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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

'...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

As the wording of the amendment evolved during the Congressional debate, the principle of the debt's inviolability became a general proposition, applicable not just to the Civil War debt but to all future accrued debts of the United States. The Republican Senate leader, Benjamin F. Wade of Ohio, declared that by placing the debt "under the guardianship of the Constitution," investors would be spared from being "subject to the varying majorities which may arise in Congress." Two years later, on the verge of the amendment's ratification, its champions inside the Republican Party made their intentions absolutely clear, proclaiming in their 1868 party platform that "national honor requires the payment of the public indebtedness in the utmost good faith to all creditors at home and abroad," and pronouncing any repudiation of the debt "a national crime." More than three generations later, in 1935, Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes, ruling in the case of Perry v. the United States, revisited the amendment and affirmed the "fundamental principle" that Congress may not "alter or destroy" debts already incurred. As the wording of the amendment evolved during the Congressional debate, the principle of the debt's inviolability became a general proposition, applicable not just to the Civil War debt but to all future accrued debts of the United States. The Republican Senate leader, Benjamin F. Wade of Ohio, declared that by placing the debt "under the guardianship of the Constitution," investors would be spared from being "subject to the varying majorities which may arise in Congress." Two years later, on the verge of the amendment's ratification, its champions inside the Republican Party made their intentions absolutely clear, proclaiming in their 1868 party platform that "national honor requires the payment of the public indebtedness in the utmost good faith to all creditors at home and abroad," and pronouncing any repu

'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

'If you met me, you'd never know I was mentally ill. In fact, I've gone through most of my adult life without anyone ever knowing - except when I've had to reveal it to a doctor. And that revelation changes everything. It wipes clean the rest of my résumé, my education, my accomplishments, reduces me to a diagnosis. I was surprised when, after one of these run-ins, my psychopharmacologist said this sort of behavior was all too common. At least 14 studies have shown that patients with a serious mental illness receive worse medical care than "normal" people. Last year the World Health Organization called the stigma and discrimination endured by people with mental health conditions "a hidden human rights emergency." If you met me, you'd never know I was mentally ill. In fact, I've gone through most of my adult life without anyone ever knowing - except when I've had to reveal it to a doctor. And that revelation changes everything. It wipes clean the rest of my résumé, my education, my accomplishments, reduces me to a diagnosis. I was surprised when, after one of these run-ins, my psychopharmacologist said this sort of behavior was all too common. At least 14 studies have shown that patients with a serious mental illness receive worse medical care than "normal" people. Last year the World Health Organization called the stigma and discrimination endured by people with mental health conditions "a hidden human rights emergency." I never knew it until I started poking around, but this particular kind of discriminatory doctoring has a name. It's called "diagnostic overshadowing." According to a review of studies done by the Institute of Psychiatry at King's College, London, it happens a lot. As a result, people with a serious mental illness - including bipolar disorder, major depression, schizophrenia and schizoaffective disorder - end up with wrong diagnoses and are under-treated. That is a problem, because if yo

'"Contamination" ... is an evocative term. When people speak for an ideal of cultural purity, sustaining the authentic culture of the Asante or the American family farm, I find myself drawn to contamination as the name for a counterideal. [The Roman playwright] Terence [whose plays acquired that label to describe his conflation of Greek plays into a single Roman comedy] had a notably firm grasp on the range of human variety: "So many men, so many opinions" was a line of his. And it's in his comedy "The Self-Tormentor" that you'll find what may be the golden rule of cosmopolitanism - Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto; "I am human: nothing human is alien to me." The context is illuminating. A busybody farmer named Chremes is told by his neighbor to mind his own affairs; the homo sum credo is Chremes's breezy rejoinder. It isn't meant to be an ordinance from on high; it's just the case for gossip. Then again, gossip - the fascination people have for the small doings of other people - has been a powerful force for conversation among cultures. 'The ideal of contamination has few exponents more eloquent than Salman Rushdie, who has insisted that the novel that occasioned his fatwa "celebrates hybridity, impurity, intermingling, the transformation that comes of new and unexpected combinations of human beings, cultures, ideas, politics, movies, songs. It rejoices in mongrelisation and fears the absolutism of the Pure. Mélange, hotch-potch, a bit of this and a bit of that is how newness enters the world." No doubt there can be an easy and spurious utopianism of "mixture," as there is of "purity" or "authenticity." And yet the larger human truth is on the side of contamination - that endless process of imitation and revision. 'A tenable global ethics has to temper a respect for difference with a respect for the freedom of actual human beings to make their own choices. That's why cosmopolitans don't insist that everyone become cosmopolitan. They know they don't hav

'I went on my first Christian radio show, a year ago, and the host set out to save me.... 'I have spent a lot of time thinking about the complexity of faith, and have tried to take theologically conservative faith seriously. As I did so, over a decade of research, I found myself more open to the idea of God, and more aware of the fragile human grasp on the real. '....It was a shock to have my host grill me about the state of my soul. It reminded me that one of the things that makes mutual respect between believers and nonbelievers difficult is that there is a kind of line in the sand, and you're either on one side of it or on the other. Skeptics do this too, of course.... 'Anthropologists have a term for this racheting-up of opposition: schismogenesis. Gregory Bateson developed the word to describe mirroring interactions, where every move by each side makes the other respond more negatively.... 'These days we Americans live not only with political schismogenesis, but also religious schismogenesis. 'Yet believers and nonbelievers are not so different from one another.... When I arrived at one church..., I thought that I would stick out like a sore thumb. I did not. Instead, I saw my own doubts, anxieties and yearnings reflected in those around me.... 'Many of my skeptical friends think of themselves as secular, sometimes profoundly so. Yet these secular friends often hover on the edge of faith. They meditate.... 'We need to recognize something of what we share, and to carry on a conversation - and if we can keep the conversation going, we will, however slowly, move forward. If we can't, we're in real trouble. '

'I went on my first Christian radio show, a year ago, and the host set out to save me.... 'I have spent a lot of time thinking about the complexity of faith, and have tried to take theologically conservative faith seriously. As I did so, over a decade of research, I found myself more open to the idea of God, and more aware of the fragile human grasp on the real. '....It was a shock to have my host grill me about the state of my soul. It reminded me that one of the things that makes mutual respect between believers and nonbelievers difficult is that there is a kind of line in the sand, and you're either on one side of it or on the other. Skeptics do this too, of course.... 'Anthropologists have a term for this racheting-up of opposition: schismogenesis. Gregory Bateson developed the word to describe mirroring interactions, where every move by each side makes the other respond more negatively.... 'These days we Americans live not only with political schismogenesis, but also religious schismogenesis. 'Yet believers and nonbelievers are not so different from one another.... When I arrived at one church..., I thought that I would stick out like a sore thumb. I did not. Instead, I saw my own doubts, anxieties and yearnings reflected in those around me.... 'Many of my skeptical friends think of themselves as secular, sometimes profoundly so. Yet these secular friends often hover on the edge of faith. They meditate.... 'We need to recognize something of what we share, and to carry on a conversation - and if we can keep the conversation going, we will, however slowly, move forward. If we can't, we're in real trouble. '

>JimWallis: 'We urgently need a new social covenant between citizens, businesses, and government. Contracts have been broken, but a covenant adds a moral dimension to the solution that is now essential. By definition, this will require the engagement and collaboration of all the "stakeholders" - governments, businesses, civil society groups, people of faith, and especially young people. >Social covenants should all include shared principles and features - a value basis for new agreements, an emphasis on jobs that offer fair rewards for hard work and real contributions to society, security for financial assets and savings, a serious commitment to reduce inequality between the top and the bottom of society, stewardship of the environment, an awareness of future generations' needs, a stable and accountable financial sector, and the strengthening of both opportunity and social mobility. >Such a covenant promotes human flourishing, happiness, and well-being as social goals, and it elevates the movement from a shareholder model to a stakeholder model of corporate governance. Such new social covenants are already being discussed in a variety of settings and countries. The discussion itself will help produce the conversation leading to the results that we need. >A moral conversation about a social covenant could ask what a "moral economy" should look like and for whom it should exist. How can we do things differently, more responsibly, more equitably, and yes, more democratically? >Lack of trust is bad for politics, bad for business, and bad for overall public morale. It undermines people's sense of participation in society as well as their feelings of social responsibility, and makes them feel isolated and alone-more worried about survival than interested in solidarity. Because the "contract" was broken, a sense of "covenant" is now needed, fused with a sense of moral values and commitments. And the process of formulating new social covenants could be an important pa

'For decades the dominant story of postwar American religious history has been the triumph of evangelical Christians. Beginning in the 1940s, the story goes, a rising tide of evangelicals began asserting their power and identity, ultimately routing their more liberal mainline Protestant counterparts in the pews, on the offering plate and at the ballot box. In "After Cloven Tongues of Fire: Protestant Liberalism in Modern American History," published in April by Princeton University Press, Mr. Hollinger argues that the mainline won a broader cultural victory that historians have underestimated. Liberals, he maintains, may have lost Protestantism, but they won the country, establishing ecumenicalism, cosmopolitanism and tolerance as the dominant American creed. Mr. Hollinger's argument generated much chatter among his colleagues when he first presented it at the 2011 meeting. But his sometimes pugnacious new book, he said, is just a "punctuation mark" on the recent spate of work reconsidering the left-hand side of the American religious spectrum, which includes titles like Matthew S. Hedstrom's "Rise of Liberal Religion: Book Culture and American Spirituality in the 20th Century"; Jill K. Gill's "Embattled Ecumenism: The National Council of Churches, the Vietnam War and the Trials of the Protestant Left"; and David Burns's "Life and Death of the Radical Historical Jesus." The surge of interest in liberal religion, many say, reflects the renewed vitality of religious history more generally, which has spread beyond its traditional redoubts in divinity schools to become one of the most popular specializations among academic historians, according to the American Historical Association.

'That undercurrent of violence I felt when I was 6 was there again, present in the easy devaluation of the word "nigger." I knew that it was that very history of violence - my dead great-great-grandfather's ghost and all the young black men who died at the hands of people who thought they were lesser - that was the subtext. This was why I felt so threatened, so overwhelmed, why I was often silenced when people said these things to me. [Violence] in fact exerted a strong undertow in the present. That it could take my great-great-grandfather, but also take young men like Oscar Grant III, shot to death by a transit officer in Oakland in 2009, like Trayvon Martin, like my only brother, killed by a hit-and-run drunken driver who was charged with leaving the scene of an accident but never with the crime of my brother's death. That it could assert they were less in life and deny them justice after death as well. That living in a country where one group of people owned another group of people for some 250 years yielded a culture where one life was worth less than another. Again and again. Then and now.... There is power in naming racism for what it is, in shining a bright light on it, brighter than any torch or flashlight. A thing as simple as naming it allows us to root it out of the darkness and hushed conversation where it likes to breed like roaches. It makes us acknowledge it. Confront it. And in confronting it, we rob it of some of its dark pull. Its senseless, cold drag. When we speak, we assert our human dignity. That is the worth of a word.'