Mother's Day for the earth mothers

Few moments are as precious to mothers as the hushed rituals of bedtime.

Kristin Madden's memories include watching her 3-year-old son use the first personal altar he built on his father's old ironing board. He covered it with a blue cloth and added rocks, a baby tree, an earth flag and his hatching-dragon sculpture. Then the two of them would snuggle and talk about magic and the travels he would take in his dreams.

Finally, they would say a favorite prayer, such as: "Now I lay me down to bed. Great Spirit, bless my sleepy head. As I journey in my sleep, I know the Dragons my soul will keep. Mother Earth and Father Sky, watch over me here where I lie. Fairies please carry my love to all. Relations and loved ones, I do call."

Kristin Madden is a tutor in the Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids. Pagan mothers say bedtime prayers, too. They also celebrate Mother's Day, which is natural since they focus their spirituality on nature and, literally, Mother Earth.

The pagan pantheon includes female and male deities and most rites are rooted in cycles of birth and death and the four seasons. Madden stressed that it's hard to make sweeping statements about the legions of groups in this complex and evolving movement. However, most Wiccan believers emphasize feminine and lunar traditions, as well as spells and witchcraft. Druids blend masculine and feminine symbolism and are more solar oriented.

This is certainly an interesting time for magical families, said Madden, who was raised in a single-parent pagan home in the heady 1960s and now lives in Albuquerque, N.M. The pop-culture powers that be are so fascinated with the occult that this has turned into a problem for many pagan parents, especially recent converts. Children often think that what's happening in movies and on television is real, she said. "You hear kids saying things like, 'Wow! Cool! You're mom's a witch? Can she cast a spell on someone for me?' "

In Hollywood, this is the age of "Sabrina the Teenage Witch," "Practical Magic," "Charmed" and "The Craft." Oprah Winfrey is leading Middle America in prayers to the spirit of the universe and covens can be found in many liberal Christian seminaries. Pentagon debates about pagan chaplains, naked worship and sacred daggers offer the first glimpses of another constitutional issue -- the separation of coven and state in the age of faith-based initiatives.

Works friendly to neo-paganism, especially Wicca, fill shelves in mega-bookstores. In the wake of the New Age explosion, pagan publishers are producing waves of their own books, from "Astrology & Your Child" to "Secrets of Western Sex Magic." Madden is the author of "Pagan Parenting" and the "Shamanic Guide to Death and Dying."

And everyone is pondering the kid-culture earthquake triggered by You Know Who.

"The whole Harry Potter thing has just taken off and glamorized everything. It makes it seem like all of this is about spells and magic," said Madden, who has chosen not to read the J.K. Rowling books with her 5-year-old. "It can be hard to get children to remember that what we're about is faith and spirituality ... Many pagan parents consider Harry Potter a mixed blessing."

Pagan parents realize that they live in a culture dominated by a "lip-service" brand of Judeo-Christian values. The key, said Madden, is that the mainstream fears any form of rigorous faith that "isn't normal" and becomes counter-cultural. Thus, she is considering home schooling to avoid having to compromise her family's strong beliefs.

Ultimately, this entire neo-pagan revival is about choice, she said. More and more Americans are claiming the freedom to find their own gods and goddesses, their own rituals, their own truths and their own brands of spirituality. This revival is about believers insisting that they can be their own priests and priestesses.

"As a pagan believer, I am very hopeful," she said. "America is really coming along and becoming more open and tolerant. ... People are out there searching for a personal relationship with a god and with nature. They don't want dogma. They want new experiences and their own kind of spirituality. They are ready to try all kinds of things."

The Gray Lady's gospel crusade

Dr. Warren Hern had "just finished performing an abortion for the last patient of the morning" when he heard that James Kopp had been arrested in France for the 1998 murder of a Buffalo, N.Y., abortionist.

Readers of the New York Times learned this symbolic detail in an op-ed piece entitled "Free Speech that Threatens My Life" in which Hern attacked the fiercest critics of his late-term abortion practice in Boulder, Colo. His column followed an editorial restating the paper's unwavering support for abortion rights, which underscored a page-one story about the arrest.

This three-punch combination several weeks ago indicated that the Times wanted newsmakers and opinion shapers to realize that this was more than an abortion story. This was a parable about the meaning of life and truth. An earlier profile of the anti-abortion extremist in the newspaper's Sunday magazine made that absolutely clear.

"The question of Kopp's innocence or guilt is finally less absorbing than the consequences of his search for a higher good, sure and unchanging, to sustain him in a fallen world," concluded David Samuels. "It is a shared if unspoken premise of the world that most of us inhabit that absolutes do not exist and that people who claim to have found them are crazy."

So take that, Pope John Paul II. And you too, Billy Graham.

This remarkable credo was more than a statement of one journalist's convictions, said William Proctor, a Harvard Law School graduate and former legal affairs reporter for the New York Daily News. Surely, the "world that most of us inhabit" cited by Samuels is, in fact, the culture of the New York Times and the faithful who draw inspiration from its sacred pages.

"It is rare to see a journalist openly state what so many people at the Times seem to think," said Proctor, whose book "The Gospel According to the New York Times" analyzes themes in more than 6,000 articles from the past 25 years. "But it's true. They really are convinced that the millions of people out in Middle America who believe that some things are absolutely true and some things are absolutely false are crazy and probably dangerous, to boot."

Proctor, meanwhile, is absolutely convinced that this affects the newspaper's work on moral and theological issues, ranging from abortion to education, from the rights of unpopular religious minorities to efforts to redefine controversial terms such as "marriage" and "family."

But critics are wrong if they claim that the New York Times is a bastion of secularism, he stressed. In its own way, the newspaper is crusading to reform society and even to convert wayward "fundamentalists." Thus, when listing the "deadly sins" that are opposed by the Times, he deliberately did not claim that it rejects religious faith. Instead, he said the world's most influential newspaper condemns "the sin of religious certainty."

"Yet here's the irony of it all. The agenda the Times advocates is based on a set of absolute truths," said Proctor. Its leaders are "absolutely sure that the religious groups they consider intolerant and judgmental are absolutely wrong, especially traditional Roman Catholics, evangelicals and most Orthodox Jews. And they are just as convinced that the religious groups that they consider tolerant and progressive are absolutely right."

Naturally, believers in the flocks that are ignored or attacked tend to get mad and many try to ignore the Times. This is understandable, said Proctor, but precisely the opposite of what they should do. He urges the newspaper's critics to pay even closer attention to what it reports, while contrasting its coverage with a variety of other wire services and publications -- across the political and cultural spectrum.

Trying to avoid the New York Times is like fighting gravity, said Proctor. It is the high church, the magisterium, for the artists, journalists and thinkers that shape popular culture.

"If people tune all that out," he said, " how are they going to know how to defend their own beliefs? People need information and they need discernment. The first part of that statement is just as important as the second part. ... What are you going to do, try to pretend that news and information don't matter?"

Reading the Sporting Jews

When scribe Jonathan Tobin selected his all-Jewish baseball team, it was tempting to pencil in Rod Carew at second base.

This would have given his fantasy Maccabees squad its third Hall of Famer, with Hammerin' Hank Greenberg and southpaw Sandy Koufax. When you're talking baseball holy writ, it's impossible to overlook Carew's 3,053 hits and seven American League batting titles.

The Baseball Online Library took a leap of faith and put Carew in its Jewish All-Star Team. After all, he married a Jew and they raised their children in the faith. But Carew never converted, despite years of rumors. Thus, Tobin sent his team into cyberspace competition without Carew's .328 lifetime average.

One passionate reader reacted to the column (at JewishWorldReview.com) by saying: "OK, so he never converted. What's important is that he's still a better Jew than most of the Jews today who are not even raising their children in the faith. I say we should count him!"

Truth is, there's more to this than pundits seeking another excuse to argue about baseball and culture while enjoying a ballgame and kosher hot dogs. The search for what the Philadelphia Jewish Exponent editor calls "The Sporting Jews" offers intriguing insights into the puzzle of American Jewish identity.

Jewish immigrants once yearned -- like members of any religious or ethnic minority -- to find their own heroes and role models in a new land. Thus, Tobin said Jews grew up watching their elders point in history books while saying, "Look! Eddie Cantor is a Jew. Look! Irving Berlin is Jewish." It was important to thrive everywhere from Main Street to Hollywood and Vine. And then there was the sports page.

Athletics wasn't even on the "radar screen" in the old Jewish communities of Eastern Europe, he said. But it was impossible to deny baseball's role here, especially in the thriving urban neighborhoods into which Jews moved in the cathartic, agonizing decades before and after World War II.

Millions of Jews cheered when Greenberg opted out of a 1934 World Series game that fell on Yom Kippur. Decades later, Koufax declined to pitch on the opening game of the 1965 World Series, once again on Yom Kippur. Who could have imagined living to see such open displays of pride and Jewish identity?

"What could be a better symbol of this new Jew, this Jew who was finally living in a land where he could be comfortable in his own skin, than to be able to find Jewish heroes at the ballpark? ... I think it's hard for us to grasp how important someone like Greenberg was at that time. He was an icon of this new Jewish experience in America," said Tobin.

That was then.

Today, American Jews live in the age of Jerry Seinfeld and Joe Lieberman. Today, it's hard to imagine a time when the word "assimilate" would have sounded good to Jewish leaders. A century ago, millions of Jews were anxious to claim a new sense of identity -- as Americans. Today, the question is how many will choose to claim an old identity -- as practicing Jews.

The statistics are now familiar. Jews have declined from 4 percent to 2 percent of the U.S. population. While a 1990 survey -- currently being updated -- found 5.9 million Jews, researchers said 1.3 million practice another faith and 1.1 million claim no faith. Only 484,000 American Jews regularly attend temple or synagogue services.

While doing assembling his Maccabees roster, Tobin researched whether he could list current Philadelphia catcher Mike Lieberthal, who has a Jewish father. In the Phillies yearbook, he saw that the Lieberthal family picture showed them posed in front of a Christmas tree. He took that as a sign.

"There is a phrase that we use these days to describe people who convert to Judaism or step forward to publicly claim their Jewish identity. We call them 'Jews by Choice,' " said Tobin. "What we need to realize is that, in 2001, all Jews in America are 'Jews by Choice.' That is the reality of our situation. ...

"That seems humorous, when we're talking about hunting for Jews in the major leagues. But it isn't funny, otherwise. This is serious."

Year 13 -- A brand name for your soul

Anyone strolling through last year's National Funeral Directors Association convention could catch glimpses of Baby Boomer heaven.

The Baltimore exhibits included "fairway to heaven" caskets for those especially devout golfers and NASCAR models for true fans that have seen their last race, at least in this life. The goal, said a convention spokesman, is to offer dying consumers the same kinds of choices that they demanded in life.

What's next? Allowing people to defray some funeral expenses via product-endorsement logos, like the ones on golf caps and racing cars? If there is a Harley-Davidson casket -- yes, there is one -- can a Lexus model be far behind? Could a user re-boot his Microsoft casket?

I cannot answer such soul-wrenching questions. But every year I do mark this column's anniversary by weaving together a few bizarre items that loiter in my files. For year No. 13, the designer-casket news snapped into place next to a story from The Financial Times.

It seems that the prestigious Young & Rubicam advertising agency is convinced many brand names have become substitute religions. They provide meaning for millions of believers who gradually become what they consume while taking communion, so to speak, at the mall.

"The brands that are succeeding are those with strong beliefs and original ideas," said an agency report. "They are also the ones that have the passion and energy to change the world, and to convert people to their way of thinking though outstanding communications."

When true believers think of Apple, Calvin Klein, Gatorade, Volvo, MTV, Starbucks, Nike and Virgin, they don't just think of products. These uncompromising "belief brands" help establish a sense of identity, according to Young & Rubicam. They are icons that define lives.

Are ad men our new priests and evangelists? With that in mind, ponder this.

* Up in Vancouver, some Canadian Christians were not amused by "Second Coming" ads for the Playland Amusement Park, which included a turnstile clicking ominously to "666." The park had just added two new rides -- the "Hellevator" and the "Revelation."

* While many were offended by "Yo' Mama's Last Supper," a work of modern art that depicted Jesus as a nude black woman, an exhibit in Chicago offered up "The Last Pancake Breakfast," with Christ as Mrs Butterworth.

* Leaders of Southern California's 600,000 Muslims were not amused by Los Angeles Times ads juxtaposing images of bikini-clad California women with women in Islamic attire, linked by the slogan "Connecting Us to The Times." The newsroom staff protested, too, and the ads were soon phased out.

* In other multicultural news, shoppers noted changes in Nativity images last year in London. In a few, Joseph had been omitted to avoid offending female single parents. Wire-service reports also described tableaus in which a female figure replaced Joseph, to appeal to what the survey called those with "Sapphic," or lesbian, "inclinations."

* Here's another British innovation with mass appeal. The Anglican vicar of All Saints Parish in Guildford advertised a Harry Potter service complete with wizards, costumes, broomsticks, "Muggle songs" (hymns) and a non-flying version of a "quidditch" game.

The church's doorway was decorated as the King's Cross Station platform on which J.K. Rowling's characters catch the train to the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. There was even a serpent banner for the ominous House of Slytherin, along with other Hogwarts decorations. The London Times said other parishes quickly requested copies of the liturgy.

* Can one purchase inner peace and salvation? The satirists at www.TheOnion.com have their doubts. They published a fake press release for an imaginary snack meant to ease the "hideously bleak emptiness of modern life. ... We're proud to introduce T.C. McCrispee's as the antidote you've been reaching out for. Our tasty new snack cracker will, if only for a few lovely moments, significantly lessen the aching, gnawing angst that haunts your very soul."

Participants in taste tests testified that the "satisfying crunch distracted them from the parade of tears that is life." A faux spokesperson summed up the campaign: "We're selling more than a cracker here. We're selling the salty, unctuous illusion of happiness."

Yes, Columbine was a God thing

The weeks before Easter are rich with ancient images of suffering, sacrifice, death and hard choices.

One of the biblical texts focused on martyrdom, during a Mass two years ago at Saint Frances Cabrini Catholic Church in Littleton, Colo. The visiting preacher tried to make this concept come alive.

Imagine that a spiritual war is raging, said Bishop Sam Jacobs of Alexandria, La., as he paced among the pews. What if someone burst into the church with a gun? What if he pointed it at people's heads and asked if they believed in God? Who would bravely say "yes"?

Youth minister Jim Beckman said the bishop asked the young people: "What if someone came into your school with a gun and did that?"

The words didn't register at the time. But that flock included many of the parish's 300-plus teens from Columbine High School. They remembered the sermon a few weeks later -- after April 20th.

"I don't understand how anyone can deny the spiritual dimension of what happened at Columbine," said Beckman. "The repercussions of the shootings have continued to dominate our ministry here in so many ways. ... Yes, we survived and, yes, we will prevail and, yes, we have hope to carry on, in the name of Jesus Christ. But this tragedy raised spiritual issues that are not going to go away in a few months or even years."

Many state officials insist that the massacre wasn't "a God thing." They can chant this mantra, but the facts cry out that there was more to Columbine than familiar questions about school discipline, mass media and gun control.

The killers wanted to make a statement about good and evil, about morality and anarchy, and they succeeded. The first combatants to march into the church-state minefield at Columbine were Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold.

"Eric and Dylan told us why they did what they did," said Wendy Murray Zoba, senior writer at Christianity Today. "They were acting on the laws they had been taught by their culture. There is no God. You are your own god. There is no eternal law. You make your own law. The material world is all there is. Power is what matters. You just do it."

Thus, Harris wrote on his Web site: "My belief is that if I say something, it goes. I am the law, if you don't like it, you die. If I don't like ... what you want me to do, you die." In the pre-rampage videos, Harris vowed to shoot Christians in the head. He was furious at Christians who shared their faith with others. Witnesses said he went out of his way to shoot students who were praying out loud. He asked several if they believed in God.

Clearly, said Zoba, "Eric Harris had a God problem." And as their "judgment day" approached, Klebold looked into a camera lens and said: "We're going to have followers because we're so ... god-like." He added: "We're not exactly human. ... We have bodies, but we've evolved ... one step above you."

In her book "Day of Reckoning," Zoba writes: "There is no other way to explain what overtook these boys than to call it raw evil -- not the Hollywood version but the religious kind." Thus, "Columbine rests uneasily in so many hearts. ... If hell, as it were, opened up and temporarily held sway in those hallways that day, such an occurrence would mean the existence of a spiritual world, and worse, a spiritual battle. And that, to many ... is irrational and creepy."

If there is spiritual evil, then that also implies that there is spiritual good and that's a hard equation to discuss on the evening news, in political debates and in classrooms.

"Something has gone terribly wrong in this culture," stressed Zoba. "I still think America hasn't faced the issues that were raised at Columbine, in part because there is always the next shooting, the next controversy, the next something to distract us. ...

"But there were big spiritual questions raised at Columbine and they will not go away on their own. If the church tries to just move on and get past this, then where will those spiritual questions be answered?"

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."