Working on our spiritual issues?

It was a "slack day" in the confessional, with "only 88" parishioners receiving the sacrament of penance, a New York City priest recorded in his diary for 1899.

Another day was even slower, when he heard a "few" confessions -- 71 at one sitting.

Several generations later, National Opinion Research Center surveys in 1965 and 1975 found that monthly confession among American Catholics fell from 38 to 17 percent during that interval, while those who never or almost never went rose from 18 to 38 percent. A decade later, noted historian James O'Toole, a University of Notre Dame study found that 26 percent of active, "core Catholics" never went to confession and another 35 percent went once a year.

Today, a typical parish priest may hear a dozen confessions a week.

"Catholics just don't want to do this anymore," said O'Toole, who teaches at Boston College. "They go to communion week after week and they simply don't go to confession. They no longer see a connection. ... Some people think that everything would change if the priests got tough again and started talking about sin and confession and hell. The reality is more complex than that."

This is Lent, when Catholics should be lining up to say their confessions before receiving Communion on Easter, which is April 15th. Even though this ancient tradition remains in effect, "I have never heard a priest point out this duty in Mass, not even in the days before Holy Week," said O'Toole. "This canonical standard ... seems to have vanished."

What happened? Writing in Commonweal, O'Toole noted that some women don't want to confess to males. Many Catholics now prefer to discuss institutional and societal sins, rather than personal ones. Some believe the Vatican II reforms undercut the need for private confession. And who believes in hell, anyway?

But while confession has faded, there has been a sharp rise among lay people in a practice called "spiritual direction." For centuries, priests, monks and nuns have met regularly with individual spiritual directors to receive spiritual guidance. This can include confession, but now the emphasis is on advice and mentoring.

"It's hard to talk about this without psychoanalyzing it a bit," said O'Toole. "The key is that a spiritual director is supposed to help you, quote, 'work on the spiritual issues in your life,' unquote. There are elements of the patient-counselor relationship in this. This is what people are going in for, these days."

Traditionally, spiritual directors have been monks and priests. In a convent, a sister would take spiritual direction from a mother abbess, then go to a priest to confess. Now, more nuns and lay people are assuming the role of spiritual directors and O'Toole said the students enrolled in seminary programs teaching this skill are overwhelmingly female. For many, counseling from a layperson has replaced confession to a priest.

Nevertheless, "working on your spiritual issues" is not the same thing as "confessing your sins," said O'Toole. Part of the problem is that, for generations, Catholics were expected to come to the confessional with lists of specific sins to confess as quickly and efficiently as possible. The emphasis was on the kinds of sins that could be counted on one's fingers. "Sin" was a highly legal, technical concept.

"Confessing your sins meant saying, 'I was angry with my kids five times. I kicked the cat three times,' " he said. "Today, Catholics are telling their spiritual directors, 'I've been angry and I don't know what's causing me to be so angry. Can you help?' ... The bottom line is that sin -- especially those embarrassing, specific sins -- just don't come up very often in what most people call 'spiritual direction.' "

So repentance is out and sympathy is in. People want spiritual advice, rather than penance. Once, confession was one of the rites of life that separated Catholics from Protestants. Now everybody goes to counseling.

"People want help," said O'Toole. "But what people are not doing is going to a priest and saying, 'I committed this sin and I know that I need to be forgiven.' That's not how they think, anymore. ... At some point, American Catholics stopped seeing the world that way."

God of the Fridge

The clear plastic egg rack is empty right now and it mocks me whenever I open the refrigerator door.

The drawer that usually contains bacon, sausages, lunchmeat and chicken is full of flour tortillas. I still haven't thought of what to put in the three cheese slots. The butter has gone AWOL, too, unless you count apple butter.

This is Great Lent and in million of homes the cooks are in a state of shock.

For Eastern Orthodox believers, Lent began all the way back on Sunday, Feb. 25, with the candlelight Forgiveness Vespers. Thus, my family is striving to follow the ancient Christian fasting traditions that ask us to shun meat and dairy products until Pascha (Easter) on April 15. This year, the Eastern and Western church calendars happen to be on the same page, which means that for Western churches Lent began with Ash Wednesday on Feb. 28.

There is more to Lent than the ritual avoidance of certain foods, forcing us to become one with our fruits and veggies. This is supposed to be a season of prayer, confession and intense worship. Lent is not a diet.

And many observe the season in different ways. Some Western believers, such as Roman Catholics and Episcopalians, elect to give up a specific pleasure, such as candy or soft drinks. Some go much further and surrender meat or caffeine. Others, in the East and the West, may add modern twists. A friend of mine gave up email, one year. Some families give up television. Of course, the vast majority of churchgoers -- even in the ancient churches -- totally ignore Lent.

But for those who try to embrace the most traditional disciplines, this is when we venture outside of our culinary comfort zones, way out into tofu territory. Following this kind of fast isn't easy in America. This isn't Greece, where you know who offers a fast-food "McLent" menu.

Do the math. Let's say that your house contains a boy under the age of 10. If you give up all meat and dairy, this means you will not be eating cheese. This means you will not be eating macaroni and cheese. Got the picture? Of course, the church isn't asking us to sacrifice the health of our children, requiring them to stop drinking milk. Still, this is a time for radical changes.

But why place such an emphasis on food? Does anyone really think it's spiritually better to eat dark chocolate (no milk) than to eat milk chocolate? Some people forgo steaks or fried chicken, but eat their weight in forms of seafood that are allowed during the fast, such as shrimp or clams. It would not be a Lenten discipline to eat lobster every day.

A priest I know faces a unique temptation. He has a deep and abiding passion for peanut butter, a substance the Orthodox tend to see a lot of during Lent. He would happily eat peanut butter several times a day. Now, is this good or is it a temptation? Perhaps it would be a better spiritual test for him to give up peanut butter instead of real butter. Go figure.

The bottom line is that the saints and apostles agree that human appetites matter. In the early church, St. Paul preached against the sinful ways of those whose "end is destruction, their god is the belly, and they glory in their shame, with minds set on earthly things." But the Bible also warns believers not to turn ancient spiritual disciplines into showy gestures, planting seeds of pride and arrogance. Finding that balance can be tricky.

Still, it's good to open the refrigerator door and ask the question: Who's in charge here? This is an issue that comes up in other ancient faiths, as well.

As an Orthodox Jewish friend of mine once said: "God wants to be in my refrigerator, too. If God isn't in ... my refrigerator, then He isn't in charge of the rest of my life. If God isn't the God of my refrigerator, then He isn't the God of my check book, or my Day Timer, or my television or any of the other things that try to run my life."

Orlando's new Holy Land

ORLANDO -- In his flowing Middle Eastern robes, Coptic Bishop Youssef stood out among the other tourists in the newest theme park next to the highway between Walt Disney World and Universal Studios.

Then again, he fit right in with the Holy Land Experience staffers who wear period costumes on the streets of this 15-acre model of old Jerusalem. And he felt surprisingly at home inside the Wilderness Tabernacle exhibit, a multi-media dramatization of the rites, chants, incense, vestments and holy art of Israel's ancient priesthood.

"Of course, this (ritual) is the shadow of things to come, a shadow of the worship we see in our churches in the here and now," said Youssef, who now leads the Coptic Orthodox Diocese of the Southern United States. "This is all a shadow of the glorious worship we will see in heaven for eternity."

That's lofty praise, coming from an Egyptian monk. But this also explains why controversy has swirled around this non-profit park since it opened in early February.

The Wilderness Tabernacle program opens with a tape of an Orthodox rabbi chanting Hebrew prayers from Deuteronomy. It ends with the narrator asking if the burnt offerings of the ancient Hebrews would someday lead to God offering the "perfect lamb" to die for the sins of the world -- Jesus. In other words, the Jewish covenant is a prelude to the final Christian covenant.

Jewish leaders in Orlando have cried "foul," saying the Holy Land Experience twists their traditions and is a tool to proselytize Jews. Its creator, they note, is a self-proclaimed "Hebrew Christian."

Marvin Rosenthal is, in fact, the grandson of Orthodox Jews and the son of conservative Jews. So far, he said, a few Jews have visited the park -- along with atheists, liberal Christians, Buddhists, Moslems and many, many busloads of Christian conservatives.

"We aren't hiding anything," said the 65-year-old Baptist minister, who converted as a teen-ager. "I don't mind people taking issue with our theology. What I mind is people who say that we don't have a right to share our beliefs or who deny that what we're saying here is what Christianity has proclaimed as the truth for 2,000 years."

Take that Hebrew chant from Deuteronomy. This is the same prayer that Jesus spoke when scribes asked him to name the greatest commandment. Jesus began by quoting: "Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is One."

"Yes, this is an ancient Jewish prayer," said Rosenthal. "But this is also a prayer on the lips of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. It's our prayer, too. ... You can't understand the New Testament unless you see it in the context of Jewish believers and their faith. You have to understand the old in order to appreciate the new."

The irony is that this echoes what Israeli tour guides have said to Christians for decades, as buses roll past Jewish and Christian holy sites in Israel. But Rosenthal is not the Israeli Tourism Board. This message is much more controversial when delivered at a Christian park five miles from downtown Orlando and 7,000 miles from Jerusalem.

Rosenthal calls his creation a "living biblical museum" and it offers exhibits, pageants and pop-gospel music rather than rides and games. There is an "Oasis Palms Cafe," but no "Water Into Wine" bar. There is, alas, no reverse-bungee "Rapture Ride."

The shops in its Jerusalem Street Market sell a few crosses, but display a much wider selection of menorahs, shofars and Stars of David. The bookstore shelves include "Let My People Eat! Passover Seders Made Easy," alongside "The Sign: Christ's Coming and the End of the Age (Updated Edition)."

Terri Dyer, a Vietnamese convert from Buddhism, said this is a strikingly different set of symbols and messages than she encounters at Orlando's First Baptist Church.

"I think more people need to realize that the earliest Christians were Jews. They wouldn't have been walking around wearing crosses," she said, standing in an exhibit line with her husband and baby. "I think seeing all of this helps me identify with the early church. ... The Bible describes all kinds of things, but sometimes it's hard to picture what it would have looked like. This park helps you see things."

The Very Rev. Ted Turner speaks

Once again, the Very Rev. Ted Turner has bravely stepped forward to blaze new trails for peace, love and religious tolerance.

And all the people said: Say what?

"I was looking at this woman and I was trying to figure out what was on her forehead," said the founder of the Cable News Network, during a retirement party for anchorman Bernard Shaw. Looking around, Turner realized it was Ash Wednesday and several other Catholics were standing nearby.

"What are you, a bunch of Jesus freaks?", he asked. "You ought to be working for Fox."

There was nothing particularly shocking about the latest statement from the vice chairman of AOL Time Warner, Inc. After all, the Mouth of the South has previously said that Christianity is "for losers," pro-lifers are Bozos and the pope is a Polish idiot. Perhaps he was shocked to see signs of Lenten repentance in his newsroom and he was caught off guard.

But the key to this story came when Turner responded to the latest howls of outrage from his critics. "I apologize to all Christians for my comment about Catholics wearing ashes on their foreheads," he said. "I do not believe in any form of prejudice or discrimination, especially religious intolerance."

If his recent sermons are to be taken seriously, Turner is openly campaigning for the role of religious leader and prophet. By holding himself up as an advocate of religious tolerance, he also is implying that his enemies are the true advocates of religious intolerance.

Turner spoke at length on this topic last fall in a highly confessional address to more than 1,000 rabbis, swamis, monks, ministers and other spiritual leaders at the United Nations. Of course, the media leader did more than speak at the Millennium World Peace Summit of Religious and Spiritual Leaders -- he helped create it.

As a boy, stressed Turner, he had wanted to be a Christian missionary. But now, he said, he understands that missionaries are the enemies of truth and tolerance.

"Instead of all these different gods," he said, "maybe there's one God who manifests himself and reveals himself in different ways to different people. How about that? ... Basically, the major religions which have survived today don't have blood sacrifice and they don't have hatred behind them. Those which have done the best are the ones that are built on love."

Thus, he concluded: "It's time to get rid of hatred. It's time to get rid of prejudice. It's time to have love and respect and tolerance for each other."

Turner doesn't consider himself anti-religious. He is merely opposed to religious groups that he believes are intolerant of other faith groups. Turner believes he is not anti-Christian. He is opposed to Christians who still believe that Jesus is the only path to salvation. And Turner is not anti-Catholic, per se. He financially supports Catholics who oppose their church's teachings on messy, personal subjects such as sex and salvation.

And Turner is not alone in seeing direct links between missionaries and hate groups, between evangelism and violence.

As part of a global United Religions Initiative, California Episcopal Bishop William Swing has said that in order for "religions to pursue peace among each other, there will have to be a godly cease-fire, a temporary truce where the absolute, exclusive claims of each will be honored, but an agreed-upon neutrality will be exercised in terms of proselytizing, condemning, murdering or dominating. These will not be tolerated in the United Religions zone."

Critics who think Turner and his allies are anti-religious crusaders are not seeing the big picture, said Mary Jo Anderson, a contributing editor at the Catholic journal Crisis. There's a reason Turner is so critical of religious groups that he believes are mired in the past. He is convinced that he is helping create the religion of the future.

"Ted Turner has a kind of vision," she said. "He sees a world in which everyone is free to live the way Western man lives, with three TVs, two BMWs and one child. He believes man is evolving spiritually, as well as physically. ... He is absolutely sure that he is going to be a leader in what happens next."

Lieberman takes faith-based leap

It's the question haunting the U.S. Capitol: Does changing lives have anything to do with saving souls?

If the answer is "yes," then the Beltway powers that be will have trouble sharing tax dollars with faith-based charities. Truth is, America is packed with groups that offer radically different maps describing how souls get to heaven or hell.

Many of these true believers don't like each other much and there are swarms of secularists who distrust all of them. If the U.S. government starts writing checks to the God squad -- better make that the squads of the gods -- then things will get real tense, real quick.

So be it, says Sen. Joe Lieberman. This tension could be good for America.

"Too often, people assume faith-based initiatives inevitably mean entanglement, establishment and ultimately theocracy," he said, in a recent Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. "That need not be the case. We are not calling for ... government endorsement of any one religion, or government favoritism for religious groups over non-religious groups." The goal, he said, is ending "favoritism of non-religious over religious groups."

But how many Americans who have yearned for a revival of faith in the public square will say "Amen!" when their tax dollars flow into the budgets of controversial religious groups? Will the religious right tolerate pluralism?

As the saying goes: Be careful what you pray for, because you may get it. Catholics will build new halfway houses, but so will Scientologists. Southern Baptists will operate counseling programs on teen sex, but so will the Unification Church. Jewish groups will open centers for the elderly, but so will the Nation of Islam.

The challenge, said Lieberman, will be to craft laws that judge faith-based programs on their deeds, not the doctrines that inspire them. It might help to assume that religious people have the same rights as non-religious people. They should be judged according to their works, not their words.

"If a non-religious group seeking federal aid meets the program criteria, produces proven results, and does not violate civil rights or other laws, it will not matter that they may have unconventional views on unrelated issues," he said. "Shouldn't the same standard apply to programs run by religious groups as well?

"In fact, it would in my view be problematic on First Amendment grounds to discriminate against faith-based groups for their particular beliefs."

It was easy to find a larger agenda in this speech, especially after Lieberman's historic role as the first Jew to receive a major-party nomination to be vice president. The Washington Post bluntly noted that this step toward supporting President Bush's faith-based initiative has placed him "in a more conservative position than many other Democrats -- especially many of those considering a bid for the presidency."

Lieberman even said that evangelistic groups should even be allowed to compete for social service grants, as long as the government money is not directly used to fund campaigns to win converts.

This is where the fire will fall, if and when Lieberman and other political progressives dare to support legislation that pours government funds into aggressively faith-based programs. Combat will immediately commence between armies of lawyers, clergy and politicians focusing on the meaning of words such as "sin," "repentance" and "evangelism."

After all, some faith groups insist that all paths to God are right and anyone who says otherwise is wrong. Others want the freedom to proclaim that only their faith knows the way to heaven. These days, one man's "evangelism" is another man's "proselytizing," and one man's "proselytizing" is another's "hate crime." Will the religious left tolerate free speech?

Hopefully, said Lieberman, disagreements over religious words will not prevent new opportunities for people of faith to change more lives through their good works.

"If the proper protections are in place," he said, "and the money can't be used for proselytizing, and there are secular alternatives for beneficiaries to opt to, and no one is coerced, what in the end is the harm? Does society have more to fear from a rehabilitated drug addict who has broken his habit through a faith-based treatment than the untreated, unrehabilitated drug addict?"

Looking for a new god? A fresh creed?

When it comes to answering life's big questions, the World Wide Web offers more research options than you can wiggle a mouse at.

Trying to find the right used car? Doing homework to find an appropriate college for your firstborn child? Are you a cat person or a dog person? What breed?

Perhaps you wake up in the middle of the night wondering if you need a new god or a fresh creed. Are you a liberal Protestant kind of person or a Hindu person, a Baptist or a Scientologist, a Reform Jew or a Neo-Pagan?

Want to find out? Then go to www.SelectSmart.com/RELIGION/ and click your way through Curt and Lorie Anderson's new and improved "Belief System Selector" site that covers two dozen world religions. Then you can tell them how happy or furious you are about the results. But don't ask about their religious ties. You can ask, but they won't tell.

"People have accused us of being part of every imaginable religious group in the world," said Curt Anderson. "A lot of people accuse of being members of their religion, only they think that we've totally messed it up. Or they feel really threatened and they think that what we believe must be the total opposite of what they believe."

Lorie Anderson interjected: "Some people say, 'You must be Scientologists.' Other people think we're a Buddhist front. ... A lot of people think we're Unitarians. It seems that if you go through and click on answers randomly, the test almost always tells you that you're a Unitarian Universalist. Of course, maybe that says something about Unitarians."

Cue the rim shot. One patron even claimed to have received a mixed test score of "100 percent Unitarian-Universalist" and "100 percent Jehovah's Witness." Sure enough, the writer emailed them the old joke: "You know what you get when you cross a Jehovah's Witness with a Unitarian? Someone who knocks on doors for no apparent reason."

The Andersons created SelectSmart.com three years ago, combining her social work and psychology skills with his experience in marketing and advertising. Their Ashland, Ore., home base is near the California border, which means they live in one of America's most complex regions, when it comes to religion and, of course, technology.

So far, they have written or endorsed 200 "selector" programs to help people make choices affecting everything from hobbies to careers, from vacation spots to romance. The site includes links to nearly 2,000 other tests written by volunteers. At the peak of the campaign season, their presidential-candidate selector was receiving 80,000 visitors a day.

Since making its debut last August, the religion selector has been attracting 7,000 users a day and the site now includes advanced quizzes to help Fundamentalists, Jews, Gnostics, agnostics, Pagans, Muslims and others further refine their options. The site includes scores of links to official Web sites representing the various churches, movements and traditions.

Lorie Anderson said she worked on the religion quiz off and on for at least six months and has continued to fine-tune her text, based on user feedback. The goal was to find issues that united the faiths -- creation, evil, salvation, suffering -- in order to provide some structure. Then she had to pinpoint doctrinal differences in order to sift through the users and pin on some theological labels.

The results often yield strange bedfellows. Orthodox Jews, for example, have more in common with Muslims than with Reform Jews. Liberal Protestants have more in common with pagans than with evangelical Protestants. Liberal Quakers resemble Hindus, while orthodox Quakers may hang out with the Mormons.

The test still isn't perfect. In particular, the Andersons have struggled to break the Christian doctrine of the Trinity down into bites of computer data. Is God a "corporeal spirit (has a body)" or an "incorporeal spirit"?

"That's a tough one," said Curt Anderson. "Christians believe that Jesus had a body, yet God the Father does not. Yet they're both in the Trinity. ... We're still working on that one."

"Right," said his wife. "Words mean a whole lot when you start trying to describe who or what God is or isn't. ... When it comes to words, religious people get really picky."

Kosovo mourns on All Soul's Day

For generations, Serbs have visited the graves of their ancestors on All Soul's Day to mourn, pray and give thanks for the ties that bind.

But the refugees in a Brezovica hostel had a problem last week, as they prepared to make dangerous trips to cemeteries elsewhere in Kosovo. When they requested an armed escort, a KFOR official said the timing just wasn't right. Couldn't they do their rites some other day?

The NATO officers didn't get it. The Orthodox Serbs who practice their faith had to observe All Soul's Day on All Soul's Day, because this precedes Lent. NATO is powerful, but not powerful enough to reschedule Lent, Holy Week and Pascha, which is Easter in the West.

Nevertheless, the terrorists who put about 500 pounds of explosives in a drainage pipe under the road to Gracanica knew the power of centuries of unbroken tradition. They knew thousands of Serbs would risk returning to Kosovo on Feb. 16, to the blood-soaked land called the "Jerusalem of Serbia" and its 1,300 churches, monasteries and holy sites.

"We cannot know what was in the mind of the bomber, but it is likely that this happened on All Soul's Day for a reason," said Father Irinej Dobrijevic, of the Serbian Orthodox office in Washington, D.C. "We do know this. ... Religion is not the true cause of the violence. Religious leaders are actually a moderating influence in Kosovo. Yet it is also clear that religious groups have been the victims of much of the worst violence there."

So someone pushed a remote-control button and shredded a bus full of parents and children, seconds after armored troop vehicles leading the convoy rolled past. Thus, there were another dozen deaths to mourn on All Soul's Day.

Surely this pleased ethnic Albanian extremists, since it demonstrated once again how dangerous it is for Serbs to remain in Kosovo. And the blast certainly provided encouragement to Serbian extremists with ties to former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, since they believe all Albanians should be driven out of Kosovo.

The mourners were the religious leaders who remain caught in the middle, those who have long sought a multiethnic Kosovo.

"I have almost lost my voice from shouting to the international community that something must be done to stop the violence against all the people of Kosovo," said Orthodox Bishop Artemije Radosavljevic, speaking through a translator last week to students in George Mason University's Program on Peacemaking Policy.

Anyone truly seeking peace, he said, would recognize the symbolic role of religion in the Balkans and seek negotiations involving Christian and Muslim leaders.

Yet interfaith talks could only be held with the protection of NATO forces. After all, clergy who tried to travel to such meetings would be risking their lives. No one would be in greater danger, stressed Artemije, than moderate Albanian leaders -- Muslims and Christians -- who openly advocate peace, nonviolence and a multiethnic Kosovo.

The bishop of Kosovo knows what he's talking about. Artemije is used to drawing sniper fire -- literally and politically. Radicals in Milosevic's neo-Communist regime once called him a traitor to the Serbian people. When Serbian army units swept through Kosovo, he sought justice for ethnic Albanian refugees. While living in what amounts to a NATO protectorate, Artemije has pleaded for protection of Serbs who are refugees in a land that, theoretically, remains part of Serbia.

Nearly all of the 200,000 Serbs in Kosovo have fled, with a remnant living in guarded ghettos. During the past 20 months, Artemije has seen nearly 100 of his parishes, monasteries, shrines and graveyards damaged or destroyed. Many were ancient and irreplaceable. There have been no arrests or trials after these crimes.

This shepherd needs a military escort just to pay pastoral visits to his flock. Now, the All Soul's Day bombing has demonstrated that armed vehicles are not enough.

During his latest U.S. visit, Artemije was repeatedly asked what he thought NATO forces should do. "I am not a military strategist," he said. "I am a bishop. ... But the voices of religious leaders in Kosovo are not being heard very often, and when they are heard, they are not respected."

Praying with the digital natives

It's hard to move into a new office without spending some time exploring the past.

Digging into a 20-year-old box, Drew University evangelism professor Leonard Sweet time-warped back to his Ph.D. studies as he dug through layers of onion-skin paper smudged with real ink and an ancient substance called "Wite-Out."

"I went from being an archeologist to, as I dug deeper, a paleontologist. I found carbon paper. This thing need to be carbon dated, it was so old," he said, speaking at a global forum for leaders from 150 Christian campuses. "I looked at this and I said, 'Sweet! This is from a defunct civilization.' But you know what? It was from MY civilization. I'm a Gutenberg person. ... My world was shaped by the book."

Now that world has passed away, even if the rulers of many fortresses haven't noticed.

Sweet believes there is one fact of life that clergy and religious educators must learn -- pronto. If they refuse to do so, he said, they will have as much success as someone who tries to make "a credit-card call from a rotary telephone." Here is that fact: "If you are born before 1962, you are an immigrant. If you are born after 1962, you are a native."

Calendar age isn't everything, Sweet conceded. It's theoretically possible to be a 70-year-old native or a 20-year-old immigrant, in the land of digital dialogues and postmodern parables. But immigrants who want to leap from the old "Carpe Diem" world into what he called the culture of "Carpe Manana," must be open to learning languages, customs and skills from the natives.

"I am an immigrant," he said. "I am having Ellis Island experiences every day."

While trained in church history, Sweet is best known for his attempts to peer into the future of the church. He draws rave reviews as a speaker in both liberal mainline and evangelical gatherings, while writing waves of books with trendy titles such as "Quantum Spirituality" and his futuristic trilogy "SoulSalsa," "AquaChurch" and "SoulTsunami."

The history of education has included three landmark events, said Sweet, speaking in Orlando last week to leaders of the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities. These were the creation of the Greek alphabet, the invention of the printing press and the arrival of the World Wide Web. Colleges and seminaries can handle the first two, but most are doing little to face the implications of that third shift, other than buying hardware and software. They have re-wired their campuses, but not their brains.

Immigrants lead these institutions and many have replaced their rose-tinted glasses with "black-out shades," said Sweet. Nevertheless, they know the natives are restless.

When seeking answers to big questions, the natives don't want to sit in orderly rows and sing tiny sets of hymn verses interspersed with bulletin-board announcements, all of which precede a long lecture called a sermon. When they sing, they prefer flowing songs that seem to last forever while they stand enraptured in an atmosphere of worship.

They are not pew people. What they want, said Sweet, is faith, and even education, that is "experiential," "participatory," "image-based" and "connective." They want a faith that is timeless and timely, at the same time. They want truth that touches all of their senses.

This will be traumatic for leaders of America's aging mainstream religious groups, said Sweet. They feel comfortable with people with blue hair, "unless it shows up on a 16-year-old kid." Many worship in sanctuaries containing images of a Savior with pierced hands and feet, yet they panic when young people show up who "look like they fell out of a tackle box."

Truth is, these natives are swimming in information, but they lack perspective, he said. They don't need the help or permission of authority figures to find their own information about politics, technology, morality and even religion.

That is when the immigrants must be willing to listen carefully to their questions, said Sweet. The natives have information, but many are asking, "Now, what do I do with it? How do I test what is good and what is bad information? How do I turn that information into knowledge and then that knowledge into wisdom?"

The Late Great Planet Hollywood

The book was a global phenomenon and inspired sequel after sequel until millions rallied around the apocalyptic cry, "Don't be left behind!"

True believers handed copies to friends and warned strangers about the Second Coming. Evangelists said the books would convict sinners. It would have made a great movie, except that William E. Blackstone's "Jesus Is Coming" came out in 1878, before Hollywood was born.

"These books were very, very popular. ... They gave evangelists a new weapon in the war for souls," said Baptist historian Timothy Weber, author of "Living in the Shadow of the Second Coming: American Premillennialism, 1875-1982."

"If you read the sermons from back then, it's clear that the great revival preachers were using the same kinds of lines. They were saying, 'Christ could return before I finish this very sentence! Are you ready? What will happen to you if your loved ones vanish into heaven?' ... You heard this all across America. They were saying, 'Don't be left behind!' "

Today, these apocalyptic visions are alive and well, as the thriller "Left Behind" by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins leaps from mall bookstores into movie theaters. The first eight books in the planned 12-book opus have sold 25 million copies, with audio and kids editions selling 11 million more.

The movie -- produced for a mere $17 million -- blends snippets of "Independence Day" warfare and Bible conference plot twists. Secular critics are slamming it, with the Washington Post calling the film a "blundering cringefest." Some Christians have cautiously called it a small step forward for religious entertainment. Truth is, parts of "Left Behind" are so bad it could become a hip classic, a fundamentalist "Rocky Horror Picture Show."

One thing is certain: the 700 churches and businesses that invested $3,000 each to help Cloud Ten Pictures distribute the movie did so in an attempt to win converts.

Belief in the Second Coming of Christ is an ancient doctrine. But in the 19th Century, John Nelson Darby, Blackstone and other "premillennial dispensationalists" began dividing world history into a complicated series of covenants and "dispensations." They believed Jesus would "rapture" believers up into heaven before a seven-year time of tribulation, followed by an apocalyptic battle between good and evil and Christ's victorious return. This "rapture" concept was especially popular with evangelists.

"Until then," explained Weber, "all preachers really had was the threat of unexpected death, the whole idea of asking, 'If you died tonight, would you be ready to meet God?' Well, that's serious business, but people get used to the idea that they might die. ... The idea of a mysterious, secret rapture took things to a completely different level. How do you debate that?"

After grasping this central image, many converts graduate into a labyrinthine school of prophecy built on highly literal interpretations of the Book of Revelation, Daniel and other mysterious Bible passages. This approach infuriates traditional scholars, yet has long intrigued spiritual seekers -- especially in the age of mass media and paperback theology. In the 1970s, Hal Lindsey and Carole C. Carlson built a publishing empire on "The Late Great Planet Earth," one of the biggest non-fiction hits of that decade.

Dispensationalism has it all. It offers a doctrinal system that claims to address everything from Y2K to OPEC, from Darwin to the United Nations, from Russian nuclear strategy to how many Israeli jets can land on the head of a pin. It also packs an emotional punch. Adults raised in homes steeped in this worldview always have childhood stories to tell about frightening moments when they asked: Where is everybody? Have I been left behind?

These images make sense when fleshed out in sermons and books that provide lengthy passages to explain complicated historical references and obscure symbols. But outsiders will struggle to read between the pictures in "Left Behind: The Movie."

"This may turn into a tribal ritual for people who have already bought into this whole system" of beliefs, said Weber. "You have to wonder if this movie will work as evangelism, in this day and age. ... There's going to be a lot of head scratching going on out there in movie theaters."