It's hard to distinguish between news "analysis" and "opinion" writing that reflects the beliefs of the writer.