RealClearReligion: What is the Interfaith Youth Core?

Eboo Patel: We want to make interfaith cooperation a social norm in the United States. We think that is a generational endeavor. So, over the course of the next thirty years, we try to impact the conversation about religion in public discourse in moving the conversation from faith as a barrier to faith as a bridge, we partner with higher education institutions to help them model interfaith cooperation, and we train young people to be interfaith leaders.

RCR: Where's the starting point for interfaith conversations?

EP: The starting point is: How does your faith or philosophical identity inspire you to serve others?

RCR: Only service?

EP: It's service. It's compassion, hospitality, and mercy. How does your faith tradition speak to those concepts and how are you inspired to apply them?

RCR: It is an interfaith cliché to start with the statement: Christianity, Islam, and Judaism all worship the same God. Is that a productive starting point?

EP: That's not IFYC's starting point because Christianity, Islam, and Judaism are not the only three major faiths. There are over a billion Hindus in the world. There are 500-some-million Buddhists in the world. We have the Sikhs, the Jain tradition, Taoism. We're not interested in telling anybody that they're not a major tradition. And in the United States, a third of people between the ages of 18 and 30 say that they're none.

We are interested in cultivating respect for diverse faith and philosophical identities, we want to help shape positive relations among people who orient around religion differently, and we want to cultivate cooperation for the common good. We think that that's best accomplished through shared values -- hospitality, mercy, compassion. People can share these values through their particular narratives and then apply them together.

RCR: Some Christians might tell you that service is also about evangelism.

EP: We believe in the pluralization of service. People serve out of a variety of particular inspirations, traditions, and narratives. People ought to share those traditions and narratives, but I don't think service ought to be a wedge to proselytization. I'm not opposed to proselytization, but when you proselytize, you ought to be clear about what you're doing.

RCR: Isn't evangelism a by-product of service?

EP: A young evangelical once told me: in the Bible there is the Great Commission and there is the Great Cooperation. In other words, within the same tradition there are different impulses.

RCR: How can Christians and Muslims serve together if they don't worship the same God?

EP: You should read Miroslav Volf's Allah: A Christian Response.

RCR: Am I wrong in suggesting Christians and Muslims don't worship the same God?

EP: Yes. You're wrong in Muslim cosmology. A significant dimension of Muslim cosmology is about reason. Human beings are meant to use their minds to discern the nature of things, including the will of Allah. This is one of the reasons there have been centuries of great Muslim philosophy. Medieval Muslim philosophers translated Aristotle.

RCR: Didn't that school of Muslim philosophy lose?

EP: Look, Islam is in dark days right now. But, there are certainly voices of that school around today. It is more accurate to say that those voices are not the most ascendant voices right now.

RCR: Are Salafi jihadists perhaps too ascendant right now?

EP: I'm not a fan of Salafism at all. But let's not imply Salafism and jihadism are synonymous. Salafis have a particular view of the tradition that I don't believe is correct. However, if they want to live their lives and establish their communities in ways that are literalist, they are free to do that insofar as it doesn't infringe negatively on others. In other words, the Amish are free to be Amish, so long as they don't destroy everyone else's cars.

RCR: But you're not an Islamic pope. There's no one in Islam saying to the jihadists: your view of the tradition is incorrect. So, if we can't all agree on God, how do we serve others together?

EP: That's the point of interfaith conversations. You have people around the table who have various different theologies. When it comes to Christians, Muslims, and Jews, they have an interesting set of theological things in common: God the Creator, a set of revealed texts, a set of prophetic messages. The problem with beginning there is that you leave out Buddhists and Hindus and Taoists and secular humanists. It's not a good way of starting a conversation that is meant to be inclusive.

We start, as I mentioned before, with a set of shared social values.

RCR: Are those values transcendent, though?

EP: Yes. Mercy, compassion, service, and hospitality are relatively transcendent values. I think the question you're implicitly asking is: How do people, who fully believe in their own tradition, also have positive relations with other traditions? At IFYC we call that a theology of interfaith cooperation. Within one's own tradition is a set of resources of why you ought to relate positively with other religions.

Here's the alternative to that: People don't believe anything at all. I prefer a world where people have a deep relationship with their own tradition and have an understanding of the threads within their tradition that are positively relational to other traditions.

RCR: Is there room for a serious theological conversation amongst traditions?

EP: It depends what the goal of the interfaith endeavor is. The goal of IFYC is to create a civic pluralism. People from different religious backgrounds ought to be in Little Leagues together, PTAs together, and they ought to work together in hospitals and law firms. We are less interested in the question, for instance: How much do Muslims and Christians agree on the idea of God? That's a question for seminaries.

Let me better define civic pluralism: How do people who orient around religion differently work together positively in the same society? That's a question we're trying to answer.

RCR: Isn't it exceptionally American that your organization exists to answer that question?

EP: In my book, Sacred Ground: Pluralism, Prejudice, and the Promise of America, I write about the exceptional nature of America when it comes to pluralism and the importance of fighting for American pluralism. America was the first diverse democracy. It was the first nation to believe that people from different backgrounds who spoke different languages and prayed to God in different ways could come together and build a nation. That's a stunningly inspiring notion.

Pluralism is a deeply embedded value in the American tradition, but it's not something that falls from the sky. It's something you have to continue to work on. America is a nation that welcomes the contributions of all communities and nurtures the cooperation between them. It is a responsibility of different communities to contribute.

America's promise is that all communities will have equal rights; America's genius is that communities who are given their dignity will return their contribution. In that regard, the United States is remarkable.

Nicholas G. Hahn III is Deputy Editor of RealClearReligion. Follow him on Twitter @NGHahn3.

I know that some longtime fans complain about non-conforming details in J.J. Abrams's reboot of the original series. The hormones of human-Vulcan hybrids, for instance, apparently operate more on a human clock (no ponn farr). And the Federation seemed a bit more gun-happy even in the first Abrams movie than in Gene Roddenberry's original vision.

But there are lots of ways where Abrams has toed the line. Religion is surely one of those.

Mild spoiler alert: I'll not give away much more than I've seen in other reviews, but if you're the sort who wants to know nothing about a movie before you see it, come back when you're done.

And here's my two-paragraph review: Star Trek: Into Darkness is a wonderful Star Trek movie in much the same way that Skyfall was a wonderful James Bond movie. (Which is not exactly the same as saying either is a wonderful movie.) Both are faithful, but not slavishly so, to their characters' histories, make just enough sense to be fun, and include a lawn-full of Easter eggs for longtime fans to spot and smile about.

So we get a tribble and "I'm a doctor, not a..." and the original musical theme and other references that have not much to do with the story. And more than a few familiar elements that are central to the story but I can't discuss without spoiling things. Well worth the popcorn. See it on the biggest screen with the best sound system you can find.

But what you don't have is anything remotely like a whiff of religion. You might think that's because the plot zips along at, ahem, warp speed and there really wasn't room for anything about faith. But there were at least four places where the lack of even the faint aroma of metaphysics was notable.

Two people die in the movie up close and personal. One dies in Spock's arms, as he does a Vulcan mind-meld. Which Spock recounts later. The second death happens with the dying man giving what amounts to a play-by-play about what he's feeling up until moments before he passes.

What do we get? Fear and anger and confusion and friendship. But not a word about the hereafter or even any wondering about it.

I'm really not going to spoil anything by telling you the second death is followed by a literal resurrection. That particular plot line is so obvious it should be on the billboards. And the character was dead. Not in a coma or stasis or suspended animation. Dead as the no-doornails on the Enterprise sliding entries.

When he wakes up, does he talk about his trip to the light or meeting his father or making contact with the transcendent? He does not. Not a word.

None of this is an accident. The original Star Trek series was about as devoid of religious references as your average strip club. Only the most devoted Trekker can identify even a handful of obscure nods to even the existence of religion in that universe.

Roddenberry, whose vision drove the project, was a secular humanist who had little patience for organized religion. Among his relevant quotes is this one:

"We must question the story logic of having an all-knowing all-powerful God, who creates faulty humans, and then blames them for his own mistakes."

So his subcreation that had so much room for finding ways to accommodate racial and cultural diversity had almost nothing to say about religion.

That was still mostly true for the later iterations of the Star Trek saga. Even the mysterious Prophets of Deep Space 9 seemed more tied to science that the supernatural. More resonant with Clarke's Third Law than anything from, say, Genesis or the Bhagavad Gita.

When Abrams restarted the franchise in 2009, he was utterly faithful to this guiding principal: If there are Christians, Jews, Jains, Hindus or any other adherents of organized religion in the 23rd century, they were invisible to the cameras.

Ditto for this film. There's one character who has a name that in 2013 would be a clue that he belonged to a particular faith. But there's nothing in this movie or any of the other canonical versions of the character to suggest there's anything religious attached.

The final place where Abrams could well have inserted at least a nod to religion is almost at the end. The good guys have won. (I hope that's not a spoiler.) And there's a ceremony that is both a memorial service and a rechristening of the repaired Enterprise.

Don't get your tunic in a tangle about the word "rechristening," which is actually said in the film. In context, the usage was about as religious as an "Enterprise" ornament for a Christmas tree. And where today this sort of ceremony would surely have made room for a prayer, instead we get a slightly tweaked version of the most sacred text in the Roddenberry canon:

"Space, the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Her five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no one has gone before."

The dilithium crystals that provide the power of the passage are all packed into that wonderful split infinitive: "To boldly go."

If Roddenberry believed in anything, and he surely did, it was in the ability of humans to succeed and thrive and achieve by going boldly. Religion, he thought, was not a bit necessary. Thus far in his Trekking, Abrams seems content to agree.

Jeffrey Weiss is a RealClearReligion columnist from Dallas, Texas. Follow him on Twitter @JeffreyWeissRCR.

That's because the college chose scandal over solidarity by inviting a politician who flouts Catholic Church teaching to be its commencement speaker.

The college invited Enda Kenny, the Prime Minister of Ireland, to speak to graduates. Mr. Kenny is currently pushing an abortion law in Ireland, one of the few fully pro-life countries left in the world. And he is the same man who had his foreign minister close down Ireland's embassy to the Holy See and tried to pass laws that would jail priests who do not violate the seal of confession, a sacred space considered inviolate by the Church. He has consistently trashed the Catholic Church and will no doubt use the platform Boston College has literally constructed for him to continue to do so.

This leaves Cardinal O'Malley with no choice but to stay home.

His critics will accuse him of close-mindedness and argue that the halls of the academy are meant for discussion and conversation about the issues of our day. But a graduation ceremony is not a conversation. It is an honor bestowed on the speaker and a prime opportunity to unilaterally exhort one's ideals on the rising generation. Were it an invitation to a debate or dialogue, one could make the argument that Cardinal O'Malley should attend. But a prince of the Church cannot offer his blessing to what is little more than an anti-Catholic politician using an esteemed Catholic institution of higher education for his own political gain.

Cardinal O'Malley's decision is not intended to punish the students of Boston College. Rather, the college is punishing its own students by drawing them into a scandal and depriving them of the privilege of graduating in the presence of a man who just returned from electing the Pope and who himself was considered a possibility for the role. The students have the right to begin the next stage of their lives with the blessing of their bishop. But the bishop has the right and the duty to avoid the appearance that he supports abortion.

As Pope John Paul II wrote in his 1995 papal encyclical, Evangelium Vitae, "No word has the power to change the reality of things: procured abortion is the deliberate and direct killing, by whatever means it is carried out, of a human being in the initial phase of his or her existence, extending from conception to birth." The Catholic Church does not have the authority to change the humanity of all people nor determine whose humanity is more valuable. That all people, regardless of age, sex, race, or genetic composition, have the right to life is a position that her leaders are obligated to defend. A cardinal does not have the authority to change what is fundamental Church teaching.

So while some may accuse Cardinal O'Malley of stubbornness, he doesn't really have a choice in the matter. He has taken a vow to defend life in all stages, and moments such as these are when he must flex his own humanity by discerning his conscience. He is a conscientious objector, something the American project has made a wide space for.

The Boston College scandal is reminiscent of the scandals that surround so many Catholic politicians in America these days. Politicians who one day call themselves Catholic only to turn around and enact laws so restrictive of religious freedom that their own church is suing them nationwide. Political figures who embrace the label Catholic and turn around and honor abortionists such as LeRoy Carhart, recently caught on tape referring to fully viable babies as like "meat in a crockpot". These men and women seek to co-opt the Church into complicity with their political agendas, something the Church is quite used to but quite successful in refusing.

This is a free country. Catholics may rise to power and flout their Church. Catholic institutions of higher education are free to buck their bishops and give a microphone to figures that promote what the Church considers grave evil.

But thankfully, those same bishops are not required to tip their mitre in approval. They are free to protest and stand on principle in allegiance to their Church.

I didn't attend Boston College; I went around the corner to Tufts University. But I can say with certainty that if I were a graduating senior at Boston College today, nothing would give me greater honor than to sit in quiet protest with Cardinal O'Malley.

Ashley E. McGuire is a Senior Fellow with The Catholic Association and editor-in-chief of Altcatholicah.

The simplest way to answer that question would be to point to any evangelical who looked up deracinated to see if it might be latent form of hate speech -- that's deracinated.

The hallmark of an evangelical used to be confidence -- confidence in the Bible, confidence in the message that Scripture entrusted to us, confidence in the reality of the new birth, and confidence in Jesus. Today all such confidence is denounced as triumphalism, or at best is worried over as a suspicious and unbecoming display of epistemic pride. This is because contemporary evangelicalism has the epistemic jimjams.

Faith overcomes the world. Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. Faith is single-minded, never wavering. Faith is more precious than gold which perishes. Faith is the work of Jesus, poured into our hearts. Faith is where we stand after we have been pulled out of the miry clay. Faith travels everywhere with its two best friends, hope and love, and they never quarrel. Faith rocks.

This realm of joyful confidence is the natural habitat of the evangelical, and so when an evangelical becomes ill-at-ease in that habitat, that's deracinated. When an evangelical is alienated from the truisms he was given in his childhood (which were true, remember), that's deracinated. When an evangelical weaves down the middle of the highway, it makes the state troopers of orthodoxy want to make him blow into the little plastic tube.

It all began innocently enough. From the beginning, evangelicals did not want to display the fractiousness of the fundamentalists, but they wanted to do this without giving up their faith in all the same foundational doctrines. They were fundamentalists with a happy face. They were fundamentalists with an emphasis on catholicity -- and who could be against catholicity? Only bigots, right? But this is where the fatal mistake was made -- catholicity is a positive virtue, and coming up with a negatively-stated counterfeit was for the devil the work of a moment. This knock-off catholicity is a lowest-common denominator approach to truth. What is the bare minimum of what we can believe and still be in the evangelical club? Not surprisingly, the size of the truth that is held in common has been dwindling over the decades. But we were told to increase and multiply, not to do fractions.

We used to be fundamentalists with a cheerful disposition. Now we are fundamentalists without a fundament.

Just look at what is now up for grabs among those who still (for some reason) identify as evangelicals -- biblical inerrancy, the doctrine of the final judgment, same-sex marriage...not to mention the raging controversy in some quarters about the possible ordination of Bella Abzug's nightgown. We are even falling short of the comparatively low bar set by Kipling -- we don't even believe in the gods of the copybook headings anymore.

Catholicity is firmly convinced in its own mind, across the board, and yet includes within its framework of worldview understanding a right grasp of the importance of charity, and the distinction to be made between matters of first importance and things that are not as important. Catholicity does have a sense of proportion. But the lowest common denominator approach, despite its best efforts, has no sense of proportion at all -- as witnessed by all the essential things that have been jettisoned in the name of it.

No creed but Christ, no law but love. Sounds great. Who is this Christ guy? What did He do? Why did He do it? Does it matter very much that He did it? Why does it matter? Please answer all these questions, and any others that come up in the course of our discussion, in as non-creedal a way as possible. If possible, answer the questions without making any affirmations, which could be taken by some as triumphalistic and off-putting. This is admittedly hard to do, because no creed but Christ is a creed, but nobody is paying us for being consistent.

And as for love, what's that? Rob Bell says that love wins (which sounds triumphalistic, come to think of it), but does that mean that winning is love? The apostle said that love is the fulfillment of the law, but that approach sounds suspiciously like it might have to result in some Bible study. That makes it sound as though love is defined by its content, and that might get in the way of our pursuit of funding for this new center for the empowerment of deaf alcoholics. And that last phrase shows how difficult it is to be a satirist in these troubled times of ours. The present author, as the Victorians used to say, once walked by an actual Center for the Empowerment of Deaf Alcoholics. That's where "no law but love" gets you.

So here is another illustration of what deracinated evangelicalism looks like. If any evangelical church starts to describe itself as a "faith community," it is more likely to be a "shared unbelief community," quietly assembling for their outward bound pilgrimage to nowhere.

Douglas Wilson is the Senior Minister of Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho. Follow him on Twitter @douglaswils.

At this gathering, like so many others, scholars asked questions that have been familiar since Max Weber founded the scientific study of religion over a century ago: just why do people join new faiths, especially those enthusiastic sects that make such intense demands on their time and energy? What makes people convert to life-changing new faiths? And what decides whether those new movements succeed or fail?

But in all this emphasis on conversion, on novel and insurgent movements, we may be missing a very important point. We can come up with plenty of reasons why people found or join new religions -- but why, in so many cases, do people not change their faith traditions? Why, in short, do they stay the same?

That might seem like an odd question, given the huge volume of available works on new religions and religious founders, compared to the handful on religious continuity or stability. But that imbalance largely reflects the interests of scholars, who naturally find much more to say about the new and daring rather than the old and stolid. Look for instance at the number of books published on the innovators and radicals of the Reformation era, rather than the people who were quite content to let the church march steadily along as it had always done. In fact, though, tradition and continuity must have some appeal, or else the Roman Catholic Church would not still be, by far, the largest single religious organization on the planet. (Among Christians, its runner-up is the Orthodox church, another body scarcely known for wild innovation for its own sake.)

Look also at the religious scene in the contemporary United States. As everyone knows, the Roman Catholic Church has for decades suffered horrible scandals, chiefly sexual in nature, and prelates and priests have often shown themselves far removed from the political and cultural attitudes of many of the faithful. Moreover, the American religious marketplace offers countless rival opportunities for any disaffected believers. Obviously, then, Catholic numbers should in theory have collapsed to vanishing point over the past decade or so -- as they clearly have not. While there certainly have been defections, millions of Catholics turn up to services regularly despite any suspicions and discontents. Why do they stay?

One answer of course is that the activities of any faith at an institutional level do not necessarily reflect ordinary life as it is seen from the grass roots. It is easy enough for scholars or journalists to write about a church's public activities and controversies, its scandals and policy statements, but those have little to do with the real reasons people belong to their parishes or congregations. They identify with the church partly for reasons of family heritage and tradition, sometimes from ethnic identification or community loyalty. And however much this violates the church's theology, Catholicism is in practice highly congregational in nature. In their parishes, believers find friends and relatives, and support from a kind of extended family. The parish is home.

So strong are these ties that it is difficult to imagine just how horribly provocative an official church statement must be in order to force them out of the institution. Ordinary Catholics will rather stay and wait for the departure of the prelate in question, while maintaining the day-to-day life of the parish community.

Of course, people do defect on occasion, but only rarely over political or theological issues. They are much more likely to leave because the parish in question has ceased to function as a working community, possibly because of a disastrous shortage of clergy, or a singularly malevolent priest. Movement is also more probable when some other institution offers a more appealing facsimile of community, fellowship and family. This is largely the appeal of Pentecostal churches in Latin America, with their much more numerous and accessible clergy, and their powerful sense of compañerismo, fellowship.

In the United States, similarly, individuals may change churches out of theological convictions, but they are much more likely to do so because of a change in personal relationships, a marriage or divorce. Change is also likely when a rival denomination offers powerful practical temptations in the form of an outstanding children's ministry or singles' group.

I am certainly not trying to reduce religious loyalty to worldly matters of community or family identification. Of course, people belong chiefly because of the spiritual fulfillment they find there, which may or may not follow the church's official theologies. I recall a wise remark of Fr. Andrew Greeley, a writer with whom I have had more than one battle in past years. Sit an average bunch of Catholics down and you might be horrified by how many errors they make in summarizing the Church's doctrines. At the same time, though, you will find them absolutely tuned to a particular set of narratives and images, of abundantly Catholic ways of thinking and imagining. Or as he summarized it perfectly: "They stay for the stories." When those stories also incorporate the traditions of communities and ethnic groups, the resulting package is enormously strong, to the point that people really will die for this faith.

In recent years, journalists have often asked, in effect, what the Catholic church can do to save itself, and the desired answer usually involves issues of policy, about transparency on abuse cases, about attitudes to sexuality and gender. Those are all crucial matters, but the underlying assumption is that people belong to religious institutions chiefly because of its official attitudes and statements. In the vast majority of cases, I suggest, they don't. The problem is that, as yet, we really don't have a scholarship of why people stay.

So here's a proposal for a whole new academic discipline: the study of staying put.

Philip Jenkins is a Distinguished Professor of History at Baylor University and a columnist for RealClearReligion. His latest book is Laying Down the Sword.

Do we think: "What awful women?" Or maybe "what an awful religion?"

Likely not.

Try this for a plotline:

A woman is born to wealth and spends her early years in the meaningless pursuit of social status. Suddenly, she discovers a deep faith and piety and turns away from her earlier values. Instead of revealing designer dresses, her attire is now modest. She takes a humble job caring for the ill in their own homes.

Could be the start of one of the Lives of the Saints, yes? Maybe even Clare? Or if set in modern times, it's the start of a movie for the Hallmark or GMC cable channels.

Let's add a fact: She is brought to her new faith through the love of a man who becomes her husband. She is devoted not only to her faith but to her family and her daughter. Probably not the life of a Catholic saint, then. But still fodder for an uplifting movie.

It would be a rare American indeed who would not find as least parts of this narrative admirable. Even an atheist might nod in agreement as she turns from finding the next party to a life that is filled not only with religious meaning but with actions that manifest those new values.

Now let's add another fact: Her husband is Muslim. The modest clothing includes a hijab. And there goes the movie. There also goes, for many people, any presumption that could possibly be a positive story.

I am, of course, stealing from the headlines and from an account that we know has a terrible ending. To the extent that we can trust media accounts, this is the tale of Katherine Russell, the widow of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings.

Daughter of a pair of Yale grads, described by college friends as a "social butterfly," she turns away from a life of comfort into a life of Muslim piety. She works as a home health aide, caring for the sick. She is faithful to her husband and raises her daughter.

In the days after the bombing, as information about Russell filtered out, a lot of the chatterers wondered whether she had been brainwashed. Whether she had been abused. What else could explain someone turning from the life she had to where she ended up?

In the Washington Post, Melinda Henneberger wrote about how people she knows described that movement from free spirit into a hijab as a "debasement." Henneberger was also kind enough to quote a question I asked during a Facebook discussion of whether Russell sacrificed her "real identity" for the love of her husband.

Who are we to say whether she gave up her identity or found it? We don't live in her head. We can't assume we know why she made her choices. How much should whether she decided to wear a wimple or hijab or sheytl or bonnet make a difference in how we think about those choices?

Did she know what Tsarnaev was planning, if he was the man behind the bombings? That's a question for law enforcement. If she says she did not, she wouldn't be the first woman willfully blinding herself to her husband's terrible deeds. The Godfather is fiction. But it reflects some truths about the ways people operate. I don't think that most viewers of that film automatically condemn either the women or the church.

The latest news reports say that Russell will continue to cooperate with authorities. Maybe one day she'll choose to tell her story publicly. She owes the world -- or at least the police -- an explanation for what she knew and did not know about the Boston bombing.

But about her religious choices, not as much.

Jeffrey Weiss is a RealClearReligion columnist from Dallas, Texas. Follow him on Twitter @JeffreyWeissRCR.

Next week, delegates from the National Council of the Boy Scouts of America will gather in Grapevine, Texas to vote on whether to change the long-standing membership policy against "open and avowed" homosexuality on the part of youth members of the Boy Scouts.

On Wednesday the National Catholic Committee on Scouting (NCCS) released a statement about the upcoming vote that outlines some important principles for Catholic delegates to consider.

First is the principle that those inclined toward homosexuality must be treated with dignity and respect, a belief based on the fundamental doctrine that every person is made in the image and likeness of God.

The statement also cites the most authoritative source of Catholic teaching on the question of homosexuality, the Catechism of the Catholic Church. In paragraphs 2357-59, the Catechism explains that homosexual acts are objectively and intrinsically disordered and contrary to natural law, and cannot be approved under any circumstances. This is a truth, based in Sacred Scripture, that the Church has always declared.

The NCCS statement affirms that "the Church reserves the right to seek to place those who live by its teachings in leadership positions that serve our youth, as well as the right to continue to call our young people to live by the teachings of our faith and by moral truth which can be known by all."

Why speak of "leadership positions" when the resolution addresses only youth membership?

One reason is known well to those inside the organization. The Boy Scouts allow older youth members to apply for leadership positions with significant authority over younger members in the troop. The proposed membership change would authorize open and avowed homosexuality on the part of older teens in leadership posts.

The other reason is fast becoming known: While the terms of the resolution purport only to affect youth, the practical and legal result of a bifurcated membership policy would be a change in the policy on adult leaders as well.

Practically speaking, if the resolution passes, open homosexuality will be officially consistent with the Scouting code throughout a Scout's career until the moment he turns 18, when it suddenly becomes inconsistent with the code. Under the new policy, some action against the Scout will be required, but no troop leader would want to enforce such an irrational rule and few will. A de facto change in the rule for adults will occur almost immediately.

What's more, the new policy would forfeit the legal victory the Scouts won at the Supreme Court over a decade ago. When the organization was sued for unlawful discrimination because of its membership policy, the Court ruled in Boy Scouts of America v. Dale that the policy is constitutional under the Boy Scouts' First Amendment speech and association rights. But if the Scouts' new "speech" is incoherent -- open homosexuality is consistent with the Scouting code except when it isn't -- there will be no legal basis left for courts to uphold the prohibitory portion of the policy.

The Scouts will be sued, they will lose, and it will be impossible for them to continue to prohibit open and avowed homosexuality on the part of adult leaders.

Finally, an important distinction has been lost in the current debate. The Boy Scouts' long-standing policy does not, by its terms or in practice, exclude people who experience same-sex attraction. Rather, the prohibition is on "open and avowed" homosexuality, and it is that prohibition which will be lifted if the resolution passes.

Boy Scout officials conducted a survey in recent months on whether to change the long-standing membership policy. The survey found that 72 percent of the chartering organizations oppose changing the policy. That corresponds almost exactly with the percentage of chartering organizations that are faith-based. And a great many of them are Catholic parishes.

How can Catholic churches sponsor troops with leaders who live in open and avowed opposition to the truths of the Catholic faith and the teachings of its Church? It is a question that all Catholic delegates must ponder before they vote in Grapevine next week.

Cathy Ruse, Esq. is Senior Fellow for Legal Studies at the Family Research Council.

Last year I wrote that radical liberals would rather see women die of breast cancer than allow the Susan G. Komen Foundation to defund Planned Parenthood. When Komen relented under tremendous public pressure, the Planned Parenthood-NARAL-NOW triumvirate and their ilk celebrated like they had won tickets to see Joni Mitchell sing to Sandra Fluke on The Rachel Maddow Show. Cancer ridden mothers, sisters, and daughters be damned.

In recent weeks, however, these same folks have had to shelve their morbid celebrations and incessant self-congratulations in the face of two stories that undermine critical arguments they make to advance their agenda.

The first story is out of Philadelphia, where abortion provider Kermit Gosnell was convicted of first degree murder of three children who were born alive and then murdered by Gosnell at his clinic. The media, of course, was slow to cover the case because it made abortion seem like, well, murder. And besides, Amanda Knox is being retried halfway across the world and American Idol has ratings issues and as Mrs. Clinton would say, "What difference does it make?" As it turns out, it makes all the difference in the world.

Those who support abortion rely on an antiseptic view of it to keep half of the country in their corner. It's a "medical procedure" between a "woman and her doctor." It involves a "fetus" or a "tissue." It's private and, if you must know, mundane. That's until parts of little babies are found floating in jars in the good "doctor's" office. God forbid the American public starts to believe that this is where we end up when we bestow upon ourselves the power to decide when life begins.

The second story dates back to the 1970's. It was when tennis superstars Jimmy Connors and Chris Evert were young, wealthy, and in love. Connors recently revealed that Evert aborted his child and hinted that she did so, as was her right, without his consent. She was 19 years old at the time. He was 21. The ages of their contemporaries were stationed in Vietnam and elsewhere, fighting for the tennis stars' right to be fabulous.

The Connors story shines a light on an abortion circumstance the Left wants to discuss even less than Kermit Gosnell. That of millions of people over the years who have had the time, the means, and the ability to have and care for a child, some didn't because to do so would be inconvenient. The Left wants us to believe that every abortion is the result of extreme poverty, medical necessity or rape and incest. Not because the U.S. Open is just around the corner.

Not surprisingly, the narrative from the liberal spin machine is that these stories are just aberrations. That the vast majority of abortions are necessary, and that they will continue to fight to keep abortion "safe, legal and rare." And besides, the issue is settled -- see Roe v. Wade. This is about a woman's constitutional right. It's about liberty. Who could argue with that?

But this isn't liberty. It's tyranny. And if we don't stop it, we will look back some day and realize that we really were on the wrong side of history.

Patrick Hughes was a conservative Republican candidate for U.S. Senate in 2010. He lives in Hinsdale, Illinois with his wife and three children.

Nothing ever gets built, whether pyramid or skyscraper, if everybody is just wandering around in aimless little circles muttering that whatever they think is simply their opinion, which of course could be wrong. That kind of behavior does go on, of course, but only when a civilization is down to its fin de siecling of the drain. That's how they fall apart, not how they get built.

Now if these civilizations are very conceited, or if they don't get out much, they frequently may not know that they believe certain fundamental truths -- they just chalk all that stuff up to what "everybody knows." When the occasional person shows up who doesn't "know" that stuff, he is dismissed as a sociopath, mentally ill, a religious nut, or a terrorist. But such epistemological naïveté is really indefensible -- and unfortunate in our case, because Western values currently are under attack, and whenever you are under attack, indefensible is not the adjective you want to have riding your noun.

Now this explains a great deal about why Christians who are actively engaged with issues in the public square usually get the reaction they do. (I leave out of this analysis the reaction that some Christians get when they decorate leftist dogma with random Bible tinsel. They already have their reward, which appears to be some kind of empathy grok with the spirit of the age.) The secular elite wants to act as though biblical Christians are breaking the rules by intruding purely religious concerns into an arena that ought to be entirely a-religious. They want to believe the problem is that the Christians are appealing to a particular God, when the real problem is that they are appealing to a rival God. The issue is never "no God or God," but rather "the establishment God or the rival." When Christians start to act in a way that threatens to reveal that there actually is an established and embedded god of the system, the reactions can be spectacular -- what Moliere, with his unerring instinct for the mot juste, might have called "freaking out."

Another way of saying this is that religious systems are inescapable. I am not in the habit of quoting Tillich favorably, but I don't do it much, and so I beg to be forgiven just this once. No individual, no group of individuals, and no culture can fail to have an ultimate concern. When you have found their ultimate concern, you have found the object of their faith -- their foundational religious commitment. Every society has one, and after we have dealt with the reality and inescapability of that, we should endeavor to find the right one.

Some religions have candles and altars, and some of them don't. The way secularists try to plead that they are not religious at all because they don't have the accoutrements that other "denominations" have is mystifying. It is like Catholics claiming that Shakers aren't religious because they don't have prayer books, or Shakers arguing that Catholics can't be religious because they do.

Secularism is a faith, plain and simple -- every culture has a cultus, a system of worship at the center. We are no different, and so our high claims of religious neutrality are therefore a sham, a pretense, a fraud, chicanery, duplicity, a civic hustle, a fast one, a bit of flim-flammery, and any other relevant terms of disapprobation.

I wrote earlier of "Western values." What are those? The West was not built by the secularists, but it has been hollowed out by them. Jesus once compared two men who built two houses, one on sand and the other on the rock. He then compared what happened to the two houses when the storm hit them. Left out of His parable was the option of initially building a house on rock, but then going off to college and taking one philosophy course too many, and coming home again in order to have the house moved to a sandier location, but one with a better view of man's endless potential and innate goodness.

Whenever you deny that ever-present realities are not actually present, the result is simply confusion. Very few Christians think that they can be Christian and Muslim at the same time, or Christian and Buddhist. But quite a few have been maneuvered into thinking that it is possible to be Christian and secularist. Of course, it is physically possible, but this is because syncretism has always been possible. People have been trying to split the difference for a long time.

But as Joshua told the people a long time ago, when he missed a great opportunity for inter-faith dialog, the time had come for choosing (Josh 24:15).

Douglas Wilson is the Senior Minister of Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho. Follow him on Twitter @douglaswils.

As a prime example, I offer the wave of investigations that the United States and other countries undertook into Communist subversion and espionage in the Cold War years. Well, that description is a little wordy, so let's just use the convenient short-hand that has become so standard: the McCarthy witch hunts.

It's concise, it's memorable, everyone knows what you mean by it -- and it's utterly wrong. In its way, the whole "witch-hunt" idea is a highly religious concept, rooted as it is in the history of supernatural thought and demonology. But beyond this, it has acquired the status of an infallible dogma of political faith, to err from which is damnable heresy.

For a current example, look at the most recent New York Review of Books, in which Adam Hochschild reviews a book on the FBI's war in the 1960s against student radicalism, chiefly at Berkeley. Hochschild declares that American Communism scarcely existed as a real force. It "never controlled a major city or region, or even elected a single member to the national legislature." The real danger, instead, was American anti-Communism, which "witch-hunted dissidents in Hollywood, universities, and government departments; and was a force that politicians like Joseph McCarthy and Richard Nixon rode to great prominence."

To speak of a witch-hunt evokes a whole mythological system. In the original witch-hunts of sixteenth or seventeenth century Europe, thousands of innocent people were tried and punished for crimes of which they were not just innocent, but which were actively impossible, such as riding on the back of a goat to a personal meeting with Satan. Witch panics served to focus fears and anxieties within hungry and war-torn communities in desperate need of scapegoats.

Real witches, by definition, did not exist.

And that is the implication of the phrase when applied to the twentieth century. When Congressional committees dragooned left-wing activists before them to answer humiliating questions, they were (we think) investigating imaginary crimes by non-existent witches. This picture is consecrated in American culture by Arthur Miller's heavy-handed allegory, The Crucible. Once you accept the witch-hunt idea, you have a ready-made system of near-diabolic villains, and a heroic martyrology of saints and innocent sufferers.

In the Communist case, though, the "witches" really did exist, and genuinely posed a threat. For some thirty years now, we have had excellent historical studies by such scholars as Ronald Radosh, Allen Weinstein, John Earl Haynes and Hervey Klehr, and they demonstrate a picture of American Communism absolutely at variance with the myth. At its height in the 1930s, the US Communist Party had at least 75,000 open members, including many well placed in key strategic industries. There was also a penumbra of clandestine members, of unknown scale.

That party was never in any sense an autonomous political organization, as it existed as a wholly owned and lavishly funded subsidiary of the Soviet Union. Now, supporting a foreign country is one thing, but giving it active aid to the point of espionage and sabotage is another, and that was the primary purpose of U.S. Communism as a movement. (That observation obviously does not apply to the intentions of most ordinary members, who were gullible rather than malicious).

If that statement about the movement seems far-fetched, then you are probably not familiar with the evidence of VENONA, the highly successful effort of US and other Western intelligence agencies to decipher the secret communications of their Soviet counterparts from the mid-1940s onwards.

VENONA shows beyond doubt that the Soviet Union did mount a massive espionage effort against the United States, and that Soviet agencies recruited large numbers of Americans, including some at high levels of government. Alger Hiss was a spy, as were the Rosenbergs. If FDR had died before 1944, his successor would have been Vice President Henry Wallace, who identified Laurence Duggan as his potential Secretary of State, and Harry Dexter White as his Treasury Secretary. Duggan and White were both Soviet spies. Quite apart from the many known cases, VENONA reveals the existence of several hundred more Americans who worked for the Soviets, but who still remain unidentified.

The "witch hunts" of course began long before McCarthy's rise to prominence, and arguably had done far more to dismantle the Soviet spy threat than the Senator from Wisconsin. Anti-Communist purges were in fact at their height under the Democratic Truman administration. They reached new heights after 1950 not because of the rise of a new demagogue, but because the U.S. was at open war with Communist forces in Korea, with the daily expectation of an imminent escalation against the Soviets -- who had tested a nuclear bomb the previous year. In such a dire situation, it was natural to expect a domestic sabotage campaign by those Soviet assets on American soil who could most easily be found within the ranks of the Communist Party.

In the 1950s, unlike the 1650s, the "witches" were quite real and deadly dangerous, and any government that failed to seek them out and neutralize them would have been signally failing in its basic duty of national self-preservation. It made excellent sense to ask exactly who was, or recently had been, a Communist, and the obvious way to do that was to track their political views over the previous decade or so. In what sense could investigating such a record be called a witch-hunt?

Frankly, I'm not too hopeful about laying the "witch" mythology to rest, because it is so firmly established in our political discourse, not to mention in popular culture. And whether we're dealing with secular or religious believers, it rarely makes sense to argue with strict fundamentalists.

Philip Jenkins is a Distinguished Professor of History at Baylor University and a columnist for RealClearReligion. His latest book is Laying Down the Sword.

"My thoughts turn to all who are unemployed, often as a result of a self-centred mindset bent on profit at any cost."

Which got him tarred as a wooly-headed socialist or worse by some in the Twitterverse. NBCnews.com quoted this:

"And John MacDonald, managing director at the JMAGroup accounting firm in Oakville, Ontario, shot back: 'blah blah blah... it's always the capitalist....what about self indulgent employees who never retrain or take control of their options?'

From my seat on the sidelines, I continue to enjoy the papal actions and resultant reactions. And I got to thinking: Why do I care? Yes, I have a professional stake in tracking the leader of a billion Catholics. But I'll admit to having developed a bit of a rooting interest in seeing what he comes up with next.

Partly, its because he's been confounding prognostication since the moment he was elected. In a column in the American Spectator this month, RealClearReligion editor Jeremy Lott was kind enough to point out one of my early wrong guesses. The day former Archbishop Jorge Bergoglio was elected pope, commentators wondered whether his name choice was an acknowledgment of Francis of Assisi or Francis Xavier, founder of the Jesuit order to which the new pope belonged.

While the early explanation was that he was honoring the saint of Assisi, I figured the easy thing for him to do would be tip his mitre to the Jesuits' founder. I wrote: "I won't be shocked if eventually the Vatican issues a statement with a nod to that saint, as well."

Nope. The new pope cleared that up by Day Two. The name was only to honor the saint who famously rejected all luxuries, took humility to an astonishing extreme, and helped a woman found her own holy order. And whose name had never been chosen by a pope. He was, in fact, the first pope to choose an entirely unused name in 1,100 years.

Day after day the stories filtered out about how he was rejecting other reasonable expectations about how a new pope would fit into the grand and long tradition.

Here's a secret about reporters: We always want to get the facts right. But only slightly better than making accurate predictions is getting those predictions confounded for interesting and unexpected reasons. Which we can then write about.

Francis has been the gift that keeps on giving in that regard. Paying his own hotel bill, rejecting the papal palace apartment, washing the feet of women -- including a Muslim woman! And his repeated emphasis on the poor, the poor, the poor. Just as if he was taking his name seriously. Not to mention taking seriously the incredibly frequent mention of the importance of caring for the poor in Jewish and Christian scriptures.

From my bleacher seat, the reaction of hidebound traditionalists has been flat-out fun to watch. On the one hand, Francis is their pope. And they take obedience to the pope as an article of, ahem, faith. On the other hand, some of them do love the pomp and smells and bells and an emphasis on rituals and particular portions of dogma and tradition that aren't so much about the "least of these."

It's not that he's given a millimeter on any matter of settled Catholic theology, mind you. I'll go far out on a distant limb and predict that there will be no loosening of rules about celibacy, birth control, gay marriage or the other social hot-button issues that roil the American Catholic body politic during his reign.

But I'll also bet that the predatory priest scandal and hierarchical cover-up will be attended to differently. A few days ago, the former cardinal of Scotland was ordered into exile. He'd resigned after admitting making advances on seminarians. He'd wanted to settle into his retirement house in Scotland. Instead, the Vatican ordered him out of the UK.

Contrast that with the fate of former Boston Cardinal Bernard Law. Under his leadership, the Boston Archdiocese was dragged through American secular courts and into revealing a pattern of abusive priests whose offenses were hidden by the hierarchy. For his troubles, John Paul II took Law to Rome and appointed him archpriest of the Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore.

So there's that.

But there's something else that makes Francis a particularly sympathetic figure, I think: He's making a clear and explicit effort to live in keeping with parts of the New Testament that make many Christians squirm.

For all the hoo-hah about abortion and homosexuality -- both real issues, without question -- one almost needs a magnifying glass to find scriptural references to back up the attention. But living humbly? Putting special emphasis on caring for the poor? Reaching out to people who do not seem to fit into the pomp of a traditional papal ceremony? One need not be a theologian to find verses that command followers of Jesus to do all of those things.

Heck, Jesus himself is quoted mentioning the poor at least eleven times. And not once in the context of "self-indulgent employees."

I'm not remotely attracted to Catholic theology, no matter what this pope does. But his behavior offers a spot of hope that transcends the Vatican. So many public figures these days have feet of clay that extend at least up to their groins. Even religious leaders are too often caught guilty of hypocrisy, cherry picking, or flat-out lying.

Thus far, Pope Francis has been unusually consistent. Yes, we're still in the shakedown period of this cruise. But he's had plenty of chances to take a pratfall and hasn't stumbled yet.

Those who would say that all that he's done thus far has been symbolic are mostly right. But the pope's job is mostly about symbols. And symbols matter, in and out of religion.

A friend of mine who worked with the late management guru Peter Drucker told me recently that Drucker had a saying: "All you need is one working model to demonstrate that something can be done."

Maybe that's why I'm rooting for Pope Francis. If he can demonstrate that moral consistency is possible about difficult issues without sacrificing his humanity, humility and civility, maybe that's proof for others. Even for others who will never agree with him about important matters of principle.

Isn't that what leadership should really be about?

Jeffrey Weiss is a RealClearReligion columnist from Dallas, Texas. Follow him on Twitter @JeffreyWeissRCR.

Has the Association actually read anything by Michael Sean Winters? I'm skeptical.

A cursory review of Mr. Winters's posts reveals him to be a habitual name-caller. Papal biographer and theologian George Weigel is "noxious." Bishop Thomas Paprocki is "pathetic." The National Rifle Association is "poisonous." Canon lawyer Ed Peters is "pernicious." Catholics who opposed Pope Francis's washing of female feet on Holy Thursday were "insane" and "crazy." (Although, he may have a point there, as this website's editor Jeremy Lott also ridiculed fears of this "dangerous bisexual foot-washing anarchy.")

Winters's trademark retort to conservatives is to denounce them as "venomous." Winters's favorite foe is George Weigel, who he claimed had "special venom" for former Democratic congressman Fr. Robert Drinan. Then, there are the predictable culprits: Vice President Dick Cheney, venomous. The Tea Party, venomous. The Thomas More Law Center, venomous. Audit the Catholic Campaign for Human Development? Venomous. Winters again used the moniker, "venom," for National Review editors who opined against comprehensive immigration reform. Archbishop Charles Chaput, and others, spat "venom" when they criticized Notre Dame University's decision to bestow an honorary degree on President Barack Obama. Almost any criticism, for that matter, was "venomous."

It is hard to find an instance where Winters engages critics of President Obama without mentioning their "venom." Not even Richard Nixon endured "more venom, more irrational hatred." Winters's heart bleeds for black Catholics, who he knows feel the "pain" of the "venom" directed at Obama. In a single post where Winters attacks allegedly xenophobic and racist Obama critics, the word "venom" appears not once, not twice, but four times!

Perhaps no one has spewed more venom, according to Winters, than author and frequent RealClearReligion contributor George Neumayr. When Donald Cardinal Wuerl reprimanded a parish priest for denying Communion to lesbians, Neumayr took the Cardinal to task over it and threw Winters into a tizzy. Winters devoted a post to each item Neumayr wrote about the affair and each time condemned Neumayr's "anti-Bishop," "disturbing," and "shocking" venom.

When Neumayr recently challenged the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops' immigration activism as too political, Winters asked "What planet is Mr. Neumayr living on?" Neumayr is deeply "confused," Winters complained; and no, he didn't forget to again remind readers of Neumayr's "venom."

I'd be remiss if I didn't mention one of my own run-ins with the venom vanquisher. Winters once recommended I be "deported" for, like Neumayr, opposing the clericalism of some Bishops. He railed against the "bile" in my piece, but surprisingly didn't label any of it as venomous. I've been accused of "inquisitorial venom" before, but it's just not the same if it doesn't come from Michael Sean Winters.

So, what gives? Is Winters trying to prove he's an insufferable incarnation of Saint Patrick, banishing snakes and their venom from the land? One explanation may lie in Winters's revealing suggestion that Neumayr "go back to school." Ah, yes. The antidote to stupid conservatives and their venom is re-education.

Read Winters's blog regularly, as I do (and yes, I'm putting in requests for hazard pay), and you'll notice certain things. The omitted words, amusing typos, yawn-inducing titles, the prayer requests for his St. Bernard; it is all too disappointing for a purported public intellectual.

The bottom line is that this is a man with a truly limited range of expression.

Nicholas G. Hahn III is Deputy Editor of RealClearReligion. Follow him on Twitter @NGHahn3.

I rather emphatically do not subscribe to this interpretation. It would be foolish indeed not to see that tremendous advances, especially in the arenas of science and politics, took place because of the modern turn, but it would be even more foolish to hold that modernity did not represent, in many other ways, a severe declension from what came before. This decline is particularly apparent in the areas of the arts and ethics, and I believe that there is an important similarity in the manner in which those two disciplines went bad in the modern period.

Classical philosophy and science sought to understand things in terms of Aristotle's four causes: material (what something is made of), formal (a thing's essential structure), efficient (how it got the way it is), and final (its purpose or destiny). The founders of modernity became suspicious of our capacity to know form (for things seem to be in constant flux) and finality (for it just wasn't clear where the universe was going). Accordingly, they put a great stress on the remaining two Aristotelian causes, the material and the efficient. And this is precisely why the distinctively modern sciences -- with their exclusive focus on what things are made of and how they got in their present state of being -- developed the way they did.

But this elimination of formal and final causality and the hyper-stress on material and efficient causality had profound effects outside of the physical sciences. A classical sculptor, painter, or architect was trying to imitate the forms that he found in nature and thereby to create something objectively beautiful. It is by no means accidental, for instance, that architects from the classical period through the High Renaissance designed buildings that mimicked the dimensions and features of the human body. One reason that Michelangelo's architecture is so deeply satisfying to us is that it was grounded in that artist's particularly profound grasp of the body's rhythms and proportions.

Thomas Aquinas defined art as recta ratio factibilium (right reason in regard to the making of things), and the rectitude he had in mind was none other than an understanding of the forms that God had already placed in nature. But a modern artist, unconvinced that objective form ought to provide a norm for her work, tends to see her art as the objectification of her subjectivity. The self-expression of the artist -- the efficient cause of the work, if you will -- is more important than any conformity of that work to a formal norm. This approach was beautifully and succinctly summed up by the Dadaist painter Marcel Duchamp: "Whatever an artist spits out is art." With that statement, we have reached the polar opposite of recta ratio factibilium.

And the marginalizing of final causality had a deep and deleterious effect on the way moderns tend to think about morality. Classical moral thinkers -- from Plato and Aristotle to Augustine and Aquinas -- considered the ethical act in terms of its purpose or finality. What made an act good was its orientation toward its proper end. Thus, since the end of the speech act is the enunciation of the truth, speaking a lie is morally problematic; and since the end of a political act is the enactment of justice, unjust legislating is unethical, etc.

If art is recta ratio factibilium, then ethics, for Aquinas, is recta ratio agibilium (right reason in regard to action), the rectitude of the reason in this context coming from conformity to finality. But with final causality relegated to the margins, morality became a matter of self-expression and self-creation. The extreme instance of this attitude can be found in the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche and Jean-Paul Sartre. The nineteenth century German opined that the supreme morality -- beyond good and evil -- was the ecstatic self-assertion of the super-man, and the twentieth century Frenchman held that the "authentic" person is the one who acts in accord with her own deepest instincts. Sartre famously argued that existence (unfettered freedom) precedes essence (who or what a person becomes). And that is the polar opposite of a recta ratio agibilium ordered to objective finality.

If you think that all of this seems hopelessly abstruse and irrelevant to the contemporary situation, think again. Even the most radical ideas of the moderns in regard to morality have trickled down, through a network of professors, teachers, script writers, television personalities, singers, bloggers to reach the ordinary person today. And this, I would submit, is what makes the Catholic position on ethics so hard to understand. The modern person instinctually says, "Who are you to tell me what to do?" or "Who are you to set limits to my freedom?" And the Catholic instinctually says, "Order your freedom to an objective truth that makes you the person you are meant to be."

It would be the stuff of another article to explore, even with relative adequacy, the manner in which this dilemma might be resolved, but might I suggest, in closing, just one observation. The fundamental problem with modern ethics (as with modern art, generally speaking) is that it is boring. The self-asserting and self-expressing ego never really gets anywhere, never breaks out of its own clean, well-lighted space. But the human subject, enraptured by the objective good, sets out on a journey away from the narrow confines of the self and becomes an adventurer.

Father Robert Barron is the founder of the global ministry, Word on Fire, and the Rector/President of Mundelein Seminary.

Please understand, I do not personally accept any allegations of official conspiracy in this affair. In my view, law enforcement agencies acted as bravely and efficiently as they possibly could against two truly dangerous terrorists. But here's the problem. Over the past twenty years, the independence struggle of the Chechens and neighboring peoples of the North Caucasus has involved ferocious violence, frequently directed against innocent civilians. Throughout, this has been an ugly and confusing clandestine war, marked by repeated acts of deception and provocation. Russian forces assuredly have engaged in false flag actions, seeking to blame atrocities on rebel forces. Chechens naturally assume that American agencies follow the same tactics.

However poorly reported in the West, the scale of terrorism resulting from this Caucasian conflict has been horrendous. If the United States or a European ally suffered such carnage on a regular basis, we would be wondering if the nation in question could escape total collapse.

As the Russians tried to suppress the insurgency, so Caucasian forces -- usually Muslim -- took the war to the enemy, carrying out mega-terror attacks on Russian soil. Among the worst incidents, we think of the terrorist takeover of a Moscow theater in 2002, which killed 130 hostages, in addition to forty militants. In 2010, two women suicide bombers killed forty commuters on the Moscow subway. The following year, forty civilians perished in the bombing of Moscow's Domodedovo airport. Suicide bombers have also brought down airliners. Most notoriously, the Islamist seizure of a school in Beslan (North Ossetia) in 2004 killed almost four hundred, including two hundred children. And those ghastly "spectaculars" were just the tip of a very large iceberg of continuing murderous attacks.

In most cases, there is no reason to doubt the attribution of blame, particularly when actions were publicly claimed by terror leaders like the monstrous Shamil Basaev (who was probably assassinated by Russian forces in 2006). Sometimes, though, attributing responsibility is close to impossible.

The most troubling such incident occurred in September 1999, when huge bombs detonated in apartment blocks in the Russian cities of Moscow, Volgodonsk and Buynaksk. Three hundred innocent civilians died, most of whom were sleeping in their beds. (Other simultaneous attacks were planned, but prevented). Popular fury about the atrocity gave an enormous boost to the new government of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. This patriotic upsurge gave the Russian state the justification it needed for a renewed offensive in the Caucasus. The resulting conflict -- the Second Chechen War -- lasted a decade and killed perhaps a hundred thousand.

As the apartment bombing story developed, though, it became still more sinister. Government critics noted implausible elements in the official account, and they noted the highly convenient timing of the crime, just as the regime needed an excuse to renew its war effort. These suspicions were further publicized when billionaire oligarch Boris Berezovsky fell out with the Putin government, and used his wealth to promote a media campaign denouncing the official version. Berezovsky's propaganda war against Putin ended this year when he died in England, the victim of a highly controversial apparent suicide. Another prominent advocate of official conspiracy in the apartment bombing case was intelligence officer Alexander Litvinenko, who also died in England, murdered by exposure to a rare radioactive isotope. British law enforcement and media have widely attributed the Litvinenko murder to the Russian government.

Although the apartment bombing case remains the most controversial, it's not hard to find activists who accuse the Russian Federal Security Service, the FSB, of covert involvement in virtually all the major terror attacks in recent years.

The notion of false flag provocateur terrorism might seem like gross paranoia, but it has been a well-known intelligence strategy through the years, and one highly familiar to Russia. In its modern form, the method was largely devised by Pyotr Rachkovsky, who served as head of overseas operations for the Okhrana, the Tsarist secret police. Later Soviet agencies like the KGB imitated their Tsarist predecessors enthusiastically, and the FSB has inherited much of the old KGB world-view. (Putin himself served as a KGB officer for sixteen years).

False flag actions have various goals. At the simplest level, an intelligence group might set up a front organization to allow the perpetration of a violent act in such a way as to escape responsibility -- in other words, to achieve deniability. Alternatively, an agency can carry out an outrage in a way that places the blame on some hostile group or nation, so that this enemy will be stigmatized. In extreme cases, an outrage might even justify a military response or a declaration of war.

The clandestine structure of terrorist groups makes such false attribution easy enough. Hypothetically, imagine a situation in which Russian agents have penetrated the command structure of a hostile terrorist movement, such as a Chechen Muslim group. A low-level operative receives an order to carry out an act and obeys it, knowing nothing of the real purpose he is serving. Truthfully, then, we could say that the actual crime was the work of a Chechen group and a Chechen terrorist -- but the orders came from Moscow. As English thriller writer Eric Ambler observed, the important thing is not who fires the shot, what counts is who pays for the bullet.

Matters become still shadier when we think of the clandestine underworld of rogue intelligence agents and would-be spooks, double agents and independent contractors, lone wolves and petty criminals, any of whom would carry out the bloodiest atrocity if sufficiently well paid. In some cases, neither intelligence agencies nor terrorists might be entirely sure who actually orchestrated a given attack.

The more widely conspiracy charges circulate in a society, the harder it becomes to accept any act at its face value. An intelligent or well-informed person will respond suspiciously to virtually any official statement or attribution of responsibility. And that is why some people around the world, however improbably, will always regard the Tsarnaev affair as a manifestation of American manipulation and dirty tricks.

Philip Jenkins is a Distinguished Professor of History at Baylor University and a columnist for RealClearReligion. His latest book is Laying Down the Sword.

But in the past week, I spotted two examples of putative conservatives crying wolf. And both examples have religious overtones.

Start with a column on the conservative CatholicCulture.org website, by site editor Phil Lawler. He's complaining that, in the moments immediately after the bombing at the Boston Marathon, priests were turned away. Here's a nugget:

Doctors and nurses were welcome at the bombing scene. Firefighters and police officers were welcome. But Catholic priests, who might have offered the solace of the sacraments, were not. "Catholics need not apply." That slogan was familiar in Boston years ago, before Irish and Italian immigrants took over control of the city. Now, after decades of decline in Catholic influence, the attitude has returned.

He got his information, he said, from a column in the Wall Street Journal. Sure enough, there was a piece by Jennifer Graham. It begins:

The heart-wrenching photographs taken in the moments after the Boston Marathon bombings show the blue-and-yellow jackets of volunteers, police officers, fire fighters, emergency medical technicians, even a three-foot-high blue M&M. Conspicuously absent are any clerical collars or images of pastoral care.

Apparently a bunch of priests from nearby Catholic churches -- this is Boston, after all -- rushed to the scene seeking to offer spiritual succor to their faithful. Only to be turned away from the actual blast site. She quotes a priest who had been turned away; "Once it was clear we couldn't get inside, we came back here to St. Clement's, set up a table with water and oranges and bananas to serve people, and helped people however we could."

To which Lawler said: "Doesn't that nicely capture what a once-Catholic, now-secular culture expects from the Church? It's not essential for priests to administer the sacraments; in fact it's unwelcome. But if they could just stay out of the way, and give people something to eat, that would be fine."

Proof that anti-Catholicism has wormed its way back into American culture? You have got to be kidding.

Did you watch any of the video of the blast scene? Chaos and danger and hundreds of wounded for whom any delay in care could have meant the difference between life and death. Anybody who rushed to help get the wounded to safety and medical attention were welcome. Prayer dispensers -- Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, or the Flying Spaghetti Monster -- not so much.

Yeah, I know some Catholics want to claim that their sacraments are so important that an exception should have been made. But to non-Catholics, that's just so much abracadabra. Many faiths have their own rituals for the dying just as important as them as the Last Rites are to Catholics. And first responders had no time to sort them out.

Yes, there were victims in Boston that terrible day. None of them happened to be Catholic priests.

My second example is pegged to a small news story that, for a moment, was a big deal in the conservative Christian blogosphere. The Southern Baptist Convention news website was being blocked on military computers because of "hostile content."

Surely this was yet another example of the government's war on Christianity? Nope. Bob Smietana of The Tennessean chased the truth down: Turns out the SBC website had been infected with malware and the Pentagon's cybersecurity defense system was doing exactly what we'd all hope it would.

So it's a non-story. Or maybe a cautionary tale about jumping to conclusions. Or maybe not. Tony Perkins' Family Research Council sends out a regular email newsletter commenting on the news of the day. Here's how one started last week:

While the rest of the world is hunting down real terrorists, the Obama military is still targeting Christians! That's why yesterday's reports of religious censorship were so believable. Emails had been streaming into Fox News from service members across the country who all shared the same complaint: the Southern Baptist Convention website had been blocked on their bases for "hostile content." When Defense officials tried to pass off the problem as a computer glitch, most people--including myself--thought, "Here we go again."

It goes on:

Turns out, it was faulty wiring -- a hiccup in the website security that's since been corrected. And while the flap can't be pinned on the Obama administration's hostility toward faith, it did reveal plenty about the current military environment...

Leave aside that the FRC's complaints are usually about the failure of government agencies to give an unconstitutional nod to one particular sort of Christianity. In this case, the FRC acknowledges the accusation wasn't true. But apparently, that doesn't matter! It's still proof of government hostility!

Conservatives are supposed to stand for truth against relativism. But that seems not to be the play in this case. Truth that doesn't fit a predetermined narrative is stood on its head and square-peg-crammed into a round hole.

Again, this is a narrative of victimhood. A victim is entitled to anger. Entitled, in fact to justice and reparations. And these folks surely want to claim victimhood and all the rights thereof.

This is a world with real victims. Even real Christian victims. I wonder how the Egyptian Coptics in Cairo who are actually dying for their faith would view the boo-hoo-ing by these American Christians.

Feel their pain? I bet not.

Jeffrey Weiss is a RealClearReligion columnist from Dallas, Texas. Follow him on Twitter @JeffreyWeissRCR.

RealClearReligion: What does the Association of Catholic Colleges and Universities do?

Michael Galligan-Stierle: The Association of Catholic Colleges and Universities is a membership organization. We have 190 plus Catholic colleges in the U.S. and 20 international colleges, universities, that pool their common monies and common ideals and they ask our association to help them strengthen their Catholic identity. The two ways we do that is by being a public and collective voice and by delivering programs, projects, and written materials to help them strengthen their identity.

RCR: What do you use as a base document for Catholic identity?

MGS: Pope John Paul II's 1990 Apostolic Constitution, Ex Corde Ecclesiae, really frames how we go forward. That document has in it -- in the very beginning -- the four essential characteristics of what a Catholic college or university is. The shorthand would be this: inspire Christian values, connect the Catholic faith to knowledge and research, embody the Christian message in a faithfully Catholic way, and serve all in the search for transcendence and meaning.

RCR: Do you think all of your members live up to those characteristics?

MGS: Well, Ex Corde Ecclesiae is very clear about who the judge of that is supposed to be -- the Bishop in the diocese. Our association helps members to the degree that they have an interest in developing a certain dimension of their school. So, one year a university may put their energy into the campus ministry office, another they may focus on student affairs, another they may put their monies in the faculty to try to strengthen different components at different times. But ultimately, it is up to the Bishop to have that cooperative relationship with the college or university. Sometimes the university will help the diocese, and sometimes the diocese will point out areas where the school needs improvement.

RCR: Francis Cardinal George has said: "You can't have a Catholic university that takes Land O'Lakes as a charter document." Do you agree with him?

MGS: Every Catholic college or university has to take Ex Corde Ecclesiae as its landmark document.

RCR: What do you think of the Land O'Lakes conference?

MGS: It is a subtext of history.

RCR: In my experience as a student at DePaul University in Chicago, the largest Catholic university in America, Catholic identity often played second fiddle to Vincentian identity. Does this tend to secularize a campus?

MGS: I think it particularizes it, but I think you're on to a very good point. I don't think your experience at DePaul is characteristic of the United States because it happens to be one of our largest, and that's not typical. Secondly, DePaul was founded with a unique way of proceeding. That is, when the University of Chicago was founded, Catholics and Jews weren't allowed in. So, the Vincentians built into the mission statement at DePaul some things that generalized things in a certain way that today could be used to secularize.

Of 220 of our colleges, 200 were founded by religious orders, 10 were founded by Bishops, and 10 were founded by lay people. So, the predominant thrust is to proceed through a certain lens, the way of that religious order. You have the basic Catholic way of looking at the world, but then Saints have emerged through history that take a certain dimension of Jesus's message and raise it up into a larger than life perspective. They're all Catholic, but they will start in different places and end up in different places because they believe that dimension of Jesus's Gospel message in the Catholic tradition is the best way to fully realize it.

RCR: What about when religious orders go too far and create, for instance, Vincentianism?

MGS: You are absolutely correct in stating that today in the Catholic Church, not just Catholic higher education, there are people who misunderstand the truth and the essence of who we are. There are people in pews today that approach Mary as a goddess. That's not what our Church teaches. There are other people who take that word, Vincentianism, and use it as a common denominator. That is, they might pull out a couple of things that they really like about a way of life --

RCR: And they forget everything else.

MGS: Right. So, if you are Catholic, you should be the freest person in the world. But, you should also be the person who's the most responsible person for the common good. What happens often in the culture of the United States, Catholics emphasize the freedom dimension without remembering the responsibility that comes with it. You're right: there are people who misspeak. Are they in Catholic higher education? Yes. They happen to be in our Church, too.

RCR: What role do you think Catholic education has in this state of affairs for American Catholics?

MGS: Catholic education needs to be an academic institution that's vibrant and full of the search for truth and simultaneously a place where Catholicism is real and operative. On a good day, when we're batting 1000, that's what we need to be. Are we batting 300? 400? Are we perfect? No.

Our graduates, by every study that's been done in the last 25 years, consistently view their education as substantively more helpful in living an ethical, authentic life. For instance, if you take the Hardwick Day data, people that graduate from state institutions are at 9 percent in terms of having an ethical way of proceeding. Within Catholic higher education: 55 percent. It's not even close!

RCR: How much do American Catholics know about the Catholic faith after going through Catholic education?

MGS: I'm really not an expert in doing a comparison of the general population of Catholics against Catholics in Catholic education. Now, the entire populations of Catholics in the United States would do well to embrace the tenets of the Catholic Church in a more faithful way. Would Catholic higher education be stronger if the larger population did that? Absolutely.

RCR: Would you say it's common for a Catholic curriculum to preclude theology?

MGS: It's absolutely not common. I think you're working through a DePaul lens, not Catholic higher education as a whole. There are no 200 schools in the world that have a higher requirement in theology, philosophy, and ethics. On an aggregate -- not your one campus experience -- it is two courses in theology, two philosophy, and one ethics or morals. You have to back up from the picture and go: you're right, we're not batting 1000. How are we doing with what's happening elsewhere? Not bad. Probably the All-Star team. This association exists so that we can get better.

RCR: What needs to get better? Faculties?

MGS: I think every component of the university needs to get better and faculty is a primary one. Right now, we know from a UCLA study on spirituality, of the 21 million students in the United States that are going through college, 8 of 10 want to grow spiritually during the college years. They believe that during their coursework, they should be able to integrate their understanding of spirituality and have those conversations in the classroom and on campus. Only 5 percent of faculty are willing to have that conversation and yet, 8 of 10 students in a classroom want to have that conversation.

Now, let's parse that out in the Catholic world. How willing are the faculty at Catholic colleges to have conversations about spirituality and making the connection to coursework? 57 percent.

RCR: These conversations are still uncomfortable ones on far too many Catholic campuses. For instance, what about the recent brouhaha at Gonzaga University where administration initially denied and then placed a request for a Knights of Columbus organization under review?

MGS: But, how many of our campuses do have Knights of Columbus? You have one example of one campus that, quite frankly, hasn't made a final decision.

RCR: The fact that it's a question at all doesn't trouble you?

MGS: That they ask questions? I would hope all our campuses ask questions of any group about why they're there. In general, I do think that our schools should be places where good questions are asked. Now, were all the questions asked at Gonzaga? I don't know.

RCR: There are other examples: Notre Dame bestowed an honorary degree on President Obama. Georgetown covered an IHS symbol during a Presidential visit to campus. Aren't these incidents typical of the Catholic campus culture?

MGS: It's not typical. There's no data to back it up. Did those things happen? Yes. Are they characteristic of the large amount of good that's happening on our campuses? Absolutely not. It's like saying: "did you see Wes Walker drop the ball in the playoff game before the Super Bowl? Can you believe it?" It's obnoxious, but are you going to try to convince me that Wes Walker is a bad player? It ain't happening because you're not working with the whole body of work.

I would agree with you that we need to get stronger and this association stands ready to assist every school.

RCR: Can you identify specific areas of focus for improvement? You mentioned faculty as one. What else?

MGS: The best place to look at how to get better is what the Bishops think we ought to do. It's important to remember that it doesn't fall to this association to dictate anything. Now, what are the Bishops saying? More than faculty, we need to find ways to strengthen who our trustees are. We also have to hire for mission better. We have to get smarter about who we hire.

How do you discuss Catholic identity during an interview that doesn't violate state or federal protocol? There are ways to ask questions. One way is to ask this question: "This is a Catholic college. How would you contribute to that Catholic identity?" Well, research now shows us that that's not the best way. The best way is to have interviewees write something before the interview begins on how they're going to take their discipline and apply it to Catholic identity. So, we're getting smarter at this.

RCR: How does Catholic higher education hiring deal with the Church's decline in vocations?

MGS: In 2000, of the 220 colleges, the see-saw tilted. Before 2000, there were more religious and priests than there were lay. And in 2000, there are more lay than priests or religious. Let me give you an example of how one diocese is moving forward. Bishop George Leo Thomas of Helena, who sits on the Committee on Catholic Education of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, has decided to take one of his best preachers with pastoral skill and move him from a parish to a university chaplaincy. He says it has completely transformed the campus. The number of students going to Mass has doubled. Groups of students are meeting to discern a vocation to the priesthood. It has completely reinvigorated the pastoral program at that particular college.

This is in contrast to a number of colleges who have asked their Bishops to give them any priest and the Bishop has said no, because of the shortage of priests. The truth is that Bishop Thomas has a shortage of priests also, but he has made a strategic decision that he believes would be in the best interest of the diocese, the future of priesthood, and the college community. These are very, very hard choices.

RCR: What choices do Catholic colleges and universities need to make about the HHS mandate?

MGS: We're on record about how we believe the understanding of a religious entity according to the HHS is not in keeping with religious liberty, the groundwork of this country. The pillars that the entire thing is built upon are faulty.

RCR: So it's not just about contraception?

MGS: It's religious liberty. It's the government swooping in and naming us instead of the group naming itself. It's a substantive problem. Going forward, it's going to be quite challenging to figure out what to do until the Supreme Court weighs in. There's been an attempt at an accommodation, but it isn't fixing the pillars the mandate sits on. You're tinkering with details, but the structure is faulty. It's a matter of time before the whole thing falls into the sea.

Nicholas G. Hahn III is Deputy Editor of RealClearReligion. Follow him on Twitter @NGHahn3.

What they call on their web page the "Catholic Church's position on Immigration Reform" is not orthodox teaching but tired left-wing clericalism.

Blurring the line between real Church teaching and personal political opinions disguised as Church teaching undermines both orthodoxy and unity. But clericalist bishops don't seem to care. They like that blurred line, as it allows them to play lobbyists for their pet political causes, from global warming to gun control to amnesty.

It is a scandal that the U.S. bishops feel entitled to use the faithful's money to put together propaganda campaigns for disputed policy prescriptions. Were those policy prescriptions Republican rather than Democratic, liberals would be the first to object and bemoan the insidious influence of "religion in politics." Imagine if the USCCB had a web page called taxjusticeforamericans.org and offered a "parish kit" that explains the "Catholic Church's position on tax reform." And what if it proposed an "intercessory prayer"(as it did for "immigration reform") for the passage of a Flat Tax act? The cries of "clericalism" would be resounding.

But for what amounts to advancing the cause of amnesty, the bishops feel no qualms about using the faithful's money to supply parishes with tools of propaganda, such as a "sample homily on migration related issues from Cardinal McCarrick," which "may provide some insights on creating a homily related to immigration."

Bishops who can't even bring themselves to withhold Communion from abortion advocates lash out at "opponents of immigration" venomously, speaking of them as if they are apostates. By "opponents of immigration," the bishops mean Americans who support existing law. What is contrary to Church teaching about that stance? Since when has opposition to illegal immigration constituted a sign against "justice for immigrants"?

Hectoring the American people about clinging too tightly to the rule of law seems an odd exercise of the Church's moral authority. If anyone is on shaky ground in the illegal immigration debate, it is the Cardinal Mahonys who encourage the breaking of just laws. What exactly is holy about that?

The irony is that the same bishops who won't criticize Caesar when he is wrong will criticize him when he is right. Securing borders falls within the authority of Caesar. For the bishops to treat the performance of that legitimate duty as evidence of injustice does nothing to aid the advance of the Church's teaching on the natural law.

At the very least, the bishops could temper their clericalism by acknowledging that supporters of existing law and secure borders hold a defensible view. Instead, they act like Democratic partisans who use sophistries and motive-mongering to shut down debate. It serves the political needs of the moment to cast opposition to their lobbying as opposition to "immigrants." But that is completely dishonest. Does disagreeing with the bishops on something as technical and complicated as "earned citizenship" really make one less understanding of the true nature of justice? Is a Catholic "anti-immigrant" if he favors, say, legal residency rather than legal citizenship? There is no "Catholic teaching" on the precise form of a state's regulation of legal immigration, much less its handling of illegal immigration.

The specificity of their demands makes their clericalism look even more ludicrous. The other day leading bishops were urging that the already liberal immigration bill currently under consideration in the Senate be made even more liberal. It has too many "restrictions," said Los Angeles Archbishop Jose Gomez.

Bishops have neither the authority nor the expertise to descend into the details of policy like that. By doing so, they just weaken the perception of their authority where it does exist. The Church in America appears to be gravitating back to the "Seamless Garment," the attempt by clericalists in the 1980s to lump half-baked liberal opinions on trendy topics in with the Church's official teachings. Out of that confusion came a stream of inane statements on subjects the bishops knew little to nothing about. This had the effect of making all the Church's pronouncements look like feeble opining.

A glimpse of the garbled message to which Seamless Garment-style clericalism leads could be seen in Cardinal Sean O'Malley's recent remarks after the Boston bombings. "The individualism and alienation of our age has spawned a culture of death. Over a million abortions a year is one indication of how human life has been devalued. Violent entertainment, films and video games have coarsened us and made us more insensitive to the pain and suffering of others," he said. "The inability of the Congress to enact laws that control access to automatic weapons is emblematic of the pathology of our violent culture."

So a million-plus abortions a year is "one indication" of a violent culture and another is the failure of a specific piece of gun-control legislation backed by the USCCB to pass. Can't the bishops see how this dilutes the Church's teachings? Can't they see that in their desperate craving for political relevance they make the Church's most important contribution to politics, the transmission of natural-law orthodoxy, irrelevant?

Clericalism ends up dogmatizing personal opinions and relativizing dogmas, making the Church just one more forgettable voice in the din of public life.

George Neumayr, a contributing editor to The American Spectator, is co-author (with Phyllis Schlafly) of No Higher Power: Obama's War on Religious Freedom.

Many of us awoke in the middle of the night to gunfire and explosions; and we received calls and texts alerting us that the Boston Marathon Bomber was loose in our neighborhood. Some of us sobbed in the dark of our houses through the long unsettling night, startled by every creak and murmur, amazed at how slowly time could creep.

When, in the dawn mist, SWAT teams surrounded our houses, scouring under our porches and in our garages, searching attics and closets, most of us huddled together with our families in shock; others dared to open a shade to find our normally quiet street transformed into a surreal warzone: riflemen standing under the blossoming trees, armored trucks in the middle of the road, bloodhounds and German shepherds sniffing around the daffodils, the insistent drone of the same low flying helicopter.

We did not need TV. We were living it, cordoned-off from the rest of the world.

At one point, the search converged on a neighbor's house five doors down. The bomb squads were rushed in. Our neighbor -- who they thought was tied with explosives -- was SWATTED; she wound up in the hospital on account of her nerves. As they searched her house, we waited for explosions; sought shelter in basements. And we were not the least bit relieved when, around 6:00, Governor Duvall Patrick announced the end of the lockdown since officials were convinced the suspect was still hiding out in Watertown.

We began to hunker down for another long fearful night, although not before venturing out into the street -- in our sweatpants and pajamas, teeth unbrushed, hair mussy, pale and bleary eyed -- to swap stories with neighbors. My three year old son and his best friend danced in the shadow of the rifleman stationed at the top of our hill; and as they did, the gunfire erupted again, and we ran for cover.

Yes, we were terrified, but we were not terrorized. There is a huge difference.

We were horrified by the violence and the tragic loss of life; and we were frightened to realize that it could strike so close to home; that the same man capable of such evil might have crawled through our very own gardens in the middle of the night; frightened to think about these darkest parts of humanity.

But we were not coerced or intimidated or negatively influenced. What is seared into my memory from that day is not the fear, but rather the simple acts of courage and love that defined those hours. I will never forget the sunburned faces of the officers who had worked nearly nonstop since the tragic bombings, and who -- in such unprecedented circumstances -- had been on duty without food or water, or any planned backup, since the middle of the night. As a result, our house became the "police bathroom" on the block; our three-year-old son quickly learned to welcome officers into the house and show them "to the potty." Neighbors up and down the street left whatever food they had on front stoops -- cheese sticks and crackers, chips and popcorn, pasta and fruit, soda and water bottles -- for the famished officers; as a result, the feeling on the block- despite the dire circumstances -- was one of mutual gratitude.

Throughout the day, we received endless texts and emails from family and friends around the world, with the simplest of messages: Stay safe; We love you; give the kids kisses; be strong. When my infant son was startled awake by the flash bang grenades, I kissed his nose and sang him back to sleep. And when it was over, I left my husband with the sleeping children and joined the neighbors pouring out onto Mount Auburn Street with their frothing beer mugs and half-drunk wine glasses. The mood was so festive you might have thought the Red Sox had just won the pennant.

But -- forgive me Red Sox fanatics -- we had accomplished something much more precious. We did not let the Tsarnev brothers succeed in their efforts to terrorize. Rather, it is the many acts of kindness and courage -- small and large -- that erupted throughout the streets of Watertown and Boston, and the American spirit of resilience, that have come to define that week.

Ananda Rose, a published poet and journalist, is author of "Showdown in the Sonoran Desert: Religion, Law, and the Immigration Controversy."

In September 2012, the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea signed a bilateral scientific and technological agreement opening the way for nuclear as well as missile technology collaboration. In February 2013, North Korea tested, no doubt with Iranian scientists observing, a nuclear device which U.S. experts suspect may be based upon highly enriched uranium. A report just surfaced in Washington that North Korea may have acquired the capability to miniaturize nuclear warheads for delivery by ballistic missiles, another technological area in which Pyongyang is ahead of Tehran. And now, a North Korean delegation visits Iran to conclude a deal involving major exports of Iranian oil.

In a press conference on April 21, Iranian Oil Minister Rostam Ghasemi announced that an agreement between Iran and North Korea was signed and Iran will export 100,000 barrels of oil per day to North Korea. North Korea has no crude oil reserves of its own. This is a huge deal and North Korea does not have the cash to pay for it.

What would be of more value to Tehran than cash for its oil? Nuclear cooperation, of course.

The beauty of this trade deal from Tehran's perspective is that North Korea becomes the Iranian regime's reliable supplier of nuclear weapon and missile technology, along with natural or enriched uranium, in exchange for exported Iranian oil, which meets Pyongyang's need for oil while at the same time effectively by-passing U.S. and European Union oil and financial sanctions.

The Iranian nuclear issue grows more serious with each passing month. The head of the regime's Atomic Energy Organization, Fereydoun Abbasi-Davani, who also has been involved in nuclear weapons research, announced publicly that highly enriched uranium may be needed in the future to power submarines and other vessels. Suddenly, the regime is now speaking of nuclear-powered submarines whereas previously requirements for highly enriched uranium presumably were confined to civil nuclear power plants and medical research reactors.

The U.S. government needs a strategy that halts the Iranian regime's nuclear program and prevents nuclear cooperation between the regimes in Tehran and Pyongyang. Current U.S. policy calls for the Iranian regime to give up its relentless pursuit of a nuclear capability or confront a military attack launched against its nuclear facilities.

At some point the U.S. government will recognize that the Tehran regime will never forego its nuclear program and that resorting to a military attack will only delay, not end the program, and also will harm the democratic movement under way in Iran. It is time for new Secretary of State John Kerry to consider another alternative that would stop the nuclear program and sever the collaboration between Tehran and Pyongyang.

The National Council of Iran will be conducting its inaugural meeting in Paris on April 27-28 and will present a path to a free, democratic Iran. The National Council's transition to democracy in Iran warrants the careful consideration and support of the free world and specifically, the United States. The Charter of the National Council of Iran will present a blueprint to bring about the end of the Tehran regime and establish a free and democratic country.

One in which the elected government is responsive to the needs of its citizens and meets its obligations as a responsible member of the international community playing a constructive role in regional and world affairs.

Amir Fakhravar is President of the Iranian Freedom Institute, Secretary General of the Confederation of Iranian Students, and a former political prisoner of the Islamic Republic. He is presently a Research Fellow and Visiting Lecturer at the Institute of World Politics. G. William Heiser is a former official in the Reagan National Security Council Staff and is an Advisor to the Iranian Freedom Institute and the Confederation of Iranian Students.

On the one hand, that appears to be an increasingly easy question to answer. Their family was Muslim. The Tsarnaev brothers were seen at mosques. Investigators are saying that they were "motivated by religion."

Case closed?

The other hand is being waved by Muslims.

From a CNN report:

"I don't care who or what these criminals claim to be, but I can never recognize these criminals as part of my city or my faith community," said Yusufi Vali, executive director for the Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center, the largest mosque in the Boston area.

From the Huffington Post:

"I would not be willing to do a funeral for him," said Imam Talal Eid of the Islamic Institute of Boston, a community services organization that frequently arranges funeral prayers and burials in the region. "This is a person who deliberately killed people. There is no room for him as a Muslim. He already left the fold of Islam by doing that."

To which Mark Silk suggests that Muslims should accept the bombers as part of their community, even as they condemn their terrible acts:

"Better, I think, to acknowledge that faith traditions with centuries of history, complex scriptures, diverse and mutually antagonistic sub-groups, and millions of followers encompass examples of the worst as well as the best that humanity has to offer. To own the worst as well as the best is to put your enemies in a position of having to recognize the best as well as the worst."

Silk is Professor of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College and director of the college's Leonard E. Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life. And a guy I've quoted a few times over the years. But I disagree with him here.

If the bombers had "merely" been murderous thugs who happened to be Muslim, I think I'd likely side with him. Catholic Mafiosi are still considered Catholic. Very bad Catholics, but still. Similarly, mobsters Meyer Lansky and Bugsy Seigel were considered terrible Jews. But the Jewish community didn't declare them non-Jewish.

But this case is different. These men, if the investigators are right, committed their atrocities in the name of Islam. They were making a specific theological claim about their faith and what is acceptable within it.

For the imams I quoted above, that's not simply wrong. It's heresy. And surely every religious community has the right -- even the obligation -- to expel heretics.

There are some differences in the ways that faiths exercise this option. Judaism is more tangled than some. To be Jewish is as much a matter of blood as it is belief. It's perfectly possible to discuss Jewish atheists without ignoring either Judaism or atheism. But even Judaism has a tradition of excommunication.

People who ascribe to the tenets of other religions -- "Messianic Jews," for instance -- have excluded themselves from even the most basic of Jewish beliefs and are considered beyond the pale.

Christianity, which is wholly dependent on beliefs to define membership, has a much richer tradition of excommunication, anathema, inquisition, and schism.

Islam is much more like Christianity. Despite the American stereotype that ties Muslims to a particular ethnicity, the billion or so Muslims in the world come from many nations with many indigenous forms of Islam. All are based on a profession of belief and tied together by traditions of Islamic law and understanding.

Of which there are several competing traditions. Islam is not a lot more unified than Christianity, actually. Should Christians accept members of the Christian Identity movement as part of their faith community? How about the vile members of Westboro Baptist Church? If a Christian leader wanted to declare that these folks are not Christian, I'd can't think of a valid objection.

So if these imams say the bombers acted utterly outside Muslim tradition in a way that defies any claim of belief, then I say the imams have every right and even an obligation to speak out.

Silk says that exposes them to counter proof-texting by Muslim haters, who will say that they have the same right to define what is and is not authentic Islam. I say that the haters are gonna hate and need no excuse or specious reason.

Think of it as quality control. The people on the inside are the only ones who can do that effectively. And maybe, just maybe, some other angry young man considering violence in the name of Islam will pause for just a moment and consider what it would be like to be rejected by his own.

Certainly no non-Muslim can make that happen.

Jeffrey Weiss is a RealClearReligion columnist from Dallas, Texas. Follow him on Twitter @JeffreyWeissRCR.

Why not just drive a car into a crowd of infidels? Or build a bomb from a simple pressure cooker? And as the British Daily Telegraph was the first to point out, the bomb design offered by the magazine was precisely that adopted by the Tsarnaev brothers in their deadly attack in Boston. The mere fact of borrowing a technique proves nothing about ideology, but the brothers' actions so precisely fit those of dozens of other lone wolf terrorists in the West in recent years that it is virtually certain that they were following the al Qaeda playbook.

In itself, the idea of Chechen extremists identifying with al Qaeda is hardly surprising, as the movement has for twenty years made the Caucasus region one of its principal battlefronts worldwide. From a historical perspective, though, that alliance should give us pause. Muslims in these parts have a very long tradition of religious-based insurgency directed against the Russian state, dating back almost two centuries. For most of that time, resistance stemmed from one particular tradition within Islam, namely the Sufi mystical brotherhoods. The Sufis, though, are anathema to the stringent fundamentalist version of Islam preached by al Qaeda. In Pakistan and Iraq especially, al Qaeda followers regularly target Sufi shrines and devotees for terrorist violence.

While Westerners tend to lump all forms of Islamic-inspired violence under a common jihadi label, Chechen-related militancy involves some truly odd and counter-intuitive alliances. Ideally, that internal conflict should give non-Islamic states some leverage in discouraging the spread of al Qaeda militancy.

Scarcely had Tsarist Russia established control in Caucasian regions of Chechnya and Dagestan than local Muslims began their campaigns of resistance. From 1830 through 1859, the Russians faced a deadly guerrilla war led by folk-hero Imam Shamil. Beyond being an Islamic leader, Shamil was also a leader of the Naqshbandi school of Sufi Islam, which still flourishes across Central Asia and much of the former Soviet Union. Then and since, such secretive brotherhoods provided a wonderful institutional framework for clandestine organization.

The Russians acknowledged the central role of the brotherhoods by the names they gave their rebel opponents. Tsarist officials called them muridists, from murid, a Sufi disciple. The Soviets later denounced their enemies as zikristi, those who repeatedly chanted the dhikr declaration of faith in order to bring themselves into an ecstatic state. But whether murids or zikrists, there was no doubt about the Sufi foundations of Chechen nationalism, which time and again sprung to life to challenge Russian rule. In 1944, the sheer impossibility of suppressing zikristi persuaded Stalin to deport most of the Chechen people to Central Asia, where they remained until 1957.

Islamic pride and self-awareness revived during the 1980s, as the Soviet Union lurched towards dissolution. We get a hint of this, oddly, from the names of the two Tsarnaev brothers themselves. Tamerlan, born in 1986, was named for the great Islamic conqueror of the fifteenth century, Timur or "Tamerlane." Dzhokhar, born 1994, received the name of Dzhokhar Dudaev, the first president of the breakaway Chechen republic, and a hero of Islamic nationalism.

Sporadically from 1994 through 2009, the Russians found themselves repeatedly at war with Chechens and neighboring Caucasian peoples. Giving a sense of historical déjà vu, insurgents based themselves explicitly on the old Sufi heroes. Their most ferocious commander -- and a persistent sponsor of vicious acts of terror -- was Shamil Basayev, who took his name from the nineteenth century imam.

From the mid-1990s though, the region's endemic violence drew in a new religious and military force, namely the newly formed al Qaeda. Saudi militant Emir Ibn al-Khattab brought thousands of foreign fighters to assist the Chechen war effort, many trained in Afghanistan and Pakistan. In fact, several of the later 9/11 hijackers originally joined the global jihad specifically to fight Russians in the Caucasus, and only later were they redirected against the US mainland. Osama bin Laden's second in command, Ayman al-Zawahiri, made a personal visit to try and create an al Qaeda base in Chechnya. The horrific recruitment videos circulated online by al Qaeda propagandists often show the murder and beheading of Russian soldiers.

As I have suggested, the religious slant of al Qaeda was radically hostile to Sufi traditions. Their own background was Wahhabi or Salafist, and condemned the Sufi brotherhoods as semi-pagan, both for their mystical practices and their devotion to saints and local shrines. Despite this, their fanatical militancy gave al Qaeda's foreign fighters enormous prestige in the North Caucasus, where networks of Islamist militia soon developed. In turn, al Qaeda tactics influenced the older local movements. Chechen militants now launched terror attacks aimed at inflicting mass civilian casualties, and increasingly used suicide bombers -- including women. Ibn al-Khattab himself formed a close personal relationship with Shamil Basayev.

Yet the Sufi heritage has not vanished, and Chechen Muslims are usually much more broad-minded in their religious practice than the puritanical Wahhabis. While Chechens definitely want an independent Islamic state, few wish to live in a Caucasus emirate under stringent Sharia law. That outlook has translated into politics. While early Chechen leaders were religiously moderate, their successors have had to become more ostentatiously pious and Muslim -- but they do so in a way that is strongly Sufi.

Since 2007, the Chechen head of state has been Ramzan Kadyrov, who has vigorously promoted Sufi Islam as a deliberate counter-balance to alien Salafi influences. He is himself a disciple, a murid, of the Qadiriyya order, and regularly holds dhikr ceremonies. In public life, his administration has built and rebuilt mosques, including most sensationally a pilgrimage shrine (a ziyarat) commemorating the nineteenth century sheikh Haji Kunta. At a time of war and devastation in Chechnya, Kunta was a famous mystic who led a Sufi revival, and became so venerated as to gain supernatural status: for his devotees at least, he never died. He thus represents everything the Wahhabis and al Qaeda loathe in the practice of Islam, and militants regularly threaten Kadyrov's life. Presently, though, the state-sponsored Sufi revival shows no obvious signs of abating.

Not just in Chechnya, Sufi Islam remains an enormous obstacle to al Qaeda and its supporters. Treated with due caution and respect, it could yet become a potent de facto ally for Western interests.

Philip Jenkins is a Distinguished Professor of History at Baylor University and a columnist for RealClearReligion. His latest book is Laying Down the Sword.

The Waco siege was an accidental blowback from an American terrorist crisis that has now largely faded into oblivion.

At first sight, terrorism may seem to have little to do with the Waco story. The group involved, the Branch Davidians, originated in the 1920s as a breakaway from the Seventh Day Adventist tradition. They settled at Mount Carmel, near Waco, where they developed distinctive views about the apocalypse and the End Times. From the late 1980s, they were under the command of a charismatic figure named Vernon Howell, who adopted the messianic title of David Koresh. Whatever his other flaws, Koresh showed little concern with political activism, and his group was strictly color-blind, with many Black and Caribbean members.

But Mount Carmel would suffer terribly from a quite unwitting (and unjust) association with racist violence. During the 1970s and 1980s, America developed a sizable and highly active network of ultra-Right and neo-Nazi militants, drawing variously on such existing movements as the Ku Klux Klan, American Nazis, Minutemen, and anti-tax militants. They shared a common fascination with William Pierce's fantasy novel The Turner Diaries, a harrowing blueprint for the overthrow of the U.S. government by an imaginary Nazi militia called the Order. (Spoiler alert: the book climaxes with a suicide air attack against the Pentagon).

The different groups increasingly adopted the religious rhetoric of the anti-Jewish Christian Identity movement. They rooted their operations in the compounds of small sects and religious movements, which provided a wonderful infrastructure for paramilitary training, and for organizing terrorist campaigns. They also pioneered the use of electronic media for militant organization via Usenet, the precursor of the Internet.

In 1984, some of those far-Right militants actually tried to put the dreams of the Turner Diaries into action, and formed a terrorist movement called the Order. Under leaders like Robert Jay Matthews, the extremists planned an underground war of assassinations and bombings, robberies and counterfeiting. These outrages were intended to overthrow America's Zionist Occupation Government, the ZOG. Some militants sought access to the tools of biological warfare.

These efforts provoked a stern official reaction. By 1985, the Order was disrupted and Matthews killed in a firefight, and in 1988 federal authorities levied draconian sedition charges against a broad range of far Right leaders. Desultory campaigns against other terror movements continued into the early 1990s -- the Covenant Sword and Arm of the Lord, the Aryan Republican Army, and various self-styled successors to the Order. Because of the emphasis on tracing illegal weapons, the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) found itself on the front-line of the anti-terrorist campaign. Right up until September 2001, federal law enforcement agencies remained far more concerned about the continuing threat from the paramilitary far Right than it did about Islamist dangers.

Unconsciously, the Davidians acted in a way that precisely fitted the emerging stereotype of the anti-government terrorist militia. Although the group had nothing to do with the racist Right, its theology made it essential to prepare for the armed conflicts that would ensue in the imminent apocalypse, and that meant stockpiling weapons. Koresh's followers also lived in a culture where trading guns was an acceptable way of generating income to support themselves. What federal agents called an arsenal, they thought of as inventory.

For federal agencies, though, Mount Carmel was a fortified compound, and potentially a base for armed violence, close to some crucial metropolitan areas. Coincidentally, one of the extended set piece descriptions in Turner Diaries involves the Order's activities in Texas, as its violent actions paralyzed Houston. Moreover, ATF believed it had evidence that the Branch Davidians were going beyond merely assembling an arsenal, and were actively converting their arms into illegal fully automatic weapons -- in other words, they were manufacturing machine guns.

In the context of the early 1990s, then, the ATF and the Justice Department believed they had excellent reasons for acting against Mount Carmel. Although the Clinton administration later claimed that it was forced to act because of systematic child abuse by Koresh and his followers, that justification was offered only after the fact. The initial story was all about weapons.

In itself, religious dissidence would not have provoked the government to strike at the Branch Davidians, and federal officials overseeing the siege showed not the slightest comprehension of the group's apocalyptic views. What concerned them was the nightmare vision of the machine guns, and the prospect that Mount Carmel might serve as the nucleus for a renewed Order campaign. Federal agencies then interpreted all new intelligence, wrongly, as confirming their initial assumptions and stereotypes.

In its origins, then, the Waco siege belongs to the history of terrorism fears rather than religious persecution. Ironically though, that siege in turn contributed to the history of authentic terrorism, by inspiring the Oklahoma City bombing attack of 1995. This atrocity, which also took place on April 19, two years to the day after the Waco conflagration, was widely seen as an act of revenge against the federal government. Appropriately enough in the context, the bombing followed a pattern outlined fairly precisely in the early pages of the Turner Diaries.

Ever since 9/11, Americans have naturally identified terrorism in terms of Islamist and Middle Eastern causes. It's not easy to remember a time not too long ago when the deadliest enemies on the rosters of wanted terrorists were all white, and thoroughly American.

Philip Jenkins is a Distinguished Professor of History at Baylor University and a columnist for RealClearReligion. His latest book is Laying Down the Sword.

RealClearReligion: Time magazine referred to you as "The Man Who Picked the Pope." Did you?

John Allen: [Laughter] No. I did twenty-two candidate profiles and he was one of them. Imagine how bad it would have been if I had done twenty-two profiles and the pope wasn't among them! Somebody on CNN, after we had been on-air for days talking about who the papal candidates were, asked, "How do you know?" All of this is unattributed reporting; we're not citing sources. How do we know this is real?

It is a confluence of three things: one, the buzz meter. Who is being talked about publicly? In the Italian papers and others throughout the world, which names seem to be drawing the most attention? Second, what are you hearing directly from Cardinals yourself? These are all background conversations, so you're not able to quote anyone, but if you've been around this beat a long time and have cultivated relationships, you can go to guys and get reality checks. The third thing is what Cardinals will say publicly in the run-up to the conclave -- the qualities they think a pope ought to have. You then listen carefully to all of that and compare it to profiles of guys you know. Again, if you've been around awhile, you can usually decode and figure out who they're talking about and who they're not.

One thing that was abundantly clear if you were paying any attention is that the Cardinals were not going to elect someone out of this Vatican regime. So, anyone who had ties to this particular ruling group obviously wasn't going anywhere.

RCR: So, you just have to know.

JA: Well, let me say this about the Vatican generally: it is the single beat in journalism where the byline counts the most. So much of it is done on background. So much of it is sort of trying to read the tea leaves. You really have to learn whose byline you can trust and whose you can't.

RCR: Newsweek's Ken Woodward once wrote that outside of North Korea, "no bureaucracy is harder for a journalist to crack than the Vatican's." Do you agree with him?

JA: I'm not 100 percent sure that's true. The problem with the Vatican isn't so much secrecy, because this isn't like the Pentagon where they have troop movements they're trying to conceal. There aren't really state secrets in that sense. There aren't spy satellites orbiting.

RCR: No drones either?

JA: [Laughter] No. The problem with the Vatican is that it's unique. It is unlike any other institution so you have to learn how to crack the codes. Now, it's not rocket science, but you have to spend enough time doing it that you learn to speak the languages.

RCR: Why do you think the Cardinals picked a Jesuit who seems to behave like a Franciscan?

JA: I don't think the Jesuit piece was the most important piece. I think it was that he is a Latin American outsider. I think this was clearly, and self-consciously, the most anti-establishment conclave of the last 150 years. I think you'd probably have to go back to the election of Leo XIII in 1878 to find a conclave where the Cardinals understood themselves so clearly to be voting for a change. In this case it wasn't a rejection of the substance of Benedict XVI's papacy, but it was a rejection of the methods of management and governance.

RCR: Or lack therof.

JA: They were either non-existent or dysfunctional. The Cardinals wanted somebody who was not tainted in any way by association with this regime. To them, this meant a geographic outsider and a life-experience outsider. I think those were the key pieces for Bergoglio.

RCR: How do you think this outsider will go about reforming the Vatican with his newly appointed "Gang of Eight"?

JA: Let's be clear about the mandate of that group: reforming the Vatican is only its second task. If you read the statement that was issued, it said that the Pope has assembled this group to (a) advise him on the governance of the universal church and (b) to study Pastor Bonus, John Paul II's document on the Roman Curia with an eye towards reform. So, this isn't like a commission to study reform of Social Security. This is the appointment of a cabinet that advises the chief executive on everything.

RCR: Specifically what do you think the Pope himself will do to reform the curia?

JA: We don't know yet. Depending on how this group plays out, it may go down as the most important act of reform. One, people have said since Vatican II that there's too much concentration of power in Rome and that the Church isn't collegial. The creation of the synod of Bishops by Paul VI was supposed to address that, but I think that it has been a mixed bag, at best. This group could actually promote the more collegial vision of Church that people have been talking about.

Seven of the eight guys aren't Vatican guys. They come from the local Church in various parts of the world. It is a way of saying that the Vatican has to be accountable to those local churches. Second, this is not a Pope who relies on people to make decisions for him. This is a Pope who does his own consultation. This is a Pope who picks up the phone himself and calls people and asks for advice. Clearly he's created this group to be his primary sounding board.

RCR: These are people he trusts.

JA: Of course. We don't know how long these eight guys are going to serve or how often he's going to be consulting them. These are not milquetoast, these are all strong personalities. It means you've got a Pope who wants real advice, not yes-men. What's more, these guys don't all think alike. Most people would see Cardinal Pell from Sydney as to the right and most people would see Cardinal Rodriguez from Honduras as fairly far to the left. This suggests that the Pope doesn't want to just hear one opinion before he acts.

RCR: There has been some concern from conservatives that this Pope won't be friendly to their issues. Are those concerns valid?

JA: I wouldn't worry about him rejecting them. I would worry that it's not what he's going to be thinking about when he gets out of bed in the morning. I mean, I don't see him abrogating Summorum Pontificum. However, I don't think you're going to get what you got under Benedict XVI who self-consciously tried to set an example of a more reverent and sober liturgical style. To the extent that the reform of the reform in the liturgical life of the Church goes on, it's probably going to be led less from Rome. I don't think the Pope is going to get in the way of it, but I don't think he's going to be the agent of it in the same way Benedict XVI was.

RCR: Will Francis be a political figure in the same sense that John Paul II was?

JA: That's a good question and I'm not sure yet how to answer it. If you talk to people in Buenos Aires, they will say that he was not a particularly political figure.

RCR: He took on Cristina Kirchner over gay marriage.

JA: He got drawn into that because he was President of the Bishops Conference at the time. He certainly was not the leader on that issue and adjusted himself to where the consensus of the Conference was. He felt obliged to speak for the consensus of the Conference, but had it been left up to him, I'm not sure that the line from the Bishops would have been quite as tough.

Aside from that, can you name another political fight?

RCR: Not especially.

JA: Neither can anyone in Buenos Aires. In broad strokes, you can say he was in favor of justice for the poor, but what exactly is the political payout of that? Now, during the time of John Paul II there was a clear enemy, a clear target for the Church's political energies. Even if you want to say poverty is to Francis as communism was to John Paul II, where's the Kremlin of poverty?

I do think that the Vatican will continue to be active internationally. Clearly as the first Pope from the developing world, he will be conscious to advance the agenda of the Church in the developing world. Let me just put it this way: I don't think Bergoglio is as naturally gifted a politician as Wojtyła was.

RCR: What does that mean for Bishops who often go far beyond their competency when discussing public policy?

JA: I think we have to get past the model of the papacy as some kind of oracle who has something meaningful to say on every issue under the sun. Part of that, frankly, is just Italian culture. Italy is the only nation on Earth that puts out its annual budget and the first thing reporters do is run to a Bishop to get a reaction. There is this myth of omni-competence where churchmen are supposed to be experts on everything.

I don't think that's where Francis comes from. He doesn't have an exaggerated notion of his own competence. My guess would be that on a lot of this stuff, you're going to get fewer papal pronouncements and you're going to get more reliance on the experts of the Catholic world.

RCR: Why don't we have an Ambassador to the Holy See yet?

JA: First of all, it's not all that unusual because a transition took place with the Secretary of State. You've got to get that first and then everything else sort of falls into place. Further, it would be deeply destabilizing to appoint an ambassador during a period of transition because you already have a Chargé d'Affaires there who is sort of running the show. You want him to be able to make decisions without looking over his shoulder wondering what the next ambassador will say. I think they're going to let the dust settle and then make an appointment.

With that said, we need to break this model of appointing exclusively Catholics.

RCR: Appoint a Protestant to be the Ambassador to the Holy See?

JA: Appoint someone who is a career diplomat and who doesn't have a dog in Catholic fights. It's a particular problem for Democratic administrations where the most prominent Catholic Democrats are pro-choice, which would be completely unacceptable to the Holy See. There's a low pool of talent.

RCR: Congressman Daniel Lipinski of Illinois is pro-life.

JA: I floated that name, but it's not a long list. If you go to the Holy See and ask what they want in an ambassador, they don't care whether the person is Catholic or not. They want someone who is diplomatically serious. Somebody who can move the ball with the administration they're supposed to represent. Not somebody who's first conversation with the President is during the photo-op at his announcement and never talks to the President again meanwhile working with flunkies in the State department.

If Barack Obama were to name somebody with the caliber of Warren Christopher, who of course isn't around anymore, nobody in the Vatican would care that the guy is a Methodist. They would be very pleased with that appointment because to them it would mean that the United States is serious about the relationship.

RCR: You've been very professional and knowledgeable throughout this conversation and the whole time I've found it hard to believe that you're among colleagues at the National Catholic Reporter who meanwhile endorse gay marriage and women ordination.

JA: I'm not responsible for any of that. The only thing I'm responsible for is what goes out under my byline. I don't think that makes me different than most journalists on the planet. I've always found it curious that people have this expectation that I'm supposed to somehow be responsible for what's on the editorial page. Should we blame the Rome correspondent at the New York Times for its editorial page?

Whatever you may think of the editorial line of the National Catholic Reporter, at least they usually know what's going on in the Church.

RCR: Thanks to you.

JA: Well, think about how I feel sometimes in the CNN world. I have limited ability to control that kind of ignorance.

RCR: You don't subscribe to some of the wilder stuff that comes out of Kansas City?

JA: I don't take positions on issues like that.

RCR: Why not?

JA: I'm a reporter and an analyst, so I'm trying to give people tools to think about issues in the Church. I'm not trying to tell them what to think about these issues.

RCR: Your kind of objectivity has been described as "maddening." Does it ever drive you mad?

JA: I take it as a compliment, if it's true. I have never in my life set out in an effort to write an objective story. I'm just trying to get the story right. That's it. Getting the story right means you have to respect the complexity of reality. There's always more than one view of what's going on in the Church or anything else.

You try to assemble the facts as best you can, then you try talk to a bunch of different people representing different points of view about those facts, and then you try to lay it all out there in a way that's engaging to people who don't have a Ph.D in ecclesiology. More than that, I'm very nervous of any journalist who has a loftier notion of what our calling is. Any journalist who goes into a story with an idea of who the good guys and bad guys are makes me nervous.

The aim should always be getting the story right and objectivity is a byproduct.

Nicholas G. Hahn III is Deputy Editor of RealClearReligion. Follow him on Twitter @NGHahn3.

You've seen it in endless films and Masterpiece Theaters, in Downton Abbey, and in Upstairs Downstairs before that. The world of 1914, we are told, is a country house idyll, the Indian Summer of Edwardian England, and none of the characters is too alarmed when someone reads about an archduke being murdered in some distant corner of the Balkans. Nothing to do with us! By the end of the series or the film, of course, most of those characters have died in the trenches, in a war that apparently dropped from a clear blue sky. Who could have expected such an outbreak of primitive savagery at a moment of ultimate tranquility and civilization?

Such a view would have perplexed most educated Europeans, whose cultural world had for several years before the war been dominated by the prospect of imminent apocalypse, by visions of blood and angels. By 1913, Europeans were living through a Golden Age of apocalyptic expectation, but somehow, that's a centennial we've missed.

Anyone surprised at the onset of war in 1914 must have spent the previous decade in a cave. Europe had come close to war over Bosnia in 1908-1909, while conflicts over control of Morocco almost detonated catastrophe in 1905 and 1911. In 1912 and 1913, half a dozen countries were engaged in the extraordinarily bloody Balkan Wars. The merest slip could have dragged one or more of the Great Powers into conflict in a chain reaction that would have engulfed Europe, exactly as occurred in the Summer of 1914. Any number of colonial rivalries could also have brought the Powers to blows. Anyone who read a newspaper knew all this.

When war came, moreover -- when, not if -- the young men of every country except Britain knew that they faced the certainty of military conscription. If you were a 20-year old artist or writer in 1913, whether in Paris or Vienna, Berlin or St. Petersburg, you knew that your chances of seeing 1920 were strictly limited.

Visions of apocalypse stirred progressive avant garde figures at least as much as to traditional religious believers. The early twentieth century was an effervescent time of cultural innovation and experiment, the era of Cubism, Futurism, Symbolism, and Expressionism, and they all emerged in what was quite self-consciously a pre-war atmosphere.

One heroic young German Expressionist was Stefan Heym, whose apocalyptic nightmare poem Krieg, (War), dates from 1911. Krieg sounds weirdly prophetic, but in the context of the time, its themes were absolutely routine: apocalypse was already a German literary and artistic genre. Among visual artists, Expressionist Ludwig Meidner earned fame in these very years for his paintings of burning cities, and his sequence of Apocalyptic Landscapes.

Russia, meanwhile, produced the greatest urban apocalypse of the century. Andrei Bely's 1912 Modernist novel Petersburg resembles the work of Joyce or Proust in its daring experimentation. The novel depicts pre-war St. Petersburg as a city under the eye of angels, where the Devil walks the streets. The statue of a horseman is a pervasive symbol, obviously suggesting one of the four horsemen of Revelation. Petersburg is a city living at the end of the world.

Painter Wassily Kandinsky was no less fascinated by angels and imminent judgment. In 1912, Kandinsky edited the legendary manifesto Der Blaue Reiter, which cultural historians regard as an epochal movement in European Modernism. But we lose the religious significance of the name when we use too literal a translation of the school's German name, calling it the "Blue Rider." It actually refers to a Blue Horseman, and the movement was born as a protest against a gallery's decision to reject Kandinsky's painting of the Last Judgment. That cosmic finale lay at the heart of European Modernism. In 1910, painter Natalia Goncharova created her stunning image of the archangel Michael, the leader of the heavenly hosts in Revelation's final battles.

Russia's musical avant garde was led by composer Alexander Scriabin, who devoted the years before the war to composing his Mysterium. This titanic multi-media and multi-sensory event would be performed in the foothills of the Himalayas with the goal of unleashing Armageddon, and initiating the birth of a new era in world history.

In Switzerland, meanwhile, Carl Gustav Jung claimed to have received repeated and deeply unsettling auguries of the coming conflict. One in 1913 foresaw "mighty yellow waves, the floating rubble of civilization, and the drowned bodies of uncounted thousands. Then the whole sea turned to blood...That winter [1913-14] someone asked me what I thought were the political prospects of the world in the near future. I replied that I had no thoughts on the matter, but that I saw rivers of blood."

They knew what was coming.

British elites were somewhat cut off from these movements, and fears. After all, all that country faced in 1913 and 1914 was the prospect of a ruinous civil war, which might erupt at any moment from tensions over Irish Home Rule or labor insurgency. Hardly anything to be concerned about...

When war came in 1914, then, it actually appeared from a blood red sky in which the hooves of galloping horsemen were audible to anyone who cared to listen. And so was the rustling of angels' wings.

Philip Jenkins is a Distinguished Professor of History at Baylor University and a columnist for RealClearReligion. His latest book is Laying Down the Sword.

In a conversation where I was expected to have the answers, a friend said something about his preschool-aged girls that dropped into place a long-missing puzzle piece about Christian spiritual practices.

"I've been thinking," he said, "My girls may love Jesus more now than they ever will. Why withhold Baptism and the Eucharist from them when their trust is so complete and their hearts so undivided by doubts and questions?"

Why indeed? Of course, some Christians don't "believe" in baptizing children. Mark Twain was famously asked if he believed in infant baptism. He replied, "Believe in it? I've seen it."

When I am asked why we baptize our little ones and why we grant them participation in Communion at Holy Redeemer, even at a very tender age, I always begin with the words of Jesus:

"'Let the children come to me. Don't stop them! For the Kingdom of God belongs to those who are like these children. I tell you the truth, anyone who doesn't receive the Kingdom of God like a child will never enter it.' Then he took the children in his arms and placed his hands on their heads and blessed them."

Our children are full participants in our life and worship because Jesus himself invites them close to his person, to bless them.

It's ironic that Christians with the deepest conviction that our salvation is Christ's work alone -- that we do nothing in the exchange, that even our faith to believe is a sheer gift (and I am with them all the way here) -- sometimes believe that it's important for their children to "come of age" in order to "make their own decision" when it comes to the faith their parent's have in Jesus Christ as a gift from the Holy Spirit.

This seems to make Christ's finished work dependent upon a certain amount of personal maturity or intellectual development, even upon an achieved degree of faith, when salvation is the same holy, unmerited gift for children as it is for adults.

As with Israel, God invites all his people close to him and desires that they have full access to his grace and presence no matter what their age. Following the Jewish practice, it was the consistent pattern of the early Christians (abundantly evidenced in the New Testament and ancient Christian literature) to baptize whole families when the parents came under God's covenant, Old or New.

This hit home with full force a few months back. I presided over the Baptism of a young woman with Down syndrome. She was an adolescent, full of joy and love for Jesus. But for her there was no "personal decision," no grasp of the theology and teaching of the apostles concerning the mystery of Jesus nor of the rich biblical and abundant apostolic witness about Baptism, no "mature awareness" of what was happening, just a simple love for Jesus and her parents, a trust that did not come from herself but an effortless charity granted by her Lord. It was pure beauty and the Spirit fell with great power on the waters and us all.

It's true that the churches in which children are baptized, and the parents who bring them for Baptism, can neglect their responsibility to lead these children to mature and personal faith by example and teaching, and that, at times, baptized-as-children adults of these churches can assume too much upon their family's faith, not surrendering their everyday lives to Christ. This can, of course, happen also to those whose full participation in the life and worship of their church in the Sacraments is delayed by the practices of their churches or their parents. The outcomes can be just as heartbreaking but why "stop them" when Jesus opens his arms wide to the little ones?

Christ never abandons the baptized and such adult outcomes should never be the basis of a pendulum swing or overreaction that bars children from the waters of Baptism or from the table set by Jesus himself, the supper of Christ's Kingdom rule to which all baptized citizens are welcome.

So, yes, we invite our children forward every Sunday at Holy Redeemer and never "prevent them." Parents make the final decisions about when their children participate in Baptism and the Eucharist but the church never restricts the little ones when their parents are ready for their involvement.

And, yes, my friend got it right: How can we know if the minds and hearts of our children will ever be as pure and undivided and resolute in their love for Jesus as they are right now?

Let these words from Augustine -- a teacher received by all Christians -- draw you into the heart of Christ for all little ones:

"Those who say that infancy has nothing in it for Jesus to save, are denying that Christ is Jesus for all believing infants. Those, I repeat, who say that infancy has nothing in it for Jesus to save, are saying nothing else than that for believing infants, infants that is who have been baptized in Christ, Christ the Lord is not Jesus. After all, what is Jesus? Jesus means Savior. Jesus is the Savior. Those whom he doesn't save, having nothing to save in them, well for them he isn't Jesus. Well now, if you can tolerate the idea that Christ is not Jesus for some persons who have been baptized, then I'm not sure your faith can be recognized as according with the sound rule. Yes, they're infants, but they are his members. They're infants, but they receive his sacraments. They are infants, but they share in his table, in order to have life in themselves." (Augustine, Sermon 174, 7)

In the words of a great song sung by children of all ages, "Little ones to him belong; they are weak but he is strong."

Thanks to the parents for allowing our lives to be touched by the presence of three beautiful girls with trisomy 21. They are different, alright: they make every moment heaven-like, as if the veil were briefly lifted between this world and the one to come.

The Rev. Kenneth Tanner is pastor of Church of the Holy Redeemer in Rochester Hills, Michigan. Follow him on Twitter @kennethtanner.

I don't mean that description as ironic. People who are certain there is no God are operating, ultimately, as much on faith as any other religious system. Prove a negative? And with the possible exception of Muslims, I can think of no faith-related group that paddles so upstream in America as the aggressive nonbelievers who belong to this particular organization.

Even in a nation where "none of the above" has become the second most common religious self-identification, atheists remain a relatively small splinter a few percent of the population. And these folks are a splinter of that splinter, the self-described "bad cops" of their movement, the organizational descendants of Madalyn Murray O'Hair, who founded the group in the 1960s.

These are the in-your-face atheists. They always hold their convention on Easter weekend.

Persecuted? Compare atheists to other faiths. The blather of a "war on Christianity" in this country is almost always about a particular sort of Christian complaining that his or her form of proselytizing is not being privileged by a business or by an unconstitutional government recognition. (See the weekend's dumb complaints that Google honored Cesar Chavez on Sunday.) In other nations, Christians are literally dying for their faith. You think that might instill some humility in Americans.

But imagine walking into a party or standing around the water cooler and mentioning you're Catholic, Lutheran, Methodist, Presbyterian, Baptist. Not much chance of provoking instant hostility. Buddhist? You might get a question about the Dalia Lama. Hindu? A question about Yoga. Mormon? Maybe a query about that guy who ran for president last year.

Muslim? You may well have a problem or two. But many people of faith at least recognize a certain kindred spirit in someone else who takes religion seriously.

Even a doubting agnostic is likely to get no worse than a shrug. After all, even most people of any particular faith go through their moments of doubt.

But an atheist? That's a living attack on the notion of religion. Repeated surveys indicate that atheists are less trusted than people professing any religion. There are large swatches of this nation where it's surely safer for someone of that opinion to keep it hidden. So the 950 people who assembled in Austin reveled in being able to be out and proud.

At times, the event sounded like a pep rally. A speaker got wild applause for a chart showing growth in the number of young adults willing to doubt the existence of God. We all like to think that we're part of a growing point of view, yes?

That's not the only way the atheists convention felt like many other religious meetings I've attended. These folks, not surprisingly, were hungry for meaning, for ritual, for a sense of congregation. And the event attracted smaller groups and vendors as inevitably as a shark attracts remora.

The Military Freedom Foundation represents people in the armed forces who say they have been pressured there by aggressive Christians. An author wandered the room hawking an "Atheists' Survival Guide." A stand sold anti-religious tchotchkes: Jewelry in the form of an "atheist atom." The fellow at the Secular Student Alliance booth proudly described the growth in the number of chapters at colleges and high schools.

A couple of tables were filled by black atheists representing their groups. One woman explained she was black, an atheist and gay. Which is surely the American cultural equivalent of rolling snake eyes. She was thrilled to be amongst her peers.

The Foundation Beyond Belief is an attempt to create a non-believers' social service organization. The money it collects is used to support the same kinds of do-gooder causes that you'd find supported by, say Catholic Charities. The group is even planning a "mission trip" to Cambodia.

The keynote speaker on Sunday was A.C. Grayling. If you're an atheist, he's a rock star -- part of the pantheon with folks like Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett. His Day Job is as a philosophy professor in England and his speech covered references surely unfamiliar to most of his audience.

My favorite obscure passage: He spent several minutes summarizing an ancient Greek play. The Orestia, by Aeschylus, is a re-telling of some of the events surrounding the Trojan war and its aftermath. You should not be shocked that it's filled with sex and violence. My summary will be much shorter than Grayling's:

A king is murdered by his wife who, in turn, is killed by their son to exact vengeance. People who kill their parents in these Greek sagas are routinely tortured by the Furies, who quickly get on the case. Another goddess intervenes and convenes a jury of the murderer's peers. And gains an acquittal on a technicality.

The Furies, Grayling explains, complain that this upsets the old order by setting human debate and discussion above divine justice. It's the first step of a culture pulling away from the supernatural.

"This is the moment where we see the beginnings of Western Civilization," Grayling said.

I'm not sure there are many scholars who would peg that particular point. But it was interesting.

He also, literally, offered an answer to the question "What is the meaning of life?"

I was really hoping for "42." But no:

"The meaning of life," he said, "is what you make it."

Which I suppose is not much less satisfying than, say, the answers in the Book of Job.

Jeffrey Weiss is a RealClearReligion columnist from Dallas, Texas. Follow him on Twitter @JeffreyWeissRCR.

In trying to explain that durability, I turn to an odd source, namely the Victorian English writer Thomas Babington Macaulay, Lord Macaulay (1800-1859). Little of his vast literary output is much read today, but one piece in particular demands to be remembered for its brilliant observations about the nature of religion, and the reasons why some forms of faith succeed while others fade and die. It's a magnificent piece of religious sociology -- and possibly an effective practical strategy for modern-day religious bodies of all stripes.

The piece in question was Macaulay's 1840 review of the History of the Popes by the epochal German scholar Leopold von Ranke. Although Macaulay was writing at a time of fervent anti-Catholicism, he nevertheless recognized the vast importance of the topic. In fact, he said,

There is not, and there never was on this earth, a work of human policy so well deserving of examination as the Roman Catholic Church...The proudest royal houses are but of yesterday, when compared with the line of the Supreme Pontiffs...The Papacy remains, not in decay, not a mere antique, but full of life and youthful vigour. The Catholic Church is still sending forth to the farthest ends of the world missionaries as zealous as those who landed in Kent with Augustine, and still confronting hostile kings with the same spirit with which she confronted Attila. The number of her children is greater than in any former age. Her acquisitions in the New World have more than compensated for what she has lost in the Old. Her spiritual ascendency extends over the vast countries which lie between the plains of the Missouri and Cape Horn, countries which a century hence, may not improbably contain a population as large as that which now inhabits Europe.

Few would argue with those claims. Today, the Catholic Church counts over a billion believers, roughly half of the world's Christian population, and some forty percent of them do indeed live in Latin America. And now, there's an Argentine pope.

Macaulay continued with a prophetic vision:

Nor do we see any sign which indicates that the term of her [the Papacy's] long dominion is approaching. She saw the commencement of all the governments and of all the ecclesiastical establishments that now exist in the world; and we feel no assurance that she is not destined to see the end of them all. She was great and respected before the Saxon had set foot on Britain, before the Frank had passed the Rhine, when Grecian eloquence still flourished at Antioch, when idols were still worshipped in the temple of Mecca. And she may still exist in undiminished vigour when some traveller from New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul's.

But why was the Catholic Church so long-lived, and why, despite so many forecasts of imminent doom, did the Papacy still flourish in 1840 (or in 2013)? Macaulay has his answers, which still impress after so many generations of subsequent scholarship.

Macaulay notes that Christianity inevitably inspires great thinkers and activists, what we might call spiritual entrepreneurs. The enthusiasm of such individuals can make them hard to live with, and institutions find it very difficult to keep them within reasonable bounds. As these people know, absolutely, that they are serving God, they see no point in following merely human instructions. Inevitably, charismatic or prophetic individuals often desert their former institutions to set up new churches, sects or denominations, and that process has recurred frequently within the Protestant tradition. In fact, it is a trademark of that tradition.

The Catholic Church, in contrast, has always shown its ability to absorb an amazing range of dissidents. Its inclusive powers are not absolute -- witness Martin Luther, and the various spiritual leaders condemned as heretics throughout the years. But in countless cases, the church succeeded. The Catholic genius was to provide means to absorb and channel virtually any form of charisma or inspired spirituality, while at the same time presenting itself as an unchanging and even inflexible hierarchical institution, semper eadem -- always the same. We think how the wild, anarchic, spirituality of St. Francis was channeled and disciplined into the Franciscan Order. Eventually, even a pope would take his name.

In a Protestant country like England, notes Macaulay, an ordinary person is sometimes filled with spiritual power, but because the church cannot hold him, he goes off to found his own sect. In contrast, the Catholic Church not only tolerates such innovation, but wholeheartedly co-opts it for its own long-term good:

Far different is the policy of Rome. The ignorant enthusiast whom the Anglican Church makes an enemy, and whatever the polite and learned may think, a most dangerous enemy, the Catholic Church makes a champion. She bids him nurse his beard, covers him with a gown and hood of coarse dark stuff, ties a rope round his waist, and sends him forth to teach in her name...To that Church he becomes as strongly attached as any of the cardinals whose scarlet carriages and liveries crowd the entrance of the palace on the Quirinal. In this way the Church of Rome unites in herself all the strength of establishment, and all the strength of dissent. With the utmost pomp of a dominant hierarchy above, she has all the energy of the voluntary system below. [my emphasis] It would be easy to mention very recent instances in which the hearts of hundreds of thousands, estranged from her by the selfishness, sloth, and cowardice of the beneficed clergy, have been brought back by the zeal of the begging friars.

Just think, he says, of some of the individuals who became noted Catholic saints, and imagine if they had been raised in the Anglican system: "Place Ignatius Loyola at Oxford. He is certain to become the head of a formidable secession. Place John Wesley at Rome. He is certain to be the first General of a new society devoted to the interests and honour of the Church."

Remarkably in light of modern day stereotypes, he suggests that the Catholics succeed far better than Protestants in channeling women's spiritual zeal. He cites Joanna Southcote, whom English history recalls as a deranged and somewhat shifty self-proclaimed prophetess. But what if she had grown up in a Catholic environment? "Place Joanna Southcote at Rome. She founds an order of barefooted Carmelites, every one of whom is ready to suffer martyrdom for the Church; a solemn service is consecrated to her memory; and her statue, placed over the holy water, strikes the eye of every stranger who enters St. Peter's."

Macaulay's vision could offer a practical recipe for modern-day churches contemplating how to survive and flourish in apparently impossible circumstances.

Philip Jenkins is a Distinguished Professor of History at Baylor University and a columnist for RealClearReligion. His latest book is Laying Down the Sword.

"Last session the governor signed a law requiring physicians to perform a sonogram before performing an abortion, ensuring women deserve to all the information before making such a life-ending decision."

Yeah, that seems to be a little garbled. "Gov. Oops" and all that. But it's exactly what it says on his website. And despite the tossed-word salad, it clearly includes a phrase I've seen used frequently by opponents of abortion rights: "All the information."

For some reason, this time the phrase made me imagine a visit to an obstetrician's office in a parallel universe Texas.

Dr. Smith: Hello, Mrs. Jones. I understand that you and your husband want a child and are ready for me to deactivate your government-mandated birth control.

Mrs. Jones: Yes, doctor. We've talked about it and prayed about it and we're sure we're ready to have a baby.

Dr. Smith: This is a very serious decision, so our state laws require that I provide you with all the information about the risks of parenthood.

I am required to tell you that approximately three percent of babies are born with a serious and immediately apparent birth defect and that birth defects are the leading cause of infant death. I am required to show you these photos of some of the more serious defects.

Mrs. Jones: Oh! Oh!

Dr. Smith: You aren't required to look, but I have to show them. And I'm required to show you this video of these parents caring for their severely disabled child. I'm also required to tell you that approximately 13 percent of students demonstrate some sort of learning disability. And that almost five percent of juveniles between the ages of 10 and 17 were arrested last year alone.

Mrs. Jones: My husband and I have talked about the challenges we might face...

Dr. Smith: How about the financial challenges? Some estimates for how much it costs to raise one healthy child in a reasonably comfortable environment easily top more than a quarter of a million dollars. The cost of college gets added on top of that.

Mrs. Jones: (A bit angrily) Yes. We've discussed this. My husband and I make enough money.

Dr. Smith: I'm required to point out that more than a third of all marriages end in divorce. Are you personally prepared for the potential emotional and financial strains of single motherhood?

Mrs. Jones: Children strengthen marriages, doctor! Parents are happier because they have children.

Dr. Smith: This is why these laws were passed. I can tell you something you didn't know. Several surveys have shown that people say they are less happy when children come along. See this chart? And their happiness doesn't rebound until the last child has left home. Here's a quote from a few years ago, in Newsweek:

"Parents experience lower levels of emotional well-being, less frequent positive emotions and more frequent negative emotions than their childless peers," says Florida State University's Robin Simon, a sociology professor who's conducted several recent parenting studies, the most thorough of which came out in 2005 and looked at data gathered from 13,000 Americans by the National Survey of Families and Households. "In fact, no group of parents-married, single, step or even empty nest-reported significantly greater emotional well-being than people who never had children."

Mrs. Jones: Yes, yes. But my husband and I love each other and have always wanted children. We've planned and prepared and are ready. Anything else?

Dr. Smith: There's the risk to your life. Almost nine births in every 100,000 ends with the death of the mother. That's 14 times the mortality rate of, for instance, getting an abortion.

Mrs. Jones: An abortion! This is insane! Why is my wish to have a child any of your business or the business of the government?

Dr. Smith: Gov. Perry explained it all when he signed that law. He said that women deserve to get "all the information" before making such a life-changing decision.

Mrs. Jones: Is that all? Can you deactivate the birth control, now?

Dr. Smith: Almost. I have to give you a physical exam, so you'll know exactly what shape your body is in. Lean back so I can do this intravaginal sonogram. I'm required to tell you exactly what I see.

(We avert our fictional eyes for a few minutes.).

Dr. Smith: All finished.

Mrs. Jones. Thank goodness. Now can you do what I came here for?

Dr. Smith: Hahahha. Of course not. Did you forget about the mandatory 24-hour waiting period? If you still decide you want a child, I'll see you tomorrow. Please pay your bill on the way out.

Who would possibly be in favor of such a law? Crazy, no? But Dr. Smith's information is not crazy. It's all real -- some gleaned from government sources, some from peer-reviewed research, some from other kinds of surveys.

I have tremendous respect for many people I've met who oppose abortion, most of them for religious reasons. If they believe the Creator of the universe has defined abortion as murder, I have no trouble understanding their passion for their cause.

I have less patience for pious hypocrisy. For people who believe that aborting a one-cell fertilized egg is murder, to focus on the sound of a heartbeat makes less sense. For people who believe that a miniscule human embryo indistinguishable to the untrained eye from that of a starfish is a person, to then parade graphic photos of late-term abortions seems to contradict their own deepest beliefs.

For them, neither the sound nor the appearance have anything to do with their opposition to abortion. So why do they trot out sounds and pictures? Make your arguments based on what you actually believe and let the marketplace of ideas work its magic. In the United States, such arguments and conflicting beliefs eventually nudge public policy.

And for someone with a faith-based opposition to abortion to claim his only interest is for the woman to have "all the information?" I'd take that more seriously if "all the information" were something more like all the information.

Jeffrey Weiss is a RealClearReligion columnist from Dallas, Texas. Follow him on Twitter @JeffreyWeissRCR.

To be clear: I've got no particular rooting interest in either side of the argument and I'm not close to being able to parse which side is right in any absolute sense. But the job of objective journalism, even investigative journalism, is to lay out the facts and even suggest conclusions -- without tipping the scales beyond where the facts go.

The piece, reported by Bob Simon, had no obvious time peg other than there was a new pope and CBS wanted something Catholic for Sunday's show. You can see the whole thing and read a transcript here.

What set me off was right at the top, the setup for the rest of the piece:

"The Vatican launched what some Catholics call a 'new Inquisition' when it accused the official group that represents most nuns in the United States of undermining the Church.

"The crackdown last year on the Leadership Conference of Women Religious has sparked outrage -- creating yet another rift between those who want the Church to reform, and those who do not."

How many ways was this problematic? Start with the "new Inquisition" line. Invoking one of the most notorious periods in history of religion-fueled torture and oppression isn't quite as obvious as drawing a comparison to the Nazis. But it's close. It's raised by nobody with a name -- the famous "some Catholics" -- and goes unchallenged.

And then there's the "rift between those who want the Church to reform and those who do not." Let's look at a definition for "reform."

"To put or change into an improved form or condition."

Which side of this argument is pushing for change into an improved form, do you suppose?

One way of looking at it would be that the Leadership Conference of Women Religious has drifted away from the doctrines and authoritative positions of the Catholic Church and are in need of, ahem, reform but do not want to reform. Which means the Vatican wants the American branch of the church to reform. Do you think that's what Simon was suggesting?

Me, either.

In this context, seems pretty clear that he wants us to understand that the push for reform lies with those supporting the sisters. Maybe so. And maybe not. But isn't that what reporting should reveal?

Simon sits down with Sr. Pat Ferrell, the now-former president of the LCWR, to discuss her view of the dispute. And we have this exchange:

She met with the enforcers of church orthodoxy who ordered the investigation that found her group had undermined the Church -- the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

Bob Simon: This is the same group, is it not, that ran the Inquisition?

Pat Farrell: It is the same office, under a different name, that's right.

This, apparently, in case you missed the first reference.

Sigh. The Federal Bureau of Investigation, under exactly the same name, illegally investigated American citizens and interfered with civil rights and anti-war organizations not so many decades ago. What exactly does that tell us about the current agency? Maybe something. Maybe not. That's what reporting is supposed to reveal.

In this case, the Sacred Congregation of the Universal Inquisition wasn't even set up until 1542, decades after some of the worst abuses perpetrated in the name of the Vatican were committed. It became the Congregation of the Holy Office in 1908 and the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in 1965. What, if anything, does that bit of historical trivia tell us about the relationship of the current organization and what happened more than 500 years ago?

Exactly nothing.

The purpose of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith is to act as quality control for official Catholic doctrine and practice. Which seems to me like a necessary function for any hierarchical organization. If it's abusing that power, that's the sort of thing that reporting should reveal.

To be fair, Simon's piece isn't all as bad as I'm cherry-picking. He gives Seattle's Archbishop Peter Sartain, appointed by the Vatican to oversee the sisters' organization, plenty of time to make his case. And Simon raises the dispute between the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and the LCWR about health care reform.

In this example, it looks like the bishops never came up with a convincing way to show how the argument was about theology.

But imagine if 60 Minutes had done a piece on soccer. Sympathetically interviewing leaders of an organization that suggested allowing players to hit the ball with their hands at midfield would help the game. Whether these "reformers" would be right or not (I'd vote yes) wouldn't exactly be the point. There's a league with a commissioner and rules committee who have the right and responsibility for defining the game of soccer.

Ditto, the Roman Catholic Church is a hierarchy with an unambiguous boss, currently a fascinating fellow named Francis.

I totally agree that there's an interesting story to be told -- without taking sides -- about the state of Catholic religious vocations in America, the tension between some nuns and some official church doctrine, and the efforts being made by the Vatican to bring everybody into line.

This 60 Minutes piece wasn't that.

Jeffrey Weiss is a RealClearReligion columnist from Dallas, Texas. Follow him on Twitter @JeffreyWeissRCR.

The choice of Cardinal Bergoglio has generally been discussed in terms of the church's shift to the Global South, an acknowledgment of surging Catholic numbers in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Even better, his Argentine homeland is well placed as a Global South society that is in many respects thoroughly European and First World. But it is also thoroughly diverse, ethnically and religiously. In the century following 1850, Argentina was an immigrant nation par excellence, closely resembling the contemporary United States. New York and Buenos Aires were both hugely significant hemispheric gateways. And while Argentina chiefly received Southern Europeans (Italians and Spaniards) it also hosted many smaller communities.

Jews eagerly sought out the opportunities of this flourishing land. By the 1940s, Argentina had some 400,000 Jews, giving the country one of the two largest Jewish communities in the Southern Hemisphere (South Africa was the other). Those numbers have declined in recent years, partly due to emigration to Israel, but also from the general secularization that so marks the country. Still, though, Argentina has some 300,000 Jews.

Another great source of migrants was Syria, a term that then encompassed what we would now call Lebanon. Many of these Syrians were Christians and Jews, but Muslims were well represented. Although estimates of the present population vary, Argentina is probably home to just under a million Muslims, two percent of the population. This is by far the largest Muslim minority on the continent. As with Jews, Muslims have long tended to drift to the country's religious mainstream, through conversion, intermarriage and secularization. Former President Carlos Menem (1989-99) was born Muslim, but converted to Catholicism. (The fact that he was such a dreadful incumbent should reflect on neither of those heritages).

In more recent years, Argentine Islam has also developed a harder edge, as Saudi Arabia and other nations have sponsored mosques and schools. Although Islamic extremism is not much in evidence, overseas groups have used the country's multi-religious setting as cover for their activities. In 1992 and 1994, Iranian-backed Hezbollah groups carried out horrendous attacks, respectively at the Israeli embassy and a Jewish community center. (Astonishingly, the thoroughly bungled official investigation into both atrocities still drags on). But such activities remain far removed from the normally placid story of the country's deeply rooted Islamic life.

Cardinal Bergoglio, then, grew up in a Buenos Aires in which Catholics coexisted, normally very peacefully, alongside both Jews and Muslims. After the 1994 terror attack, he immediately offered sympathy and support to the Jewish community, with whom he has excellent relations, running joint charitable projects. He was no less popular with the country's Islamic groups, which enthusiastically greeted his election. Muslims and Jews alike praise him as totally committed to dialogue and peace.

That background, particularly his relationship with Muslims, is deeply relevant to his present role as pope. There was a time when the Catholic church could afford have no particular policy towards Islam, beyond protesting against the occasional persecution of Christian minorities, or demanding that missionaries be allowed access to closed countries. That was before the terrific growth of Christian numbers in Africa and Asia, where Christians and Muslims often coexist in a delicate religious eco-system. In Europe itself, Muslims now represent some 4.5 percent of the population, 25 million souls, and that proportion could rise to 10 or 15 percent within forty years. France presently has perhaps four million Muslims, Italy and Spain a million each. Mosques commonly rise near older Catholic churches.

The presence of those new neighbors poses many challenges for the church in Europe, quite apart from the familiar stories of terrorism and extremism. One is theological. If Christians never deal with members of other faiths on a day-to-day basis, most see little need to fit them into their theological framework. But now, the question arises of exactly what Islam is, particularly given the overlap between the two faiths -- the common veneration of Abraham and Moses, Jesus and Mary. Is Islam a rival of Christianity, based on the worship of an alien God? Or is it a sister faith, even a Christian heresy? In coming decades, European Christians will have to think through these questions very carefully.

Other issues are much more materially based. Through centuries of warfare, places of worship in Europe and the Mediterranean world have often changed hands: many mosques stand on the sites of former churches, and vice versa. Such great European cathedrals as Granada, Córdoba, Toledo, Palermo and even Budapest have either served as mosques, or else replace former places of Islamic worship. Just in the past decade, with Muslims so strong a presence on European soil, that history has moved from the realm of antiquarianism to current politics. Muslim groups, and by no means extremist or violent factions, have requested the right to pray at such places, and even raised the question of restitution. Catholic authorities firmly resist such suggestions, but the question will continue to be raised.

We live in an age when the papacy has to be deeply concerned about the church's relations with Islam. It's valuable, then, to have a Pope from a society in which Muslims have long been part of the familiar religious landscape, and who has already worked hard to build bridges.

Philip Jenkins is a Distinguished Professor of History at Baylor University and a columnist for RealClearReligion. His latest book is Laying Down the Sword.

In his second paragraph from the loggia last Wednesday, Pope Francis quietly and without explicit reference quoted one of the oldest phrases extant to describe the Church of Rome as being the one "which presides in charity over all the Churches." This phrase goes back to Ignatius of Antioch, one of the earliest fathers of the Church who died somewhere around the turn of the second century.

Used in Ignatius's Letter to the Romans, it describes a vision of church relations quite different from recent Roman practice, but the quoting of this phrase, along with other gestures by the new pope, would seem to suggest that his vision is indeed quite different, and wholly welcome, especially to Orthodox Christians for whom an overly exalted and far-reaching papacy remains the last significant hurdle to Orthodox-Catholic unity.

Let us consider just a few signs:

In his inaugural address from the loggia, he never once used the words "pope" or "pontiff" or their cognates. (There is nothing wrong with either term: pope comes from the Greek for "father" and "pontiff" in Latin means bridge-builder.) Instead he consistently referred to Rome now having a bishop again. This is extremely significant because of the many titles he holds, "bishop of Rome" is not only the oldest but also the most important without which nothing else is possible. Being made a bishop requires a sacrament, which is very serious; being made pope requires no sacrament and nothing more than a simple election which adds nothing to a man's sacramental character; the pope is not a "super-bishop."

The program for his installation Mass having been released, we can already see several significant factors that confirm for us Francis's early understanding of his ministry. He is downplaying the event by simply using the pre-existing prayers and readings for the feast of the day, St. Joseph, celebrated every year in the Roman calendar on March 19th. In addition, he is having the gospel proclaimed only in Greek rather than Latin as well, indicating that there is already enough Latin in the rest of the liturgy. This will be noticed by the Greek Orthodox delegation, headed by Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew who is making history by being the first to attend a papal inauguration-along with numerous other Orthodox leaders. Francis' inauguration, moreover, is also involving the Eastern Catholic patriarchs in an unprecedented way at the outset, and thereby sending a clear signal that Francis, too, is a patriarch like them, a sign that can only greatly cheer Eastern Catholic and Orthodox hearts alike.

Much has already been made of the name, but one point has often been overlooked: St. Francis of Assisi was never a hierarch, nor even a priest, remaining instead a simple deacon. The word "deacon" comes from the Greek for service. Though the etymology is capable of several meanings, it is often construed to mean "service" as in "table-service"-a very humble job indeed. I'm not suggesting the new pope is going to moonlight as a busboy at a Roman trattoria, but together with these other signs, his overall message is clearly that of Jesus the foot-washer: "The kings of the Gentiles exercise lordship over them; and those in authority over them are called benefactors. But not so with you; rather let the greatest among you become as the youngest, and the leader as one who serves. For which is the greater, one who sits at table, or one who serves? Is it not the one who sits at table? But I am among you as one who serves" (Luke 22:25-27).

We've already heard too much chatter about the new pope's shoe color and his shunning some of the "traditional" vestments for his first appearance. These are not serious matters, but they are of a piece with what we have seen of his character to date. While I applaud the gestures and the intent, they give me unease only insofar as they give cheer to those iconoclasts who think that beauty is bad. This lot would condemn us all to celebrating communion using the latest in 1960s pottery on an overturned canoe on a beach or upended rubbish bin in an alley. As I have often remarked to these types, there is a vast difference between simplicity and ostentatious (and usually sanctimonious) meanness. At the Last Supper, Jesus didn't host a self-serve buffet of gruel for his disciples eaten off plates made of recycled hemp.

Some of the above have been taken, gleefully and almost perversely by some (including those who should know better-e.g., the execrable Roger Mahony, thankfully ex-archbishop of Los Angeles who belongs in a monastery on a deserted island for his handling of sexual abuse cases) to indicate that Francis is tacitly repudiating Benedict's liturgical "style." Nonsense. He is if anything building on and extending what Benedict did. Consider briefly three things.

First, the pallium with which he is being invested is reported to be the same pallium used by Benedict, in a design that was clearly the Latin counterpart to the Greek or Byzantine omophorio -- thus a sign not only of papal continuity, but again of outreach to the Orthodox.

Second, again the extensive and unprecedented involvement of the patriarchs in Francis' inauguration -- both Eastern Catholic and Orthodox. Benedict started writing about the importance of seeing the bishop of Rome as an equal to the patriarchs in the late 1960s, a trajectory in the theological literature he single-handedly started and would emphasis again and again over the following four decades right through his own papacy.

Third and finally, the fact that Benedict resigned was a welcome blow to the "mythology" of the papacy, and in less than a week Francis has repeatedly extended that "demythologization" in the ways noted above. The resignation, through sheer shock-value alone, impressed on people that perhaps they have placed excessive emphasis on the papacy, which is simply an office for ecclesiastical administration and not some kind of demiurge.

The pope is a man like any other man, and if he is getting old and tired, as all of us will if we make it to our mid-80s, he should be able to step down for the good of the Church. As I put it a month ago to worried friends, every other Catholic bishop in the world is expected to retire at 75-why should the bishop of Rome, that most venerable of titles clearly preferred by its newest incumbent, be any different?

Adam A.J. DeVille is an Associate Professor of Theology at the University of Saint Francis in Fort Wayne, IN and author of Orthodoxy and the Roman Papacy.

Sadly, such indifference means that moderns are missing a story that is not just rock-solid history, but is one of the most moving in early Christianity.

Normally, reconstructing the life of an early saint means picking through wildly exaggerated tales written centuries after the events occurred, and Patrick's later followers certainly concocted such accounts. Alongside the hagiography, though, we also have Patrick's very own writings. Let me repeat that: we have two documents actually written by the man himself, during a whole century when virtually no other contemporary text survives from the whole British Isles.

Patricius was born in Britain around the year 390, from a respectable Roman family, the son and grandson of Christian clergy. As an adolescent, he was kidnapped by Irish slavers. After some years, he escaped and returned to his native land, but he was persuaded to go back to Ireland to build the cause of Christianity. Though his mission achieved much, he was criticized for what looked like questionable financial dealings. This controversy drove Patrick to produce a remarkable Confession, which begins with the stark words Ego, Patricius -- I, Patrick.

It's a confession, not an autobiography, as Patrick defends his mission. Reading it today makes us think of emerging churches in the global South, where conversions are common, but where established churches and agencies worry about shady evangelists or revival crusades, about self-proclaimed bishops. Patrick, too, disturbed the bishops of Gaul and Britain, who had a poor sense of the very different conditions prevailing in the mission field. They had heard rumors about all the presents he was giving: was he trying to buy people's faith? How could he really expect to win genuine conversions? By what right did he call himself a bishop?

With all the patience at his command -- which was not immense -- Patrick told his critics about his extraordinary labors in a frightening and often dangerous pagan society, while they were living comfortably. He also stressed the practical realities of operating in this very different kind of emerging Christian society, where gift-giving was a standard part of life. Had he made gifts to influential leaders? He certainly had, and would do so again. I may be ignorant and unlearned, he says, but in winning this country, never doubt that I am doing God's will.

The defensive tone of the Confession is utterly lacking in Patrick's other surviving text, his Letter to the Soldiers of Coroticus. After years of struggle, Patrick had won many Irish for Christ -- not the overnight conversion of popular mythology, but more than enough to be proud of. Suddenly, though, the ruthless soldiers of the British king Coroticus attacked these Christian settlements, and right after a mass baptism ceremony. Patrick's fury is easy enough to understand, all the more so when we recall his own history. He knew at first hand what it was like to see your homeland devastated by soldiers, and to be carried off into slavery. Everywhere he looked in Ireland, he saw enslaved Christian women who had been seized from their British homes. But these latest horrors were the work of men who claimed to be Roman and Christian.

Patrick wrote to Coroticus himself, excommunicating him in vitriolic language that would have the prophet Jeremiah blanch. He urged those who read the letter to declare it publicly, even to Coroticus personally.

Even the letter's title proclaims Patrick's rage and contempt. He should have written to his "fellow Romans", but instead, "Notice I don't call you 'my fellow Romans' -- No, your crimes have made you citizens of Hell. You live like the worst barbarians, including your Pictish friends...Your hands drip with the blood of the innocent Christians you have murdered -- the very Christians I nourished and brought to God." (I'm using Philip Freeman's translation). Calling someone a "barbarian" today is less than polite; in the British Isles in 450, it meant reading someone out of the human race.

Summoning the other worst insults he could find in Roman custom, he denounced Coroticus's "Christians" as parricides, fratricides, bandits, apostates, murderers. He calls them sceleratissimi, which implies an ultimate degree of wickedness: translating it as "monsters of evil" comes close. Elsewhere in the world, he writes, other Christians try to ransom slaves, but you, Coroticus, enslave innocent people and sell them far from their homes, giving away young girls as prizes.

Patrick had probably never heard of St. Augustine, who lived a generation before his time, but the questions he was asking would have been familiar to the African saint. How could a state or a king boast of Christianity, if their every action betrayed the faith, if they showed neither mercy nor charity, even to fellow believers? If Coroticus did not live according to the church and its laws, then he was worse than a pagan, worse than a savage. His was not the City of God but the City of Hell. Christian kingship -- Roman kingship -- was a title that had to be earned. Christians? No, they were "rebels against Christ."

As for the murdered Irish Christians, they would dwell in Paradise, and "rule over wicked kings."

This March 17, then, forget the snakes and the green beer. Think of the prophetic Christian leader who demanded that rulers live up to the faith they professed, and who had no hesitation in damning violent oppressors to Hell.

Philip Jenkins is a Distinguished Professor of History at Baylor University and a columnist for RealClearReligion. His latest book is Laying Down the Sword.

On the morning of Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio's ascension to the papacy, Obama told George Stephanopoulos that he thought an American pope would govern just fine and refused to believe that such a pope might listen to him. "I don't know if you've checked lately," he laughed, "but the conference of Catholic bishops here in the United States don't seem to be takin' orders from me."

We can leave aside for a moment the President's very bad joke, and consider the brazen, self-absorbed attempt to insinuate that "Gee, wouldn't everything be better off if the Bishops went my way?" It called to mind his rather juvenile performance late last year in negotiations to avert the so-called fiscal cliff when he told Speaker John Boehner, I'm the President and "you get nothing."

That Obama flippantly alluded to a debate still riling his Administration bares quite clear a dangerous puerility the likes of only Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi could match with her infamous dismissal of "this conscience thing," as if conscience protections were some laughing matter.

Wednesday's lame joke was peculiar in so far as the President can't seem to give orders anyway as far as the Catholic Church is concerned. The United States Ambassadorship to the Holy See is sitting vacant and has been for over 130 days. If the College of Cardinals could manage to assemble in Rome, deliberate, and elect a pope all in a week, why can't President Obama at least offer a name? Habemus papam, sed ubi est nostro legato?

There were some rumblings in January that Congressman Daniel Lipinski's name was being passed around. Good, nominate him. Stephen Schneck? Fine, whatever. Just send someone to the Senate for confirmation. The more Obama dithers on this, the more it seems the United States is diplomatically inept or grossly neglectful of normal relations with the Holy See. And no, sending Vice President Biden to Pope Francis's installation Mass doesn't count.

Obama claims to have studied Ronald Reagan. Had he opened The Reagan Diaries, he might have noticed an entry where his predecessor complained the State Department was too slow in processing his Holy See appointment and suggested that someone ought to "get off his ass" and get this done. Soon after, William A. Wilson was confirmed as our first Ambassador to the Vatican.

Well, Mr. President...

Nicholas G. Hahn III is Deputy Editor of RealClearReligion. Follow him on Twitter @NGHahn3.

In 21st Century America, it's perfectly acceptable to relentlessly mock all three groups without fear of being labeled a bigot. This cultural double standard was on its fullest, most egregious display during the media's coverage of the Papal Conclave.

Let's first make something perfectly clear: I'm not Catholic. I have major theological and ideological disagreements with the Catholic Church, and I always have been and always will be a Protestant. Yet, watching the mainstream media trash an institution beloved by some 1.2 billion people has brought my blood to a boiling point.

Our national media got things under way by criticizing what they perceived to be the new Pontiff's failure of standing up to Argentine dictators in the 1970s, which included mentioning an unsubstantiated claim that he was complicit in the kidnapping of two Jesuit priests. Apparently, invoking unproven allegations from nearly 40 years ago passes as responsible journalism. However, the Fourth Estate's collective failure to confront the Obama Administration over its unsupervised use of drones -- even against American citizens such Anwar al-Awlaki -- makes their criticism that the new pope insufficiently challenged authority ring rather hollow.

Slate piled on with a front page article tactfully titled, "A Catholic Nightmare," in which the author (a self-identified Catholic) warns that we should be prepared for more "scandal and negligence."

When the media wasn't smearing the newly elected pope, they were offering unsolicited advice in the form of the inevitable question, "When will the Catholic Church finally reform?" Of course, by "reform," what they really mean is embrace gay marriage and abortion, two issues which the Church has been lobbied on heavily by secular progressives -- people who couldn't care less about the future of Catholicism or Christianity in general.

Case-in-point: KING5 News, the Seattle NBC affiliate, began one of their stories with this whopper: "Many Catholics in the U.S. and Europe hoped the Cardinals would pick a pope who would champion same-sex marriage and other social issues."

Unless the definition of the word "many" has changed, that's an outright lie.

On March 6, Pew released the results of a poll in which it asked Catholics to identify the most important problem in the Church today. The result? The sex abuse scandal came in first at with 34 percent; second was, "I don't know." Gay marriage and abortion both came in near the bottom, receiving 2 percent each.

In other words, gay marriage and abortion aren't issues that Catholics actually care about; instead, they are issues that secular progressives in the media tell them they should care about.

Indeed, the media's exclusive obsession with the Catholic Church is curious. Secular progressives aren't clamoring for Islam to embrace gay marriage and abortion. And while the media relentlessly calls for Catholic Church "reform," it remains mostly silent about Islam, a religion which, in its worst manifestation, oppresses and abuses women, discriminates against non-Muslims, and opposes the basic freedoms that Westerners take for granted. Where are all the calls to modernize the Islamic faith?

And why is it that nearly every story about the Catholic Church is immediately followed up with an obligatory remark about the tragic sexual abuse scandals, while anyone who expresses concern over Islamist terrorism is labeled an "Islamaphobe"? The media reminds us that Islam is a peaceful religion, but for some reason, Catholics aren't given the same benefit of the doubt. You wouldn't know it from watching news reports, but priests aren't all pedophiles.

What discussion on religion would be complete without hearing from the New York Times? In a recent piece, they quoted a 28-year-old plastics production facility supervisor, who must be a theologian in his spare time. (Otherwise, why would they bother quoting him?) He opined, "I'm not saying change everything the church stands for, but you need to evolve with the times if you want to remain a viable religion."

That opinion fits well in our amoral, post-modernist society, but it misses the entire point of religion. As Gerhard Lohfink described in his book Jesus and Community, the entire Christian Church is meant to be a contrast-society. In other words, it lives by a set of unchanging beliefs and morals, regardless of the whims of popular culture. Indeed, what is the point of claiming morals if they are subject to the court of public opinion? Morals are supposed to be timeless and nonnegotiable.

Ultimately, that's why most journalists don't understand the Catholic Church. Unlike the media, it actually has standards.

Dr. Alex B. Berezow is editor of RealClearScience and co-author of Science Left Behind. Follow him on Twitter @AlexBerezow.

Francis of Assisi might have been that level of odd for his era.

The former Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Argentina broke deeply with tradition this week with his choice of papal name. The last pope to pick a name that had never been used by another pope was Lando, exactly 1,100 years ago. (John Paul I cobbled his name from two well-worn papal choices. John had been picked 23 times, Paul six.)

And then to choose "Francis?" Initially there was some speculation about which Francis he's honoring. The pope is a Jesuit and one of the founders of his order was St. Francis Xavier, famed as an incredible evangelist. I won't be shocked if eventually the Vatican issues a statement with a nod to that saint, as well. But for the moment, the official line is that the papal choice is homage to the Assisi Francis.

The first biography of Francis was written not long after his death, by a man who knew him. (You can find a translation here.) Over the centuries, legends have accreted that make it hard to discern the nature of the real man.

Recent biographers have tried to strip away the legend and get back to the historically accurate Francis. I'm not going to even try to negotiate those rocks. After all, the resonances people have with "Pope Francis" have more to do with the popular image of the saint than any historical text.

As the Western "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance" put it in a far different context: "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend." And what we think we know makes it clear that Francis was, well, unusual.

Start with his utter renunciation of worldly goods. The son of a well-off cloth merchant, probably born in 1182, young Francis seems to have grown up with material advantages. Even that first biography, though, tells the tale of his radical rejection of wealth and family. He sells some of his dad's cloth and gives the money to a run-down church. Eventually, Francis returns the money to his father, along with all of the clothing he's wearing.

"Moreover he did not even keep his drawers but stripped himself stark naked before all the bystanders."

There's the preach-to-the-animals thing, why we have the garden statues and thre annual blessing of the animals in his name. One of the legends has Francis mediating a dispute between a village and a wolf, getting the wolf to agree not to attack the town if the residents fed him.

His most famous bit of writing is credited as one of the first poems written in Italian. Known as the Canticle of the Creatures, it's a prayer of thanks to God. Thanks for what? Brothers Sun, Wind, Air and Fire and Sisters Moon, Water, Earth and Bodily Death.

Here's a legend recounted on Catholic.org: "When someone told him of a priest living openly with a woman and asked him if that meant the Mass was polluted, Francis went to the priest, knelt before him, and kissed his hands -- because those hands had held God."

The order he founded started with a no-money rule. Eventually, his followers decided that was too harsh. At about which point, he stepped out of leadership. Many of the stories I've read indicate he was never particularly happy being in charge of an organization.

He was harder on himself than he was on his followers. One story says that after he had an evil thought about a man, he asked the fellow to stomp on his mouth and neck. Three times.

His last years were spent in physical misery. The stories say he was marked with Stigmata -- the wounds of Christ. He was blind. And he died at 45.

Never a priest, he quickly became a saint. Memorialized in tales and art, he's revered for piety, humility, love of all creatures as fellow siblings of God, unusual attention to the needs of the poor, and obedience to the Gospel. The orders he founded survive -- the Franciscan friars for men, the Poor Clares for women.

He remains among the most dramatic figures in Christian history.

So what of this did Cardinal Bergoglio think about when he decided on "Francis?" Might he pledge the Vatican's worldly wealth (See: the movie Shoes of the Fisherman) to finance alternative energy sources? Might he take an unprecedented turn to aid the world's poor? Might he write immortal poetry?

For those who know something of the name, the new Pope Francis has at least set a high bar for expectations.

Jeffrey Weiss is a RealClearReligion columnist from Dallas, Texas. Follow him on Twitter @JeffreyWeissRCR.

RealClearReligion: Why did the College of Cardinals go to the "ends of the earth" to find a Pope?

Peter Casarella: The College of Cardinals recognize that about forty percent or more of the Church is in Latin America, they recognize that fifty percent of Christianity on the globe is Spanish speaking, they recognize that there is growth in the South, but they also wanted someone that fit with their own expectations and presuppositions. Having someone who speaks Italian, German, and Spanish -- as the new Pope does -- means that he has a European cultural heritage and is a Latin American. That's a very catholic way of bringing things together.

It's a big boost for the Church in Latin America, it's a boost for Latinos in the United States, but the challenge that Pope Francis now faces is not to be an Argentine, or a Latin American, or a Spanish-speaking pope, but to be the Bishop of Rome who speaks urbi et orbi -- to the city and the world.

RCR: Do you think the Cardinals recognized the rise of Protestant evangelicalism in Latin America in choosing a Latin American?

PC: There are today varied forces taking Catholics out of the Church in Latin America. One is the Pentecostal movement. The other is secularism, which is stronger in Argentina than other countries in Latin America. Pope Francis has those experiences and will be able to reinvigorate Catholicism in Latin America, but it won't be easy. Blessed John Paul II said the new evangelization had to be new in its form, ardor, and methods. This Pope will hopefully give us a new form of that evangelization.

RCR: Did the Cardinals chose a Jesuit on purpose?

PC: I don't think that was a factor. I don't think someone who is a Capuchin would vote for a Jesuit simply to give strength to religious orders. But they're setting a historical precedent. The Jesuits have been around since the Reformation, they are the major factor in Catholic education -- though, teaching at a Vincentian university, I shouldn't admit that openly -- they set up institutions that change countries and change cultures. Ignatius asked that an appendix be added to the Spiritual Exercises whereby the Jesuits took a personal pledge of loyalty to the Pope. So, the fact that there's never been a Jesuit Pope is striking.

Bergoglio, though, is an ironic figure. He's a Franciscan-Jesuit, so to say.

RCR: What do you know about the man, Jorge Mario Bergoglio?

PC: He's the Archbishop of Buenos Aires, a city in a very complicated country. Interestingly, to be of Italian background in Buenos Aires is like being Polish or Irish in Chicago -- it's the norm. Italians are something like forty percent of the Argentine population. What you do in Buenos Aires is go to Italian restaurants. He fits into that culture very well as a Spanish-speaking Italian.

One of the big questions in Latin America is the future of liberation theology. In taking the mantle, the name of "the poor one," he has this model of simplicity: taking public transportation, cooking for himself, refusing to live in a fancy mansion. And so, that dimension of Latin American bishops and certainly socially progressive Jesuits, seems to be in Bergoglio's witness. I seem him reinforcing that message of a "preferential option for the poor." At the same time, he is known in Buenos Aires for his support of the ecclesial movements, Communion and Liberation for one, which some regard as a counterpunch to the liberation theologians.

RCR: Does this experience with the ecclesial movements like Communion and Liberation effectively outweigh the surrounding influences of Argentinian communism and Marxism?

PC: Liberation theology thrived in Argentina, but not with the same vigor as in Brazil or Mexico. There was never the same fervor for the Marxist-Socialist brand of liberation theology among the mainstream Catholic theologians in Argentina.

RCR: There were no Ernesto Cardenals in Buenos Aires?

PC: I suppose I could find a couple of those. But when I was in Buenos Aires and talked to the theologians there who know him and would be representative of the Argentine situation, they wanted to talk to me about von Balthasar, they wanted to talk about theological aesthetics, they wanted to talk about religion in literature. They asked me to lecture on the American experience of religious freedom as a basis for the whole continent. So, they're not Marxists or socialists by any stretch -- they've come a long way and recognize that liberation theology needs to move on.

RCR: Tell that to Ms. Kirchner.

PC: Well, Bergoglio took on Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, the President of Argentina, on the debate about gay marriage. He failed. Argentina adopted a gay marriage provision, but Bergoglio opposed her publicly and was articulate in his defense of the Christian notion of marriage. That's not communist or Marxist. That's defending the Church, that's speaking the truth.

Besides, Benedict XVI left a legacy for Pope Francis. Benedict gave us encyclicals that deal with social questions. He made it very clear that the principle of subsidiarity is non-negotiable. He made it very clear that the Church, when advocating for a "preferential option for the poor" as it relates to structural sin, can't negate the value of capitalist free enterprise. Pope Francis walks in these footsteps and I'm confident he will align himself with Benedict.

Pope Francis won't be a communist or an anti-communist. He's going to be a Franciscan Jesuit who serves as the Bishop of Rome. And this new Bishop of Rome will travel to Rio de Janeiro in the summer for World Youth Day. He will be returning to Latin America not as the Archbishop of Buenos Aires, but as Pope Francis. This is an opportunity, a chance for him to show this model of humility, to witness to the Gospel, and to be a model for young people. That will be a key moment in understanding exactly what influences prevailed. He won't be able to avoid it when he returns home.

RCR: What will Pope Francis do about the rise of persecution of Christians throughout the world?

PC: He will face questions of religious liberty in the struggle between the American episcopacy and the Obama administration. With the news that Vice President Biden will attend the installation Mass, Pope Francis will face that directly. A more significant issue will be how he interacts with the Church in China. But other than his Franciscan gesture of being poor, humble and speaking the truth, I can't really predict how he'll engage those geopolitical debates. He'll have to do it.

The only thing we can look at with any certainty is that Pope Francis wants to evangelize not just in word, but also in deed. He didn't wear the pallium; he appeared in a simple white cassock. He asked for the people to pray for him as he stood there silently with his head bowed.

RCR: As a 76-year-old man with one lung, will Pope Francis be able to make it through all this?

PC: I don't know that the College of Cardinals gave him a medical exam, but they're practical. I do, however, acknowledge your point. I, too, was surprised. Many were looking for someone in his sixties, and this 76-year-old man caught us by surprise. The fact that Benedict XVI opened the door to a resignation means that should his faculties diminish, I'll assume Pope Francis will exercise that same capacity to examine his conscience before God if he has to resign. Then the Church will move on to the next conclave. In this sense, I think that the resignation of Benedict XVI was a game-changer.

Nicholas G. Hahn III is Deputy Editor of RealClearReligion. Follow him on Twitter @NGHahn3.

History, for the most part, gives truth to that maxim. Few guessed that in 1958, the genial but elderly diplomat Angelo Cardinal Roncalli would emerge as Pope John XXIII or that twenty years later the humble and obscure patriarch of Venice, Albino Luciani, would be elected John Paul I.

A more fruitful pursuit is identifying the pastoral experience and virtues required of the next pope if the Church is to triumph over the formidable forces that threaten its relevance in the 21st Century.

Historically, the Roman Catholic Church has been miraculously resilient. Throughout its turbulent two thousand year existence, it has survived official inquisitions that tortured and brutally executed suspected heretics; crusades that butchered countless innocent people; rogue popes who led lives of unspeakable debauchery; and antipopes whose ambition rivaled that of the fallen angels.

But that wasn't all. The Church weathered strains of blatant anti-Semitism, the systematic prohibition of books, the condemnation of scientists like Galileo who challenged erroneous Church teachings about the universe, and scandalous practices like the selling of indulgences that ultimately provoked the rupture of Christendom.

The Church's remarkable resilience is no guarantee, however, that it can survive the clashing forces that besiege it today. Thus, the need for a new pope whose personal life is unassailable, whose humility is palpable, whose wisdom is Solomon-like, whose gentleness is endearing, whose benevolence is inspiring, and whose devotion to the Word supersedes his loyalty to the flawed human policies guiding the Church when the two should collide.

We were once blessed with such a pope. Albino Luciani, the first Pope John Paul, captivated the world in his brief thirty-three day pontificate in 1978 because of his transparent holiness, his hopeful smile, his abiding meekness, and his unfaltering devotion to Christ.

In the early sixties while the Church hierarchy wrestled with the issue of artificial contraception, Luciani publicly expressed his dream that some reasonable accommodation could be reached to ease the suffering he witnessed in families where children became the victims of crippling poverty. When Louis Brown, the world's controversial first "test tube" baby was born, Cardinal Luciani, alone among the princes of the Church, publicly congratulated the parents.

In a flash, Pope John Paul I abandoned the vestiges of a bygone time that the Church, a fierce guardian of its traditions, clung to desperately. He unceremoniously discarded the royal "we" habitually used by popes, insisting instead on the informal first person singular "I." He initially abandoned the pope's portable throne and refused to be crowned. His simple homilies enchanted all but a few anachronistic prelates entombed alive in the fossilized Vatican bureaucracy.

A brilliant teacher capable of making the most profound issues comprehensible to the most unsophisticated among us, Luciani's rendition of the Good News appealed even to lapsed Catholics, many of whom became willing to take another look at the teachings of the Church they had formerly disowned.

Today, the modern Church itself has contributed mightily to its sullied reputation.

Nobody but clerics were responsible for the monstrous sex crimes perpetrated against innocents, and nobody but their bishops were culpable for the indefensible folly of covering-up these abominable sins thereby endangering more young people. The belated and often feeble apologies from Church leaders combined with the arrogance of complicit cardinals undermined the faith of practicing Catholics in the conduct of their Church. Yet the Vatican hierarchy, ostensibly operating within an impenetrable bubble, never seemed to understand the toxic implications.

Beyond that, millions of practicing Catholics reject the Church's prohibition of birth control, particularly in cases where unwanted children are either aborted or abandoned to disease or starvation. Millions more denounce the marginalization of women, including nuns, within the mission of the Church. Still others decry the lack of transparency in Vatican finances and its unfathomable obsession with secrecy. Many question the relevance of priestly celibacy, especially with the precipitous decline in priestly vocations. Of concern also is the rapidly dwindling numbers of practicing Catholics in Europe and the United States.

Only an extraordinary pastor blessed with the virtues of John Paul I and guided by the unerring hand of God can successfully steer the bark of St. Peter safely through these stormy times. The only remaining questions are: Is there such a man among the today's college of cardinals, and, if so, will they have the wisdom to elect him?

Mo Guernon is a Rhode Island-based writer and consultant. He is currently writing a biography of Albino Luciani.

RealClearReligion: Why the Bible? Why now?

Roma Downey: Why not? No one has ever done a series on the whole Bible -- individual stories have been told, but not as a whole. My husband and I wanted to be able to make a series that would glorify God, one that would tell God's love story. We felt a calling in our hearts. It's a very ambitious and bold project to step into, and we did so prayerfully. It's been very humbling and exhilarating to see the numbers climb as the show has been run and re-run. It's exciting.

RCR: It's also curious that you, as a Catholic, have taken such an enthusiastic interest in telling the stories of the Bible -- not many Catholics would.

RD: Either there's no God, or there's only God. For me, there's only God. The Bible is our story of God's love, so I don't know why that would be a surprise. I love the Bible. My earliest memories in my Catholic household were of sitting on my Father's knee and having him read Scripture to me.

I also remember watching Bible movies on rainy Sunday afternoons in our little house in Derry [Ireland]. And with the memory of some of them in my heart, there was a desire to update some of those stories, to be able to tell them in fresh, visual ways. We wanted to make it accessible for the youth. We wanted to tell these stories in a way that would emotionally resonate with them.

RCR: But, you can't tell all the stories of the Bible in only ten hours.

RD: It was an enormous challenge. While it's easy to criticize, it's hard to create. We gathered a team of scholars and theologians to ensure that we were accurate, but we had to gallop through it -- there was no way else to do it.

RCR: How did you go about making the cuts?

RD: Well, obviously we had to tell the story of Abraham, we had to tell the story of Moses, and we had to tell the story of David. We decided that the bridge from the Old Testament to the New would be through the story of Daniel. Once we then started on the narrative of the life of Jesus, the story became easier to tell because it became natural. They're powerful, uplifting evenings of television.

RCR: While you didn't require that everyone tune in on Sunday evenings, you and your husband did suggest that the Bible ought to be mandatory reading in public schools.

RD: Yes, there's too much ignorance of the basic stories of the Bible. We've been so surprised. In the early parts of our marketing campaign, we produced iconic images from the set and passed them out to a young group working in an advertising agency. One photo was clearly Moses with his staff up over the sea, one was clearly Abraham on the mountaintop with Isaac, and the entire group had no idea who anybody was. It was shocking.

The Bible is the cornerstone of culture, literature, and art -- shame on us for not knowing it better. We understand that it can't be taught in schools as religion, but it certainly could be taught as literature or history.

RCR: Aren't you concerned that educators might be hostile to the Bible and would misrepresent it in their classrooms?

RD: You're basing that they'd be hostile to the Bible on what? Would they be hostile to Shakespeare, too? I know many public school teachers who would think of it as a great gift to our children. And it would be a gift.

In the end, Mark and I wanted to start a conversation. It's amazing that so many people are discussing the series and we think it's a good, healthy place to start a dialogue about our Bible.

Nicholas G. Hahn III is Deputy Editor of RealClearReligion. Follow him on Twitter @NGHahn3.

Leave it to Protestants to ask the question experts in all things Catholic are only tiptoeing around. Phil Lawler, about as straight a shooter as you can find among the more conservative papal pundits, laments, "there isn't anyone in the College of Cardinals like Joseph Ratzinger. There isn't anyone like Karol Wojtyla, either." Lawler explains, "For nearly 35 years we have been blessed with the leadership of two towering figures, two world-class intellects. It's unrealistic to expect that trend to continue." For a silver lining, all he can muster is this: "The Church doesn't always need a great philosopher or theologian in the apostolic palace; sometimes what's needed is just a firm hand at the helm of Peter's barque. "

Maybe the Catholic Church will get that firm hand, maybe it won't. Some Catholics believe the Holy Spirit superintends the selection process. That view is not shared by, among others, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who argued in 1997, "There are too many contrary instances of popes the Holy Spirit obviously would not have picked." Translation: Don't blame God for the bad popes. We did that. Said the future and once pope, "the Spirit does not exactly take control of the affair, but rather like a good educator...leaves us much space, much freedom, without entirely abandoning us." In fact, "probably the only assurance He offers is that the thing cannot be totally ruined."

Ratzinger could have added that some particularly awful popes have given the Holy Spirit a run for his money. Popes did more than Martin Luther, John Calvin and King Henry VIII put together to spark the Reformation. Pontiffs have launched stupid wars and pointless persecutions. They have fathered households full of bastard children, disrupted the normal religious lives of Catholics in entire countries for wholly political reasons, and gorged themselves on the indulgences of the faithful. These are the men, critics of the Catholic Church are going to ask, invested with infallible authority?

Popes have also done heroic and necessary things. They governed Rome when it fell to pieces, mustered the manpower to fight off the Mongol invasion of Europe, championed science, campaigned against human bondage, worked to reform the Church and publicly repented for her many past crimes and misdemeanors.

And they are every one of them -- including those relatively few popes now recognized as saints -- a mixed bag. John Paul II was a striking figure who helped rid the world of Communism. He may have lived a life of heroic virtue but administrative skill wasn't one of those virtues. He proved a lousy administrator who did not do a great job addressing pedophile priest sex scandals. Benedict XVI, as close to a hand-picked successor as a pope can ever manage, was a great teacher and theologian and reformer who never wanted to be pope. He has now thrown the leadership of the Catholic Church for a loop by abdicating the papal throne.

The first pope, as we Catholics understand the office in its infancy, was Saint Peter. He was a man of rare insight and rank cowardice, identifying Jesus as the Christ and then denying him three times when threatened with reprisal. Peter was restored to grace and then some. It was his acceptance that allowed Christianity to spread from Jews to the rest of the known world. He himself went on to Rome and, unwilling to deny Jesus yet again, was martyred there. That is what all the fuss over today's conclave is about.

Jeremy Lott is editor of RealClearReligion, associate editor of RealClearScience, and author, most recently, of William F. Buckley (published by Thomas Nelson).

It is good to speak with you again after so many years. Much has happened since 1941. We are winning. The battle for Europe has been won but America remains the prize. "Belief" is in decline. I note with satisfaction that now twenty percent of the American people are now non-believers or have no religious affiliation. The population is in favor of normalizing gay marriage, but abortion is a more difficult task.

We are capturing the language, which as I have told you before is His weakness. The people live busy lives and will use short cuts in thinking about issues. Despite His best efforts encouraging thoughtfulness and contemplation, we have an advantage here.

The "We Shouldn't Judge" campaign began years ago in the academic world has delivered major victories. Gay marriage is trending our way. Couching it as an equal rights issue with analogies to the civil rights movement is working. Some have even called gay marriage the "civil rights issue of our time."

The other side is pushing back, suggesting that abortion is the real civil rights issue of our time. Fortunately this has not taken hold in the media. Amazingly, the "rare" was taken out of the Democratic party's "safe, legal and rare" 2012 election platform on abortion and few noticed or cared. Our friends at Planned Parenthood have been hard at work, and have spent their dollars well.

Pro-abortion was never good for us. Pro-choice is much better. Some in the mainstream media are beginning to refer to pro-lifers as "anti-abortion rights" while pro-choice is becoming "abortion rights supporters." This is a major victory in describing the other side as "anti-rights." You see how important it is to capture the language? Our Father Below is no fool.

The most important thing, above all else, is no pictures. That is our weakness. If people see that the fetus is not a "bean," but a helpless living being they will recoil. I am afraid that this will be a long fight as ultrasound technology shows abortion for what it is. And anyone can logon to the internet to see for themselves. This light will be our downfall. We need darkness; otherwise our deeds will be exposed.

There is much more to talk about but that is for another letter.

Your affectionate uncle,

SCREWTAPE

Jeff Pantages writes from Anchorage, Alaska.

The truth is that, for about 99 percent of them, they're a hunting pack with hardly a prayer of finding prey. Whatever importance there is in the choice of the man who will follow Benedict XVI is a story that can best be explored far from St. Peter's Square. And yet, even in these budget-strained times, many media companies want to have somebody there for every puff of pope-ballot smoke.

I feel their pain because, in 2005, I was part of the pack. At the time, I was a religion reporter for the Dallas Morning News. The Dallas diocese is among the nation's largest, with more than a million members. So after John Paul II died, my bosses wanted a presence in Rome.

I spent ten days abroad. Wrote seven stories with Italian or Vatican City datelines. Some of them still read fine. But did I uncover a nugget of news about the process of papal selection? Of course not. And neither will the vast majority of the current frantic 4,000.

There are exceptions, of course: Those are the few reporters like, say, National Catholic Reporter's John Allen who have long experience and deep familiarity with the men who will pick the next pope. And the Italian papers that cover the Vatican like a home sports team have been somehow publishing what amounts to a daily play-by-play of the Cardinals' closed meetings. (If you can't trust a Cardinal to keep an oath of secrecy, who can you trust? It's not like any of them have a history of duplicity over important issues, right?)

But most of that 4,000-member horde of journalists could no more identify a random Cardinal than they could pick an individual bird from a flock of cardinals. Who is going to talk to them who knows anything about what's actually going on?

Ann Rodgers is the truly excellent religion reporter for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette whose analysis of American Catholicism (among other topics) is always worth reading. This week, she was reduced to writing a story -- also covered by many others -- that the American cardinals would no longer be giving content-free "news" conferences. She mentioned in the same piece that the Vatican's official "news" conferences were given in Italian. And only reporters who regularly cover the Vatican were allowed to ask questions.

Worth the time and money and stress of travel, with the pressure from back home to produce news? I'll ask her when she gets back.

On my trip in 2005, I wrote a perfectly nice color story about John Paul II's funeral. A short piece about the security for the event. A description of the Sistine Chapel as set up for the conclave, from a short tour given to some of the reporters. A musing about the deep influence of Christianity on Italian culture, based on a day trip to Assisi. A food story about a visit to a wonderful Roman deli, highlighted by a taste of cheese that, back then, was more than $50 a pound.

And by total coincidence (or Providence, depending on your theology), I had been booked to attend a conference in Rome that very week, presented by an American interfaith organization, where the reporters would gain access to some high-level Vatican officials. That event went off almost as planned, so I was able to toss together some reasonably informed speculation from some pretty good sources.

For grins, let's see how my experts did:

"The next pope will need to think about Islam, Buddhism and Pentacostalism as he guides the Roman Catholic Church into the 21st century, a top Vatican interfaith leader said this week.

"'It's the church in a pluralistic world. How do we deal with that?' said Archbishop Michael Fitzgerald."

Fitzgerald was John Paul II's president of the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue -- the Vatican's official link to all other faiths, except Judaism.

The next pope will likely focus some attention on the growth of interest in Buddhism -- not so much in Asia as in Western countries, the archbishop told me.

Buddhism, he said, appeals "to people in a post-Christian world...who are looking for something spiritual and see that in Buddhism. We see that as a challenge to our community. Why are they [onetime Catholics] going to other communities?"

What happened? Benedict XVI stepped in an early cow patty with Muslims and didn't make a point of talking about Buddhism, far as I know.

"The new pope will have to work for a 'general fostering of Catholic ethos' in Catholic schools and universities," said Archbishop Michael Miller, then the secretary of the Vatican's Congregation for Catholic Education.

That's still an issue the next pope will be dealing with, I'd say.

"One concern that will be on the next pope's list, though perhaps not near the top, the archbishop said: Whether celibate homosexuals should be allowed to attend seminaries and become priests."

Hm. "Homosexuality is incompatible with the priestly vocation," wrote Benedict XVI unambiguously in his book Light of the World.

"The next pope will need to be even more media savvy, and in ways John Paul II couldn't have imagined at the start of his papacy, said the Rev. Steven Lopes of San Francisco, a graduate student at Rome's Pontifical North American College."

This one's another clear winner: Benedict XVI became the first Tweeting pontiff. Betcha the next guy gets even more digital.

But the truth is that I could have done much the same talking head story from Dallas. And the truth is that the most important issues -- why and how the papacy matters -- are much more easily detailed back home and a long way from the mob.

I'm not saying that there shouldn't be reporters there. If, perish the thought, something evil happens, the world will be well served by having journalists in place. And there is some value for beat reporters to hang out with the penumbra of characters, sources and experts who gravitate to an event like this.

But in 2013, anything that happens in public will be streamed live to anybody with a smartphone. Maybe it still matters to readers and viewers to see a familiar name covering an event like this in situ. But if there ever were a journalistic justification, it's mostly long gone.

I'll be looking for a story by a visiting reporter in the next week or so that has actual news that couldn't have been as easily gleaned from any seat in the world with wifi and phone. If you spot one, let me know.

Jeffrey Weiss is a RealClearReligion columnist from Dallas, Texas. Follow him on Twitter @JeffreyWeissRCR.

Not a few of the men who emerged as pope caught the world largely unawares. John Paul II was the first non-Italian pope in over 450 years. The Polish pontiff's shock election was made possible because his predecessor died after only a little over a month in the Vatican. When John Paul I was chosen, the princes of the church collectively gave themselves a big pat on the back. His unexpected death seemed a sign from above that they needed to reconsider.

Pope Benedict XVI was well known as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger. But he had a small army of difficulties pressing up against his chances as well. He was too old; too tied to the papacy of John Paul II; too German; and he seemed, in his speech to the College of Cardinals before the voting began, to be begging them not to elect him. A lot of people then, as now, were rooting for an African pope. Nigerian Cardinal Francis Arinze stood at the ready.

In compiling their lists of popefuls this time, speculators have added a few Americans. Most prominent is New York's boisterous, New York Times-hating Cardinal Timothy Dolan. Boston's Cardinal Sean O'Malley is also generating considerable buzz in the Italian press. Buzz is one thing, you might say, but what kind of realistic chances do either of these priests have of becoming pontiff?

Hard to figure. There is no obvious candidate to replace Benedict after his shock resignation. John Allen, perhaps the best English language writer on all things Vatican, explains, "For a long time, conventional wisdom held that an American could not be elected to the Throne of Peter because you can't have a 'superpower pope.'" Yet, Allen says, that negative perception is fast eroding. In fact, "for the first time an American seems thinkable."

There is a distance, a gulf even, between "thinkable" and "likely." Still, I devoutly hope Allen is wrong. Nothing against Bishops Dolan and O'Malley, but an American pope would be a horrible idea for the foreseeable future. It would be bad for the Catholic Church worldwide and it would be excruciating for American Catholics, including yours truly.

Anglo-Catholic writer Hillaire Belloc famously said of Catholicism's heart that "Europe is the faith." As a demographic fact, that is no longer true and as a legacy it is, well, petering out. Europeans still have a majority in the College of Cardinals but that is owing mostly to the fact that the bureaucratic center of the church, the Vatican, is in Italy. Most of the world's estimated 1.2 billion Catholics are elsewhere.

In terms of demographics, belief, and practice, we can put away any idea that "America is the faith." Over the last 60-plus years, Catholicism has been treading water here, in spite of wave after wave of immigrants from majority-Catholic countries. Researchers from Catholic University of America found that only about 30 percent of self-described American Catholics supported the Vatican's teaching authority, and 40 percent of respondents thought it was OK to think of the Mass as just wine and wafers -- thus denying a rather central claim of the faith.

Catholic education in the nation that Dolan and O'Malley help to preside over is in shambles, thus many parishioners default to a sort of Protestantism-with-candles. Progressive Catholic polemicists such as Garry Wills and Maureen Dowd regularly exploit this ignorance to cast barbs at the faith of their fathers. Imagine how much more agitated they would get if an American were pope, and how much journalistic hay would be made when the Bishop of Rome stupidly took the bait.

Catholicism actually is growing and thriving elsewhere -- in Africa, for instance, and in parts of South America. It has a foothold in Asia and if the Vatican can ever gain purchase on China, it is likely to grow like gangbusters there. India, with its Hindu-inspired caste system, ought to be ripe for evangelization.

Meanwhile, Catholics and other Christians face serious persecution all over the globe, some of it exacerbated by the policies of the U.S. government. The Iraqi liberation and the Arab Spring resulted in persecution and exile for all too many innocent worshipers. If what the Catholic Church needs is a pope with truly global vision, then the last place the College of Cardinals should look to is America.

Jeremy Lott is editor of RealClearReligion, associate editor of RealClearScience, and author, most recently, of William F. Buckley (published by Thomas Nelson).

Was polygamy still kosher? If so, were any of Mitt Romney's five sons looking for an extra mate (wink, wink)? I was clueless. The most notable thing I knew about the Church was that it boasted a world renowned choir. What they sang about, I couldn't tell you. Mindful of my ignorance, I admit I half expected a neatly groomed young elder in suit and tie and scripture in hand to evangelize me in the airport (obviously in song, Stone and Parker style). Instead it was Jose directing me to baggage claim.

The next day, as I prepared for my visit to Temple Square, I still didn't know what to make of this sleepy city in the mountains. The only thing I had decided was that the people were very friendly -- suspiciously friendly from the view of this Chicagoan. It was an adjustment. The cab driver was almost too nice, offering me a free map, and spoke at length about how much he enjoys his job. When the barista at Starbucks asked, "What are you up to today?" I responded with a confused stare as I contemplated why he wanted to know.

I approached the Square keeping an eye out for the Temple itself -- you know, the one that serves as the backdrop for the Book of Mormon set. Finally, between some buildings (the hotel bellhop described them as skyscrapers, but I'm not endorsing that statement), I spotted it. With its pristine towers of granite rising toward the sky, it looked more like a majestic Bavarian castle than a temple. Architecturally, it's beautiful. Seeing it in person makes it all the more unbelievable that it was built with such rudimentary tools by a group of pioneers over 150 years ago. You might truly believe you've been dropped into King Ludwig II's pre-Germany if you ignored some of the structures around which the temple is surrounded.

For example, just beyond the beautiful temple, obstructing the picturesque backdrop of snow-capped mountains, rises a large concrete monstrosity, more reminiscent of a Soviet government building than acclaimed architecture I'd expected. I wondered how the Church could allow such an eye sore to disrupt the post-card worthy scenery behind the temple, only to realize the building was actually another part of the LDS complex -- the church office building which serves as the headquarters for the Church. Just another part of the 35-acre Church complex (for comparison's sake, the Vatican City State comprises 110 acres).

Disagreements on city planning aside, I'd say Temple Square is most aptly described as a Disney World of religious pilgrimages. Everything is optimized for the tourist experience. Friendly missionaries assist you in researching your family history (for free) at the Family History Library. The pencil and family tree are included. The Church History Museum offers free audio tours via iPod Shuffles and a life-size replica of the cabins the early pioneer saints built upon settling in the Salt Lake Valley. Though non-Mormons aren't allowed in the Temple itself, a model in the visitors center showcases the interior, accompanied by a monitor which points out each room's significance.

Their message is carefully weaved into each attraction. Adults can watch sermons from modern day prophets on various topics. A separate section for children allows them to navigate through videos with cartoons that pose questions like, "How can we truly be happy?" Even the ill-placed church office building includes a must-see attraction, a 26th floor observatory with incomparable views of the Salt Lake Valley.

Upon entering the South Visitors Center (oh yes, there are two visitors centers) I was immediately greeted by the cheerful Sister Lee from the United States. I was caught off guard, accustomed to the experience of visiting old Catholic and Protestant churches where one is generally left to one's own devices. If you're lucky there might be an audioguide available in your language to guide you through the architecture and point out significant statues or windows. As a reared Catholic, I've seen my share of statues and windows.

When I told her I had some spare time and came to wander the Square, she immediately phoned for two missionaries, sisters from Australia and Japan, to show me around. While waiting for the sisters, I was invited to sit in comfy leather chairs and watch video profiles of Mormons around the world, including celebrities and professional athletes as well as your "every day Mormons." A happy Vincenzo shows you around his Italian home, where he lives with his wife and four children. He keeps busy as a contractor and amateur beekeeper. Each segment ended with "I am a Mormon." They seemed to be welcoming viewers with the message: "Hey, we're more diverse and cool than you think we are, so stop with the polygamy jokes and give it a chance."

The sisters arrived and walked me and another Jewish couple around the Square, explaining the significance of certain traditions and buildings as we went. They were knowledgeable, but not scripted. The Australian sister asked if I was a religious person. No, I said, just a lapsed Catholic. "Yeah, we get a lot of those," the sister replied.

We finally reached the end of our tour at the North Visitors Center where a magnificent statue of Christ looks down on visitors in the center of a domed room, the walls of which are adorned with a mural of the cosmos. The sisters began to talk more about their faith and why the appreciated the statue. The Australian sister liked the manner in which Christ looked down on visitors, she believed he was watching over and guiding his proudest creations -- us. The other woman on our tour interjected, "Well, do you expect God to intervene to do everything for you, or are you supposed to better yourself?" The sister responded that of course we are. God can't force us to make the right decisions. But these choices are hard, too hard to go through alone, and that's why Jesus is there. To support us, and comfort us, and be there for us. We have a lot of work to do on ourselves, but in the end we're not perfect. He makes up the difference.

Her words were powerful. I'm not very devout, but I couldn't help but respect her dedication and faith. She talked about Jesus lovingly, like he was a close friend. It clearly made her happy to share this relationship with us. I was profoundly struck by the willingness of the people at the Square to share their faith.

It's not something today's Catholics are particularly good at. In many cases it seems like many Catholics are the opposite of evangelical -- they're apologists. This was especially true during my time at the largest Catholic university in America, DePaul in Chicago. If you didn't know any better, you might think the official motto is "We're Catholic, and we're really sorry about that. What can we do to make it up to you?"

While the Mormons have nothing on Rome's collection of old stuff, they sure know how to market their faith. Did Jesus take a vacation to America? Probably not. But as the Catholic Church continues to hemorrhage members, perhaps Catholics ought to work on shared values, including the importance of family and respect for life. And these are good things to value, no matter what you believe.

At the airport, ready to return to the land of true skyscrapers, I tried to put words to my overall impression of the city. It was a struggle. The entire Valley seems suspended in much the same way our country seemingly is -- somewhere between modern secularism and the traditions of the past. Salt Lake City is actually now populated by more non-Mormons than Mormons. But the beautiful state-of-the-art mall which includes many of the most popular shopping destinations you can find in Chicago is still closed on Sundays. The city offers an impressive array of restaurants, but the strict liquor laws prohibit you from accompanying your meal with a double scotch.

Where does religion fit in 21st century America? Salt Lake City is an interesting test case, and I'd submit it really hasn't fully answered that question yet. So I come home having resisted conversion, but a lot less ignorant. I'd imagined I'd have more negative things to say about my experience at Temple Square, but they were just so damned nice!

Stephanie Auditore is a graduate of Northwestern University School of Law.

"We expect all Republican officials to support the Platform. The endorsement of same-sex marriage is not acceptable...We call on the Republican National Committee to consider passing a resolution, at its next meeting, re-affirming its support of the Platform and of the Defense of Marriage Act, which was overwhelmingly passed by Congress."

Vice-President Dick Cheney, General Colin Powell, and an impressive list of other Republicans disagree. 100 of them signed a legal brief urging the Supreme Court to overturn California's Proposition 8, a voter initiative limiting marriage to one man and one woman.

But according to a recent FOX Poll, 66% of Republican voters oppose same-sex marriage while Americans in general are evenly split. The pressure is on. The party divided. So what's a party out of power to do?

And who is Phyllis Schlafly that Republican celebrities should listen? A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Washington University School of Law, one of the first female students to complete a Masters degree in Political Science at Harvard, her early interest in public policy was with nuclear disarmament. But she was thrust into the public eye when radical lesbian feminists, throwing blood on the Capitol steps in Springfield, Illinois, made her mad enough to confront their demands and become a spokesman for millions of American women. The "Equal Rights Amendment" intended to strip women of all gender distinctions from marriage law to wartime combat.

Explaining that "equality" did not mean "sameness," Phyllis rightly understood the ERA was a precursor to the current confusion on gender differences. Because of her valiant leadership, it did not pass in Illinois, thus preventing it from becoming Federal Law. But the radical feminist view of the world was implemented through the classroom and the media. Protective barriers were broken and bright lines between men and women were eradicated.

Phyllis founded Eagle Forum and became a staunch and powerful arm of the Reagan Revolution. She has been a delegate to the Republican Convention every year since 1952 and a major voice on the party platform since 1980.

Exactly! some would say: a voice from the past is not the GOP's future. According to FOX, 60% of voters under the age of 45 favor same sex marriage while 57% of those over 45 oppose it.

"For young people especially (and I'm almost talking under age forty here) gay marriage is a fait accompli," observed former PJ Media CEO Roger Simon. But while Republican pragmatists hold their finger to the wind, they should hold it up in one of the bluest states in America.

In Illinois, Governor Pat Quinn, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, Attorney General Lisa Madigan and father, Speaker of the House, Michael Madigan, along with Democratic majorities in both houses in Springfield, plus Pat Brady, the Republican Party Chairman, the President of the United States and the entire body of Chicago media are all loudly, aggressively pushing gay-marriage. Gay rights advocates tried to pass legislation during the Lame Duck Session, setting wheels in motion the Friday before Christmas 2012. Family groups, in the midst of their Christmas celebrations unexpectedly fought back. They formed what proved to be the very effective "Coalition to Protect Children and Marriage," so that the legislature didn't have the support to even bring it up for a vote.

The newly elected Illinois Senate passed SB10 handily, but in preparation for a vote in the House, traditional families descended on the Capitol -- nearly 5,000 strong. Catholics, Evangelicals and Orthodox Jews rallied, and expert witnesses were brought to testify. For the first time in most of their lives, legislators heard the other side of the same-sex marriage story from a former lesbian, a professional family expert, and an impassioned black pastor. They heard what they have never heard on television or at the movies or in their public schools for the past twenty years; that same-sex marriage is harmful, especially to children. It robs them of the basic need to have a mother and a father.

As legislators listened, minds began to change. What was expected to be an 8-4 slam-dunk in committee became a squeak-by majority of one. The fight in Illinois is not over and if there is a vote, it will be close. But the fact that there is a fight is the untold story.

Now GOP leader Pat Brady is under fire for his support of same-sex marriage. The catalyst for Schlafly's letter to Reince Priebus was the Republican Party Chair's intention to attend a Brady-sponsored luncheon in Illinois. The luncheon was abruptly canceled.

General Powell and the others should educate themselves on the real costs of homosexual marriage to society. One can only look to Massachusetts to see the devastating effects of gay marriage and the LGBT movement on public schools where children are encouraged to change genders without parental approval or knowledge, and public school girls' bathrooms are accessible to boys who think they are girls.

If this madness is what General Powell or Dick Cheney want for their grandchildren in the misguided notion of "fairness," then so be it. But when one day, the other side of this sordid story is told, they will be glad the wisdom of Phyllis Schlafly prevailed and not their fickle, feckless leadership in dangerous times.

Sandy Rios is the Vice President of Family-PAC Federal, host of "Sandy Rios in the Morning on AFR Talk," and a FOX News Contirbutor.

Long before that event, in 1954, Gore Vidal's Messiah offered a wide-ranging satire of religious fanaticism, which stands out today because it depicts true believers pursuing their faith by ritual suicide. As I have argued, we should be very skeptical about claims concerning such "cult suicide" events. In the Waco case, we can debate whether the Branch Davidians actually did cause their own deaths, as opposed to being killed as a result of official action. In other cases though, as at Jonestown and in the Heaven's Gate cult, devotees really did end their lives, as Messiah foretold.

New religions continually surface. In some cases, religious entrepreneurs construct new faiths, usually claiming some deeper roots for them. Others originate as jokes or fictional devices, but then acquire remarkable traction in the real world. Invented faiths abounded in the 1950s and 1960s, partly because authors were intrigued and impressed by L. Ron Hubbard's success in promoting Scientology (his Dianetics appeared in 1950). They naturally wondered what else might lie on the horizon. Also driving interest in religious innovators was Fawn Brodie's classic 1945 biography of Joseph Smith, No Man Knows My History.

In the same years, the sense that the world was facing a near-apocalyptic crisis led science fiction writers to imagine new messiahs and prophets who could deal with the anxieties of a deeply disturbed public. In Cat's Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut invented the cynical pseudo-faith of Bokononism. Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land created the proto-hippyish Church of All Worlds, which subsequently morphed into a genuine real world movement. In the 1966 musical Sweet Charity, devotees of the prophetic hipster Daddy recall how a message from on high told him to spread his Rhythm of Life church throughout the nation. After all, Daddy learns,

Brother, there's a million pigeons
Ready to be hooked on new religions.

In 1954, perhaps the oddest of these new faiths appeared in a book by up and coming author Eugene Luther Gore Vidal. I stress the full name, because Messiah's hero is one Eugene Luther, a transparent Vidal substitute, who is working on a book about the Roman Emperor Julian. Vidal's own novel Julian appeared a decade later.

Messiah tells the story of John Cave, a mortician who has learned the core cosmic truth that death is superior to life. Postponing a natural temptation to suicide, he realizes that he must spread his truth throughout the world, from his base in Southern California, the natural home for all quirky new creeds. He now becomes a messianic prophet, the "J.C." for the contemporary era, and in Christian eyes, probably the Antichrist. Much of the book concerns how Cave's followers spread his message, using television and other media then becoming available. Anyone who saw last year's brilliant Hubbard-based film The Master will have flashes of recognition.

Luther initially helps the project, using his historical background to show how Cave's teachings purportedly fit into the world's great religious and philosophical traditions (which, as he well knows, they certainly do not). Over the next forty years or so, Cave's doctrine -- Cavesword -- sweeps the Atlantic/Western world, and penetrates other non-Western regions, including Arab and Muslim territories.

Vidal uses Cavism to parody and critique Christianity, which he also sees as an intolerant religion that favors death over life, sterility over sexuality. He is also asking Christians how they would like to be on the receiving end of the treatment they had themselves dealt out to their historical competitors. As Cavesword spreads, so its leaders become ever more repressive towards any and all rival creeds, including Christianity itself. All churches and cathedrals burn, and the last Pope dies a martyr in the ruins of the Vatican. Christmas becomes Cavesday.

Not only does Cave's Testament have absolute authority, but each new edition of this ultimate truth demands that all previous versions must be rounded up and destroyed, lest anyone be rash enough to detect contradictions. Cave's surviving telecasts also have scriptural status. Any deeds or words that might deviate from orthodoxy demand the forcible reprogramming of the unfortunate heretic, by brain surgery if necessary. The new faith becomes rigidly hierarchical and bureaucratic.

Much of Messiah is a satire of institutional Christianity, grounded in Vidal's deep historical awareness. What makes it memorable, is the logical culmination of Cavism. If death is better than life, then death is something to be welcomed rather than feared, and ritual suicide is the ultimate act of piety.

The Church struggles to make the passage to non-existence as easy and pleasant as possible, as believers take Cavesway. Suicidalists take poison in the most pleasant of circumstances, in the hospitable Cavite Centers. This is the development that forces Luther to abandon the movement. He goes on the run, knowing that in the new order his very name has become a byword for treason. Nobody wants to be a Lutherist, any more than a Judas.

For anyone who remembers the news film from Guyana in 1978, the suicide accounts sound very prescient. I know no evidence that Messiah actually influenced either the People's Temple or any comparable movement: in fact, the book rather dropped out of view, even among Vidal's fans. That is unfortunate, because Messiah deserves to be better known as an imaginative case-study of the birth of a religion. The book also does a wonderful job of taking an aberrant idea and exploring its consequences to their ultimate conclusion.

Before the 1970s, we might have said it was wildly improbable, but we have since learned better.

Philip Jenkins is a Distinguished Professor of History at Baylor University and a columnist for RealClearReligion. His latest book is Laying Down the Sword.

After Young America's Foundation published the vandals' names, the University pursued disciplinary sanctions against Del Campo. He was told that in having anything to do with the release of the names, he engaged in "Disorderly, Violent, Intimidating or Dangerous Behavior to Self or Others."

"Punishing a student for naming those who committed a crime against him or her sets a very dangerous precedent," says the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education's Senior Vice President Robert Shibley. "For example, would DePaul punish a female student for telling her friends to avoid a person who admitted to sexually assaulting her?"

Del Campo certainly wasn't sexually assaulted, but he is a victim. He's been censored, bullied, and now sanctioned. Ron Robinson, President of Young America's Foundation, agrees, suggesting that DePaul "put [Del Campo] through a Soviet-style show trial."

In a clumsy attempt to explain DePaul v. Del Campo, DePaul's Interim Vice President for Student Affairs Cynthia Summers invoked the Guiding Principles on Free Speech and Expression which defines the University as a "community of speakers and listeners marked by compassion and mutual respect, a community in which we never lose sight of the potential effects, both beneficial and harmful, of our words and of our expressive conduct."

Summers's mentioning of the Guiding Principles is curious, not only because while I was a DePaul student Cindy and I served on the Task Force which drafted the Principles, but also because the vandalism was clearly an act of censorship.

Cindy should remember the several drafts we worked through in producing the Guiding Principles. The language of the first draft opened the doors of the University to all ideas -- as it should. It was eloquent in its commitment to "ennoble the God-given dignity of each person" and promised "open discourse and robust debate" by requiring the University to remain "open to a broad range of ideas and opinions" as a way to "create the best conditions for discovering the truth." Most importantly, the Principles were not patronizing and they respected the "right of listeners to respond with their own expression, or choose to turn away."

However, before releasing the draft to the University community for comment, the Task Force voted to remove the words "God-given" from the Guiding Principles. It also removed the phrases "create the best conditions for discovering the truth" and "choose to turn away." When I publicly rejected these edits, I was removed from the Task Force.

The Principles invert the definition of free speech in noting that there is "a distinction between being provocative and being hurtful," and condemning speech whose "purpose is to wound." Instead of protecting the right of the speaker to speak, DePaul seeks to protect the listener from being "hurt." As I've argued before, this is part and parcel of the alternate universe DePaul's President calls a "welcoming environment."

Is there any wonder as to why thirteen children thought it was within their rights to censor speech they didn't like?

Back on DePaul's Lincoln Park campus, Del Campo is busy writing a required letter to himself as part of an absurd "Educational Project." For in keeping with the Guiding Principles, the University "must respond" to controversial or offensive speech "by reasserting our fundamental values and by fostering educational opportunities, where appropriate."

Read: if you have the wrong ideas, the University will re-educate you with the right ones.

Nicholas G. Hahn III is Deputy Editor of RealClearReligion. Follow him on Twitter @NGHahn3.

We can debate at length what actually happened: did they die because of deliberate decisions by the group's leaders and members, or were they killed by the federal agents storming the compound? But whichever view we take, few challenge the underlying idea that some fringe religious groups have a powerful inbuilt tendency to kill themselves en masse.

I think this Doomsday Cult view is a myth, and a deeply dangerous one.

The idea of mass cult suicide assumes that devotees follow an ideology that requires them to kill themselves as an article of faith, perhaps to bring on the apocalypse, or else to pass on to some higher state of being. Drinking the Kool Aid has become a familiar stereotype of cultish fanaticism. But however standard that image might be in the media vocabulary, it is in fact extremely rare, and very new historically.

Now, cults and fringe religions have been very commonplace, particularly in the American experience, and some have been led by truly dangerous and violent extremists. Also throughout history, people have killed themselves when a cause they deeply believe in has collapsed. After Hitler died, Josef Goebbels and his wife took their own lives and those of their six children. In such cases, fanatics leave a world that has become intolerable to them -- which is quite different from the deliberate ideological action suggested by the cult suicide theory. If matters had worked out differently, Goebbels would have been delighted to live to a ripe old age in a Nazi Europe.

But let's return to that "cult" context. Just how many undeniably authentic instances of "cult suicide" can we actually find?

The most notorious example was the Jonestown affair of 1978, when Jim Jones ordered the deaths of some eight hundred followers of his People's Temple, then based in Guyana. Many did kill themselves, but many others were executed by Jones's loyalists. In the 1990s again, we find events that precisely fit the image of doctrinally-driven mass suicide. Between 1994 and 1997, 75 members of the Order of the Solar Temple perished in a series of murders and suicides in Europe and Canada. 1997 brought the suicides of 39 members of the Heaven's Gate group, who killed themselves in order to join an alien spacecraft.

This concentration of events so close to the coming millennium placed apocalyptic cults firmly on the media agenda, with rife speculations about the mass suicides that would assuredly occur in or near the year 2000. They did not, and have not since. (In 2005, Uganda produced one case of mass deaths in a religious context, but it is hotly debated whether this was a case of murder or suicide).

"Cult suicide" can and does happen. But if in fact it is such a natural or predictable outcome of fringe religious belief, then surely we would expect it to be quite commonplace historically, and it is not. Before Jonestown, I struggle to find a vaguely comparable episode. Between, say, 1478 and 1978, there were literally thousands of small apocalyptic-minded sects in Europe and North America, and quite a few marginal movements with eccentric ideas about UFOs. To the best of my knowledge, though, none ever enacted anything like a Jonestown or Solar Temple scenario.

Put simply, groups that believe in imminent apocalypse very rarely try to provoke such a catastrophe, and we should be very cautious about ever applying a label like "Doomsday Cult."

So where, then, did the modern practice come from? The very first literary account I have ever found of cult suicide comes, astonishingly, from Gore Vidal, not normally remembered as a religious pioneer of any stripe. In his satirical 1954 novel Messiah, Vidal imagined the world falling prey to the sinister doctrines of John Cave, who induces his followers to accept mass voluntary death -- to take Cavesway. They do so by taking poison, the fictional precursor of Jonestown's cyanide-laced Kool Aid.

Wondrous as it would be to contemplate Jim Jones following in the lead of Gore Vidal, I see no evidence that Messiah ever exercised any influence in the real world. Partly, the Jonestown horrors were a replay of the Goebbels story, as the besieged Jones removed his faithful "children" from the imminent collapse of all they had known and built.

Insofar as Jones's acts were driven by any ideology, it was wholly secular. He derived his inspiration from the romantic fanaticism of the 1960s New Left, a very different kind of apocalyptic. Jones looked to the Black Panthers, and especially to the idea of revolutionary suicide derived from Huey Newton. Suicidal violence, in this view, was the ultimate form of self-sacrifice for the good of the idealized masses, a fantasy that became Holy Writ for the worldwide Left through the film Battle of Algiers.

But whatever its origins, Jonestown had a profound influence on the media, on law enforcement, and on other leaders on the cult fringe. Jonestown invented and popularized cult suicide, offering a model by which fringe believers were potentially expected to behave. And in the cases of Solar Temple and Heaven's Gate, they actually did so.

Apocalyptic movements, then, do not have any particular tendency to suicidal behavior, or indeed to violence of any kind, and it would be useful to remember that the next time the media do trumpet the dangers of a particular Doomsday Cult. Reporting the clear and present dangers from such sects is common enough, but when did you last see a report about how all the grim expectations were disappointed, so the members kept on living? Cult non-suicide scarcely makes a thrilling news story.

Media hype apart, the cult stereotype poses real-world perils. Imagine for instance a law enforcement agency confronting some fringe group in a future stand-off. The more the officials believe that an apocalyptic-minded group is naturally prone to violence, the greater the likelihood that the confrontation will end in violence. And a common belief that the sect intended to commit suicide makes it easy for those same officials to explain any catastrophic blunders.

Prophecies become self-fulfilling.

Philip Jenkins is a Distinguished Professor of History at Baylor University and a columnist for RealClearReligion. His latest book is Laying Down the Sword.

Much of the rest of it, from the overheated media reaction to Tebow's explanation for why he canceled, is as logical as a third down punt from midfield. What the what?

To review: Tebow, an NFL quarterback whose conservative Christian faith is as much a part of his public persona as his college triumphs, was scheduled to speak in Dallas at the church that was once considered the most important in the Southern Baptist Convention. Its star has faded, but First Dallas is still a major pulpit.

It's a church that Tebow is surely sympatico with. His home church in Florida is led by the prior pastor of First Dallas. The current pastor in Dallas, the Rev. Robert Jeffress, is a theological twin of his predecessor but is better at coming up with pithy quotes that get headlines.

Cue the outrage. A headline in the Huffington Post stuffed pretty much all the objections into one suitcase: "Tim Tebow, Jets Quarterback, To Speak At Virulently Anti-Gay, Anti-Semitic Church First Baptist Dallas."

Sigh. Anti-semitic? No more so that any other conservative Christian church. Yes, Jeffress thinks Jews are going to hell. Ditto for Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims, Bahai, Wiccans and, if you get him on the right day, he might share a question or two about Catholics.

That doesn't make him anti- any of those other religions any more than soccer is anti-football because it outlaws the use of hands. Every exclusivist faith asserts that it's the only right one, with dire eternal consequences for the outsiders. Unless that belief translates into mistreatment of those outsiders in this life, Jeffress' opinion of the Great Perhaps is utterly irrelevant outside his pulpit. And I've seen nothing to indicate that Jeffress discriminates against Jews.

"Anti-gay" is a stickier wicket. Gay, Jeffress has famously preached, is not OK. The basic theology that homosexuality is frowned on by the Almighty is briefly but unambiguously set in the Jewish and Christian scriptures and in the historical understanding of those scriptures. If you're the sort who believes that every word of the Bible is literally true and unchangeably understood, there's not a lot of wiggle room. (Which is also true for Christians and divorce, but that's another column...)

Like the earlier disagreements about religion, this only matters if Jeffress, et al discriminate in this world against gays and lesbians. In this instance, the critics have a case. Political opposition to secular same-sex marriage and assertions that gay men are more inclined to pedophilia than straights, and are overwhelmingly infected with the AIDS virus are part of Jeffress's portfolio.

But Jeffress is hardly the only Southern Baptist or Christian preacher to hold some of those views. Heck, the Catholic Church says that homosexuality is an "objective disorder," which is a fancy way of saying "not OK." Should, say, President Obama never be seen with Catholic leaders?

Tebow wasn't likely to speak on this subject. His standard stump talk is about his own story. And he planned to talk to people of his own religious flavor -- not like he was planning to stand up in an NFL huddle, turn to the TV camera and start preaching. Why was this a issue?

Besides, nothing about Jeffress's positions are remotely secret. Quite the contrary. If there's anything notable about Jeffress within his denomination, it's his ability to show up on TV. Which makes Tebow's announced reason for backing out hard to understand: "Due to new information that has been brought to my attention, I have decided to cancel my upcoming appearance."

About what information that might be, Tebow remains silent. For his part, Jeffress says Tebow told him the cancelation was "because of personal reasons and professional reasons, I need to steer clear of controversy right now."

Which leads to two more questions: If Tebow's handlers think this is a problem, why did they allow him to accept the invite to begin with? And why do they think this might be a problem? Do they really think there's an NFL GM who is going to say "that boy can sure play football, but we don't want no Southern Baptists around here"?

Hmph. If a quarterback showed up in Dallas with cloven hooves and smelling of brimstone, and Jerry Jones thought the kid could guarantee a Super Bowl, he'd schedule a signing ceremony and turn the Cowboys star upside down. A Southern Baptist would be even less of a problem.

I'm thinking Tebow's handlers need to work more on his throwing motion and worry less about how people perceive his faith.

Jeffrey Weiss is a RealClearReligion columnist from Dallas, Texas. Follow him on Twitter @JeffreyWeissRCR.

After all, how could a just and loving God allow such unchecked evil and then answer us with only silence? The harsh and essential truth is that the deafening silence in the face of pain, disease, and loved ones dying is supposed to cause doubt and doubt is absolutely essential to faith. Recognizing the possibility that there is no God, and yet still trusting and believing, is the only possible way to heaven.

Doubt also provides a valuable test. Do we choose God and do good in His name, or do we allow doubt to guide us to sin wantonly? If we doubt there is a God, then there is no deterrent from choosing the easy way and embracing the glamor of evil. Why work for anything when we can take it from the weak? Why build when you can destroy? Doubt gives us a chance to forgive those who wrong us and find God's grace -- to walk his path as He did to Calvary over 2,000 years ago.

Our path to understanding doubt's importance begins with the basic knowledge that God needs one thing and one thing only: love. God doesn't need air, water, warmth, or food. Just love. But more than that, God needs to be truly and freely loved. Could God truly be freely loved if there was proof?

Wouldn't it be nice if we had clear proof and enjoyed the presence of God? If we all lived to be 100 years old with no possibility of pain, disease, or heartbreak, and no one we loved ever died before their time or suffered. Wouldn't it be nice if we had clear proof and presence of God? Here's the problem with that: we couldn't choose to love Him. We'd have to love Him. Without doubt and free will we would be little more than pets to God. The Lord doesn't want pets. He wants free thinking and loving human beings who choose Him and His way.

Naturally this brings us to answering the question, "how can God be freely and truly loved?" Only by free will, and the necessary doubt that comes hand-in-hand with free will, and the trials of life. God's most precious and necessary gift is free will. Only through free will we get to choose to love God. Grasp and ponder this concept for moment: you cannot have faith without doubt.

Faith by definition is belief, or trust, in the absence of proof. Don't we have proof though? Every day we see miracles, and dismiss them as ordinary. Think of the miracle of your very existence. How you were born in the middle of this vast universe on a planet just the perfect distance from a star that is the engine of life. You have oceans, food, shelter, books, people who love you, a child's wild giggle, a society that tries to be just. It seems incongruous to me that this was an accident of a smattering of atoms. If we look through fresh eyes we see God's hand in all things. Trust in God becomes very easy when we take the time to see every day miracles.

Remember this lesson well the next time your tears fall; the next time an atheist hurls some powerful doubt-inducing barb wrapped in a kernel of truth (the best lies always have a bit of truth); the next time a desperate prayer is met with silence. Know that prayer was heard, but you're loved more than a mere pet. That the ability to doubt is a gift. It is the gift of faith and salvation. Overcoming doubt leads us to God.

David Welch is a Vice President of Mercury/Clark & Weinstock. He lives in Alexandria, VA with his wife and son.

Above all, it is difficult for us to realize just how thoroughly integrated religious ideas and terminology were into the cycles of the year, and the ways in which ordinary people defined the time in which they lived. In Europe, that meant a Christian cycle of time that is now all but unimaginable.

Even in advanced countries like England, right up to fairly modern times, Christians lived in a consecrated calendar. Rather, they lived that calendar. The shift from a peasant/agrarian society to an urban/industrial world created a chasm that was spiritual as much as economic, and contributed mightily to secularization.

In Western churches today, the Christian year has basically two main events, namely Christmas and Easter, and that is broadly true even for most adherents of liturgical communions such as the Catholic or Orthodox. In the Middle Ages, though -- from the fourth century through the sixteenth -- the calendar was much more comprehensive. The year was a recurring cycle of multiple commemorations, of days of feast and fast, all related to the key events of an agricultural world.

Each of these special days or seasons mandated particular kinds of behavior, in matters not just of food but of sexual expression. Even chaste marital sex was strictly prohibited during the (quite lengthy) times of fast. Weddings were permitted at certain seasons, but not others. The ritual year decided every aspect of the life, in the bedroom as much as the kitchen.

The central fact of religious life was Easter, but conceived much more broadly than today. The season of forty days before Good Friday marked the time of Lent, with the Easter season proper running from Easter to Pentecost or Whitsun. Lent and Easter combined thus made up ninety days, or a quarter of the whole year, with all the special regulations and prohibitions that implied.

Christmas again was a much more expansive season, beginning at the start of December, with Advent, and running right through to Epiphany on January 6. The time between Christmas and Epiphany was marked by a concentration of holy days and commemorations -- St. Stephen's Day, Holy Innocents (Childermas), St. John's Day.

The ritual division of the year changed at the Reformation, but not as much as we might think. Catholic and Orthodox countries, of course, retained the old cycles in their familiar form right up to the twentieth century, and those lands still constituted much of Christian Europe. But Protestant countries too still followed familiar patterns. In Protestant England, for instance, the local monastery might have been ruined, the pilgrimage shrine vandalized, and the parish church stripped of its "Popish" treasures and artwork. Even so, the year still followed old forms, enforced by highly intrusive ecclesiastical courts.

Without understanding these continuing cycles, it is all but impossible to understand much European literature written before the late nineteenth century -- certainly, many of the great novels, whether English, French or Russian.

Right up to that nineteenth century, economic life in the British Isles revolved around the Quarter Days, when all rents had to be paid, and by which laborers defined their employment contracts. England had four quarter days, namely March 25 (Lady Day, or the Annunciation, nine months before Christmas), June 24 (Midsummer, St. John the Baptist's Day), September 29 (Michaelmas, the Feast of St. Michael the Archangel) and Christmas.

Lady Day was especially important, commemorating as it did the Annunciation to Mary, and thus in a sense the beginning of the Christian story. Right up to 1752, this was the first day of the year, so that an English letter dated "February 10, 1725" was actually written in the year we would call 1726. In a Christian country, of course the year began with Christ. How could it be otherwise?

Four cross-quarter days also marked their own key events, and were particularly important in Scotland, long after the triumph of the Protestant Kirk. Most of these were also strictly ecclesiastical: February 2 (Candlemas, or the Presentation in the Temple), May 1 (May Day), August 1 (Lammas, "Loaf-Mass," the year's first harvest festival) and November 1 (All Hallows, the feast of All Saints). St. Martin's Day, Martinmas, fell on November 11 and had its special significance as the time when farmers slaughtered weaker animals in order to have food for the coming winter.

Each of these special days had its own distinctive roster of customs, folklore and superstitions, sometimes drawing on pre-Christian roots. Law courts and other national institutions faithfully followed the same markers. Cambridge University still has three terms, Lent, Easter and Michaelmas. Oxford has Michaelmas, Hilary (commemorating St. Hilary) and Trinity (Trinity Sunday is the first Sunday after Pentecost).

For a farming society then, religion marked time. If you asked someone the season, they would assuredly answer in terms that were religious, and distinctly Catholic and medieval: this is Lady Day or Whitsun, Lammas or Michaelmas. Now, it's a very open question what a given farmer could have told you about St. Martin, or indeed the theology of Easter, but they still lived the church's year. The faith was inescapable.

When we trace the story of secularization in the West, we can follow all sorts of markers and influences, including the rise of modern science and medicine. Undoubtedly, the population shift from country to town plays a massive role in the process. But this movement also fundamentally altered concepts of time-keeping and calendar observation, finally purging the old religious forms.

Urbanization and industrialization constituted a Reformation of Time.

Philip Jenkins is a Distinguished Professor of History at Baylor University and a columnist for RealClearReligion. His latest book is Laying Down the Sword.