Articles – Page 24 – Religion Online

The Other “H” Word (I Cor. 1:1-9; Jn. 1:29-42)

Church bells chime. Two muscle-bound men stand arms-crossed in front of a Gothic cathedral. A gay couple approaches holding hands. "Step aside, please," say the muscle-bound guards. They speak similar words to an African-American girl, a Hispanic man, a young man in a wheelchair. Then, just as we realize that the two large men are "church bouncers," the scene fades to black and the tag line reads: "Jesus didn’t turn people away. Neither do we."

This 30-second commercial from the United Church of Christ ignited weeks of national debate after CBS and NBC refused to air the spot, claiming it was too controversial. Pundits weighed in, filling airwaves and editorial pages with opposing views.

I am not sure what to think. On one hand, I worry that the decision reached by CBS and NBC marks a new era in public life: the political correctness of the 1990s has been replaced by values correctness. Networks are so concerned that they might offend the sensibilities of religious conservatives that they refuse to air commercials that break no FCC guidelines. Yet I also feel a small bit of gratitude toward those nervous television executives whose actions sparked controversy over an issue that Christians have forgotten ought to be controversial -- not homosexuality, but that other "H-word" -- hospitality.

In the Hellenistic world, the peculiar way that early Christians practiced hospitality set them apart from the surrounding culture. Non-Christians prized hospitality, but understood it to be discriminate. It was directed toward family, friends and influential social contacts -- those who could easily reciprocate the host’s goodwill. Christian hospitality, on the other hand, was notoriously indiscriminate. Not only were all welcome, but it was those least likely to reciprocate -- the widowed, the orphaned, the outcasts and the estranged -- who were its primary recipients. In a modest way, Christian hospitality cut against the grain of social propriety and courted controversy in the ancient world.

Hospitality has lost its edge in the contemporary church. We no longer see it as a weighty moral issue; it is now more about manners than morals. I recall meeting with a group of church members about changing the name of our evangelism committee. We were divided into two camps. One side recalled Billy Graham and felt we were unworthy of the title "evangelists"; others remembered Jim Bakker and thought we could do better. Thinking I had the perfect solution, I recommended that we call ourselves the hospitality committee. Neither side was impressed. One man finally broke the silence. "We’re about more than just hospitality. That makes it sound like we’re the tea and crumpets committee."

But the hospitality of Jesus was controversial. He chafed against the limits of social propriety by welcoming prostitutes and adulterers, crooks and outcasts into his gracious presence. His hospitality knew no limit. It was not just indiscriminate: it was promiscuous.

It was also central to the incarnation. Through his promiscuous hospitality, Jesus reenacts the gracious being of’ the Triune God. The Trinity calls into question everything we assumed about the structure of reality. We live not in a world of divisions ruled over by a supreme being, but in a universe tightly bound and called into being by the God who desires intimacy with us. Divine hospitality lies at the heart of creation. It is also the source of our redemption. When Paul greets the church in Corinth, he does so in the name of the God ‘who has called you into fellowship with his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord."

The pattern can be seen in a story from the Gospel of John. Two men approach Jesus and ask, ‘Where are you staying?" Jesus replies, "Come and see," and Andrew rushes to find his brother Simon. It is such a simple story, but John seems to want us to see something significant. He concludes with the words that signal the beginning of the Christian church "You are Simon son of John. You are to be called Cephas." John wants us to see that simple words of invitation are more crucial to the life of redemption than even proclamations of faith. This is how the church begins.

"Come and see." Christ invites us to enter into a shared life with this Gracious Host. From this point on, the way to truth will be constituted by personal encounters. Our evangelism is simply a reflection of this truth. Andrew invites Simon to come and see, We welcome because we were welcomed ourselves. We invite because we received an invitation.

I was leaving church one evening as the Alcoholic Anonymous meeting was about to adjourn. I noticed a man crouched over the hood of a rusty Ford and introduced myself as one of the pastors. He sighed and told me how long he had intended to "get back to church." I invited him to worship. His face flushed and he launched into the story of his life. It was the familiar string of regrets and loss that accompany addiction. We shared a prayer and said, "Good night." As I was walking to my car, he called after me with urgency. "Did you mean what you said?" "About what?" I asked, "Did you mean that 1 could come to this church?" Driving home, it occurred to me that he had told me his life’s story as a response to my invitation. It was his polite way of explaining why he couldn’t take me up on my offer. He felt he wasn’t "clean enough" to be included in our congregation.

I never saw him again. I wish my response to his questions had been more direct. I wish I had simply repeated the words of Christ. I wish I had said, "Come and see."

What Can We Say About the Afterlife?

When Rudolf Bultmann observed in 1941 that "there is no longer any heaven in the traditional sense of the word," he was speaking accurately about the spirit of his age. For much of the 20th century, heaven has been treated as the theological equivalent of Timbuktu. With the phrase "from here to Timbuktu," popular speech reduced an actual city in Mali to a synonym for the impossibly far away, the totally foreign. Something similar has happened to heaven in mainline churches.

We no longer speak of heaven as an actual destination, a hope to be realized. Now heaven is a figure of speech, a consoling metaphor to pull out for funeral services. I am not saying that we have stopped believing in heaven. Rather, I am suggesting that like Timbuktu, heaven is treated as if it were a term for something foreign and far away.

As a pastor, I am uncomfortably aware of my own reticence to speak of heaven and how that places me at odds with the founder of my denomination. "I am . . . passing through life as an arrow through the air," John Wesley once preached. "I am a spirit come from God and returning to God. . . . I want to know one thing, the way to heaven -- how to land safe on that happy shore." I believe that too, but to be honest, I would be embarrassed to say so from the pulpit. Any serious attempt to describe for my congregation what it means to believe in heaven is about as likely from me as my traveling to Timbuktu. Like a lot of mainline pastors I know, I’m caught between honest belief and embarrassment. The result of this uneasy truce is silence.

Several forces have led to this ambivalence. Most obvious is that mainline clergy have reacted against heaven’s being used for manipulation: the ultimate carrot dangling on the stick of conversion -- or worse, used as a crass fund-raising tactic by televangelists. Even when people’s motives are pure, mainline pastors are rightfully uneasy when faithful Christians become preoccupied with the world to come. They scrupulously avoid appearing like a country preacher in Wendell Berry’s novel A Place on Earth, who "has what I reckon you would call a knack for the Hereafter. He’s not much mixed with this world."

The embarrassment on the part of clergy also comes from their training. In most mainline seminaries, belief in heaven is rarely discussed. In my years in seminary, I can’t remember the topic of heaven, at least as my congregation would recognize it, ever coming up. This is in part due to the influence of 20th-century theologians such as Paul Tillich, Rudolf Bultmann and Jürgen Moltmann who have argued persuasively against viewing eschatology in personal terms. Their influence has made it hard to imagine oneself as a thinking Christian -- someone who reads not only the Bible but also the New York Times -- while making explicit claims about a heavenly life to come. As mainline seminarians enter the parish, they take with them the assumption that heaven is not a topic worthy of serious discussion.

This attitude not only places clergy out of step with the expectations of their parishioners but with contemporary culture as well. In recent years, our culture has been fascinated with heaven. A 2003 Harris poll, for instance, revealed that 82 percent of Americans profess to believe in heaven. A long-term study from the University of Chicago indicates that the number of Americans who believe in an afterlife has increased over the past 30 years, even as other measures of religious belief -- such as church attendance -- have significantly declined. When you start comparing results, it is tempting to think that more Americans believe in heaven than believe in God.

There is also an intensity of enthusiasm for the afterlife that cannot be captured by pollsters, a cultural craving that the distant shore of heaven be brought closer into view. This yearning is found in the lyrics of a song called "Heaven" -- a surprising crossover hit on both pop and country charts:

How far is heaven, Lord can you tell me?

Cause I’ve been locked up way too long

In this crazy world, how far is heaven

Lord can you tell me?

Cause I know there’s a better place

Than this place I’m livin.

How far is heaven?

Popular television shows, like HBO’s Six Feet Under and Showtime’s Dead Like Me, feature deceased characters who continue to make cameo appearances, remaining quite active even after their deaths. And, on the "new nonfiction" table at my local book store, I’ve spotted both the schmaltzy -- A Travel Guide to Heaven -- and the scholarly -- a 700-page tome by an Ivy League professor, Life After Death: A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion.

For grasping the cultural fascination with heaven, perhaps nothing compares to two recent best-selling novels about the afterlife: Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones and Mitch Albom’s The Five People You Meet in Heaven. The Lovely Bones was published in mid-2002. Sebold’s publisher originally planned to print 35,000 copies. Three weeks later The Lovely Bones was already in its 11th printing. It has now sold over 3 million copies.

In his 2003 review of The Lovely Bones in the New York Review of Books, Daniel Mendelsohn suggests that a way to measure reader engagement with any book is to count the number of customer reviews on Amazon.com. Eight months after its publication, The Lovely Bones had received 842 reviews, far more than other popular books. Two years later this number has grown to an astonishing 2,124. The Five People You Meet in Heaven is on a similar path. Out for little more than a year, it has already received 957 customer reviews. It appeared near the top of the New York Times bestsellers list the same week it was released and has remained there for 59 straight weeks. And an ABC-TV dramatization of it aired December 5.

How do we account for such success? Michael Pietsch, an executive with Little, Brown, publisher of The Lovely Bones, attributes part of the novel’s surprising popularity to Sebold’s imaginative portrait of heaven. The same is almost certainly tine for The Five People You Meet in Heaven. But these two novels are not only beneficiaries of the contemporary interest in heaven. Their creative portrayals of the afterlife also fuel our fascination.

In both novels, the main character is killed in the first few pages. Sebold begins with chilling tragedy. A dog comes trotting home with a strange-looking bone in its mouth. Soon everyone in the Philadelphia suburb knows that a little girl, Susie Salmon, has been raped and murdered. Albom’s character, Eddie, is an unassuming maintenance worker at an amusement park who meets his demise in the predictably heroic fashion of a Hollywood script: he dies trying to save a little girl from a runaway ride.

Both novels take their characters to a personalized heaven made especially for them. Susie’s heaven is the culmination of a 14-year-old’s most fervent desires. There is a high school just like the one she never got to attend except that all the boys behave themselves, and the textbooks are limited to Susie’s favorite reading material: Seventeen, Glamour and Vogue. Along with soccer fields and friendly dogs, heaven has an ice cream shop, where peppermint-stick ice cream is always in season. The most important place in Susie’s heaven is a pretty gazebo where she can watch those she has left behind: her shattered father obsessively attempting to solve her murder, her stoic mother trying to escape a "ruined heart" through "merciful adultery," her baby brother struggling to understand that the word "dead" means Susie is never coming back.

In Albom’s novel. Eddie wakes up in heaven and meets a succession of five people carefully selected just for him. Eddie’s heavenly guides show him the true significance of his earthly life. They reveal that we are all connected. Our lives overlap in surprising ways. Seemingly inconsequential acts of sacrifice and love impact others in ways we could never imagine. It is the well-loved theme of the film It’s a Wonderful Life. Albom makes it his own by emphasizing that the purpose of life can be discovered only in an afterlife. The first person Eddie meets in heaven makes this clear. He explains, "Each of us was in your life for a reason. You may not have known the reason at the time, and that is what heaven is for. For understanding your life on earth."

This is a contemporary twist on the traditional notion that earth is but a school preparing us for heaven. Now the roles are reversed. Heaven exists for the purpose of shedding light on the meaning of our earthly existence.

There are of course some potential problems with such portraits. Observing Susie and Eddie in their own personalized versions of paradise, we witness the ultimate extension of designer handbags, designer coffee, even designer cars. The convergence of consumerism and individualism has so thoroughly shaped our lives that personal choice is not only our highest cultural value, it has become a central part of our eschatological imagination. In light of this, it is striking that after entering heaven both Susie and Eddie remain preoccupied with what they have left behind. Susie pines away in her little gazebo, and Eddie explores the mystery of his life on earth. The similarity of their experiences suggests the influence of the most popular cultural term for heaven -- the rather flimsy afterlife. The word implies a residual, antecedent existence -- a half-life merely left over from our primary existence on earth.

Why is this the favored term? Perhaps because embedded in every dream of life beyond death lies the threat of discontinuity. Will I still be me on the other side of death? Will I still possess the memories, desires and affections that made my earthly life unique? If not, how is heaven different from extinction? Contemporary people long for the tangible and specific -- for soccer fields and peppermint ice cream -- not merely as promises of future reward but as a way to emphasize continuity. It is better to risk an eternity of heartrending nostalgia than suffer the loss of personal identity. We crave a heaven that will validate, not repudiate, all we have been before.

This concern about identity sheds some light on why many parishioners find little comfort in strictly theocentic portraits of heaven. A few months ago, a man who had lost both his wife and son to cancer spoke up in a Bible study group: "I remember hearing a preacher say that we would recognize our families in heaven but we would not have any family relations. They would be familiar, but we wouldn’t share intimately as we had done on earth. And I thought to myself, How awful! I would hate to pass my son or my wife on the street in heaven and then go back to my own little house. I know this is a terrible thing to say, but if that is true, then heaven sounds a lot like hell to me."

He was obviously looking for some guidance, but I had no idea what to say in response, having little understanding of the fullness of Christian hope from which to draw. I wish now I had simply assured him that heavenly union with God will not wipe out our essential identities. Every part of us worth saving -- every relationship worth preserving -- will be mercifully affirmed. This experience taught me that if I present heaven only as an abstract realm where we are lost in wonder, love and praise before God, I may have said what is most important, but I have not said enough.

The reluctance of clergy to help parishioners imagine the fullness of heavenly society results in a one-dimensional idea of paradise -- a kind of never-ending Sunday school. On the way home from a youth beach trip, a 15-year-old admitted that he dreaded the thought of heaven. "Aren’t there other ways of saying thank you to God than just singing hymns?" he asked. "If we’re just going to sing God’s praises, heaven is going to get boring." If, as a pastor, I have conveyed heaven to my congregation in a way that fails to evoke anticipation and delight, then I have failed to describe it appropriately. And despite their tendency toward the saccharine and the sentimental, Sebold and Albom succeed on precisely this point: they create for their readers an emotional connection to heaven. They present heaven as an actual place one might want to go.

One of the ways they do this is by recasting heaven in images appealing to a culture enamored with the therapeutic. When Susie enters her paradise, she is met by a deceased social worker named Hannah who serves as her "intake counselor." Later, Susie discovers a kind of victims’ support group for all the girls who have been killed by her murderer. In Albom’s novel, Eddie’s pilgrimage through the five stages of heaven is a journey of self-discovery, an eternal program of personal development.

As with therapy, the first step in moving forward in eternity is to make sense of the past. Susie must accept the implications of her tragic death for her and her family. Eddie must wrestle with the apparent meaninglessness of his earthly existence. For a culture deeply imbued with Freudian assumptions, it should be no surprise that the healing necessary for eternal redemption is understood as a coming to terms with one’s past.

As Susie and Eddie struggle with the past, readers are offered consolation. One of the lessons Susie learns in heaven is that the assumption that we are separated from loved ones is untrue: "The truth was very different from what we learned in school. The truth was that the line between the living and the dead could be . . . murky and blurred." These words could have been written as a direct response to the question "How far is heaven?" Sebold assures us that it is much closer than we think. Her novel, published six months after the nation watched the deaths of September 11 over and over on its television screens, bore a powerful message.

Death, of course, is not the only thing that brings us grief. We also mourn our failure to live authentically and fully. Rendered anonymous by faceless corporations and disintegrating communities, people are no longer sure their lives have significance. George Steiner describes this spiritual malaise as a "core-tiredness," the loss of "our capacity to hope, to truly speak in the future tense." Part of the cultural fascination with the perfected future state of heaven stems from our reaction to this loss. This is the point where Albom offers reassurance. He consoles us with the idea that the true significance of every person will finally be revealed in the afterlife. This will happen as we are reunited with those we have loved on earth, reminisce together, and finally discover just how lightly (and permanently) the ties of earthly love are bound.

And perhaps this is where the reticent, slightly embarrassed mainline clergy might clear their throats and enter the conversation. They have assumed for too long that when it comes to heaven, silence is the only viable option, given the overly explicit speculations of popular piety. They have failed to imagine alternatives. They can restate the Christian belief in heaven in a way that invites people to consider it anew. They can bring traditional themes forward, presenting them afresh to a culture already intrigued with heaven.

How can this be done? First, by considering the deep desires that fuel the present-day fascination. Karl Barth once instructed preachers. that their goal should be to press through surface concerns in order to address something deeper in the hearts of their hearers. This deeper concern is the question that will not leave them alone, the "incurable wound" that cuts close to the bone of human existence. It is also, Barth reminds us, the place where God addresses each of us through the death and resurrection of Christ.

A robust theology of heaven for our time would attempt two things: It would articulate the yearning beneath the culture’s preoccupation with heaven, and it would seek to address this yearning with the hope that arises from the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

With Sebold and Albom as guides, one can dig deeper into people’s desire for heaven. The desire is not merely a wish to survive death or to be compensated for earthly struggles. It is more substantial, more vital than that. It is also timeless -- not so different from the "immortal longings" evoked by Shakespeare or the anxious concerns John Calvin discerned in his parishioners. It is a desire for true fulfillment, an indescribable fullness that will somehow make sense of the emptiness of our existence.

What is different is that people are likely to interpret this desire through the dominant cultural metaphor of our age -- the therapeutic. So when they experience this universal, timeless yearning, they are likely to envision the therapeutic ideals of deep consolation and genuine human flourishing -- two worthy goals that the forces of this world and the conflicts in our hearts do not seem to allow.

Christians can help people recognize that embedded within this desire is a longing for God. The desires to be consoled and ultimately to flourish are good. God has implanted them in our hearts. Yet they will remain unfulfilled if oblivion is our end. True consolation and genuine flourishing call for the merciful presence of God. This is the yearning that God addresses in the resurrection, the one event that is central to all Christian hope. As Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams reminds us, the message of the risen Christ is not only "I am risen" but also "I am with you." Thus, at the point where our yearning is most acutely felt, we also receive the promise that Jesus’ resurrection is the sign of our own, that those who "hunger and thirst" will ultimately be satisfied.

This is why one can’t help noticing that missing from these two novels is the central character -- God.

That is a troubling omission, and it represents in part an indictment of Christians. When there is more talk of heaven in novels, television shows and pop songs than in sermons, Christians must shoulder some of the blame for the fact that visions of life beyond death fail to include God.

It is also a sign of how thoroughly contemporary culture has misunderstood the essence of human flourishing. Augustine puts the Christian alternative best in his oft-quoted words at the beginning of the Confessions. "O Lord," he prayed, "you have made us for yourself, and our heart is forever restless until it rests in you." With this prayer, Augustine points to the summum bonum of both this world and the next: not the only good, but the highest, the one that gives life to all the rest. On earth and in heaven, we thrive and grow ultimately in relationship to God. People need this reminder. They need to consider the possibility that their desire for heaven is a kind of homesickness, a restlessness of soul that will remain unfulfilled until we are united with the One who created us -- the One who remains the source of all true consolation and genuine flourishing.

I believe our culture is ready to hear this message. Perhaps, as Paul put it, they are even "standing on tiptoe." For me, the only question that remains is whether I will be too embarrassed to tell it.

Don‘t talk nonsense: Why Herbert McCabe Still Matters

Books Reviewed:

Law, Love and Language. By Herbert McCabe, O.P. Continuum, 215 pp..

God Matters. By Herbert McCabe, O.P. Continuum, 264 pp.

God Still Matters. By Herbert McCabe, O.P., edited by Brian Davies, O.P. Continuum, 256 pp.

God, Christ and Us. By Herbert McCabe, O.P., edited by Brian Davies, O.P. Continuum, 224 pp.

Though he was one of the most significant English theologians of the 20th century, influencing such figures as Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, philosopher Alasdair Maclntyre and literary critic Terry Eagleton, Herbert McCabe, OP. (1926-2001), has had relatively little impact in the U.S. That may be about to change with the republication of two of his early books, Law, Love and Language and God Matters, and the posthumous publication of a collection of essays, Cod Still Matters, and a book of sermons, Cod, Christ and Us.

Those of us on this side of the Atlantic have every reason to be glad. McCabe’s theology merits attention not only because of its wit (‘The reason why it is hard for me to envisage a Coke and frankfurter becoming the body of Christ is that I have difficulty imagining them as food in the first place’) but also because of the care and precision with which he treats difficult questions. Theology needs such precision of language if it is going to do what McCabe thinks it should do: theology "is not concerned with trying to say what God is but in trying to stop us talking nonsense."

McCabe joined the Dominican order, the Order of Preachers, in 1949 at age 23. Having studied chemistry and philosophy at Manchester University, he was ready for the rigorous training he received under the tutelage of Victor White and other Dominican scholars. From his teachers and from his own careful reading of Aquinas, McCabe learned that there "is no God who is a being, an item in the universe, a rival person; there is just the unknown beyond and behind the whole universe itself, the mystery at the heart of my being myself. In Christ, says St. Thomas, we are united to God as to an unknown."

The next two decades were a time of rapid cultural change. The situation in Northern Ireland was increasingly tense. Liberation theology was beginning to blossom in the Third World. The tragedy (and the sin, from McCabe’s perspective) of the war in Vietnam loomed on the horizon. By 1965, when McCabe became editor of New Blackfriars, the Dominican journal of culture and philosophy, he had begun to combine his knowledge of Aquinas with a commitment to radical politics on behalf of the poor -- a kind of politics he learned from both Marx and Jesus. He was sacked as editor of New Blackfriars in 1967 for remarking in one of his widely anticipated monthly editorials that the church "is quite plainly corrupt." After his reinstatement three years later he began his first editorial, "As I was saying before I was so oddly interrupted."

Christianity is not just about saving souls, McCabe insisted, recalling Aquinas’s claim that "my soul is not me." Humans are embodied creatures, and God’s future kingdom will be no less bodily. And for McCabe, ethics is not about distinguishing between right and wrong -- a model still popular in areas like medical ethics and Catholic moral theology. Ethics, rather, is more like literary criticism. It helps us to grasp and thus live the deeper meaning of our embodied lives, lives which find their fulfillment in sharing the life, the bodily life, of Jesus.

In the late 1960s McCabe challenged the influence of situation ethics (see Law, Love and Language, first published in 1968). For the situationists, moral rules are simply rules of thumb, rules which should be broken in favor of doing the loving thing in the concrete situation. Love trumps any rule. Situation ethics opposes any absolutist ethic that might say, for example, "It is always wrong to lie no matter what the situation." Obviously, said the situationists, one should not lie habitually; nevertheless, in some situations, lying is the most loving thing to do. For example, it is right to lie in order to save Jews from the Nazis. (Most of the time the arguments weren’t about lying but about sex,)

McCabe’s response to this approach to ethics shows the importance he gave to language. He notes with regard to the language of moral absolutes that "it is quite important to notice that being absolutely wrong is not the same as being very very wrong. A man might hold that lying is absolutely wrong while at the same time regarding it as often a rather trivial offense. All that ‘absolutely’ says is that whatever makes it wrong is independent of circumstances." Whether these kinds of absolutes exist was (and still is) precisely the debate.

It is true, McCabe says, that love is a basic moral concept. And he agrees that the word "love" is in some sense related to context. What counts as a loving act and how we recognize one will depend on our own biographies -- whether, for instance, we were loved as a child. "Love" is a word one learns to use over the history of one’s life, and in this respect it is unlike the word "tree." Once you’ve got "tree" down, you’ve got it.

Yet there is one crucial qualification McCabe wants to make. There must be something the word "love" can never mean if the word is to have any meaning at all. McCabe compares this view of words to the place of dogma in the Catholic Church. "It must be possible for a Christian to say ‘I don’t know how they will be formulating Christianity in the 24th century, but at least I know they won’t be Arians or Nestorians."’ Similarly, there must be some kinds of human behavior which could never be called "loving" if the language of love is to remain meaningful.

He thinks killing children is a good candidate for being that something which can never be called loving. However one describes an act -- and every act will have a multitude of relevant descriptions -- if the description "killing children" applies to it, then we can know the act isn’t loving.

A second critique McCabe makes of situation applies to any type of quandary ethics, which focuses on the moral rightness of individual acts. (Quandary ethics is practiced, for example, by Randy Cohen, resident ethicist of the New York Times Magazine.) Situation ethics says that all the relevant circumstances must be taken into account before an act can be called right or wrong. But how, McCabe asks, can we know when we have all the relevant information? How do we know where to draw the frame around a situation? Without absolutes we can’t know what love is, and without a frame we can’t know where the act in question ends.

These are not quaint reflections. In the context of Catholic moral theology, they anticipated John Paul II’s encyclical Veritatis Splendor in which the pope condemns Catholicism’s own version of situation ethics, proportionalism. Some acts, John Paul asserts, are intrinsically evil. No account of relevant circumstances can justify certain kinds of behavior. (The pope and McCabe would disagree, however, about which acts belong in this category. McCabe has in mind methods of war that kill children; the pope has in mind the use of birth control.)

McCabe wrote Law, Love and Language during the Vietnam war, and his reference to the killing of children reflects his awareness that dropping napalm on villages roasts children alive. We are currently in a situation in which the language of "war" and "terrorism" seems to be changing to suit the interests of those in power. Something is called "war" and something else "terrorism" in order to justify military actions or decide whether the Geneva Convention applies.

But McCabe’s point about the word "love" can be applied to "war." The language of war can be extended metaphorically, as in "war on drugs" and "war on poverty." But if there are not some things that can’t be called war, then the just war tradition becomes as hollow as "all you need is love." Before a war can be justified we have to be able to say it is a war. Is a war against a military tactic, like the war on terror, sufficiently war to be judged by just war criteria? McCabe’s approach to ethics helps us ask these kinds of questions.

If McCabe’s approach to ethics centers on questions of language -- how we use the word love and how we describe a situation -- even more so does his approach to questions about God. Talking nonsense in ethics can lead us astray. Talking nonsense about God can make us idolaters.

McCabe spent most of his life in Oxford at Blackfriars, the Novitiate of the English Dominicans and the intellectual center of the order. He continued to edit New Blackfriars, traveled to teach and preach, and instructed the novices. Most of the essays written in these years have been published in the books God Matters and God Still Matters. In these essays he wrote, "I am only trying to say two not very original things: that the only God who matters is the unfathomable mystery of love because of which there is being and meaning to anything that is; and that we are united with God in matter, in our flesh and his flesh." Not original, perhaps, but worth reiterating.

Since God is this mystery, we must be very careful about how we refer to God. Perhaps the greatest mistake a theologian can make is to talk about God as if God were a part of the universe, as if God were the biggest thing around.

In talking of such a mystery, of the "unknown beyond and behind the whole universe," all we have, it seems, are metaphors. It is clear that language about God is metaphorical when we say things like "God is a rock" or "God is a mighty fortress." But what about when we say, "God is angry" or "God changed his mind" or "God is sympathetic"? These words give us appropriate pictures of God, McCabe says, but the language cannot be taken literally.

God, for instance, cannot literally have compassion or sympathy. This does not mean that God is unsympathetic if by that we mean God is stoical. But words like "sympathetic" and "unsympathetic" cannot literally apply to God. If we think they do, we begin to turn our appropriate pictures of God into idols, mistaking the God beyond the universe for one of the gods in the universe.

To have compassion, McCabe reminds us, means to suffer alongside of Compassion makes up the gap that exists between people. But because God is not a part of the universe, there is no gap between us and God. "In our compassion we, in our feeble way, are seeking to be what God is all the time: united with and within the life of our friend."

Many recent theologians, especially process theologians, have been fond of critiquing "classical theism." They have asserted -- wrongly, according to McCabe -- that the God of the classical theists is a stoic God, impassible and immutable. Because these theologians have believed that we need a God who feels our pain, they have rejected the so-called static god of classical theism and opted for a god who is one agent among others, tirelessly at work within the world.

According to McCabe, this approach involves an illicit theological move. When the tradition has said that God is impassible it has asserted that God does not literally suffer; when it has said that God is immutable it has asserted that God does not literally change. But it is wrong to assume that if God does not suffer then God must be unsympathetic, or that if God does not change then God must be static. Such an analysis applies language too literally, McCabe thinks, and is idolatrous.

McCabe reminds us that we do not need to reimagine God. We need to remember that classical Christianity gives us a way to talk about God’s suffering. God walked dusty roads, sweat, ate and drank (with sinners), was tortured, and died a brutal death on a cross. This is all tine of God because it is true of the man Jesus. We do not need to imagine a God who feels our pain because God really did feel it.

The dual emphasis on God’s utter inaccessibility to our language and on the literal suffering of God in the person of Jesus marks almost every page of McCabe’s essays. The theological point is not easy to grasp, but it is the whole point of the incarnation:

Part of the doctrine of the incarnation is precisely that Jesus was and is a human person; the other part is that this same identical person was and is divine. The adjectives ‘divine’ and ‘human’ express what Jesus is (his nature), the name ‘Jesus’ refers to who (which person) he is. In virtue of his human nature certain things can be asserted or denied about Jesus; in virtue of his divine nature certain other things can be asserted or denied of him, but all these assertions are about one person (God Matters).

God lived a human life, God died on a cross. God felt our pain.

September 11,2001, did not present a new situation for the world that required a rethinking of God. It should have sent us searching for theological clarity, the kind of clarity given by McCabe, who describes the God who created the world out of nothing and who suffered in the world as the man Jesus, the God about whom it is easy to talk nonsense if you are not careful.

Those who knew McCabe best say that he was a preacher at heart. Appropriate for a member of the Order of Preachers, every aspect of McCabe’s work was a kind of proclamation. Whenever he challenges our language about ethics, whenever he reminds us that God is a mystery hard to talk about but made visible in Jesus Christ, whenever he is performing this task of carefully expositing the faith, McCabe is fulfilling his vocation as a Dominican.

He was also a real preacher, a man who crafted sermons with exquisite care, harnessing the sometimes complicated debates among theologians to present the mystery of the gospel in language both simple and beautiful. God, Christ and Us contains 27 sermons that are worthy models for preachers, who stand on thc front lines of theological discourse.

When preachers find that time is running out or when they get lazy, they run the risk of talking theological nonsense. McCabe’s sermons are examples of ways to talk about God so listeners can come to see the incomprehensible mystery of God as profoundly good news.

In a sermon on the Trinity, for instance, he suggests that our listening to talk about the Trinity is like a child listening to conversation in a room full of grown-ups. The adult conversation is peppered with humor, wit and irony. The child hears the adults laugh and knows this banter has some kind of purpose. She knows they are not mad. But she is baffled by what is going on. The child has not yet entered the lives of adults so as to understand their jokes. "The child is on the way to sharing the life of her parents who made her. We are all on the way to sharing the life of God who made us." Though often perplexed, we can sometimes glimpse what this adult life with God will he like:

Just as the child gets glimpses of’ what adult life can be from the interest that grown -- ups take in her, so all human beings can get glimpses of what divine life can be from the interest that God takes in us. That interest, that care and attention, is the whole story that is told in the Bible, from the creation of humankind to the sending of God’s son to be one of us, to die for us, to be raised from the dead, and to send his Spirit of love and joy amongst us (God, Christ and Us).

More than one of McCabe’s sermons ends with something like this summary of the heart of the Christian faith: "For God the Father, through his Son, is even now sending us the Holy Spirit so that we shall ourselves live that life of love and joy for eternity."

That formula returns us to the main point of McCabe’s ethics. Ethics does more then help us make choices in difficult situations; it helps us to discover the deep meaning of life, a meaning deeper than our superficial wants and desires. The job of ethics is to aid us in discovering and living out the deepest desires of our fleshly, human hearts. And that deepest desire, the end of all our lives, turns out to be nothing other than sharing the life of God available to us through the body of the man Jesus and the Spirit whom he sent. A great mystery, yes; nonsense, no.

God in Evolution

While controversies over evolution continue to arise in some sectors of American Christianity, most mainline Christians have made their peace with Darwin. We may not grasp all the nuances of the scientific debate, but we have concluded that evolutionary theory is good science and therefore must be compatible with good theology. Darwin’s name doesn’t send chills up our spines. We are theistic evolutionists: we believe that natural selection is evidently part of God’s method of shaping the natural world.

But I suspect that the compatibility of evolutionary science with Christian theology is more often asserted than explored. I, for one, do most of my thinking about science out of one mental box and my thinking about religion out of another. On questions about evolution, the origin of life and the future of the planet, I look into the science box. On questions about God, salvation, theology and ethics, I turn to the religion box. While I think that the contents of the two boxes are compatible, I rarely try to work out the terms of their relationship.

Perhaps that’s because the contents of the two boxes are, when mixed, still combustible. When theology faces off against the account of the world set forth by evolutionary biology, God’s goodness and power and God’s plans for the future seem to be called into question with new force.

For instance, knowledge of evolutionary history raises questions of theodicy in an especially disconcerting way. Evolution reveals a vast history of unfathomable waste, loss, extinction, suffering and death in the natural world. What has God been up to all these millennia? And what is God up to now? If we believe that God oversees creation, then God’s way of doing it through evolution seems strange and even appalling.

Over the 4.5 billion years of our planet’s existence, 98 percent of species have become extinct. Extinction is written into the pattern of life. What does it mean, then, to talk about a God who cares for "each sparrow that falls"? How can we think of God’s care for the world in light of the millions of years of suffering and death that have been a feature of evolution in the natural world?

While traditional theology separated "human evil" from "natural evil," I would venture to guess that for most Americans, the category of natural evil is a strange one. We understand nature as perhaps neutral or even good. Human evil is obvious, but is a tsunami or an earthquake, even while causing terrible effects, evil?

Evolutionary biology intensifies this problem because it connects humans to the natural world. We stand not outside of nature observing it but inside of it, an extension of the tree of life. Biologically speaking, we are animals, and our development as animals comes out of a slow process and deep connection to all of life. The field of evolutionary psychology is demonstrating great-ape behavior so similar to human behavior that even some of our cherished "human" attributes like peacemaking and expressions of selflessness might be attributed to our animal selves. We may be, as the psalmist says, "a little lower than the angels," but we are also, literally, beasts. Understanding humans as connected inextricably to nature makes it very hard to distinguish human evil from natural evil, because we cannot distinguish the human from the natural. Human evil is natural evil. As Lutheran theologian Ted Peters puts is, "We inherit evil from the tree of life."

If that’s the case, I would be tempted to set aside the category of evil altogether, as observers such as Richard Dawkins have done.

It might seem strange to use the term evil to describe the struggle for survival among animals that we see in evolutionary history, but Peters thinks such a label is necessary if we are to hold the human and animal worlds together--which is something we must do given the insights of evolutionary science. And if we refrain from using the category of evil in talking about the natural world, Peters says, we will end up in the intellectual position of having to view horrendous events in the human world--genocide, for example--as the natural product of evolutionary struggle and natural selection.

The notion that God oversees creation and is leading it toward redemption is deeply embedded in Christian language. Some modern defenders of Darwin--like Daniel Dennett, director of the Center for Cognitive Studies and professor of philosophy at Tufts University--argue that it is just such a notion of God that has to be discarded in view of evolutionary science. The processes of evolutionary development are simply too random, too intertwined with natural circumstances, for us to believe that an outside force, like God, is directing them.

But Robert Jenson, Lutheran theologian at the Center of Theological Inquiry at Princeton Seminary, suggests that such arguments are off target in that they operate with a view of God as external to the cosmos, acting on it from outside. This idea of God derives more from the Enlightenment than from Christianity. Christians, Jenson says, have traditionally conceived of the cosmos as contained in God. Holding to this conception of God, one can view natural selection not as a process separate from God but as a process that takes place in God.

The benefit of this approach is that God is not consigned to the gaps in scientific knowledge. While this view may not solve problems of theodicy, at least it does not pit theology against biology to see which has more explanatory power. Jenson’s formulation suggests that God may not oversee creation so much as work through it.

But how does God work through creation? The fact that suffering, pain, death and extinction are part of life in the evolutionary scheme--that the sacrifice of some creatures is necessary to the survival of others-remains a theological problem, but it is also an invitation to think more deeply about the nature of God’s power. To make sense of God’s role in this scheme, some theologians focus not on God’s directive power but on God’s self-sacrificing love in and for creation.

In the Christian understanding, God’s love shown in Jesus involves God’s own death and sacrifice for the sake of new life. Perhaps we can see this kind of self-sacrifice by God in the suffering of creation. Following this vein of thought, Denis Edwards, Catholic priest and a senior lecturer in theology at Flinders University and Adelaide College in Australia, says that the cross of Christ teaches us that God’s power is of a specific kind: "It does not destroy human integrity or natural processes, but brings life in and through them."

Still, evolutionary biology makes it hard to discern purpose or direction in creation. For some theologians, facing a universe that includes randomness and chance may require a shift in thinking about how God works. John Haught, Catholic theologian and professor of theology at Georgetown University, suggests that we think in terms of a God who offers "a wide range of possibilities that the world can realize, a universe of innumerable possibilities." Realization of any one possibility happens amid the play between God and creatures.

While in some ways this is a new and unfamiliar way of thinking about God, it is consistent with one key part of the scriptural tradition: in the Bible, God is the one who makes things new. God is the source of novelty. Evolutionary science, according to Haught’s way of thinking, shows us the dance between order and randomness by which novelty is produced.

Humans have their own special part in the creation of novelty, for we are a conscious part of the dance of order and randomness. Philip Clayton, a theologian at Claremont School of Theology, picks up on this dimension of evolutionary process and likens creaturely life to the unfolding of a jazz composition: God provides the motifs, but creatures (of various kinds, from the smallest to the largest) provide the original riffs.

The theological problem with going in this direction, of course, is that such a view leaves little sense of divine direction or action. Clayton argues that evolutionary biology severely limits what we can call divine action, though he believes that science does allow a small but significant space for interaction between creature and Creator. Nature can be "biologically constrained without being biologically determined," he says. He calls the divine-creature interaction "the divine lure." As evolution occurs, more complex structures emerge. And the more complex forms that emerge are not reducible to a mere compilation of the kinds that come before them. In the space between what is and what is becoming, God might be said to act.

Theologies that emphasize God as deeply involved in natural, open-ended processes seem better able to make sense of evolution than do the classical accounts of an omnipotent God. On the other hand, if Jenson is right, perhaps what is needed is a richer notion of the God in whom these processes occur. At the very least, substantial interaction between Christian theology and evolutionary biology is prompting new metaphors and new ways of thinking about God.

Perhaps the most tangible outcome of such interaction will be a new attitude toward the natural world. The drama of creation and evolution is being played out all the time, all around us, from the minute interaction between insects and plants to the vast realms of weather and climate. Perhaps we will learn to pay closer, more humble attention to our part in this drama. And as we contemplate the reaches of space and time, we can learn to say yet more earnestly with the psalmist, "What are we that You take thought of us?"

The Problem with Government Subsidies

A breakfast frequently served at my son’s school--where over half the children receive government-supported meals--consists of commercially produced French toast sticks and syrup. The list of ingredients on the package for this meal is as long as this paragraph. It includes not only partially hydrogenated soybean oil and high fructose corn syrup, but also more mystifying additives like gelatinized wheat starch, calcium caseinate, lecithin, guar gum and cellulose gum. The story of how these items arrive at a school cafeteria and are designated as food is a long and complicated one involving the interaction of farmers, government policy makers and the food industry.

The modern story of why we eat what we eat begins in the 1930s, when President Franklin Roosevelt faced the challenges of the Depression. He saw that many farmers were poor and that one in every five people in the country was undernourished. Farmers and other Americans were too Vulnerable, he believed, to the cycles of boom and bust. When crop production was high, prices were too low to support farmers. When crop production was low, farmers didn’t have enough to feed themselves, let alone the rest of the nation.

Farmers’ vulnerability was the impetus for Roosevelt’s reform. "An unprecedented condition calls for new means to rescue agriculture," Roosevelt said as dust storms devastated fields in Oklahoma. The program included a subsidy system to ensure farmers’ income and to "reduce the gap between huge surpluses and disastrous shortages." This system was designed to create greater reserves of food that could "help iron out extreme ups and downs of price." Originally more than 100 distinct crops qualified for support.

When Roosevelt signed the Agriculture Adjustment Act and Farm Relief in 1933, he believed he was saving the family farm. At the time, 21 percent of Americans earned their living from farming and one in four Americans lived on a farm. Today that number is less than 2 percent.

In the decades that followed, the industrialization of farming changed the subsidy system dramatically. In the 1970s, under Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz, farm policy sharpened its focus on creating cheap raw materials. It turned farmers from tenders of the land into managers of agribusinesses. Due largely to Butz’s reforms, today the bulk of farm subsidies go to producers of only five crops: wheat, soybeans, corn, cotton and rice, and the food economy is based on processed foods and additives derived from corn.

The subsidy program is not so much a means of stabilizing family farms as a way of supporting agribusinesses. Seventy percent of the $21 billion in subsidy payments goes to 10 percent of farmers. In 2005, Riceland Foods Inc. received almost $16 million. Some family farms receive as much as $700,000. Eighty percent of eligible farmers receive an average of $704. In other words, a lot of the money goes to subsidize a very small number of farmers.

American farmers are, as Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma, puts it, "the most productive humans who have ever lived." A small number of farmers grow the food that feeds a nation and many other people around the world. Yet we do not eat much of the food they grow in the form in which they grow it. More than two-thirds of farm products go into livestock feed, and much of the rest must be transformed through manufacturing into the products we consume.

The rise of processed food is linked to what the surgeon general has called an "obesity epidemic" and the rise of lifestyle-related diseases such as heart disease and diabetes. Processed foods offer cheap calories and little nutrition. Our bodies have long been good at digesting apples but hardly know what to do with guar gum or partially hydrogenated vegetable oil. The problem has perhaps most directly affected the poor: calorie-rich food is inexpensive, while the price of flesh foods is increasing. As Kimberly Burge of Bread for the World aptly puts it, "Calories are cheap in the United States--it’s nutrients that are expensive."

We can see, then, how and why a rather unhealthy breakfast is prepared at my son’s school. The production of the wheat and corn in his breakfast are subsidized by the government. The elements are processed and then sold back to the government as part of a nationwide nutrition program.

Schools that attempt to bring high-nutrient food to children can find themselves scolded by the Department of Agriculture for failing to deliver enough calories. Activist and writer Bill McKibben is one of many who sees something wrong here. "Having ‘nutrition’ programs ride on the back of an unsound agricultural policy--basically, tossing the scraps of a crappy food system to the poor--is in nobody’s interest in the long run," he says.

Besides encouraging the use of processed food, the subsidy program has had surprisingly negative effects on rural areas. Supporters of subsidies--especially members of Congress-argue that subsidies bring much-needed funds into economically struggling areas. But subsidies do little to stop the trends affecting those areas. As large farms become, larger and small farms disappear, the population dwindles. Corporate farmers have little incentive to shop locally, so local economies begin to disappear too. Tamela Walhof, a regional organizer for Bread for the World, says many rural residents have to drive an hour and 15 minutes to the grocery store and bus their children two and half hours to school. Poverty in rural areas outpaces that of urban areas. And poverty in rural areas is more intractable--90 Percent of persistently poor counties (counties with high poverty levels for 30 years or more) are rural.

The subsidy program is not only problematic for Americans. It also disrupts the global food economy. By selling corn below cost in the 1990s, the U.S. destroyed about a third of Mexican agriculture, putting a million Mexican farmers out of business. Not incidentally, Mexican immigration to the United States increased 123 percent over the same period. A change in the U.S. pricing and subsidy system might not make enormous differences for small farmers worldwide, but with many of the world’s farmers living on less than $1 per day, small differences turn out to be significant. The World Trade Organization has repeatedly reprimanded the U.S. for its practice of subsidizing cotton growers, and it has given Brazil and other countries the right to retaliate.

Finally, the current system does not put a priority on environmental protection or on sustainable agriculture. Industrialized farming means that land is worked harder than it should be. Soils are depleted and the water supply undermined. Perhaps most disturbing, the agricultural system rests, as Pollan observes, "on a sinking sea of petroleum." Food is transported an average of 1,500 miles from the place where it is grown to where it is eaten. Farmers rely on petroleum for pesticides, fertilizers and manufacturing.

Many of these issues were discussed when Congress debated the farm bill last year. It was evident then that an increasing number of people see the subsidy program as an untamed monster. Major reports on the topic appeared in Time, the Washington Post and the New York Times. Yet legislators have little incentive to enact major reforms. What senators in their right minds would oppose subsidy payments that bring money to their regions and their constituents?

One of the reform proposals most hotly debated in the Senate, but ultimately defeated, was the Lugar-Lautenberg Amendment, which would have shifted subsidies to fruit and vegetable growers and cut overall spending on subsidies in order to shift money to conservation, biofuel and nutrition programs. The amendment would have replaced a number of subsidies with an insurance program for farmers. Several other amendments--also defeated--would have capped payments to individual farms (the proposed caps ranged from $250,000 to $750,000). In the end, debate yielded very little in the way of reform.

The exact nature of the reauthorized farm bill has yet to be decided. Disagreements in the Senate and the House as well as disagreements between Congress and the White House make the most likely scenario an extension of the 2002 farm bill for at least a year. This could very well mean that even the small number of reforms and slightly increased funding levels for nutrition fought for in the 2007 legislation will not be enacted.

In earlier years, when mainline churches and parachurch organizations like Bread for the World lobbied on the farm bill, they emphasized the importance of nutrition programs. During debate on the 2007 farm bill, however, they took a broader approach. They urged a change in the commodity payment system, arguing that subsidies should go to smaller farms and smaller farmers. They also wanted an end to the trade-distorting subsidies that have devastating consequences on people worldwide. And they wanted to see a redistribution of funds to address conservation, nutrition and global hunger. Leslie Woods of the Washington office of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) says that church groups are now grappling with the lack of success in their reform effort.

Daniel Imhoff, author of Food Fight: A Citizen’s Guide to a Food and Farm Bill, thinks the debate on farm policy would be more productive if nutrition programs were taken out of the farm bill. The equity and benefits of the subsidy system would be clearer if legislators did not negotiate nutrition programs at the same time that they discussed farm policy. As it is, legislative bodies are "held hostage," he says, with some legislators arguing, "If you don’t support my region’s subsidies, we won’t support your region’s nutrition programs." Woods agrees, arguing that the food stamp program helps everyone--it is not an issue that should divide rural areas from urban areas.

Woods, Imhoff and McKibben all argue for a dramatic change in the way that subsidies are allocated. Subsidies should be redirected, McKibben says, toward small farmers and new farmers. "At this point we grow far more corn and soybeans than we need, and far less good food than we should; we have far too few people on the farm; and it’s all the result of government policy favoring industrialized agriculture."

McKibben proposes that church groups, which have long been interested in food and hunger issues, start to take malnutrition seriously and link up with farmers’ markets and local-food movements in order to begin to create a more equitable system for the distribution of healthy food. Church and parachurch organizations are uniquely poised to make the local, national and global connections that need to be made to create real reform. They have congregants who are educated about world hunger and who are active in local communities.

Some of the most useful proposals come in the form of pilot programs that can be groomed to fit local circumstances, local farmers and local consumers. Such experiments include support for organic farming, for a greater diversity of crops, for changing distribution systems and for supplying nutritious food to institutions. Churches and nonprofit organizations can also be important in this effort because they can offer small grants and loans to support not only direct food services (food pantries and soup kitchens, traditionally), but also the development of sustainable agriculture.

If there were any successes in the debate over the 2007 farm bill, they came in the development of what Imhoff calls literacy. People all over the country started to debate farm policy. "We succeeded in changing the debate," Woods says. "Folks in congregations are more knowledgeable than they were about the effect of farm policy on both local and global markets. Even though we were not able to find a satisfying answer to the problems posed by farm legislation, the conversation is continuing."

To face the challenges of contemporary farming, Americans have to think both locally and globally. We have to connect the food put on our tables and in our lunch sacks to the fields we drive by on our vacations and to fields and feedlots we will never see. The challenge of creating an equitable farm policy that serves farmers and consumers is just as great as it was in the 1930s. The consequences of not facing up to the challenge may be even more dire.

A Curriculum on Dating and Marriage

I’m in a high school classroom talking to Lisa. (I’ve changed her name and the names of all the students mentioned in this article.) Lisa’s hair is dyed black and purple, and she has numerous piercings, including one in her lower lip that bounces as she talks to me.

“I broke up with my boyfriend because of this class,” she says.

The class is Introduction to Psychology, and the school is Redlands High School in Redlands, California. Lisa’s teacher is Char Kamper, who uses a curriculum called Connections that she developed to teach students about dating, relationships and marriage.

“When did you break up with him?” I ask.

“Three days ago,” Lisa says, and then she looks me straight in the eye. “I realized he only called me when he wanted one thing.”

Students tell me that one of their favorite pages in Connections is “The Breakup Page.” I turned to it expecting to find principles, rules or guidelines for breaking off a relationship, maybe “Ten Steps to Breaking Up.” Instead I found a list of questions with space for students to write answers:

When it isn’t working out.

If you are the one choosing to end a relationship, what are some common feelings that you might struggle with before doing it?

If you are the one with whom someone has broken up, what feelings are associated with the experience?

Were your expectations about the other person or the relationship realistic?

Does the length of time you have gone out with a person make breaking up more difficult?

How could breaking up be handled in a way that showed genuine concern for the feelings of both partners? Tell how you would want someone to treat you in this situation.

Getting a plan...

Why is it often so difficult to make a decision to end the relationship?

Once the decision is made, why is it important to carry it out as soon as possible?

What are the advantages of choosing a time and place to end the relationship rather than letting things “just happen”?

Why is it important for the end of the relationship to be truly final?

These questions convey the power of Kamper’s curriculum and her classroom dynamic. She does not preach. She asks, inviting dialogue with teenagers by raising questions that suggest fundamental principles such as “listening is important,” “all people have feelings and deserve to be treated with dignity and respect,” and “significant decisions require planning.” Kamper provides on-the-ground, tangible activities for students to engage in, and she leaves space for them to reflect and come to their own conclusions. Kamper, who is a lifelong member of the Reformed Church and a graduate of Calvin College, calls her curriculum “values-based.” Privately she admits that she believes that her teaching is a mission field. “I see so many kids hurting. They have absolutely no moral compass, no way of finding their way through.”

The political and social context has gradually grown more complex over the 17 years that Kamper has been teaching at Redlands. While the divorce rate in the U.S. is at its lowest level since 1970, fewer people are choosing to get married, and the word marriage has become politically charged. A rallying cry for “traditional marriage” galvanized conservative voters in the 2004 election, even as a recent court decision in California legalized marriage for gay couples.

Public schools and school boards across the country continue to argue about sex education. The Bush administration insists on funding abstinence-only education even though studies question its effectiveness. Some educators insist that teaching students about the biology of sex is insufficient; we must also address the context of teens’ social relationships. Then there are the bare facts: one in five teen girls enters adulthood with a sexually transmitted disease, and one in five teenagers experiences violence in a relationship.

Oklahoma, the state with the highest divorce rate in the nation, responded to the crisis by implementing relationship training for its public high school students. The Oklahoma Marriage Initiative supplies copies of Kamper’s Connections to all of the state’s public high schools. Other states use Connections or Love U2, a popular curriculum that focuses on preventing teen pregnancy while teaching about all aspects of human relationships. Some states recommend relationship and marriage education (RME), some mandate it and still others provide money to make it happen. Does RME make a difference? Can it help young people make better choices?

Sarah Halpern-Meekin, a graduate student at Harvard University, became interested in RME when she was studying welfare reform in the 1990s. When the federal government implemented the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, it began to provide money to states to promote healthy marriages. This included RME classes in public high schools. With the help of a relationship questionnaire that helps gauge a person’s capacity for healthy, mature relationships, Halpern-Meekin is studying the impact of RME curricula in Oklahoma and Florida.

Initial results indicate that relationship and marriage curricula provide positive outcomes for students. Halpern-Meekin looks for gains such as improved communication skills, a better understanding of commitment and more maturity in relationship timing. All are difficult to quantify, of course, but students in both rural and urban areas showed improvement in these areas. A study by Scott Gardner of South Dakota State University also seems to confirm RME’s effectiveness. Researchers followed students for four years after their classroom experience and found that students who studied Connections were better at conflict resolution and more likely to say they would seek out premarital or marriage counseling than those who did not.

Gardner’s work also suggests that although Connections only rarely mentions sex, students with a better overall understanding of human relationships were less likely to engage in risky sexual behavior. The most positive gains in relationship maturity were in students raised in two-parent homes. This means, says Halpern-Meekin, that children who already have the strongest relationship skills, according to previous research, benefit from RME the most, while those from single-parent and divorced parents struggle more and respond less to interventions like Connections.

In Kamper’s classroom, even those from homes with divorced or single parents were reflecting on the issues raised by the curriculum. Amber, a tall, willowy sophomore with long hair and glasses, says her favorite pages of Kamper’s curriculum are titled “Problem People.” Here Kamper lays out types of behavior that cause problems: a tendency to wide mood swings, impulsiveness, lying and manipulating, inability to trust, highly controlling behavior and so on. “I think I might be a problem person,” Amber says, laughing.

Jessica, a quiet, mature senior, says that she will save page 35, “What Is Love?” forever, and give it to her little brother and anyone else she thinks will listen. At the top of the page, Kamper identifies three elements of “imitation love”: “overcontrolling,” “conditional” and “based solely on physical attraction.” Further down on the page, “genuine love” is described as “nurturing,” “unconditional” and “generous.” Jessica says that she sees “imitation love” everywhere, and it helps to believe that the genuine kind exists and that she can find it.

Other students are using Connections to think carefully about their futures. James sits at the back of the room diligently filling out his workbook. He tells me that he’s going to college and will major in criminal justice -- and that he’s never had a girlfriend but has seen his friends get into trouble with the girls they’ve dated. He hopes to avoid the same mistakes, and he says now he has the words to tell his friends why they get into trouble and maybe even how to get out of it.

Micah, a sophomore who has just moved to California from Texas, is using Kamper’s curriculum to help him think about a long-distance relationship. He read Kamper’s “Rate Your Relationship” checklist to his girlfriend over the phone.

“No way am I reading that list to my girlfriend,” a student named Josh fires back. When I ask him why, he says that Mrs. Kamper told the students that when people do these exercises together they often break up. He doesn’t want to break up yet.

Here are some of the questions:

Does your partner share similar interests with you?

Is the relationship growing stronger and moving forward?

Does your partner trust your decisions and behavior when you are apart?

Does your partner treat his/her family members well?

When you talk to friends or someone new, does your partner feel threatened?

Does your partner show respect for your feelings and ideas?

Can your partner handle disappointment or frustration without demonstrating physical aggression or violence?

One chapter of the curriculum directs students to find partners and get “married” for a few days. They can marry anyone -- inside the class or out, of a different gender or the same. The couple has to plan a wedding together, work out a budget, have children and get jobs.

Once married, the students “design babies.” Kamper has adapted this exercise from her days as a science teacher. The students have a handout with several pages of physical characteristics from eyebrow shape to skin color. Each “parent” flips a coin and uses the results to determine the appearance of the child, on the basis of dominant and recessive genes and a complex chart that Kamper gives them. The students then try to draw the baby they have designed. Implicit in this exercise is an understanding that you cannot predict what your baby will look like or act like and that two people participate in creating a child. Perhaps this seems like common sense, but in teenagers, common sense can be rare.

This is also a moment for Kamper to do the kind of teaching she has clearly mastered. She gets the students involved in an activity and then drops one-liners.

“Remember, when you have children, you don’t get to decide ahead of time who they are going to be.”

“Remember, a baby is not a little you. A baby is its own person.”

Most of the students in the sections I am observing tell me that they have partners in another class or even out of state or in another country. A few have partners in the class.

Peter and Joanna, for example, quickly work out a way to accomplish the assignment as they lightly joke with each other and enjoy each other’s company. But in front of them Christina and Ryan are flirting outrageously and arguing constantly. “Mrs. Kamper,” Christina complains loudly, “I want a divorce!”

“Tough luck,” Kamper says dryly. “You picked him. Work it out.”

Another youth in this class seems removed from all that is going on. He doesn’t have a partner, he tells me, looking away. He doesn’t even bother to flip the coin but randomly fills in blanks to assign hair color and chin shape to his imaginary, designed child. Clearly something about this assignment does not speak to him. Perhaps, for any number of reasons, it is difficult for him to see marriage and family as applying to his life.

This may be a pitfall of the marriage curriculum: not every student will get married, and no doubt some feel alienated by the very word marriage. But Kamper insists that “everyone needs relationship skills. Everyone needs to learn to listen to and work with others.” Furthermore, she says, 86 percent of these students will get married at some point in their lives, and most will do so with only a vague idea of what lies ahead of them.

Ironically, although Kamper repeatedly and explicitly tells her students that living together before marriage does not increase the chances of staying together after marriage (she cites a 75 percent divorce rate for live-in couples who later marry), this is the one message that students do not accept. According to Gardner’s study, they believe that living together improves the chances of a successful marriage even after they’ve participated in a relationships program.

While Kamper is thrilled to see evidence that her relationships curriculum reduces risky behavior, she insists that the curriculum is not a teen pregnancy reduction program, and she gets nervous when people start to test the curriculum for results. “It is helping kids with what they experience in their everyday lives. I’d hate for a school board somewhere to say, ‘Well, it doesn’t accomplish this or that objective,’ and stop using it. People who teach this program know it is helping kids.”

Kamper’s curriculum is designed for a secular classroom with students of diverse backgrounds, and although Kamper believes she is teaching students about God when she teaches them about love and values, she never crosses the boundary of her secular context. When her fellow Christians ask why she doesn’t teach in a context where she can be more explicit about her beliefs, she says: “I do this in a public school because here I can do the most good for the people who need it most.” Her curriculum provides a way to talk about values in a diverse, public landscape that must be sensitive to and respect religious differences.

Despite her conservatism, Kamper disagrees with some evangelicals as to how teens should learn about relationships. For example, instead of suggesting that teenagers should not date as many popular evangelical curricula do, she argues in favor of dating. “Dating is good practice,” she says, “and marriage is a very hard place to learn what you might have learned from dating.” She believes that parents and churches that rule out dating for their young people are afraid of sexuality and especially afraid that their own children won’t make it through the American sexual wilderness. Instead, she says, “You give kids arrows on the sidewalk. You tell them, ‘If you follow these, you’ll get there.”’

Now, with the help of a Lilly Endowment grant, Kamper and her daughter Shana have written a Christian curriculum called One, Two . . . I Do that identifies Christian principles that are key to healthy relationships.

Bromleigh McCleneghan, a Methodist pastor in Riverside, Illinois, is glad for the new product. Having studied relationship education for youth groups, she says that on one side of the spectrum there are abstinence curricula that demand adherence to an absolute set of practices. On the other side are carefully researched materials like Our Whole Lives, a joint effort by the Unitarian Universalist Association and the United Church of Christ that teaches an understanding of justice in relationships. What’s been lacking, however, is a curriculum that works in mainline youth groups where conservative, moderate and liberal voices need a common vocabulary to talk about human relationships. The Kampers’ One, Two . . . I Do meets this need.

As might be expected, One, Two is far preachier than its secular counterpart. Student lessons rely more on commentary than on the activities that make Connections come alive. Instead of the inviting blank spaces that draw students into responding and then discussing, One, Two has lengthy sections that tell rather than show the principles the curriculum is trying to teach. Char and Shana Kamper say that in creating One, Two they did not want to simply take the principles of Connections, “add God and stir.” They wanted to create a curriculum that is biblically based and rooted in Christian tradition. Yet “add God and stir” would have been more effective if it meant lecturing less and leaving more room for students to think and respond.

For mainline churches, the question is how and when to teach young people about relationships. A session of premarital counseling may be comprehensive and honest, but pastors know that their sessions with couples come too late to have much effect on a relationship; couples are usually only rubber stamping a decision they’ve already made.

At the same time, youth group leaders struggle to find an opportunity and a vocabulary to talk to young people about relationships. The real issue may be not political arguments about what marriage is but how in church, with children, youth and adults alike, we can teach people to forge strong, rewarding relationships.

Back in Char Kamper’s classroom, Lisa rolls her eyes and tells me she is finished with high school relationships anyway. “I don’t think I am ready to be that serious with someone,” she continues. “I think I need to wait.” Mrs. Kamper will be glad to hear it.

An Interview With Ron Hansen

Novelist Ron Hansen is known for working with a variety of themes and in a variety of genres. His first novels, Desperadoes (1979) and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (1983)--recently made into a film starring Brad Pitt--were set in the wild West. Mariette in Ecstasy (1991) is about a nun who receives the stigmata. Atticus (1996) retells the story of the prodigal son in contemporary North America. Hitler's Niece (2000) explores the dictator's peculiar romance with his half-niece. His latest book is Exiles, based on the life of poet and priest Gerard Manley Hopkins and his response to the shipwreck of the Deutschland, which carried five exiled Catholic nuns. Hansen teaches at Santa Clara University in California and is a deacon in the Roman Catholic Church.

How do you practice your faith?

I go to daily mass, and I pray the liturgy of the hours. I don't pray all the hours, but I do at least one a day. I mostly do evening prayer, because it is a time for recapitulating the day, seeing what has gone on and giving thanks or chastising myself, as the case may be. At Santa Clara Mission, I am often a lector and a eucharistic minister, and if a priest doesn't show up, then I can do a communion service as a deacon. I started going to daily mass at least 30 years ago. I've been going to mass at Santa Clara for longer than I have been teaching there.

What do you think about the resurgence of interest in the Tridentine mass?

I grew up with the Tridentine mass. When I was a teenager and the church started changing it, I thought it was a breath of fresh air. I liked the dialogue between the people and the priest, and I liked the mass in the vernacular so I could understand what was going on. It seemed much more like a supper than a sacrifice. The whole idea of the re-creation of the last days of Jesus' life and the supper comes forth so much more clearly in the new mass than in the Tridentine mass, in which the priest is praying privately and you are just involved in your own little private space. The difference for me is that the new mass puts more responsibility on the parishioners to actually know what is going on and to participate.

How has going to mass every day for 30 years shaped you?

The mass is so familiar in all of its movements that it is almost like meditation. I can drift off and at the same time know where I am. It's both a quiet time and a time of community. There are people in the pews whose faces I recognize, but whose names I don't know. Often I hear really good homilies, and I have often heard things that I can make use of in my fiction.

What kind of ministry do you do?

I was assigned to campus ministry at Santa Clara. My chief responsibility seems to have become preparing people for marriage and presiding at their ceremonies.

People talk a lot about the religious apathy of college-age Catholics. Is that what you find?

It depends on what group you are talking about. I think that most college students are really eager to talk about spirituality and about God and eager to have that in their lives. But this generation of Catholics--this generation of students in general--is incredibly busy. To some degree, spirituality has to fit into their schedule. When you get them out to a retreat, they really love the experience, but actually getting them to go is hard.

What kinds of things work with this generation to open them up spiritually?

They are very good at sharing, either talking to a spiritual director or in groups. They are very good at talking about their own lives. They are very close to each other and to their parents--a lot more so than I was. They talk to their parents on their cell phones at least once a day and talk to their friends five or six times a day. They are much more community-based than I was.

Do you see your writing and your ministry as connected?

For me, they are joined, and I think they are joined for my readers as well. Many of my readers are looking for some kind of spiritual nourishment and of course entertainment as well. My typical readers have had some kind of religion in the past, although they may not consider themselves religious now. But they have enough background to know what is going on. They get the fact that Atticus is the story of the prodigal son.

To entertain and to educate are the dual functions of any writer. I want people to notice God's actions in their lives and in the lives of others and to have sympathy for other people. I want them to see that there is something going on here that matters. I don't think you can do that by hitting people over the head. You have to slowly draw them into it.

In a sense, I am trying to proselytize by means of entertaining fiction. Fiction is ideally suited for this because it involves people in other worlds. It lets them see that world through a character's eyes. Then they find themselves making judgments about whether a character is acting properly or improperly.

Fiction, by its nature, asks ethical questions. As you are reading, you are constantly asking whether a character has done what you would have done or if the character has gone awry in some way. When you are reading, whether you are aware of it or not, you are offering advice to the character, and thus offering advice to yourself.

Aren't proselytizing and co-creating inherently different ways of looking at what a novel does?

No. That's where some Christian fiction goes wrong. It sets up a situation that's too pat, with good and evil too diametrically opposed. People are much more complicated than that. The other thing about that kind of fiction is that if you don't have an altar call at the end, people think it has failed. People should carry the thoughts of a book they've read around with them for a while and then move, ever so gradually, toward some new conviction.

Many of your books are about outsiders. How does Gerard Manley Hopkins, the focus of your latest book, Exiles, fit into that pattern?

I call the book Exiles because Hopkins felt that he had been exiled from his family and his community when he converted to Catholicism and became a Jesuit priest. At that time, a Roman Catholic was not allowed to have a fellowship at Oxford. Hopkins was one of the smartest guys there and a natural to go on to graduate school, but he had to forsake that because of his conversion.

Hopkins's parents were unhappy about his conversion as well, and in England there was a strong feeling that the Jesuits were the enemy of the crown. He felt ostracized. He was finally sent over to Ireland, where the people were pursuing home rule and thought of the British as the enemy. He actually wrote a poem called "Stranger" with the line, "To seem the stranger is my lot, my life." His family never visited him all the time that he was a priest. Some of his brothers wouldn't speak to him. Some of his old Oxford friends with whom he came into contact put him down and smirked about his religious commitments, and that must have been difficult.

How did you get interested in Hopkins?

I was a big fan of Dylan Thomas when I was in college. I read a biography of him and learned that he had been influenced by Hopkins, so I started reading Hopkins. I was entranced by his work, but I didn't really understand it. Even now when I read one of his poems, I feel like I am seeing new things every time. There is a source of endless pleasure and delight in researching him. A lot of people have noticed that you can't really solve his poems; they keep bringing up new ideas.

When people think of Hopkins they often think first of his faith. But he also wrestled with doubt.

I have a priest friend who points out that the opposite of faith is not doubt but certainty. I think God intended that--it is a way of making us creative instead of smug in our belief. God plants in us the seed to love and worship God, and the seed is enough to make us want to seek God out, but not enough to fully get there. That reaching, that striving, is what God is really interested in--that creative activity that all of us should pursue.

Who are the writers in your private canon?

I really love Gabriel García Márquez's 100 Years of Solitude. I think that Nabakov's Lolita is one of the best books ever written. And I love The Great Gatsby. There are a limitless number of great books out there.

What role does risk play in your fiction and in your faith?

Risk plays a very important role. That sense of creativity I spoke about earlier is based on risk, on pushing boundaries. When you take on a subject that isn't automatically appealing to people, you are taking a risk. When you start trying to create a world and convince people that it is special enough that they should keep on reading, that's a risk.

Most writers I know have a kind of orneriness at their core that makes it easier to deal with the risk factor. They say, "I don't care what you think. This matters to me, and you will find out if you just keep on reading that this is as special as I think it is."

Whenever you begin a project you are always afraid you are going to fall flat on your face. Almost all the writers I know are neurotic in some way about their writing. They present it to an editor just hoping that it is successful, and if it is, they feel they've gotten away with something.

Taking risks is important in religion too. Religion is a lot roomier than people think when they are looking at it from the outside. You gradually get a sense of confidence that God has a long leash. You are allowed to roam. God knows that you are coming back and you know that God will take you back, like the best of parents. Faith gives you a solid foundation, a bedrock, a way of returning.

Hopkins once wrote to somebody that he did truly want to see his poems published and that writers ought to have an audience. But then he said, "Christ is the only literary critic." For him, Christ was the only one who counted. If you are doing your best work and you are doing it for God, then whether you are well received or not matters a little less. Religion provides you with the solidity and the connection that you need to do creative work.

Cadets for Christ

Most of the 30 new staff members gathered at the United States Air Force Academy for orientation are in their 20s and 30s. Some are air force personnel and some are academy graduates. Some are veterans of the Gulf War, while others served in Iraq. A speaker is talking to them about leadership and character. Suddenly he says, "The academy has been isolated and has drifted away from standard air force practice. If you see anything that doesn’t jibe with standard air force practice, please question it."

He is no doubt referring to a recent series of scandals at the academy -- from indecent behavior by drunken cadets to poor handling of incidents of sexual assault. Apparently his comment is the new party line: the academy has been isolated too long; the time has come for integration into broader military standards and for a significant change in culture.

The most recent controversy, however, has nothing to do with violence or drunkenness among the cadets. The academy has been accused of tacitly and sometimes explicitly promoting evangelical Christianity, of allowing inappropriate proselytizing by faculty, instructors and cadets, and of creating an atmosphere hostile to those of non-Christian faiths or no religious faith at all.

Kristen Leslie, an assistant professor in pastoral care at Yale Divinity School, visited the academy in the summer of 2004 to observe basic training and help the chaplains respond to cases of sexual violence. A report by Leslie and academy chaplain Melinda Morton questioned the evangelizing that is occurring at the academy. In one instance, says Leslie, a Protestant chaplain at a worship service told cadets that if their bunkmates were not born again, they "would burn in the fires of hell."

At the same time, Mikey Weinstein, a 1977 academy graduate, was collecting evidence of more than 50 incidents of religious intolerance and inappropriate behavior by staff, faculty or cadets during his son’s time at the academy. Some of these incidents have been reported in the media. Air Force Academy football coach Fisher DeBerry once hung a sign in the locker room that said, "Team Jesus Christ." Another instructor handed out tracts to cadets who came to see him. A high-ranking officer taught his cadets a hand signal meaning "Jesus Christ" and called upon them to display it at various assemblies.

The last straw for Weinstein was the air force chaplain code of ethics, developed by the National Conference on Ministry to the Armed Forces, a private organization that supplies and accredits military chaplains. Although Weinstein agreed with one statement in the code, "I will not actively proselytize from other religious bodies," he objected to another, "However, I retain the right to instruct and/or evangelize those who are unaffiliated." In October 2005, following Weinstein’s complaints, the code was withdrawn for "further review."

Discouraged by this move, and by what he saw as paltry efforts at responding to an aggressive evangelical atmosphere, Weinstein filed a lawsuit citing the academy for severe, systemic and pervasive" religious discrimination.

There’s no doubting the evangelical atmosphere at and around the Air Force Academy. Looking out from the academy’s upper campus in Colorado Springs, one can see the 14,000-member New Life Church, pastored by Ted Haggerty. Evangelical groups meet regularly at the academy, and evangelical chaplains, who see the military as both a mission field and a stronghold of Christian values, outnumber their non-evangelical counterparts 12-1. As controversy about religion at the academy became more and more public, Focus on the Family jumped into the fray and created a video, shown at its headquarters, that attempts to frame the debate.

Colorado Springs is home to dozens of evangelical organizations whose members believe that they have a religious duty to shape and influence government and society. They see the military as a place where God, patriotism and a God-ordained social structure come together. The Air Force Academy seems to be that place: it actively recruits evangelical young people, and more than 85 percent of the cadets claim to be Christian.

In this atmosphere, the academy’s response to the accusations has been slow and tentative. The strategy of the academy and of the Department of Defense, revealed in an investigation led by Lieutenant General Roger Brady, himself an evangelical Christian, has been to respond to instances of alleged intolerance rather than to any systemic problem. Their reluctance is understandable. After all, previous attempts at reform have led to vigorous backlash from politicians and church leaders. And if the academy acknowledged that religious intolerance is systemic and involves abuse of power, then its leaders would also have to acknowledge their tenuous position in relationship to the First Amendment, which says that the government will not use its power to "establish religion."

This same amendment also calls for the "free exercise" of religion, and the tension between "establishment" and "free exercise" is at the heart of the debate. Some insist that the Air Force Academy must allow for free expression of religion and that telling someone about Jesus does not constitute establishment of religion. Others insist that in a government organization, free expression must always subordinate itself to the nonestablishment clause.

When interim guidelines for appropriate religious behavior in the air force were released last summer, U.S. Representative Joel Hefley (R., Col.) complained that individuals were being deprived of the ability to express their faith. "We don’t want to do something that keeps someone from living their faith or from expressing their faith," he argued. For evangelicals, the military is the perfect place for the expression of faith, a place where one’s duties to God and country come together. How can you ask young people to place their lives on the line and not ask them to consider questions of ultimate meaning and significance? How can you develop character and ignore religion?

But the opposition argues that with its emphasis on team unity and its role as an expression of government power, the military is no place for unbridled expression of religion, especially if such expression includes proselytizing, which undermines an atmosphere of integrity and unity in an organization with a diverse membership.

After criticizing the religious atmosphere at the academy, Morton received transfer orders to Japan. She resigned as chaplain in June. She says that when religious issues came to the surface at the academy, evangelicals took aggressive action to shape the discussion.

In all articulations of this problem, it was. . . represented as individual and personal conflicts over "opinions" about religion. By doing that, it becomes a question of personal offense, a territorial issue. We could never frame it as a question about the use of power (cadet hierarchy or faculty-cadet). We were not allowed to talk about evangelical staff proselytizing or about leaders who used their power to promote a particular religious ideology, but only to frame this as a problem between cadets. And we were not allowed to say that this was a problem that arose specifically out of the evangelical community even though every instance had to do with evangelicals.

Brady’s report notes a significant gap in perception: Christian cadets rarely perceive a problem, while non-Christian cadets cite instances of discomfort and alienation.

The academy’s creation of a training program, Respecting the Spiritual Values of All People, suggests that it is feeling some pressure to respond to criticism. RSVP went through more than 17 revisions before it was unveiled last spring. According to its developers, evangelicals objected to various aspects of the content. Morton remembers taking one version to two-star general Charles Baldwin, chief of chaplains for the air force, in the fall of 2004. She and a Franciscan chaplain had developed training material that included film clips from movies such as Smoke Signals, Schindler’s List and The Last Samurai. They wanted to give academy staff and cadets a look at various religious perspectives and then raise questions about behavior in a pluralistic environment, When they finished making their presentation, Baldwin asked, "Why is it, in your presentation, that the Christians never win?"

When the training program was finally developed, says Morton, the heart of it had been gutted. According to the Department of Defense report, cadets gave the training a poor review. "Of course they hated it," Morton says. "It was insipid. It was reduced to finger-wagging, a legalistic recitation."

Granted, the relationship between free expression and the nonestablishment of religion is complex. When the framers wrote the First Amendment, they were most concerned about the dangers of a church hierarchy linked to a state hierarchy. But since evangelical Christianity is largely a faith of the head, heart and mouth, questions of its accommodation and its effect on military atmosphere are difficult to track and evaluate. Evangelical faith is largely personal; evangelicals view themselves not as instruments of a church but as individuals freely expressing their faith. Its church hierarchies are often housed in organizations such as Focus on the Family and independent congregations instead of in denominations, and their relationship with government is more subtle and more private then that of mainline denominations. When observers note abuse of power and instances of inappropriate expression of faith, evangelicals like Brady can easily claim that the problem is a matter of a few isolated cases -- not a systemic problem or a problem of power.

To complicate matters, evangelicals (and other religious people) believe that the fullest expression of their faith is found in telling others about the gospel. Evangelism is the height of commitment and a primary duty. To suggest that they cannot proselytize is tantamount to suggesting they cannot practice their religion in the military Yet critics have suggested that evangelicalism has been accommodated by the academy to the detriment of unit cohesion and morale.

When I attended an orientation for new staff to observe an RSVP training session, I didn’t expect to see much change. Both Brady and Morton, who are at opposite poles of this issue, had expressed dissatisfaction with the training. Vickey Rast, a 1983 graduate, an officer in the Gulf War and an evangelical, began with a clip from the movie We Were Soldiers. The projector equipment was not working properly; the picture was dim and the sound muted, But a new message came through loud and clear: all military personnel are part of one team, one unit. Individuals set aside what separates them and choose unity over division. Rast ignored the series of power-point slides flashing various policies and regulations across the screen, and began to tell stories.

She moved around the room asking various airmen to stand up so that she could question them. Her method was interactive and engaging. She often repeated the goal of "unit cohesion and mission success," and referred to the problem of the misuse of power among faculty and staff, Insisting that power not be used to promote one religion over another.

"Fifty-one percent nonestablishment; 49 percent free expression," she said repeatedly as she tried to clarify the constitutional issues. She told the personnel-in-training that they are not ordinary folks, but representatives of a government that cannot back any one religion. As military personnel, their primary responsibility is to uphold and defend the Constitution. They cannot risk alienating a single member of their team; they cannot use religion to create divisions and undermine unity.

After the presentation, several staff members asked questions. One young man clearly did not like the message. Invoking the term political correctness, he insisted that the military was caving in to cultural forces that wanted to wash religion out of the public sphere. Bast insisted that political correctness is irrelevant, and that the issues are loyalty to the group and defense of the Constitution,

Another young man was bewildered. "Evangelizing is a huge part of my faith," he said. "It’s required by my religion."

"What’s your faith?" Rast asked. "I’m LDS," he said. Rast responded: "If you must proselytize in order to express your faith, you may need to reconsider your place in the military. When you put on that uniform, you speak for 300 million.

Despite consensus on the nature of the problem, there’s little agreement about how to handle it. Some believe that if constitutional requirements are clarified, cadets, staff, personnel and the leadership can act in accordance with those requirements. Others believe that the issue is an ignorance of religious plurality and would like to see the academy work to "dispel the ignorance" and "raise awareness" of world religions. A Phase 2 RSVP training, still in development, would teach academy personnel and cadets about world demographics, commonalities and the major world religions.

After testifying before a subcommittee of the House Armed Services Committee this summer, Leslie returned to Basic Cadet Training to observe chaplain activities and make recommendations. This time, she and her team were closely followed. She witnessed no examples of chaplains proselytizing during worship services. Is a cultural change under way, or was the academy cleaning things up for the media and then going back to business as usual? Conservative Christians now are complaining that asking chaplains not to pray "in Jesus’ name" in some settings is "muzzling" them.

The questions the Air Force Academy faces are central to democracy. The separation of church and state and the free expression of religion both shape and transform lives. If the Air Force Academy succeeds in clarifying these issues for itself, it may bring some clarity and understanding to the rest of society.

Breaking Away

Books Reviewed:

Born Again and Again: Surprising Gifts of a Fundamentalist Childhood. By Jon Sweeney. Paraclete, 160 pp.

Leaving the Saints: How I Lost the Mormons and Found My Faith. By Martha Beck. Three Rivers, 320 pp., paperback.

My Fundamentalist Education: A Memoir of a Divine Girlhood. By Christine Rosen. Public Affairs, 240 pp.

The Truth Book: Escaping a Childhood of Abuse Among Jehovah’s Witnesses. By Joy Castro. Arcade, 230 pp.

When Jon Sweeney was a little boy, he knelt in his living room and asked Jesus into his heart. For his parents, his extended family and his community, that act was meant to define and direct the rest of his life. In his memoir, Born Again and Again: Surprising Gifts of a Fundamentalist Childhood, Sweeney describes the many ways that fundamentalism has defined him even as he has sought his way out of it. He remembers fundamentalism almost sweetly, sometimes with nostalgia and sometimes with humor, though he also casts a critical eye on its failings, which forced him from its fold.

Several recent memoirs tell about leaving a fundamentalist faith. Each writer remembers a time when the world appeared, at least on its surface, to make perfect sense, a time when each embraced religious certainty without question, and a time when that world began to break apart.

The writers of these four books emerged from faiths that were largely formed in 19th-century North America -- Christian fundamentalism, Mormonism and the Jehovah’s Witnesses. The faiths are distinct culturally and doctrinally -- so distinct that adherents of each faith are quite sure that adherents of the others are going to hell (or technically, for Mormons, to the "telestial" kingdom). Each faith requires missionary efforts to convert followers of other faiths. If Jon Sweeney, Martha Beck, Christine Rosen and Joy Castro had gotten together for a conversation early in their lives, they might have thought it their duty to inform each other of the consequences of their beliefs. Oddly enough, this is what binds these homegrown American religions together: certainty and fear of not following the rules.

To find a way out of fundamentalism, each writer had to contend with the consequences of breaking the community’s rules. Exile, confusion and a gradual, painful articulation of their own stories in the face of accepted religious truth were the results of their struggle with fundamentalism.

In Born Again and Again, Sweeney places himself in a long tradition of fundamentalist preachers. He was raised in Wheaton, Illinois, and both of his grandfathers were independent Baptist preachers. His family’s expectation was that he too would be a great leader -- perhaps a preacher or a missionary. Sweeney remembers his passionate early embrace of this idea and his desire to fulfill his family’s expectations.

The love, pride and unadulterated certainty of his family bound him to his fundamentalist faith in a way that perhaps was unique among the experiences of these four writers. He describes his tiny grandmother giving him a hug and telling him, "God loves you and so do I!" She squeezed him so hard that it was as if she wanted to physically press the love of God into him so he would never forget it. He writes that the "sensuous aspects of his faith -- the familiar fundamentalist hymns, the voices of small-town preachers crackling through his AM radio, the "thunderous, rhythmic word pounding the Spirit of God" -- bound him, far more than dogma did, "like a slip knot, loosely but decisively to my religious place."

Although Sweeney is unique in describing the tactile bonds that tied him to fundamentalism, each writer experienced certainty and embraced the absolute doctrines of the faith with either childlike enthusiasm or a careful adult decision. Although she was thoroughly enveloped in Mormon culture, Beck does not remember being fully convinced of Mormon doctrine as a child. She remembers sitting in the pew, flipping through the hymnal and adding "in the bathtub" to each song title: "I Stand All Amazed in the Bathtub"; "I Know that My Redeemer Lives in the Bathtub"; "Behold a Royal Army in the Bathtub." As an adult, however, she moved hack to her hometown of Provo, Utah, and embraced her Mormon heritage as fully as she could. In her struggle to be the perfect Mormon wife, she tried to fulfill every expectation placed on her, from baking bread to attending the Relief Society. She made a conscious decision to accept the religious faith of her family in order to gain an authentic spiritual life.

All of these memoirists tried, like Beck, to practice what they had been taught, attempting to make the religion their own. This earnestness creates some comic moments. In My Fundamentalist Education, Rosen remembers that her fundamentalist school urged her to share her faith with others. She innocently attempted to convert her neighbors, two Catholic girls, as they played with Barbies and argued about whether Ken and Skipper could sleep in the same bed. As a first-year student at Moody Bible Institute in Chicago, Sweeney took a class called Evangelism 101, and he tried to practice what the instructors preached. He went out into the streets to speak the truth of his faith to as many people as possible.

I witnessed to everybody, it seemed, and couldn’t save a single soul. From the drunks at night on Rush Street: "Watch you talkin’ bout? I luhhv Jee-sus!" to the manager at Mr. G’s, the hamburger joint parodied by John Belushi and Dan Ackroyd on Saturday Night Live: "Never mind! Keep moving! Next!" I witnessed on the train, on the bus, on the street and in a cab. I was like a character in a Dr. Seuss story: Will you witness on the train? Will you witness on the bus? Will you witness on the street? You must, you must!

Rosen’s and Sweeney’s stories share this lighthearted poking fun at their early selves and the sense that the religion pressed on them was endearing. Castro’s and Beck’s stories, on the other hand, are marked by episodes of abuse and long periods of darkness.

In The Truth Book, Castro tells of how she spent her early childhood trying to do everything right. Born to a Jehovah’s Witnesses family, she went door to door handing out tracts, spent her Sundays at the Kingdom Hall and believed without a shadow of a doubt that those outside of the kingdom were damned. Castro’s mother, who was also trying to do things right, married a man in the church who was much admired by others. He had served at the Watchtower headquarters in Brooklyn, he was devout, and on the surface he was a good Jehovah’s Witness. But not long into the marriage, this man’s abuse of Castro, her younger brother and their mother intensified. Castro’s story is dominated by this abuse to the extent that it darkens nearly everything she says about the Jehovah’s Witnesses and her early faith.

For all of the authors a time came when they tested their own experience against their religion’s claims. Gradually they realized that fundamentalist religion had failed them. It could not speak to or explain their experiences. It could not answer their questions. This moment was perhaps most distinct for Castro. She was 14 and had been living with her abusive stepfather for two years. She had been completely encapsulated by the ideology of those around her, and she had cut off communication with her biological father because he smoked and was no longer a Jehovah’s Witness. Her mother and stepfather made it clear that the father was evil. Meanwhile, the stepfather was beating Joy, her mother and her brother and laying down bizarre and intricate rules for the family. If they were eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, for example, he insisted that he get two, the mother one, Joy half and Joy’s brother one quarter. The abuse was intense and ongoing, and Castro describes it in harrowing detail.

One day a girl at school who had gradually befriended Castro and whom Castro had very slowly and carefully told of the abuse said, "Get out of there." When Castro told her she had nowhere to go, the girl asked about her biological father.

"No. . . . He’s disfellowshipped"

"Dis-whatted?" the girl asked.

"It’s like being excommunicated. He sinned and wasn’t repentant. We have to shun him."

"What did he do?"

"He smokes cigarettes."

The girl indignantly and vulgarly expressed her disgust. "What kind of a god gives more of a sh -- about smoking than somebody who whales on little kids?" Castro had never put it to herself this way.

"Look," the girl said, "If you ever want help getting out of that f---hole, let me know." After that conversation Castro began trying to reunite with her father. It was the beginning of her distance from the Jehovah’s Witnesses as well, but for a long time she was able to follow her courageous path out of abuse only by convincing herself that her biological father would still let her attend Kingdom Hall services.

For most of the memoirists, a period of cognitive dissonance followed the realization that they could not bring together their experience with the religious tenets they had been taught. For Sweeney, crucial moments of understanding came while he was serving as a missionary in the Philippines and began to see missionary work from the standpoint of the missionized. He saw how arrogant and naive his own assumptions were and how subtly and graciously he and his fellow missionaries were rejected. This only deepened the questions growing in his own mind, questions about a multitude of claims he had always accepted about the Bible, history and the future.

Cognitive dissonance gradually gave way to tangible forms of leaving, and leaving turned, at times, into exile. Beck discovered that the warmth of her neighbors and the people in her ward dissolved when she and her husband officially resigned from the Latter-day Saints church. Friends and family alike shunned her. Sweeney’s childhood friends had little to say to him, and his actions led to difficult, although still loving, questions from his family. Castro was completely cut off from her mother’s life, and the reader questions whether reconciliation is possible amidst so much pain. The cost of leaving is high for all except perhaps Rosen, for whom fundamentalism was never deeply integrated into family life.

The consequences of leaving provoke some of the most thoughtful passages in the books. Sweeney writes that if he were to repent of his waywardness and return to the fundamentalist fold, he knows he would be welcomed with open arms, He poignantly writes, "I would be received like a convert from Judaism or Islam to Christianity, one who saw the errors of his ways. I could probably become a star on the prophecy preaching tours. My testimony would inspire all who listened. I can imagine exactly how that would feel, and I like that feeling."

Beck knows that the price she has paid for telling her truth about her life is very high. She lives in almost complete exile from her family and home. "I am the one," she acknowledges, "who broke the family code." But giving up the certainties of her Mormon upbringing has offered her another certainty on which she now builds her life. "Once you are sure that God is waiting in the acceptance of every true thing, even pain, I’m not sure despair is even possible."

Castro reaches out through the pain of her childhood to try to understand what drew her parents to the Jehovah’s Witnesses and why her mother remains in the faith.

Both my parents mistrusted and abstained from politics, joining instead-~-my father briefly, my mother for life -- a religion that recognized all people as equals, that had seen the world that way even in the 1920s and ‘30s, .when most of America hadn’t: the kitschy well-meaning illustrations on the endpapers of the Watch-tower books from the Jazz Age and the Depression: a Mexican family all in sombreros, an African family in embroidered A-line robes, a clean-cut white family, a Chinese family in their conical straw hats, all the families standing together, their faces raised toward heaven, where a pale, bearded Jesus rides down on a horse.

She sees in the Jehovah’s Witnesses an attempt to embrace American diversity. This is her most generous gesture toward the religion she perceives as having caused her so much pain.

Sweeney and Beck both have daughters who are being raised without the fundamentalism that rooted them as children. Both express anxiety and joy over their children’s hostility to "fundamentalism of any stripe." Sweeney’s daughter now follows in the Protestant and fundamentalist tradition of protest by protesting nearly all things religious, from confession of sin to the Eucharist. Sweeney, more than any of the others, wonders if he can anchor his children without the faith that so moored him.

Each of these memoirs of fundamentalism has something to recommend it. The weakest of the four is Rosen’s My Fundamentalist Education. Though readers who are familiar with fundamentalist culture of the 1970s and ‘80s will appreciate her descriptions of the impact that evangelist Joni Eareckson and traveling missionaries had on her as a small girl, and of her growing passion for the Bible and of her puzzlement over the relationship between creation and evolution, her story rarely penetrates the surface of that culture. Sweeney traces the same ground as Rosen, having grown up at nearly exactly the same historical moment, but he confronts the realities of a fundamentalist background with more depth and gives us a careful examination of his own soul. At moments Sweeney seems to be trying too hard to be gentle with his heritage, but he offers a memorable look at the way fundamentalism -- for good and for ill -- shapes a life long after its tenets have been left behind.

Comparing the stories of Sweeney and Rosen to those of Castro and Beck is a little like comparing the faiths out of which they come. There are certainly similarities, but the stark differences compel greater attention. Castro’s and Beck’s memoirs are extraordinarily well written, and both are page-turners. I read The Truth Book almost in one sitting, waiting desperately for Castro’s decision to run away from her abusive family. Though her bitterness perhaps prevents her from providing the reader with balanced insight into the Jehovah’s Witnesses, the story maintains its grip on the reader with each heart-crushing turn.

Beck is a master of the memoir. Like her first book, Expecting Adam, Leaving the Saints requires the reader to suspend attention to the outside world and enter completely into the author’s reality. She compels belief in the unbelievable, and she knows that thousands of people have reason to deny her version of the truth -- about the abuse that she claims is part of her experience and the ugliness revealed by the light she shines on her Mormon upbringing. At the same time, she is eager to praise what she can praise in Mormonism and not to leave the reader with a sense of bitterness. Her subtitle is How I Lost the Mormons and Found My Faith, and faith is what she wants readers to find for themselves.

In leaving certainty, these authors began what felt like an uncharted course in a realm where religious experience is less structured, more open and more frightening than it was in the cocoons of their religious cultures. This leave-taking and reorienting is a common path, one followed by many who are drawn to fundamentalism at certain moments in their lives. These books provide an opportunity to explore that common story, to accept the gifts of fundamentalism along with its flaws and to revisit how religious meaning is made.

Turning to Orthodoxy

On the third day of Easter, I stood in front of the Holy Trinity Cathedral in Kiev, Ukraine. With me was a prominent scholar of American religion who was visiting Eastern Europe for the first time. We were watching a priest and his flock process around the cathedral with icons, incense and crosses. "Have you heard that more Americans are becoming Orthodox?" she asked me, smirking slightly. "Smells and bells. One more way to have someone tell you what to do and what to think."

Her remarks touched on a question of increasing importance in American Christianity. With trends toward mega-churches and worship as entertainment, and with heated debates in some denominations about the ordination of homosexuals, American Christianity seems to be moving in a less orthodox rather than a more orthodox direction. In the United States, Eastern Orthodox Christianity remains a very small religious group (just 1.3 percent of the population). To many American Christians, Orthodoxy is an obscure and foreign type of religion.

But the observation of the visiting scholar was not incorrect. The past several decades have seen an increase in conversions to Orthodoxy in the U.S. Frederica Mathewes-Green writes that nearly half the students in Orthodoxy’s two largest American seminaries -- Holy Cross and St. Vladimir’s -- are converts. The number of Antiochian Orthodox churches in the U.S. has doubled -- to over 250 parishes and missions -- in 20 years. The Antiochian Church, unlike most Orthodox organizations in the U.S., has committed itself to seeking converts in North America and sees itself "on a mission to bring America to the ancient Orthodox Christian faith." The missions organization of this branch of Orthodoxy estimates that 80 percent of its converts come from evangelical and charismatic orientations, with 20 percent coming from mainline denominations.

In 1987, Peter Gillquist, a former leader in Campus Crusade for Christ, and 200 others in a single evangelical congregation made national headlines when they were chrismated (or confirmed) into the Antiochian Orthodox Church. In the ensuing years a slow trickle of converts has followed them. Daniel Clendenin suggests that while Orthodoxy may be too small to have an effect on American religion as a whole, conversions may be having a "seismic impact" on the way the faith is practiced in the U.S. In the context of American Christianity, Orthodoxy may seem archaic and irrelevant. Yet it has a strong appeal to many. The question is: why? Is it exoticism, as my colleague suggested? Is it a desire for stability in the midst of rapid culture change? Are conversions a form of protest or, as Gillquist writes, a form of homecoming?

In order to answer these questions, I decided to sit down with some converts and listen to their stories. What I learned is that converts find in Orthodoxy an antidote to American Christianity’s individualism and commercialism. While some of them seem to be reinventing Orthodoxy in America’s image, others are struggling to reinvent themselves in Orthodoxy’s image. This contrast can be striking.

In central Colorado, far from the traditional centers of Orthodoxy in Constantinople, Moscow and Mount Athos, is a small monastery where five monks live together on the sagebrush foothills of the Buffalo Range. Their abbot, Archbishop Gregory, is a renowned iconographer and

something of a renegade. The denomination to which he belongs, the Russian Orthodox Autonomous Church (ROAC), is not in communion with most other Orthodox, who it claims have strayed from the true faith via the evils of "ecumenism." Archbishop Gregory has joined and left several different groups on the fringes of Orthodoxy, and the Colorado monastery itself has changed hands more than once.

Brother John is a young monk who joined the monastery during his years at Trinity University in San Antonio. A former Presbyterian, Brother John recounted to me his early dismay at the liberalism he saw in the Presbyterian Church. He felt that the church was in "open denial of Christ and the apostles" and not adhering to biblical principles, and had been corrupted through accommodation to the world. At the end of his first year of college, he was seeking to be baptized into the Orthodox Church. Not only had he found the Bible-adhering church he sought, but he was also convinced that it was the one holy church founded by Christ and the apostles.

Most Orthodox churches do not rebaptize converts from other Christian denominations since the Orthodox teach that baptism is a one-time-only sacrament. Those who have been baptized in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit need only to be chrismated -- anointed -- to be received fully into the church. But Brother John felt that his baptism as a Presbyterian was not truly a baptism. His local priest in the Orthodox Church of America (OCA) refused to baptize him, and he grew frustrated. Much in the OCA seemed impure and wayward to him, and he began to look into groups farther from the Orthodox mainstream. His search for greater purity ended in an encounter with then Archimandrite Gregory in the Russian Orthodox Autonomous Church. The leaders of the ROAC consider the Russian Orthodox Church to be apostate and have broken communion with all those whom they consider "ecumenical."

Brother John gave me a tour of the monastery grounds, including the recently built Byzantine-style church, which looked at home on the rocky hills. The walls of the church were covered with the strikingly clear and sparse iconography of Archbishop Gregory. Later, as Brother John walked me to my car, he said quietly, "American Christians need to understand that they are not where they need to be. God wants them in the Orthodox Church. All of the other churches and religions are not being fully faithful to Christ."

Although he was adamantly countercultural in his approach, something of Brother John’s version of Orthodoxy struck me as distinctly American. In a search for the utmost purity, he had to link up with the smallest possible unit of religious organization he could find. Like many Americans of other denominations and generations, he had to become an outsider in order to assure himself that his faith was genuine.

John is similar to other converts to Orthodoxy in that he diagnoses two distinct problems in contemporary American Christianity. One is the turn toward theological and social liberalism; the other is an entertainment-oriented, self-indulgent style of worship. These two issues sometimes draw different kinds of converts, but they are often equated with one root problem: individualism. Doctrine, practice, sacrament and worship are all suited to the needs and desires of the self.

Converts are sometimes eager to point out that Orthodoxy, because of its emphasis on continuity, cannot be "liberal." One woman, a former Baptist who had an evangelical glint in her eye, rushed to tell me that the Orthodox did not and would not ordain women and homosexuals and had always stood against abortion. For her, these seemed to be markers of authentic Christianity, and she appreciated being able to feel confident that her church would not have to struggle with these issues. Mathewes-Green, a strong a spokesperson for Orthodoxy, has said that Orthodoxy is incompatible with feminism, and she has declared herself "twice-liberated," the second time from a feminism she has decided is a lie.

The word "orthodoxy" is sometimes translated from the Greek to mean "right belief." When converts emphasize belief they sometimes come up with hardline political views. But orthodoxy can also be translated as "right praise" or "right worship," and here a different emphasis comes into view: opposition to entertainment-driven worship -- what one convert calls "McChurch." Converts speak of growing tired of a refashioned Christianity that seems at the mercy of each passing fad. Entering Orthodoxy, converts repeat, is not reinventing the church to suit oneself, but reinventing the church to suit oneself, but reinventing the self to join the church. "I think of myself as grafting to the tree of the church," convert Mark Montague says. "I see that this is a process that will take my whole lifetime, and not my lifetime alone, but maybe several generations."

When Mark and his wife, Laura, married in an Orthodox Church in 1998, some non-Orthodox friends felt uncomfortable that the ceremony contained a reading from Ephesians 5, in which sub-mission and obedience were urged upon Laura. But Laura argued, "Why should I ask the church to change its words for me? Who am I to assume that I know more than the accumulated wisdom of the church?"

Though many Americans would no doubt find it alien or even unsettling, the anti-individualistic experience provided by Orthodoxy can be profoundly world-expanding and eye-opening. Converting to Orthodoxy means coming into spiritual contact with 350 million Orthodox believers worldwide, from countries as diverse as Syria and Ethiopia. Orthodoxy in the United States was once made up of closed-off cultural enclaves, but this is changing. Due to both immigration patterns and conversions, parishes outside big cities are becoming increasingly diverse. Many converts join churches where they learn to speak and pray in other languages. When the doors to other cultures open, so do the doors to different ways of thinking of and practicing the faith.

Father John is the parish priest of St. Herman of Alaska (OCA) in Littleton, Colorado. After a youth filled with drug use and drinking in Texas, Father John said, "I cried out to Christ to give me another life." He smiled as he added, "And he did."

After attending the Institute for Creation Research in San Diego and Dallas Theological Seminary, he served as youth minister at a large Baptist church in San Diego and taught science at the affiliated Christian high school. Over several years he became interested in Orthodoxy, drawn to its liturgy and rich history. He pursued this interest as a hobby only, until one day he was confronted by the principal of his school. The principal presented him with a list of what he thought were Orthodox tenets. "Do you worship icons? Do you believe that Mary never died?" Father John tried to explain his beliefs, but he was told to collect his things and never return. He was banned from the high school and the church as an "idolater."

Two months after losing his livelihood, he and his family were chrismated into the Orthodox Church of America. "I don’t want this to sound arrogant," he said. "I feel like we plumbed the depths of evangelicalism. We went as deep into it as we could go. We found the limits of it, and I those limits became walls. Orthodoxy, on the other hand, is endless. It is like a vast ocean. How deep into it do you want to go? How holy do you want to be?"

One answer to Father John’s rhetorical questions can perhaps be found at the Brotherhood of St. George monastery in downtown Denver. Nothing I had seen in Orthodoxy in the U.S. prepared me for a meeting with Father Christodoulos, the sole monk of this outpost of the Greek Orthodox Church. Three days a week at 7 a.m., a few people gather at the monastery for the divine liturgy. Answering the monastery phone only the day before, Father Christodoulos had invited me to attend the liturgy and then to join the group for breakfast, where I would be free to ask him questions.

After the liturgy, the cantor, a woman in her 50s named Anna, prepared a breakfast of fruit, almonds and toast. I asked two young men -- the only others who attended the liturgy that morning -- who they were and why they came. Both were recent converts to Orthodoxy, one from Catholicism and the other from evangelicalism. Mike, a computer programmer, was preparing for his chrismation the following Monday. Jason, a college student at a local evangelical college, said that the appeal of Orthodoxy could be easily summarized: it embodied "the truth." Anna said little. She and I carried breakfast to a table outside where Father Christodoulos was already sitting in the sunshine.

Father Christodoulos greeted us with a warm smile, but he too was quiet while the two young men talked about the upcoming chrismation, Mike’s work and their parishes in different parts of the city. Finally, Mike turned to the monk. "Father, did you get a chance to listen to those CDs I lent you?" Father Christodoulos remained quiet for several seconds. At last he said, "My mind is still on the liturgy. I haven’t fully come back yet." Then he paused again and in his voice was gentle instruction. "The liturgy is heaven on earth. Paradise on earth. Maybe we shouldn’t move beyond it so quickly to mundane things. Maybe we should take time to savor it."

An American by birth, Father Christodoulos spent many years in a monastery on the island of Rhodes in Greece. Three years ago, he was asked by his bishop to start a monastery in Denver. The monk’s manner exuded gentleness and humility. During our conversation, his face often lit up with delight. When I told him that I was a member of St. George Episcopal Church in Leadville, his eyes sparkled. "St. George! Oh, I am sure that is a wonderful place, filled with grace. St. George has so much grace. He was tortured for seven days, you know, and did not renounce Christ. Truly he is filled with the mercy of God." He refused to answer my question about his own conversion to Orthodoxy. "We are all converts," he said. "Each of us."

Father Christodoulos’s manner was profoundly welcoming, and the hospitality that he offered me was central to the work of his life. "A monk’s life is two things: prayer and hospitality. In the first we try to fulfill the commandment to love God, and in the second we try to fulfill the commandment to love our neighbor as ourselves." Clearly I was not alone in feeling the draw of the monastery. As we talked, several people came in and joined our circle. Father Christodoulos radiated a welcome to all of them.

"What is the purpose of an Orthodox monastery in Denver?" I asked. "What does Orthodox monastic life bring to American culture?"

The monk’s answer contained none of the critique of American culture, religion or life that had been so prevalent in conversations with other converts to Orthodoxy. "I don’t like to think of myself as bringing anything to American culture. I simply have been asked by my bishop to come here and live as a witness to Christ. I would live this life if I were in Greece. I live it here. People come. The Holy Spirit moves them, and that is enough. We have tried to build an oasis of prayer here."

Moved by the simplicity and openness of the monk’s faith, I decided to run the "smells and bells" theory of conversion by him, and he smiled. "Indeed, in our worship we offer something for each person. If someone comes and is moved by the beauty of the church, the beauty expressed in icons, that is good. If someone comes and is moved by the ancient rhythms of the music, that is also good. If the rich smell of the church, the holy smell of incense that sets the church apart, touches someone, that too is good. I suppose I would say respectfully that it is indeed the smells and bells. These are the qualities of our worship, and it is in our worship that you may discover everything that is central to Orthodoxy."

When Anna and I went back to the kitchen to do the breakfast clean-up and put on another pot of coffee for the arriving guests, she confirmed what Father Christodoulos had said. She had been attending Cherry Hills Community Church in Denver, an evangelical Presbyterian congregation of more than 5,000, when she and her husband became acquainted with Orthodoxy. After her first experience with its liturgy, she was astounded. "I don’t know what this is," she told her husband. "But I know I have to come back." Sometime afterward, she converted to Orthodoxy. Her life, she said, is softening as she learns to bend it to the rhythms of the liturgy.

My experience at the Brotherhood of St. George was enticing. But though I was appreciative of Orthodoxy’s rich acknowledgment of mystery, I also wondered why its social life needed to be so rigidly ordered. Why, for example, did Anna and I wait on the men at the monastery? Why are feminist voices often so roundly rejected by the Orthodox Church? If the Holy Spirit is a living presence in Orthodoxy, then why were social questions of enormous complexity -- abortion, feminism and homosexuality, to name a few of the most controversial -- treated with such dismissive certainty by many of the converts I met? While I value historical roots and the search for answers within the church’s rich past, I wonder why, in contemporary Orthodoxy in the United States, those answers are so easy to come by. Orthodox converts told me that they find comfort in the stability of the church, that positions on issues such as homosexuality and abortion have already been decided and will not change any time soon. But are answers preferred to compassion or the living work of the Spirit? By settling readily on answers to social questions, do converts embrace Orthodoxy as another form of fundamentalism?

Orthodox converts in the U.S. seek many things: stability, mystery, majesty, integrity, historical roots and authenticity. They become Orthodox both because of the hard rock they call truth and because of a taste that lingers after experiencing the liturgy. Some seek to transform American Christianity; others seek to escape it. And still others find in Orthodoxy an incarnate yet timeless witness to the gospel. What impact Orthodox Christianity may yet have on the U.S. is uncertain, but for many converts this is not the crucial question. The crucial question is what impact Orthodoxy may have on them.