Congregating with Jon Stewart Leibowitz

In the beginning, there was the multimedia superstar Glenn Beck summoning his Tea Party congregation to a faith-friendly "Restoring Honor" rally on the National Mall. And behold, two postmodern prophets witnessed this media storm and decided that it was good. In response, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert of Comedy Central organized their pre-election "Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear."

Colbert, a progressive Catholic Sunday school teacher who pretends to be a right-wing blowhard, provided the fake "fear" factor. In his upside-down catechism, preaching "fear" became the same thing as advocating that nonpartisan virtue -- "hope."

The prophet of sanity was Jon Stewart. With his snarky call for rationality and civility, the Daily Show anchor implied that his critics were preaching insanity, irrationality and incivility. And, for once, he didn't season his satire with ironic shots at his own Jewish roots.

Truth is, Stewart has become a hero for many Jews and a controversial figure for others, noted Jane Eisner, editor of The Jewish Daily Forward. Nevertheless, Stewart -- originally Jon Stewart Leibowitz -- has once again been named to the "Forward 50," the newspaper's list of those who made a "significant impact on the Jewish story in the past year."

"This is very impressionistic," she said. "We try to identify people who are acting in ways that impact the Jewish community. ... We are looking for people who are acting in ways that really show the impact of their Jewish values, whether we're talking about Judaism as a faith or a culture."

However, many Jews have "real questions about how Jewishly Stewart acts." Nevertheless, said Eisner, "if we can translate this into Jewish terms, he keeps showing us that he knows his stuff, even as he makes fun of the fine details of Jewish life."

As his Forward 50 mini-biography notes: "A Democrat in the White House has hardly tempered the irreverent and distinctly Jewish voice of the liberal-leaning fake news anchor. ... Stewart is quick to play the Jewish card, drop a Zabar’s reference or cozy up to bubbes and zaydes at the 92nd Street Y."

That's one side of this identity question. However, the Hollywood Jew weblog noted: "For some Jews it's perplexing that Jon Stewart, an American Jewish icon, isn't religious. How could the Jew who makes Jewish 'cool' be so indifferent to Judaism? ... Buried beneath the laughter from his jokes ... is a deep and hidden disappointment that he isn't really doing what we're doing." This is, after all, a man who flaunts his bacon-cheeseburgers on Yom Kippur, the holiest day on the Jewish calendar.

Nevertheless, with his edgy sermons about skepticism and reason, Stewart dwells comfortably with other Jewish progressives who see themselves as heirs of the Enlightenment -- standing against blind faith and ancient traditions. The assumption for many on the Jewish left, said Eisner, is that there is always "something worrisome about people who take their faith really seriously."

These religious tensions were visible on the National Mall during the Stewart-Colbert rally. While organizers insisted their event was non-partisan, and pled with participants to temper their words and deeds, the crowd included flocks of people who clearly were there to mock the views of religious and secular conservatives.

Consider, for example, the inevitable Hitler signs.

When announcing his rally, Stewart said he planned to distribute signs that were both civil and witty. One sign, for example, would say: "I Disagree With You, But I'm Pretty Sure You're Not Hitler."

Many got the message, but some didn't. Someone produced signs containing images of prominent conservatives -- with Hitler mustaches -- and the headline, "Afraid yet?" Beck, Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh made the sign, along with Rep. John Boehner of Ohio, almost certainly the next Speaker of the House, and Rep. Eric Cantor of Virginia, the likely House majority leader.

Cantor is Jewish and, like Stewart, made the Forward 50 list for 2010.

Stewart remained silent. Still, as his rally ended, the funny man soberly admitted that he could not control "what people think this was."

"I can only tell you my intentions," he said. "This was not a rally to ridicule people of faith, or people of activism, or to look down our noses at the heartland, or passionate argument, or to suggest that times are not difficult, and that we have nothing to fear. They are, and we do.

"But we live now in hard times -- not the end times."

Politics, Baylor, The NoZe & Aqua Buddha

If Texas Baptists had a patron saint, the Rev. George W. Truett would almost certainly get the nod. So it was a solemn occasion when the great preacher from Dallas arrived in "Jerusalem on the Brazos" in 1941 to preach a series of revival services at Baylor University, the planet's largest Baptist institution of higher learning. Then loud alarm clocks started ringing in the attic of cavernous Waco Hall, on three-minute intervals.

This pandemonium was, of course, orchestrated by Baylor's Nose Brotherhood. This club for satirists was born in 1926 and quickly became known for its "Pink Tea" spectaculars, which offered "vertical exercising" on a campus that, from 1845-1996, banned dancing. The secret society was "just a fun-loving bunch of boys," Brother Dude Nose Harrison told the Dallas Morning News in 1931.

The Nose became the NoZe in 1965 when, in an event that has achieved mythic status, a campus bridge that once a year was ceremonially painted pink mysteriously went up in flames. The brothers were temporarily banished, but began appearing in their signature glasses, fake noses and tacky wigs.

The question now facing America is whether the activities of the NoZe Brotherhood could cost the Republican Party control of the U.S. Senate.

Alas, this is not satire.

Kentucky Democrat Jack Conway has asked why Republican Rand Paul, in the ominous words of a television advertisement, was a "member of a secret society that called the Holy Bible a 'hoax,' that was banned for mocking Christianity and Christ? Why did Rand Paul once tie a woman up, tell her to bow down before a false idol and say his god was 'Aqua Buddha'?"

Being accused of "anti-Christian" activities is not a good thing in the Bible Belt. As the Washington Post put it, Paul stands accused of participating in a "secret society while at Baylor University that published mocking statements regarding the Bible."

The Conway campaign added: "This is an ad about things he did. He has failed to deny any of these charges."

At this point, I should stress that while I am a Baylor graduate from the same era as Paul, I am not, nor have I ever been, a member of the NoZe Brotherhood. I did know some NoZe folks, including one who became a White House speechwriter, and like all Baylor alumni I know that no non-NoZe knows the no-nonsense non-NoZe news that the NoZe knows.

The Republican has acknowledged participating in NoZe pranks. Meanwhile, one of his Baylor colleagues told the Louisville Courier-Journal: "We aspired to blasphemy and he flourished in it."

Sounds like the NoZe to me.

During my years at Baylor, the secret society mocked all kinds of people, including Dan Rather, Richard Nixon, Watergate special prosecutor Leon Jaworski (a powerful Baylor alum) and Bob Woodward of the Washington Post. I was present when Woodward was made an honorary member -- Brother Water NoZe, or some variation on that theme. As I recall, the NoZe crashed his campus lecture, presenting him with his own plunger, while seated on a rolling commode.

The NoZe mocked all things Baptist, targeting the many sacred cows that resided on campus. These NoZe drippings rarely achieved brilliance and often veered into college-life stupidity.

Nevertheless, the Baylor Library maintains a modest NoZe archive. While the brotherhood has been exiled from campus several times, its official historian -- the late Brother Short Nose (William B.) Long -- served on the Baylor board of regents and received his alma mater's highest honor, The Founders Medal.

Drawing on this respected physician's book, "The Nose Brotherhood Knows: A Collection of Nothings and Non-Happenings, 1926-1965," Baylor Magazine published a 2003 report that probed the philosophy behind the brotherhood's attempts to "put the 'pie' in piety" and "the 'pun' in punctilious."

The bottom line: It is, as a rule, quite dangerous to mix satire and religion.

One of the NoZe -- it may have been Brother Bilbo BaggiNoze or Brother IgNoZetius Reilly -- told the magazine: "I have no problems whatsoever with Christianity, but I think blind Christianity is a mistake. People are sometimes afraid to examine other religions, but it just makes your beliefs stronger in the end. I don't think a Christian mission means that we can't look at and study everything in the world. Furthermore, if education is really the goal of each student here ... certainly they'd want to be exposed to as many opinions and as many things as possible."

Don't ask, don't tell the chaplains

The setting: The office of a priest who serves as a military chaplain. The time: This hypothetical encounter occurs soon after the repeal of the "don't ask, don't tell" policy that forbids gays, lesbians and bisexuals to openly serve in America's armed forces.

The scene: An officer requests counseling about tensions with her same-sex partner as they prepare for marriage. The priest says this would be inappropriate, since his church teaches that sex outside of marriage is sin and that the sacrament of marriage is reserved for unions of a man and a woman.

The priest offers to refer her to a chaplain at another base who represents a church that performs same-sex rites. The officer accepts, but is less than pleased at the inconvenience.

What happens next? That question is driving the tense church-state debates that continue behind the scenes of the political drama that surrounds "don't ask, don't tell."

"If the government normalizes homosexual behavior in the armed forces, many (if not most) chaplains will confront a profoundly difficult moral choice: whether they are to obey God or to obey men," stated a September letter from 60-plus retired chaplains to President Barack Obama and Defense Secretary Robert Gates.

The repeal of "don't ask, don't tell," they argued, will cripple the ability of many chaplains to provide counseling. "Service members seeking guidance regarding homosexual relationships will place chaplains in an untenable position. If chaplains answer such questions according to the tenets of their faith, stating that homosexual relationships are sinful and harmful, then they run the risk of career-ending accusations of insubordination and discrimination. And if chaplains simply decline to provide counseling at all on that issue, they may still face discipline for discrimination."

These complaints are "somewhat disingenuous," according to the Rev. John F. Gundlach, a retired Navy chaplain from the United Church of Christ, the progressive Protestant denomination into which Obama was baptized.

"These chaplains ... will continue to have the same rights they've always had to preach, teach, counsel, marry and conduct religious matters according to the tenets of their faith. They will also continue to have the responsibility to refer servicemembers to other chaplains when their own theology or conscience will not allow them to perform the services to which a servicemember is entitled," stressed Gundlach, writing in Stars and Stripes. "Any chaplain who can't fulfill this expectation should find somewhere else to do ministry."

The urgency of these debates will only increase after this week's Pentagon statement instructing its recruiters to accept openly gay applicants, a shift driven by a federal court decision barring the military from expelling openly gay soldiers.

Military chaplains are already being asked to serve as doctrinal Swiss Army knifes, performing rites and prayers for personnel from a variety of flocks when the need arises. This kind of pluralism is easy for chaplains from some traditions, but not others.

Meanwhile, it's hard for chaplains to refer troubled soldiers to clergy in foxholes 30 miles away. It's impossible to have a variety of chaplains -- Southern Baptists and Wiccans, Catholic priests and rabbis -- serving on every base, let alone in submarines.

There is no easy way out of this church-state maze.

If "don't ask, don't tell" is repealed, "no restrictions or limitations on the teaching of Catholic morality can be accepted," noted Archbishop Timothy Broglio of the Archdiocese for Military Services. While Catholic chaplains must always show compassion, they "can never condone -- even silently -- homosexual behavior."

A letter from Metropolitan Jonah of the Orthodox Church in America to the chaplains board was even more blunt: "If our chaplains were in any way ... prohibited from denouncing such behavior as sinful and self-destructive, it would create an impediment to their service in the military. If such an attitude were regarded as 'prejudice' or the denunciation of homosexuality as 'hate language,' or the like, we would be forced to pull out our chaplains from military service."

So be it, said Gundlach. While these chaplains "worry about being discriminated against, they openly discriminate against some of the very people they are pledged to serve and serve with. If the hate speech currently uttered by some conservative chaplains and their denominations is any indication of how they will respond in the future, we can expect this discrimination to continue."

These chaplains need to resign, he said. The armed services "will be the better for it."

God hates most sinners, saith Phelps

The words of the fifth Psalm are not for the faint of heart. "Thou art not a God that hath pleasure in wickedness. ... The foolish shall not stand in thy sight: thou hatest all workers of iniquity," warned the psalmist.

Obviously, says the Rev. Fred Phelps of Westboro Baptist Church, this passage teaches that God hates the evil liberals who run the Southern Baptist Convention, along with legions of other Americans.

Phelps also believes that God hates the pope and plenty of other religious leaders who are called "conservatives," "traditionalists" and even "fundamentalists" in public debates about faith, morality and culture.

Southern Baptists are too liberal? Yes, that's why activists from the independent Westboro Baptist congregation in Topeka, Kan., like to picket major SBC meetings carrying those now familiar signs with slogans such as, "Thank God for Dead Soldiers," "God Hates America," "Thank God for AIDS" and, of course, "God Hates Fags."

With Westboro Baptist, up is down and down is up.

It may take months for the U.S. Supreme Court to rule on the First Amendment puzzle that is the clash between Phelps and Albert Snyder, the grieving father of Marine Lance Cpl. Matthew Snyder. A Westboro Baptist team held a protest near the Catholic funeral of Snyder's son and church leaders also posted a website screed claiming that the divorced father raised his son to "serve the devil." A Maryland court gave Snyder $5 million, but the award was overturned.

Behind this pain and grief is a thicket of legal and journalistic thorns.

This is a case in which the mainstream press has spilled oceans of ink attacking Phelps' flock. Nevertheless, the core facts provoked the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press and 21 news organizations to file a friend-of-the-court brief supporting the church's right to hold legal protests and for journalists to cover them. News executives are especially worried because the protesters complied with all restrictions imposed by civic officials, including moving their demonstration away from the church. Snyder saw their hateful slogans in news reports and on the Internet.

This is case in which scholars have struggled to find a way to defend the free speech and religious liberty rights of Westboro believers, as well as the religious liberty and privacy rights of grieving family members.

In a reluctant defense of Phelps, a New York Times editorial quoted Justice Felix Frankfurter: "It is a fair summary of history to say that the safeguards of liberty have often been forged in controversies involving not very nice people." I once heard a church-state scholar put it this way: "Your religious liberties have been purchased for you by believers with whom you wouldn't necessarily want to have dinner."

What about the American Civil Liberties Union? After all, in the 1970s this organization backed the right of neo-Nazis to march through Skokie, Ill., a small community that was home to a large number of Holocaust survivors.

In a court brief backing Westboro Baptist, "we pointed out that the First Amendment's protection of freedom of speech guarantees that no one can be found liable for merely expressing an opinion about a matter of public concern, regardless of how hurtful those opinions might be," noted Chris Hampton, a leader in ACLU efforts to promote lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender causes.

The goal, she added, is to protect First Amendment principles that have been "essential to the advancement of civil rights, including the civil rights of LGBT people. Allowing Fred Phelps to speak his mind may be difficult, but chipping away at one of the fundamental principles on which our country was founded is far, far worse for all of us in the long run."

This is, of course, precisely the kind of liberal thinking that Phelps condemns out of hand, even when voiced by religious conservatives. According to his reading of Psalm 5 and many other scripture passages, Phelps believes that God hates what he calls "kissy-pooh" sermons that refuse to proclaim that God never, ever forgives homosexuals and many other sinners.

The Westboro website once warned preachers who claim that God will forgive those who repent, no matter what: "You are going to Hell! Period! End of discussion! God's decree sending you to Hell is irreversible! Hypocrites!"

"That's Bible preaching," Phelps told Baptist Press, in a 2003 interview about his beliefs. "You tell [people] that God loves everybody? You're lying on God."

Love, hate, apathy, faith

One of the most important facts to grasp about the small, but growing, flock of Americans who call themselves unbelievers is that most of them are converts. "When you meet people who identify themselves as 'atheists' or 'agnostics,' these are people who are taking a stand, they're committing themselves to a strong stance in this culture," said Greg Smith, senior researcher with the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life. "People just don't wind up in the atheists-and-agnostics camp. They are there for a reason."

While some came of age in atheistic homes, the vast majority of atheists -- four out of five in one survey -- were raised as Baptists, Catholics, Jews or in some other faith, he said. Then they changed their minds, usually after intensely personal experiences, years of reading or both.

"When you say you're an 'atheist' that usually means that you've made a choice," said Smith.

This is a crucial fact to remember when reading news reports about the recent "U.S. Religious Knowledge Survey" released by the Pew Research Center.

While the New York Times headline calmly stated, "Basic Religion Test Stumps Many Americans," the Los Angeles Times was more typical of the national norm, offering a zinger that said, "If you want to know about God, you might want to talk to an atheist." USA Today proclaimed, "Unbelievers aced out the faithful when it comes to religious knowledge."

In this survey, 3,412 Americans -- 18 years old and up -- were asked 32 questions about the Bible, Christianity, other world religions and America's laws that govern faith and public life. Jews, Mormons, atheists and agnostics were "oversampled to allow analysis of these relatively small groups."

Overall, atheists and agnostics -- who were grouped together -- answered an average of 20.9 out of 32 questions correctly. The score for Jews was 20.5 and members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints scored 20.3. There was a sizable gap, at that point, before reaching white evangelical Protestants, who scored 17.6, and white Catholics, who scored 16.0. Members of liberal Protestant churches scored 15.8.

The survey found that atheists and agnostics knew the most when asked about the beliefs of world religions. Mormons and evangelicals knew the most about the Bible and fine details of Christian beliefs.

Those who dug deeper found other complex dynamics at work, noted Smith. For example, while many noted that atheists and agnostics scored well, few commentators noticed the low score -- 15.2 -- earned by the much larger group of participants who choose the "nothing in particular" option when describing their beliefs.

This finding is significant in an age in which the number of Americans who describe themselves as "spiritual, but not religious" continues to rise. Some of the "nothing in particular" Americans are quite secular, said Smith, but others have their own "beliefs and religious practices that they say are quite important to them."

At the same time, it's important that believers who reported attending religious services once or more a week had higher levels of knowledge than those who attended less often. These scores rose higher when believers reported that they frequently read scripture, educational websites and books about religion. Believers who practiced their faith more often were also more likely to discuss religious issues with other people, further raising their scores.

The bottom line: People who hold strong beliefs about faith -- positive or negative beliefs -- seem to know more about religion than those who are less committed. Passion, not apathy, is what leads to knowledge.

Consider, for example, this crucial Catholic question. In one of the Pew survey's most surprising findings, 45 percent of the Catholics polled did not know that their church teaches that the bread and wine consecrated during the Mass are not merely symbols, but are believed to truly become the body and blood of Jesus Christ. However, nearly 70 percent of white Catholics who attended Mass once a week answered that question correctly.

"We already knew that Catholics who attend Mass every week act differently and even vote differently than other Catholics," said Smith. "What this survey shows is that Catholics who are more active in their faith think differently than other Catholics, too. ... Of course, it isn't surprising that people who enthusiastically practice their faith also know more about their faith, and even religion in general, than those who do not."

A Catholic Colbert report

For Catholics raised during the head-spinning days after Vatican II, few things inspire flashbacks to the era of flowers and folk Masses quicker than the bouncy hymn "The King of Glory." But what was a goofy nerd doing on Comedy Central, belting out this folk song while doing a bizarre blend of Broadway shtick and liturgical dance?

"The King of glory comes, the nation rejoices! Open the gates before him, lift up your voices," sang Stephen Colbert a decade ago, in a video that is now a YouTube classic. "Who is the King of glory; how shall we call him? He is Emmanuel, the promised of ages."

Inquiring minds wanted to know: Was this painfully ironic comedian mocking trendy Catholics or saluting them? Was he outing himself as a Christian? Was he praising Jesus or risking a lightning bolt?

Legions of 40-something Catholics have strong memories of the first time they saw this clip, said Diane Houdek, managing editor of AmericaCatholics.org. Something in Colbert's performance told them that this was not a random gag.

"Stephen walks this thin line," said Houdek, who runs "The Word: A Colbert Blog for Catholic It-Getters" in her spare time. "He isn't afraid to be critical when it comes to matters of faith, but when he does it's always clear that his critique is from the inside. ... He'll push things pretty far. He'll dance right up to that line, but he will not cross it. He will not compromise what he believes as a Catholic."

Colbert, of course, became the star of The Colbert Report, the fake news show in which he plays a right-wing egotist (think Bill O'Reilly of Fox News) named "Stephen Colbert." Religion plays a major role in the show and there are moments when he speaks sincerely in his own voice.

That's what happened last week when his alter ego came to Washington, D.C., at the invitation of Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), chair of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration, Refugees and Border Security. His testimony mixed satire ("I don't want a tomato picked by a Mexican. I want it picked by an American, sliced by a Guatemalan and served by a Venezuelan in a spa where a Chilean gives me a Brazilian") with serious information about the plight of farm workers.

Colbert lowered his mask when asked why this issue mattered to him, slipping in a reference to a Gospel of Matthew parable in which eternal judgment awaits those who deny compassion to the poor and defenseless.

Some of America's least powerful people, he said, are "migrant workers who come in and do our work, but don't have any rights as a result. And yet, we still ask them to come here, and at the same time, ask them to leave. ... You know, 'Whatsoever you did for the least of my brothers,' and these seemed like the least of my brothers, right now."

It helps to know that Colbert was raised as the youngest of 11 children in a devout Irish-Catholic family in Charleston, S.C. Then his physician father and two brothers died in a plane crash and their joyful home plunged into grief. Colbert soon lost his faith.

Years later, a sidewalk volunteer in Chicago handed the young actor a Gideon Bible and something clicked. Today, he lives a private life with his wife and three children, but he never hides the fact that he teaches children's Sunday school.

As he told Rolling Stone last year: "From a doctrinal point of view or a dogmatic point of view or a strictly Catholic adherent point of view, I'm the first to say that I talk a good game, but I don't know how good I am about it in practice. I saw how my mother's faith was very valuable to her and valuable to my brothers and sisters, and I'm moved by the words of Christ, and I'll leave it at that."

But there is more to Colbert's faith, and his theology, than that, said Houdek. For starters, a Jesuit serves as the show's chaplain.

"There is evidence of his faith all through his work, if you know what to look for," she said. "This is what makes him so unique, in the extremely secular world in which he is working -- Comedy Central. Yet he keeps doing what he does night after night, because he never comes off as preachy."

St. Peter in Westminster Abbey

During his long exile in Normandy, the Saxon prince who would become known as Edward the Confessor vowed that he would make a pilgrimage to the tomb of St. Peter once he returned to England. After his coronation as king, the pope released Edward from this vow -- if he built a monastery dedicated to the first bishop of Rome. Thus, St. Peter's Abbey was rebuilt in Westminster.

Pope Benedict XVI gently stressed this history in the first words of his address during his recent visit to Westminster Abbey, where he prayed with the archbishop of Canterbury.

"I thank the Lord for this opportunity to join you ... in this magnificent Abbey church dedicated to St. Peter, whose architecture and history speak so eloquently of our common heritage of faith," said Benedict. "Here we cannot help but be reminded of how greatly the Christian faith shaped the unity and culture of Europe and the heart and spirit of the English people. Here too, we are forcibly reminded that what we share, in Christ, is greater than what continues to divide us. ...

"I thank the Lord for allowing me, as the successor of St. Peter in the See of Rome, to make this pilgrimage to the tomb of St. Edward the Confessor."

Benedict's historic visit to England's national shrine received little coverage, in part because his remarks there were intensely spiritual. Meanwhile, journalists had to notice that his Westminster Hall address on the role of reason and faith in politics drew a secular flock that included, as an Associated Press report noted, "former Prime Ministers Margaret Thatcher, John Major, Gordon Brown and Tony Blair, who recently converted to Catholicism."

Speaking in the hall in which the Catholic martyr Sir Thomas More was convicted of treason for his loyalty to Rome, Benedict warned that the modern world -- take Europe -- is increasingly hostile to those who try to act on their beliefs.

"There are those who would advocate that the voice of religion be silenced, or at least relegated to the purely private sphere," he said. "There are those who argue that the public celebration of festivals such as Christmas should be discouraged, in the questionable belief that it might somehow offend those of other religions or none. And there are those who argue -- paradoxically with the intention of eliminating discrimination -- that Christians in public roles should be required at times to act against their conscience.

"These are worrying signs of a failure to appreciate not only the rights of believers to freedom of conscience and freedom of religion, but also the legitimate role of religion in the public square."

The abbey visit created no sparks, in part because earlier that day the pope told Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams that there was no need to "speak of the difficulties that the ecumenical path has encountered and continues to encounter. Those difficulties are well known." Thus, there were no clear references to tensions about female priests, gay bishops in America's Episcopal Church and the Vatican's controversial decision -- after many appeals by Anglican traditionalists -- to make it easier for members of the Church of England to enter the Church of Rome.

Instead, Benedict repeatedly stressed that unity must be found in scripture, creeds and moral doctrines that date back to the early church. These words, however, are controversial in an age in which the global Anglican Communion is divided over teachings as central as the resurrection of Jesus and claims that salvation is found through Christ, alone.

"Our commitment to Christian unity is born of nothing less than our faith in Christ, in this Christ, risen from the dead and seated at the right hand of the Father, who will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead," he said. "It is the reality of Christ's person, his saving work and above all the historical fact of his resurrection, which is the content of ... those creedal formulas. ... The church's unity, in a word, can never be other than a unity in the apostolic faith, in the faith entrusted to each new member of the Body of Christ."

Finally, Benedict stressed -- yet again -- that he was speaking and acting in "fidelity to my ministry as the bishop of Rome and the successor of St. Peter, charged with a particular care for the unity of Christ's flock."

Rights and wrongs of Pastor Terry Jones

The deaths of the 10 International Assistance Mission medical workers inspired headlines that were both shocking and numbingly familiar, since these are dangerous times for believers whose convictions steer them into Afghanistan. A Taliban blandly leader told the press: "They were Christian missionaries and we killed them all."

If the gunmen had only waited a few weeks, they could have claimed that their victims were linked to a powerful global conspiracy to burn Korans.

That's the kind of statement that the head of the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission was worried about when he -- with countless other evangelicals -- urged the Rev. Terry Jones to cancel his "International Burn a Koran Day" event on Sept. 11. The leader of the tiny Dove World Outreach Center in Gainesville, Fla., did precisely that, but not before forcing religious and political leaders to wrestle with agonizing First Amendment issues.

"The behavior of this church is not Christian. I cannot imagine Christ burning any religious texts," argued the Rev. Richard Land, in an online Washington Post forum. "This behavior is unfortunately one of the prices we pay for living in a free society with freedom of speech and freedom of expression, even when it is odious and reprehensible."

A protest of this kind would "besmirch the reputation of our Savior, and that makes it blasphemy," he said. The whole idea was "appalling, disgusting and brainless."

The bonfire would have made life more dangerous for missionaries, human-rights activists, diplomats and American soldiers. Those flames also would have made life much more dangerous for Christian converts and members of other religious minorities in predominantly Muslim lands.

Nevertheless, these clergy and politicos had to wrestle with the fact that Jones had every right to buy copies of the Koran and, after planning a fire small enough to wink at local laws, strike a match.

After all, this would, have been another act of painful symbolic speech.

Did the American Nazis have a constitutional right to march in Skokie, Ill., a Chicago suburb that was home to numerous Holocaust survivors? Yes, and demonstrators in the Reagan White House era burned the American flag. Muslims overseas have burned copies of the novel, "The Satanic Verses," by Salman Rushdie, and Bibles, too.

How many times have followers of the Rev. Fred Phelps of Topeka, Kan., waved their lurid signs -- "God Hates the U.S.A." is one of the mildest -- at funerals for soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan? On Sept. 11, the Westboro Baptist Church crew burned a Koran and an American flag at the same time. For once, most journalists elected to look the other way.

In the case of Jones and his church in Gainesville, the Council on American-Islamic Relations decided that the timing of his Koran travesty was simply too hot to ignore. Even though the group regularly ignores the videos that it receives of people burning, shooting or ripping apart Islam's holy book, CAIR decided to issue a July 19 press release announcing its own protest of "International Burn a Koran Day." The group handed out free copies of the Koran.

The word was officially out and the media storm kept growing as angry reactions -- from Arab streets to the White House -- rolled into the world's newsrooms.

Lost in the din were the quiet, measured words of many religious leaders who tried to walk a knife's edge of logic in their public statements.

For starters, they had to note the painful fact that the Dove World Outreach Center was an independent Pentecostal congregation and its members were responsible to no higher religious authority than their own pastor. Thus, there was no one who could stop this event, other than public officials who, in order to do so, would have had to trample the rights of Jones and his flock.

The bottom line: Blasphemy is not illegal in the United States of America.

As the clock ticked down, Land stressed that the "only thing more dangerous than what this pastor is doing would be to allow the government to interfere. This would set a terrible precedent and would diminish all our First Amendment rights. The best way to combat this is to exercise our free speech right to condemn what he is doing in the simplest way and most direct terms."

Synagogue for Jewish seekers

For centuries, Jews have watched their rabbis show reverence to God during Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur rites by doing a prostration at the front of the synagogue. This symbolic act takes place during the "Aleinu" prayer that reminds worshipers of their duty to "bend our knees, and bow down, and give thanks, before the Ruler, the Ruler of Rulers, the Holy One, Blessed is God."

Rabbi Shira Stutman isn't sure how many people will accept her invitation to exit the pews and perform this prostration for themselves during her seeker-friendly High Holy Days service at the Sixth and I Historic Synagogue in Washington, D.C. But many of those who do, she said, will find themselves assuming a familiar meditative pose.

It helps to know that this unusual synagogue offers occasional services that blend yoga with traditional Shabbat prayers.

"There are different ways to do a full prostration, but one of them looks exactly like the yoga position called 'Child's Pose,' " said Stutman, referring to a move in which individuals sink to their knees, bow their foreheads to the floor and extend their arms forward. "I'm guessing that for most of the people who will attend the service I'm leading -- young professionals in their 20s and 30s -- the Child's Pose will be more familiar than the tradition of the rabbi prostrating during the Aleinu prayer.

"This will let me use this simple yoga pose to talk about what the act of prostrating can mean for us in worship."

This is the kind of multi-layered experience that is common at Sixth and I, which offers four radically different services -- Orthodox, conservative, family friendly and progressive -- during the holy season that begins at sundown today (Sept. 8) with Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, and ends 10 days later with Yom Kippur, the solemn Day of Atonement.

This multi-domed sanctuary on the edge of the Chinatown neighborhood has a complex and poignant history. Built in 1908 for the Adas Israel Congregation, it was sold in 1951 to the Turner Memorial AME Church and, by 2002, was hours away from being converted into a nightclub.

However, a trio of Jewish developers rushed in and purchased it for $5 million. Before long, they had created a coalition that focused on creating an urban facility that was part synagogue, part education complex, part community center and part concert hall -- yet independent from the branches of Judaism that have defined the faith for the past century or so.

"Jews in this generation, or generations, don't want to define themselves by the terms of the past," said Esther Foer, the synagogue's executive director. "Those denominational labels -- like 'Conservative' and 'Orthodox' and 'Conservadox' -- don't matter much anymore, especially when you are talking about how people want to worship.

"What matters, at the end of the day, is that we are all Jews -- who are praying."

While Stutman was trained in a liberal Reconstructionist school, she stressed that the synagogue does not have one defining congregation or rabbi. Instead, it uses six prayer books and is served by six rabbis and scores of other worship leaders. Her "Sixth in the City" services are attempts to create "primal worship" experiences, mixing English and Hebrew with themes from many sources, including Judaism, mass media and different world religions.

All of this is fitting in an age in which the vast majority of young Jews have no affiliation whatsoever with traditional Jewish institutions. Jewish leaders are struggling with this reality, as demonstrated by a 2001 survey that defined a Jew as someone whose "religion is Jewish, OR, whose religion is Jewish and something else, OR, who has no religion and has at least one Jewish parent or a Jewish upbringing, OR, who has a non-monotheistic religion, and has at least one Jewish parent or a Jewish upbringing."

What matters, said Stutman, is that people are searching for connections and experiences that help define who they are -- as Jews.

"We are not defined by any one set of doctrines or dogmas ... so every Jewish service is a fusion service," she said. "At any Jewish service there are people in the room with 1000 different views of God and half of them are probably atheists anyway. That's a given. What matters is that people know there is a place where they find community and keep searching."