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'The setting is simple, austere. The workspace occupied by the desk is small. I am impressed not only by the simplicity of the furniture, but also by the objects in the room. The spirituality of Jorge Mario Bergoglio is not made of "harmonized energies," as he would call them, but of human faces: Christ, St. Francis, St. Joseph and Mary.... 'I ask Pope Francis point-blank: "Who is Jorge Mario Bergoglio?" He...replies: "I ​​do not know what might be the most fitting description.... I am a sinner. This is the most accurate definition. It is not a figure of speech, a literary genre. I am a sinner." ' "...In the history of salvation, God has saved a people. There is no full identity without belonging to a people. No one is saved alone, as an isolated individual, but God attracts us looking at the complex web of relationships that take place in the human community. God enters into this dynamic, this participation in the web of human relationships.... ' "In Buenos Aires I used to receive letters from homosexual persons who are 'socially wounded' because they tell me that they feel like the church has always condemned them. But the church does not want to do this. During the return flight from Rio de Janeiro I said that if a homosexual person is of good will and is in search of God, I am no one to judge.... Religion has the right to express its opinion in the service of the people, but God in creation has set us free: it is not possible to interfere spiritually in the life of a person.... ' "The confessional is not a torture chamber, but the place in which the Lord's mercy motivates us to do better. I also consider the situation of a woman with a failed marriage in her past and who also had an abortion. Then this woman remarries, and she is now happy and has five children. That abortion in her past weighs heavily on her conscience and she sincerely regrets it. She would like to move forward in her Christian life. What is the confessor to do? ' "We c

'The setting is simple, austere. The workspace occupied by the desk is small. I am impressed not only by the simplicity of the furniture, but also by the objects in the room. The spirituality of Jorge Mario Bergoglio is not made of "harmonized energies," as he would call them, but of human faces: Christ, St. Francis, St. Joseph and Mary.... 'I ask Pope Francis point-blank: "Who is Jorge Mario Bergoglio?" He...replies: "I ​​do not know what might be the most fitting description.... I am a sinner. This is the most accurate definition. It is not a figure of speech, a literary genre. I am a sinner." ' "...In the history of salvation, God has saved a people. There is no full identity without belonging to a people. No one is saved alone, as an isolated individual, but God attracts us looking at the complex web of relationships that take place in the human community. God enters into this dynamic, this participation in the web of human relationships.... ' "In Buenos Aires I used to receive letters from homosexual persons who are 'socially wounded' because they tell me that they feel like the church has always condemned them. But the church does not want to do this. During the return flight from Rio de Janeiro I said that if a homosexual person is of good will and is in search of God, I am no one to judge.... Religion has the right to express its opinion in the service of the people, but God in creation has set us free: it is not possible to interfere spiritually in the life of a person.... ' "The confessional is not a torture chamber, but the place in which the Lord's mercy motivates us to do better. I also consider the situation of a woman with a failed marriage in her past and who also had an abortion. Then this woman remarries, and she is now happy and has five children. That abortion in her past weighs heavily on her conscience and she sincerely regrets it. She would like to move forward in her Christian life. What is the confessor to do? ' "W

Out of Tragedy, Questions About God: 4 out of 5 letters (surprising proportion for NYTimes) object to Wood's either/or view of theodicy: if God is omnipotent (& doesn't prevent suffering), he is cruel; if God is loving and good (and only comforts, but doesn't prevent suffering), he is weak and worth ignoring. They affirm the mystery "that God is deeply present in and through the events of the world - often inscrutably, but always powerfully and lovingly - and though we cannot for the life of us see how, even catastrophes include divine presence and power." A Christian notes that fellow believer "might counter [that] suffering and death come to all, even to a God who in his love took on our mortal, vulnerable condition as his own."

"I have never before written about Glenn Beck, [who] I think of as a hugely skilled political entertainer who ... has made his rise on skillfully inflammatory rhetoric that has hooked the emotions of millions. But this time he hooked the Bible and the God of the Bible.... "He has united and offended all Christians who know that our God is a God of justice, and that advancing justice is central to our mission as a people and to the kingdom of God for which we work and wait."

'The recent historic open letter signed by 138 leading Muslim scholars ... from around the world - "A Common Word Between Us and You" - identifies some core common ground between Christianity and Islam, as well as Judaism. 'What is common between us lies in something absolutely central to both [and Judaism]: love of God and love of neighbor. 'The future of the world depends on our ability as Christians and Muslims to live together in peace. If we fail to make every effort to make peace and come together in harmony you correctly remind us that "our eternal souls" are at stake as well. 'We are persuaded that our next step should be for our leaders at every level to meet together and begin the earnest work of determining how God would have us fulfill the requirement that we love God and one another.'

New Yorker writer James Wood addresses different theodicies (God punishing or teaching, or self-comforting) in "Between God and a Hard Place," Sunday, 1/24/10

Review by Judith Shulevitz (author of "The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time"): Wade asserts "the God gene" & its evolutionary function - "to bind human beings into cooperative groups," making altruism, group (over self-) interest & solidarity a matter of conscience (with the gods as enforcers). Shulevitz's criticism is "that he has under-ambitiously portrayed religion as less encompassing and consequential than it is."

Salon interview with R.Wright, author of "The Evolution of God"

>THE DIVINE COMMANDS to commit genocide found in the Old Testament are some of the most difficult and disturbing parts of scripture. Consider God's decree against the Amalekites: "Totally destroy everything ... Do not spare them; put to death ... children and infants" (1 Samuel 15:2-3). Such passages have been used repeatedly to justify bloodshed in the name of God, beginning with the Crusades and continuing right up through U.S. history, where texts were used in sermons to justify the slaughter of American Indians.... I'd like to propose that there is a better way-a way found in learning to read our Bibles as the apostle Paul read his. >Paul has removed the references to violence against Gentiles, and recontextualized these passages to instead declare God's mercy in Christ for Gentiles. This constitutes a major redefinition of how salvation is conceived: Instead of salvation meaning God "delivering" the ancient Israelites from the hands of their enemies through military victory (as described in Psalm 18, above), Paul now understands salvation to mean the restoration of all people in Christ, including those same "enemy" Gentiles.

'PORTLAND, Ore. - Four summers ago, on her first day as an administrator at Roosevelt High School here, Charlene Williams heard that the Christians were coming. Some members of an evangelical church were supposed to be painting hallways, repairing bleachers, that sort of thing. The prospect of such help, in the fervently liberal and secular microclimate of Portland, did not exactly fill her with joy. In truth, the connection between SouthLake and Roosevelt very much fit into a plan. It was a plan devised by an especially odd couple - Sam Adams, the first openly gay mayor of Portland, and Kevin Palau, the scion of an evangelical association created by his father, Luis. And their plan has delivered thousands of evangelical volunteers not only to Roosevelt, but also to scores of other public schools in the area and to public agencies dealing with homelessness and foster care. Getting Christian boots on the ground was the easy part. Restraining those boots from proselytizing was the challenge. The very essence of being evangelical, after all, is spreading the good news of the Gospel. Every virtuous act is meant to glorify God. Mr. Adams pointed out to Mr. Palau that service organizations like Rotary and Kiwanis assisted in city programs with the understanding that they would not recruit new members in the process. Mr. Palau said he could abide by such a tacit policy. The mayor took the risk of trusting that promise. "The vast majority of people," Mr. Palau put it recently, "have enough common sense to know that when you're in a school serving a child, that's what you're supposed to do. Trust God that if something is meant to be, it will just emerge." '

God as human projection over time, evolving toward universal and inclusive morality

Fish: "The words both 'True Grit' films, & Portis's novel, share are these: 'You must pay for everything in this world. There is nothing free with the exception of God's grace.' But free can mean (1) distributed freely, given to anyone and everyone; OR (2) given only to those whom God chooses for reasons that remain mysterious. The novel says, 'You cannot earn that grace or deserve it." FS: Jesus' story of "The Prodigal/Lost Son" suggests a 3rd notion: grace is freely given to all humans, who may not recognize its presence. Human values differ from God's in judging which person or outcome is ultimately "good" or "bad." Grace is an unearned gift. But to believe it is dispensed capriciously is more a characteristic of Greco-Roman cosmology.

God knows, there was great literature before there was the codex, and should it pass away, there will be great literature after it. But if we stop reading on paper, we should keep in mind what we're sacrificing: that nonlinear experience, which is unique to the codex. You don't get it from any other medium - not movies, or TV, or music or video games. The codex won out over the scroll because it did what good technologies are supposed to do: It gave readers a power they never had before, power over the flow of their own reading experience. And until I hear God personally say to me, "Boot up and read," I won't be giving it up.

'When I began to spend time, 10 years ago, at an evangelical church in Chicago..., I soon came to realize that one of the most important features of these churches is that they offer a powerful way to deal with anxiety and distress, not because of what people believe but because of what they do when they pray.... 'Rev. Rick Warren's "The Purpose Driven Life," one of the best-selling books of all time, teaches you to identify your self-critical, self-demeaning thoughts, to interrupt them and recognize them as mistaken, and to replace them with different thoughts.... 'In my own research, the more people affirmed, "I feel God's love for me, directly," the less stressed and lonely they were and the fewer psychiatric symptoms they reported.'

'...This, in short, is how Christian belief figures into literary fiction in our place and time: as something between a dead language and a hangover. Forgive me if I exaggerate. But if any patch of our culture can be said to be post-Christian, it is literature. Half a century after Flannery O'Connor, Walker Percy, Reynolds Price and John Updike presented themselves as novelists with what O'Connor called "Christian convictions," their would-be successors are thin on the ground. So are works of fiction about the quan­daries of Christian belief. '...Where has the novel of belief gone? The obvious answer is that it has gone where belief itself has gone. In America today Christianity is highly visible in public life but marginal or of no consequence in a great many individual lives. For the first time in our history it is possible to speak of Christianity matter-of-factly as one religion among many; for the first time it is possible to leave it out of the conversation altogether. This development places the believer on a frontier again, at the beginning of a new adventure; it means that the Christian who was born here is a stranger in a strange land no less than the Sikhs, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Soviet Jews .... 'The religious encounter of the kind O'Connor described forces a person to ask how belief figures into his or her own life and how to decide just what is true in it, what is worth acting on.... When we talk about belief we talk about what is permissible - about the sex abuse scandal or school prayer or whether the church should open its basement to 12‑step everything. What about the whole story? Is it our story? Is belief believable? There the story ends - right where it ought to begin.... ' This refusal to grant belief any explanatory power shows purity and toughness on the writer's part, but it also calls to mind what my Catholic ancestors called scrupulosity, an avoidance that comes at the cost of fullness of life. That - or it may show that the

'...This, in short, is how Christian belief figures into literary fiction in our place and time: as something between a dead language and a hangover. Forgive me if I exaggerate. But if any patch of our culture can be said to be post-Christian, it is literature. Half a century after Flannery O'Connor, Walker Percy, Reynolds Price and John Updike presented themselves as novelists with what O'Connor called "Christian convictions," their would-be successors are thin on the ground. So are works of fiction about the quan­daries of Christian belief. '...Where has the novel of belief gone? The obvious answer is that it has gone where belief itself has gone. In America today Christianity is highly visible in public life but marginal or of no consequence in a great many individual lives. For the first time in our history it is possible to speak of Christianity matter-of-factly as one religion among many; for the first time it is possible to leave it out of the conversation altogether. This development places the believer on a frontier again, at the beginning of a new adventure; it means that the Christian who was born here is a stranger in a strange land no less than the Sikhs, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Soviet Jews .... 'The religious encounter of the kind O'Connor described forces a person to ask how belief figures into his or her own life and how to decide just what is true in it, what is worth acting on.... When we talk about belief we talk about what is permissible - about the sex abuse scandal or school prayer or whether the church should open its basement to 12‑step everything. What about the whole story? Is it our story? Is belief believable? There the story ends - right where it ought to begin.... ' This refusal to grant belief any explanatory power shows purity and toughness on the writer's part, but it also calls to mind what my Catholic ancestors called scrupulosity, an avoidance that comes at the cost of fullness of life. That - or it may show that the

'Last December in these pages, the editor and critic Paul Elie wrote a much discussed essay about the relative absence of Christian belief as a theme among today's mainstream literary novelists. (Whither the Flannery O'Connors of yesteryear? Marilynne Robinson can't do this all by herself!) But there doesn't seem to be any corresponding dry spell among contemporary Jewish fiction writers. On the contrary, a surprising number can't seem to avoid engaging with faith, even when they pickle their protagonists. If today's literary fiction can't be accurately described as "post-Jewish" the way Elie calls it "post-Christian," that may be because in Judaism, faith itself is largely built on the concept of preserving memory. And the urge to stop time - to freeze the fleeting moment and thaw out its meaning later - is what drives many writers to write.... 'Commanded by God dozens of times in the Hebrew bible to remember their past, Jews historically obeyed not by recording events but by ritually re-enacting them, by understanding the present through the lens of the past.... The belief that we are just re-enacting history persists into the modern era, even among the nonreligious. To give only one example, last fall the Israeli president, Shimon Peres, described Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, then president of Iran, as "a modern-day Haman," a biblical Persian official who plotted a genocide against the Jews. ' This seeking out of patterns straddles the line between fantasy and our desire for real transcendence. It is the very stuff of literature. As Yerushalmi describes it, "What was suddenly drawn up from the past was not a series of facts to be contemplated at a distance, but a series of situations into which one could somehow be existentially drawn." '...That existential possibility makes Judaism into a religion unusually friendly to writers. Memory as an article of faith often comes naturally to writers, who by temperament are likely to be diarists and record-­keepers, forever s

'Last December in these pages, the editor and critic Paul Elie wrote a much discussed essay about the relative absence of Christian belief as a theme among today's mainstream literary novelists. (Whither the Flannery O'Connors of yesteryear? Marilynne Robinson can't do this all by herself!) But there doesn't seem to be any corresponding dry spell among contemporary Jewish fiction writers. On the contrary, a surprising number can't seem to avoid engaging with faith, even when they pickle their protagonists. If today's literary fiction can't be accurately described as "post-Jewish" the way Elie calls it "post-Christian," that may be because in Judaism, faith itself is largely built on the concept of preserving memory. And the urge to stop time - to freeze the fleeting moment and thaw out its meaning later - is what drives many writers to write.... 'Commanded by God dozens of times in the Hebrew bible to remember their past, Jews historically obeyed not by recording events but by ritually re-enacting them, by understanding the present through the lens of the past.... The belief that we are just re-enacting history persists into the modern era, even among the nonreligious. To give only one example, last fall the Israeli president, Shimon Peres, described Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, then president of Iran, as "a modern-day Haman," a biblical Persian official who plotted a genocide against the Jews. ' This seeking out of patterns straddles the line between fantasy and our desire for real transcendence. It is the very stuff of literature. As Yerushalmi describes it, "What was suddenly drawn up from the past was not a series of facts to be contemplated at a distance, but a series of situations into which one could somehow be existentially drawn." '...That existential possibility makes Judaism into a religion unusually friendly to writers. Memory as an article of faith often comes naturally to writers, who by temperament are likely to be diarists and record-­keepers, forever s

Open Letter to Wheaton Leaders (1) Supporting Dr. Larycia Hawkins in: (a) Her quotation from Pope Francis that Christians and Muslims worship the same God; (b) Her symbolic solidarity with our Muslim kindred. (2) Urging her speedy reinstatement and restoration to her students.