The recent survey by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life told us what we already knew: America is becoming more and more religious. The draw of a spiritual life is growing in all sectors, and apparently all over the world—even in the officially atheist China. Christians in China: no longer in hiding(I guess this is another case of "atheists" who believe in God). The Chicago Tribune has a fascinating article on the rise of Christianity in China, that mentions some of the reasons that people are coming to church: 

Many of the church's new adherents profess a common belief that 30 years of ungoverned capitalism, amid the fading of communist ideology, has opened a yawning spiritual gap.

A public debate in China over ethics in business has bloomed in recent years from an unlikely source: the same unsafe products that have bedeviled U.S. consumers. In the most infamous case, 13 Chinese babies died and 200 were sickened in 2004 when a manufacturer skimped on the ingredients in infant milk. The case became a symbol of an economy so out of control that people could no longer trust their countrymen to adhere to the most basic ethical standards.

Later in the article, a Chinese professor is quoted saying that he thinks Christianity may be what helps Communism to survive in China.

And in the States, though evangelical Christianity continues to attract hordes of worshippers to mega-churches every week, the quest for spirituality leads in all directions. The Atlanta Journal Constitution covers the trend of black Americans converting into Judaism. Many of these converts feel they are “coming home”: 

That's how Sivan Ariel sees her experience. Born to a Catholic family in the Virgin Islands, Ariel now believes her biracial grandmother practiced Jewish customs she learned from her mother.
"She would always talk about the laws of God" and the Exodus story, Ariel said. Her grandmother would light white candles, which now remind Ariel of those lit on the Sabbath.
"She was the only person I knew that actually did that, so I wondered if it was actually witchcraft," Ariel said with a chuckle.

Ariel left Catholicism when she moved to Atlanta for college and joined a Pentecostal church for a while. But she never felt comfortable there, and she began a spiritual search that led her to convert to Judaism.
…
Ariel, referring to her experience and those of other black Jews, said, "Some of us know beyond a shadow of a doubt we're here because we're home."

Rabbi Norry called this an "unprecedented time" of interest in Judaism.

"Business is booming," he said. "On any given Shabbos, there's 10 non-Jews at our service, visiting or studying to be Jewish."

Still, he asks every convert: "Why would you ever want to be Jewish? Don't you know how many people hate us?"

The black converts respond differently, he said. They look at him as if to say: "Welcome to my world."

People seek religion for a variety of diverse reasons.  How the spread of Christianity might influence the nation of China, and how the growing number of black Jews might ultimately influence Judaism remains to be seen.

An Empire of Their Own: in which we receive some basically redemptive message about human goodness I'm used to trusting movies. The film industry is mostly made up of Jewish liberals, and so when I go see a film, I trust -- often with a note of boredom -- that what I'm going to see has been politically approved by the mainstream left. Unless it's an indie flick, it won't be too radical. But it'll be comfortably liberal, with some basically redemptive message about human goodness, seizing the day instead of selling out, living with your heart more than your head. This is what Hollywood sells and, as described in Neal Gabler's fascinating An Empire of Their Own, it's an ideology that secular Jewish Americans deliberately created.

Well, the Right has gotten wise. After spending two decades whining about the liberal Hollywood elite, they've gone and created an evil empire of their own. Mel Gibson was just the beginning; now there's tycoon-funded Walden Films, devoted to Christian-friendly entertainment and/or brainwashing, and a dozen other outlets that seek to reverse the tide of secular-liberal culture. Watch out, rock & roll!

The Narnia series is Walden's first major undertaking, and it is major: seven multi-million dollar blockbusters based on C.S. Lewis's beloved tales. I liked The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, but I liked Prince Caspian even more. It's more focused, more fun, and darker. It's a war movie, basically, but it's also wistful where Lion was innocent, and it's got more cute guys in it.

It's well known that C.S. Lewis incorporated Christian religious themes in the Narnia series. What's debated is how intentional that was. Lewis himself, a convert to the Church of England who wrote several nonfiction books on religion, claimed that whatever symbols appear in the books crept in almost by accident. He didn't set out to teach Christian theology, he says; these were just the symbols floating about in his imagination.

Well, fair enough, but it was also Lewis who said that we moderns had to relearn religion from scratch, and that myths were the way to do it. And it was also Lewis who said that the best myths to teach the basics of religious instruction were pagan myths, fairy tales... stories just like those of Narnia.

So, at the very least, it's a tidy coincidence that the same man who said that we need new myths to teach the Christian religion also wrote new myths which happen to teach the Christian religion. No?

Prince Caspian is above all a tale of faith. The four adolescent heroes of the first book/film return to Narnia after a year away, only to find that many hundreds of years have passed in Narnia-time. Narnia itself has been conquered by the evil human Telmarines, and the children's exploits are now the stuff of myth. Some believe, and others do not.

Even once the children return as prophesied, the real hero, Aslan, does not. In the first film, Aslan is obviously Christ. He sacrifices himself for the good of others, is killed, and then rises from the dead. The film, in case it wasn't obvious, sets the scene on a kind of otherworldly Golgotha. Now, hundreds of years later, Aslan is the Christ not of the Passion story but of the Christian faith. He is absent from the stage, and all but the few faithful doubt he even exists anymore. Even three of the four children doubt, with only little Lucy still remaining entirely faithful.

But this is a Christian film: the good guys' dependence on Aslan is absolute. Their plans, from their foolish first assault to their clever second effort, are doomed to failure. Nor do they hasten Aslan's arrival by their efforts at tikkun olam. Not Peter's swordsmanship, and not Susan's archery, but only Lucy's faith brings the true Savior.

C.S. Lewis: claimed that his religious symbolism happened by accident Not just a Christian film, but a Catholic one. At perhaps the most exciting moment in the film, Peter is tempted by the White Witch, the Satanic villain of the first film. Aslan is absent, but the White Witch is summoned in a Satanic ritual, and offers her help. Peter knows she can save Narnia. He is sorely tempted. Evil is real, and powerful. Even if you probably know how this test turns out.

And not just a Catholic film, but a pagan-Catholic one as well. Prince Caspian threw me off at times, because the faith that must be maintained is not just faith in Aslan, but faith in magic as well: in centaurs, gryphons, talking animals, and fauns. Some have complained that the swarthy, accented Telmarines are typically ethnic baddies, but to me they resembled no one so much as corrupt churchmen stamping out the memory of pagan religion. They cut down trees, they work with machines; the heroes are the Earth-people.

This was surely Lewis's intention. In an interview he said that it was necessary "first to make people good pagans, and after that to make them Christians." The grammar of belief is first and foremost, not the object of it. First get children to see that faith is important, that the old stories are true, and that you must hold onto your beliefs no matter what people say. Then apply those lessons to Christian religion. Or, as the contemporary Kabbalist Ohad Ezrachi put it to me, first you have to see that there is a spirit in the tree, the lake, and the sky -- then you can understand they are all one spirit.

This is a fascinating strategy, and I wonder if it works. These days, a lot of people believe in weird myths that have nothing to do with Christianity -- the Secret, Qabalah, gnosticism, the Nation of Islam, Scientology -- and there's no sign that the New Agers are becoming baalei tshuvah for Jesus. Perhaps what these and other movements are tapping into is the unmet desire to believe in myth. Not just spirituality, but gnosticism, in its modern form: occultism, the notion that somewhere out there is indeed a secret power (or powers) that really does exist.

If belief is the Christian mode of myth-making, then interpretation is the dominant Jewish one. Kabbalah (the real, not the marketed, one) is largely about learning how to read texts and the text of the world. Allegory is central, as is allusion, symbol, and multivocality. They believe, but we read deeply.

If so, then perhaps Prince Caspian is a Jewish film, as well as a pagan-Catholic-Christian one. It is, of course, wholly enjoyable just as a fantasy film, and many critics have observed that you have to be eagle-eyed to even get the Christian references. (I may even be looking too closely; at one point, a warrior-mouse discovers that his tail has been cut off, and his fellow mice say they will cut their tails for Aslan. I whispered to my friend Tovah that this was an obvious circumcision reference, but Tovah said I was nuts.)

Lewis's Lucy Might Have Demanded More of Her God: if she had been jewish But the Jewish way is to read deeper. This is why we get accused of lacking organic genius: because we like to take things apart, analyze them, and read into their symbols. From Joseph to Freud, we love to interpret dreams, stories, and myths. Rabbis, mystics, and commentators alike delight in multiple levels of meaning. For better or for worse, we like to pay attention to the man behind the curtain, to see how the magic is done.

At its core, beneath the many layers of meaning which delight this critic, Prince Caspian finally refuses the effort of interpretation. The ultimate question, asked by several characters in the film, is why Aslan waited. Why, given the centuries of suffering and carnage, did he wait for the four English children to come back? If he's omnipotent and loving, why didn't he hear the cries of the faithful, like God heard the cries of the slaves in Egypt?

Aslan does not answer this question. In Liam Neeson's magisterial voice, he simply says that "things do not happen the same way as before." No explanation. God works in mysterious ways. That is all. If Lucy were Jewish, she would demand more of her God. She would bargain for the last ten souls in Sodom, plead for the unfaithful Israelites, and perhaps abandon God if he failed to save the innocent -- in Narnia, or in her own Europe of 1944. But Lucy is not Jewish.

As for me, I find myself caught in the crack between wanting to believe, with her emunah shleimah, her perfect faith, and being unable to accept into my heart an Aslan who consigns thousands of Narnians to death. I believe in the magic of the wood. I love the God that is with me now. But I cannot take the next step and embrace the myths of religion which Lewis thought were so central. If there is an Aslan, I hope that he can forgive me.

For those who are struck by the dangerously corrosive left-wing secularMike Huckabee: Is this man part of John McCain's "Christian problem"? cosmopolitanism inherent in the belief that Barack Obama is a Muslim fifth columnist who must be stopped at all costs, Michael Farris offers solace. A former Republican candidate for Lieutenant Governor in Virginia and current Chancellor of Patrick Henry College, a private college for Christian home-schoolers (fully accredited as of April 2007!), Farris has a large following among Virginia Evangelicals. And in that community, Bob Novak reports, Farris is promoting "the biblical justification for an Obama plague-like presidency," in rejection of John McCain and the GOP.

And that's just the tip of the iceberg. According to Novak's sources, Mike Huckabee is secretly in league with Farris and other elements of the Christian "bitter end opposition" hoping to sabotage McCain's candidacy. How will they do that? So far, it's unclear. And with just five months and change left until the election, they'd better figure out a plan soon, if they're going to manage to call down the Obama-plague upon the heads of the wicked (it's mentioned in Revelation, somewhere between the fifth and sixth trumpets, IIRC.)

Not to cast any aspersions on Novak's sources, but WTF? As Ross Douthat notes, the idea that Huckabee --- who you may remember from a few months back as not only an amiable sweetheart with an occasional retrograde view, not only a loyal Republican soldier, but also the eager president of the John McCain fan club --- is furtively plotting McCain's demise, doesn't pass the laugh test. But worse than that, does an Evangelical anti-McCain vanguard even make any theological sense? Either McCain is the closet liberal abortion-and-spic-lovin' traitor his enemies on the right make him out to be, or he isn't. Either way, vote for McCain. That provides a hedge just in case he stops what another Republican bitter-ender has called the "genocide [of] the wombs" of American women (at least as effectively as Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush), and otherwise, McCain offers almost the same presidency-as-biblical-plague value as Obama.

King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia has announced plans to organize an "interfaith conference" among Jews, Muslims, and Christians. He invites "representatives of all the monotheistic religions to meet with their brothers in faith" in Saudi Arabia, in order to foster "respect among the religions."

King Abdullah's initiative is excellent and extremely positive. A conference of openKing Abdullah and sincere dialogue between representatives of the three Abrahamic traditions can only be a step forward. My only concern is that the diversity of Islamic opinion be fully represented, but indications from the Saudi kingdom are that King Abdullah recognizes the negative impact of Wahhabism, Deobandism, and other fundamentalist sects on the future of Islam. I hope that Jewish and Christian representatives will participate in such a conference with confidence in their own revelations, and will not give way to "politically correct" accommodations with Wahhabism.

Jewish and Christian representatives should understand that mainstream Islamic tradition respects the People of the Book and expects their teachers and other advocates to present their viewpoint in a learned and insightful manner, and not to engage in nonsensical rhetoric intended to improve relations with the Muslims by offering empty compliments. Jews and Christians who meet with and enter into dialogue with Muslims should do so from a position of self-respect, not of self-abasement. I hope and expect that Muslims at such an event will conduct themselves similarly.

In Chris Hedges' New York Times bestselling, Oprah-endorsed book American Fascists, Hedges repeatedly uses the term 'Christo-fascism'.

Hedges essentially equates fundamentalist Christians in the deep South with Nazis and Japanese fascists. I have no love for Evangelicals -- especially given my time among them -- but it's obvious that Hedges has not read any Yukio Mishima. Fascism was directly connected with racial purity and physical prowess. Christian fundamentalism is not. If it's not okay to use the term 'Islamo-fascist' because Islamists aren't corporatists, then it's not okay to use 'Christo-fascist' because fundamentalist Christians aren't concerned with biology.

It's sad that men like Rove and Bush, who cared nothing for Evangelicals, have givenShould read "No to 'Bush Christian Fascists'" Evangelicals such a bad rap that you can now reach bestseller status by calling them names. But 'Fascism' is a term with a particular meaning and reference, and shouldn't be inflated to include just any extremist movement.

It certainly shouldn't be inflated to include a movement that is not universally malign. There are some great Evangelicals like Jim Wallis, and even Mike Huckabee is intellectually honest (as per his appearance on the Tyra Banks show). During the Pastor Wright flap, Huckabee said that it was unfair to read too much into Obama's connection with Wright. That doesn't sound like the making of totalitarianism.

Those who (like me) oppose using the term 'Islamo-fascist' and opposed "Islamo-fascism Awareness Week" ought to have the intellectual consistency not to use 'Christo-fascist'. (Encouragingly, another Muslim writer, Shadi Hamid of the Project for Middle East Democracy, agrees.)

The case is different with the terms 'Islamist' and 'Christianist', frequently used in in political parlance as synonyms for 'Islamo-fascist' and 'Christo-fascist'. That conflation is mistaken. Islamism is political Islam of the non-violent variety, i.e the sustained political program by conservative Muslims to acquire --- not impose --- theocratic rule within their nation-state.

It is unhelpful, even from a pragmatic perspective, to collapse 'jihadism' (which refers to a violent movement) and 'Islamism'. The reason is that equating Islamism with violence ruins the opportunity to encourage post-Islamist groups -- who are roughly akin to Germany's Christian Democratic Party and represent a case of Islamism defeating itself using self-evaluation. On the same grounds, if Hedges had been more careful with his language, he would have used the term 'Christianism' to apply to the Evangelicals in his book, since by his analysis, they too are seeking to acquire --- not impose --- theocratic rule using non-violent means.

According to NPR, one Christian woman went looking for a way to add a little spark to her waning marriage “without compromising her Christian beliefs.” The result was the creation of this website, which sells all sorts of sex toys and other “intimate” products, but only for married couples.

 

And, apparently, the people who run this site are doing it out of the goodness of their hearts, and not because they actually need to use any of these products: " Wilson says she and her husband are blessed with good health, but that God has shown them that other couples might need help from a particular toy." I give to you all things holy: including the Jelly Rabbit.

That is very good to know. So how do they know which products to include?

"We pray about things before we add them to our site," she says. "We live our lives very openly in front of Jesus, so we just kind of pray for direction about which way he would have us go, and I have to be honest with you — he's really surprised us. ... Almost our whole entire 'special order' page has come about from that."

Of course I clicked on the “special order” page. Wouldn’t you be curious about which products Jesus “surprised” the couple with? She says their site steers clear of certain types of sexual activity that they believe are unholy. Hmmm . . .

I’m not married, and so technically I shouldn’t be browsing this site that exists for “married couples” only. But it was difficult not to be curious about what constitutes “sin-free” sex toys as opposed to . . . well, that’s just it—as opposed to what? Sinful sex toys?

What I discovered, however, is that apparently any sex toy can be “sin-free” as long as it’s used by a married couple. It’s unclear whether the pleasure device retains its “sin-free” status if enjoyed by a married individual by him or herself. But since we all know that masturbation leads to blindness, one imagines that it’s best not even to experiment with this idea.

I'm not slamming the site. So many religions—or at least the more orthodox manifestations of various religions—define themselves more or less on what they do not do, as opposed to what they do, in fact, do. In other words, it’s not uncommon to hear a religious mother say, to a child who has questioned an unquestionable tenet of the said faith, something along the lines of, “We’re Christians. We don’t engage in premarital sex,” or, “We’re Jews. We don’t eat pork, and we don’t drive over Shabbas.”

If only we defined ourselves according to our actions, rather than our inactions: “We’re Christians/Jews/Muslims. That means we love our neighbors.”

But, back to this scandalous Christian sex toy site. Maybe, I mean to say, this site is a positive thing. Maybe it’s positive because it’s as if they’re saying, “We’re Christians. We have good sex,” instead of, “We’re Christians. We don’t have certain kinds of sex and you shouldn’t either.”

What I can’t quite figure out is this: Are they using Jesus to sell sex? Or, are they using sex to sell Jesus? Is this a really creative attempt to proselytize? Either way, I’m sure it’s a win-win situation—as long as you’re married, that is.

Let's get it on: Pastor Wirth's guide God wants you to have a great sex life—if you’re married, that is. This is the claim being made by Paul Wirth, lead pastor of Tampa, Florida’s Relevant Church.

Pastor Wirth has issued a thirty day sex challenge to his married parishioners, advising couples to have sex every day for a full month. A mission statement available on the initiative’s website describes the plight of married couples (previously best explained by Flight of the Conchords) and the steps they can take to “review the obvious needs of him and uncover the forgotten needs of her.” It says that married couples are letting “dirty dishes, frumpy clothes, and a lack of authentic connections” get in the way of the romance, resulting in “an epidemic of breakups.” The solution: thirty days of sex in conjunction with a detailed guide in which couples are directed to share their thoughts, needs, and emotions (NOTE: don’t leave this in the bathroom when your in-laws visit.) If you have the determination, you will prevail and voila! Magic: restored.

So maybe it's no surprise that this news was http://babble.com/CS/blogs/strollerderby/archive/2008/02/20/minister-to-...)">picked up joyously on the parenting site Babble, where (presumably married) new parents seem nothing but psyched about the idea of having sex for God -- even if they're Jewish. Non-married couples, on the other hand, need not apply. In fact, singles and dating couples are strongly encouraged to take their own version of the thirty day challenge: to abstain from sex for the same amount of time in order to better understand and appreciate the virtues and joys of marriage.

What would the rabbis say about all this? The Jewish attitude towards sex is not that far from the one Pastor Wirth is preaching. Jewish sex, formally permitted only within marriage, is not only for the production of Jewish babies. It’s also a means for strengthening the love and commitment between two married people. As the Torah frequently uses the verb “to know” to describe sexual relations between people, sex can be thought of as a way to truly and most intimately become familiar with your spouse. Not to mention: it’s a mitzvah!

Maybe Relevant Church is onto something after all.

 

 

Greetings From Moldova: where Jesus was a communist carpenter Greetings from Moldova! You know, the former Soviet state bordered by Ukraine and Romania, whose special characteristics include being the poorest nation in Europe, as well as the first former Soviet state to elect a Communist as its president! It's hard to believe that a country where 98% of the population weighs in as Eastern Orthodox voted President Vladimir Voronin -- a Communist -- into office, but they did, and now priests, nuns, and assorted other believers are being intimidated and harassed by secret police.

Meanwhile, Christians in India aren't faring much better, what with increasing attacks by fundamentalist, nationalist religious groups such as radical Hindus and "anti-Christian fanatics."

And here in the U.S., a Burmese Christian refugee who gained asylum this past August is settling into his new life on the East Coast, while religious persecution in his homeland continues on.

We have spoken about love for the Bible. But let me lift up the larger aspect of this love and refer you toward the end, to one of the most beloved passages in the beloved book: I Corinthians 13, the Ode to Love. Here Paul has to deal with the question, How can diversity and pluralism be an asset instead of a liability? How can we learn, as some of the feminist theologians have taught us, to turn the old statement around and say, How much diversity do we need? How much unity can we afford? We are used to asking, Can the center hold? How much unity do we need? How much diversity can we allow? Paul has an image that love is measured by how much diversity can handle. And he had to learn it hard, because in Galatia, in an earlier part of his ministry, he thought that by stamping his foot, he could get his way. You remember what he says in Galatians I: If anybody preaches and teaches otherwise than I do, be it so an angel form heaven, damned be that one. That's chutzpah. But now he knows in Corinth that he is one of the many, and he is even, perhaps, low man on the totem pole, so he gets ecumenical.

It's so moving. Oh, how I love that book which tells me these things. It's so moving: he says that we now see like in an old-fashioned bad mirror, in a glass, darkly. And now our knowledge is only partial. That's called relativism. It is when he thinks about the diversity that he has to tell us: Don't be so cocky about the truth. You have your insights, but you are just at the beginnings. And then he ends by saying, so there remains those three: faith, hope, and love, and greatest of them is faith. Well, that's what he should have said, according to his own thinking.Love: It's the best The basic line: He is the apostle of faith, everything depends on faith. But here, suddenly, there is a breakthrough in his thinking, and he says: And the greatest of these is love, agape, esteem of the other, not "insisting on its own way," as the RSV puts it.

So, it is proper for me to end these five points where the Bible teaches us to deal with it-as a friend, not to give it honor by just inflating it, but to hear it as that strange way in which the divine has broken in through human thought and human words and human experience.

Finally, let me leave you with a word which is the one that, in my own long love relationship to this book, I want to have in my mind when my end comes. It reads, in 2 Corinthians 3:18, like this: "And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being changed into his likeness from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord who is the spirit."

Ultimately, I came to learn that there are at lest three quite distinct symbol systems, or paradigms, for Christian theology coming out of the Bible. One is dominated by the idea of God as the judge, and what is going to happen to us on the day of judgment.God is the judge: Arnold is the bailiff

Everything circles around God's judgment, and sin and forgiveness and redemption and the cross-that's Western Christendom in Catholicism and Lutheranism. Then there is God as Lord. And that has to do with God as Lord and we as subject, and the world is full of covenants-that's Calvin and also the Jewish tradition. And the model gave the basic model for the federal structure of the United States; foedus in Latin means convenant. It's the sociopolitical model of God.

And then there is the third, the Johannine. It's all about life. Sin is sickness, not primary guilt. It's not about obedience and Lordship. It's life: He came that they should have life, and have it abundantly. In him was life. Out of his innermost parts, streams of living water will flow (John 7). And everything is to be born anew, born out of water and blood (John 3). That's John, and that's Eastern Christendom. There is no crucifix in an Eastern church; there is the icon, where the divine life shines through the human image.

These are three different ways of thinking about God. What a richness. And you don't see them until you lay them apart. Of course they flow into one another, in all our traditions. But it is by studying the scriptures to get the integrity of each of these that they come to life. It is a little like the Gospels: if you mix them, you don't get the feel of how many theologies there are in scripture. It's like with homogenized milk: when you homogenize milk, you can't make whipped cream anymore.Dairy products: Thick like Scripture And for sermons, that's a deadening thing.

So when the preacher preaches Luke, it should sound like Luke. And even the Lutherans should not mix in a little Paul to make it kosher. So, not so uptight. Let a thousand flowers bloom. Richness. Plurality. Plurals. Yes, meanings is better than meaning. Isn't that, in a way, what the Trinity is about? Isn't that odd, these confused monotheists who speak about the Trinity: We couldn't quite settle for something which was just oneness, we had to have more of a fullness of an interplay, of a giving and receiving. Do you remember how it is with the oneness in John 17, where Jesus prays that they all be one? And you, father, are in me, and I am in you, and they are in us. It's like the biological world: Everything is interdependent. It's a giving and receiving. It's a oneness that is not a glob, but a living interplay. Plural.

Which leads me to the fifth point: Not so universal. And here I come full circle. I said in the beginning that I read the Bible as if it was just about me. And now I say, the Bible, my beloved Bible, it is indeed my Bible. There might be other holy scriptures-and that might not be as threatening as some people think. Not to claim universality and uniqueness? I always felt that to speak about the uniqueness of Christianity or the uniqueness of Christ does more for the ego of the believer than it does for God. Has God Only One Blessing? is the wonderful title of a recent book. How can I sing my song to Jesus with abandon, without telling negative stories about others? What one religion says about another religion, what one beloved scripture claims to be over against other scriptures, comes pretty close to a breach against the commandment "Though shall not bear false witness against your neighbor." What we say about the others is usually self-serving. We say, Is it self-serving? Oh no, it is just giving God honor. But think about it. Think about the scriptures themselves. Jesus said, "Let your light so shine before people that they see your good deeds and become Christian." That's not what it says. It says, "Let your light shine for people so that they see your good deeds and praise your father who is in heaven" (Matt. 5). Your father-so that people have a reason to be happy that there are Christians in the world, instead of getting irritated at them, if not worse. Jesus said, "You are the salt of the earth." But who wants the world to become a salt mine?

We are born as a minority religion, as a religion among religions. And we are heirs to the Jewish perspective on these things: that's what I learned from the scriptures. It says, to Israel, that Israel is meant to be a light to the nations. That's what Jesus speaks about: a light to the nations. The Jews have never thought that God's hottest dream was that everybody become a Jew. They rather thought that they were called upon to be faithful and that God somehow needed that people in the total cosmos. What a humility, but we called it tribalism. From the enlightenment, everything had to be universal. But when Christianity started its universal claim, and got power, it led to the crusades. We couldn't really think that it was not God's hottest dream that everybody be like us. So I say, no, the Bible is my Bible. The milk of salvation: Suckling from the gospelsThis is the breast that I, as a child of God, have been nourished from. And for the little child, when the child is born that's the whole world, the mother's breast. But maturing means to recognize that other kids have sucked other mothers' breasts. That belongs to growing up.

Now this is my Bible. It was given to me as a gift, and it is full of love, for which I am grateful. If I have found a doctrine, that is my doctrine. I don't need to bad-mouth all others. This is theology for the next generations. Paul was on to that. Paul, late in his mission, had to learn to deal with plurality.

PART FOUR: Final Thoughts 

In my first post, I explained the first wrong way to read the Bible; the second lesson is that the Bible is not always as deep as we think. Of course, because it is the word of God, it is going to be bottomless, and the deeper you can make it, the more honor to God. I think about that passage where Paul says in Romans 14 that everything that is not done in faith is sin—and any theologian who reads that statement gets the existential quivers. What a wonderful statement. But when you read it in context, it seems to mean that whatever is not done out of conviction, but just to play up to somebody else’s opinion, lacks authenticity and is sin. Or, when Paul says that we should work out our salvation with fear and trembling, for God works in you both to will and to work—that’s what they call a paradox. But it’s no paradox there in Philippians 2—Paul is just saying: You were pretty good when I was with you, but now I’m gone; but remember, God is with you, so there is no reason why you should not work just as hard.

Light and quick: Float like a Lutheran, sting like a BaptistBut we like it to be so terribly deep. One of the best rules for reading scriptures is the very same as for preaching: It should be light, it should be quick, and it should be tender. It should not be ponderous, it should not be labored, and it should not be heavy.

Third, in the scriptures, sometimes it ain’t as sure as you think. St.Paul—I like him, but he was arrogant. He had a lot of human flaws, but he was great. He was a great, great theologian. A theologian is someone who sees problems where no one else sees problems, and sees no problems where other people see problems. Once, when he is speaking (I Cor.7)—it happens to be about family matters, divorce, and sex, and things of that kind—he says: On so-and-so, I have a word from the Lord, but then on so-and-so, I have no word from the Lord. I think he was the last preacher in Christendom who had the guts to say that. New situations come, really new situations. What shall we then do? And Paul says: I have no word from the Lord, but I’ll give you my advice. I’m doing as well as I can. And I think I am right…. That’s wonderful insight. What a lovely Bible that tells us that sometimes we might need to think, and not just to think that it is settled.

The fourth “no”: not so uptight. Apologetics, defending the Bible—defending God, for that matter—is a rather arrogant activity. Who is defending whom? I love to use the old Swedish expression, “It is pathetic to hear mosquitoes cough.” I don’t know why that is funny, but in Swedish it is funny. And apologetics is mosquitoes coughing. It kills so much of the joy in reading and practicing the love of the scriptures.

It is always a little moving when believers want to help God. There was a man in the second century of the Christian era whose name was Tatian, and he was so terribly bothered that, in the various Gospels, Jesus seemed to say things a little differently. And some things that were described in one Gospel were described otherwise in another—not to speak about the Gospel of John. So he thought he should help God by creating a unified Gospel. It’s called the Diatessaron. And it was very tempting for the church, because those who wanted to attack the church said: What is this? Jesus says that, and then Jesus says that. And the apologists tried to say: Of course he said it more than once, but a little differently.

The Gospels don't match: But they'll set your world on fireWell, that wasn’t quite convincing. So we got four Gospels, which do not always match, but Irenaeus, blessed be his memory, decided that it was more valuable to have the richness of the four than the streamlining of the one. And so the four Gospels are wonderful lessons in the fact that God is not pedantic when it comes to telling the story; rather, God wants it told a little different to catch as many aspects as possible. As I like to say, when you have four portraits of the somebody you love very much, you don’t make transparencies of them and send the light through—that becomes blur, holy blur because it is the Gospels, but still blur. You look at one portrait of a time. And actually where they are different is usually where the artist has something important to say. If you get the apologetic devil in you, then you get bothered by the richness and by the variation. And the more I have lived with the scriptures, the more loving my feelings for them have become. The more important thing for me is to make them as different as possible, in order to catch as many insights and as many perspectives as possible.

PART THREE: Who Owns God?

To give reasons for one’s love feels awkward. You might be able to give reasons for your choices, but before I fell in love with the Bible, I never went to the library to read the Holy Qur’an, or the Bhagavad Gita, or even the Book of Mormon. That’s not how love happens—because love does happen; it happened to me.

What else can one do—what else can I do—but tell my story, the story of my love for the Bible: how to read, to study, to ponder, to preach the Bible; how it became my professional, even professorial, career, as that study watered, even lubricated, my soul.

For the longer I live, the less adequate and less useful become all those stifling distinctions between academy and church, faith and reason, the intellectual and the spiritual. There is such an interplay between those fabricated distinctions that one cannot live without the other. So here is the story, the story of my love relationship with the scriptures.

PART 1: GETTING HOOKED

Somehow it did not start with the Bible. In my home, the Bible was supposed to be a little too Methodist. It started with Jesus, mainly as he had come to me through the hymn book, which is used as a spiritual guide in the piety of the Church of Sweden, and which we read a hymn from on Sunday morning. To go to church was a dangerous sliding into Phariseeism, as I was brought up. Somehow, what I had gathered about Jesus spoke to me, fascinated me. The image I had was of an incredibly interesting mixture of strength and kindness—strength so different from the bully world of the school yard.

Jesus became not my hero, but rather my friend. I guess I was 12 or so when I sneaked away to church on Sunday mornings—in spite of the risk of Phariseeism—to be where Jesus was supposed to be. But then in fall 1935, I was invited to something called a Bible study group. And I was given a pocket New Testament, both as a symbol and as a text, and I was told to read it as if it was all about me—my life, my conscience, my duties to God and to my neighbor. I was hooked, for life.

Not about him: The Prodigal Son

The old principle tua res agitur—it’s all about you, or, it is your case—carried me for a long time. And I got a language for my faith; I got words for my feelings; I got pictures for my dreams. And my image of Jesus became more multifaceted.

When I thought I understood, there was always more and more and more. I had begun to feed on the mysteries of God. And it was intellectually a most stimulating awakening. That way of reading served me well, for a while. This was the time when I was naïve and arrogant enough to identify with the people I read about, or whose writings I read. I felt like Peter and I felt like Paul—especially when they had negative feelings. I felt like all the disciples. I felt like the Prodigal Son—I had not yet learned that the story in Luke 15 was actually about the older son, who is the one who is like church people, those who stayed on the farm (somebody has to), but couldn’t take it unto himself to be grateful when his brother came home. I wanted to become more like Jesus, wondering what he would say or do had he been where I was.

That way of reading lasted for a while, and who would say that it isn’t the way I still read and feel from time to time. But my love for the scriptures led me to ways of reading that were so much less ego-centered. The Bible was really not about me. It was many other things—in the long run, much more interesting things. It was about many things in distant lands, from many distant ages.

I came to read it more and more like a book, perhaps more as a “classic.” Now it spoke to me from a great distance, of centuries and cultures deeply different from my own. And it began to be, just by its difference, that the fascination grew, that it had a way of saying to me, there are other ways of seeing and thinking and feeling and believing than you have taken for granted. And it just added to my love—for love is not just fascination.

When I short-circuited my reading in those earlier days of having it just be about me, I slowly learned that this was a greedy way to deal with the richness of the scriptures.

PART 2: FIVE WRONG WAYS TO READ THE BIBLE

So let me share with you as a tribute to the Bible—and perhaps in a strange way—five “no” statements. It is usual when one is describing love to describe it in positive and glowing terms. But my friendship with the Bible gave me the joy, and the courage, to express my love in five statements of “not.” The first one I have pointed at: It is not primarily about me. Second, it is not always as deep as we think. Third, even Paul isn’t always totally sure. Fourth, don’t be so uptight. And fifth, it is probably not as universal as we think.

Friendly debate: In the Jewish tradition, God likes the argumentative

It is perhaps odd to express my love in such negative terms. But it is also perhaps in the line of that wonderful word of Jesus in chapter of John: I do not call you any longer servants, but I call you friends. Somehow I became friends with the Bible. In the biblical tradition, and in the Jewish tradition, to be called the friend of God, you had to be one who argued with God. Abraham, arguing about Sodom and Gomorrah, was called a friend of God. Job was called the friend of God. To me, Jesus is the friend of God, because he argues with God. And so, these five “no’s” of mine I bring to you as a sign of love and friendship.

The first “no” is the one which became the watershed in my love story with the Bible: It is not about me. In Galatians 3 it says that the law became, as many people translated, the tutor unto Christ. And I had learned, in good Lutheran theology—and John Wesley was on that line, too—that the law was for the preparation of my conscience. The law was the tutor, and tutored me so that I could fully understand not only what I should do, but also that I couldn’t live up to it, and hence needed a savior. The law was a tutor unto Christ, preparing, tendering my conscience, so that my need for forgiveness would become so great.

Then I learned Greek. That sometimes has its value. And it seemed to me very clear that the text actually said something quite different. It said that the law for the Jewish people had been a kind of harsh babysitter who saw to it that they did not raid the kingdom until it was Gentile time, so that the Gentiles could also be in on the deal. That’s what the text actually said: The law had been tutored until it was time for the Gentiles to come in. That was confusing. Then I looked in my concordance, and I found that what the preachers had been preaching about when they preached about Paul, the forgiveness of sins, was never mentioned by Paul in either Galatians or Romans.

It's all about me: Uh, no it's not

I started to recognize that when Paul spoke about justification by faith, he was really giving the argument in favor of his Gentile converts. He had to come to grips with how, in God’s word and God’s mind, his mission to the Gentiles fitted into God’s total plan. It was about the Jews and the Gentiles and not about me. What an awakening. And I read in Romans 7: I cannot understand that I act as I act, because the good things I want to do, I don’t, and the bad things I do not want to do, I do. I, wretched human being—who is going to rescue me? And I thought that at least it was about me. I mean it was psychologically sound and easy to show that that’s the way it is. But then I found that Paul said: If I act as I do not want and I do not act act as I want, then it isn’t I who do it. That’s what the text says. Then he said: Then I agree to the law that it is good. This sounded strange. He wasn’t very bothered, was he, by his inner conflict. He described something quite different. He used this wonderful psychological example to prove that the holy law and the commandment was holy, righteous, and just. I hadn’t cared about that, because I thought it was about me. And then I read: We have the God who justifies the ungodly. And Abraham believed, and it was counted him unto the righteousness (Rom. 4). And I thought that this had to do with God’s grace, by which we are forgiven. But it seemed that the point here was quite simply that Abraham was a gentile when he believed, because the circumcision didn’t happen until chapter 17 of Genesis and we were only in chapter 15.

So, Paul had found a wonderful exegetical key to the mystery of his Gentile mission. It wasn’t about me. And I read in Chapter II in Romans where Paul says: You Gentiles had gotten a little uppity toward the people of Israel, and I’ll tell you a secret, lest you be conceited, and that is that all of Israel will be saved, so that’s none of your business. So it was about Jews, about people.

And, imagine, I read these things during the end of the Second World War, when the camps in Auschwitz and Dachau opened up, and I still thought that Romans was a theological tractate about my soul. And I didn’t feel that it was about people. And I didn’t feel that Paul had fathomed that this Gentile condescension toward the Jewish people had started to happen already in his own time. How come the greatest missionary of the Bible warns his converts of missionary zeal? Isn’t that strange? Or, is it not so strange? Paul had been burned once. It was out of religious zeal that he had committed his only sin-—no, perhaps not his only sin, but the only sin he ever mentioned that he committed, namely, that he had persecuted the church. And he saw that now perhaps it started all over again with the Christians toward the Jews. Oh, that we had listened to him instead of to the tradition that didn’t see the Jews, but just made them a kind of brick in the game of interpretation.

I learned that it was not about me, but it was teaching me about God’s way of dealing with the world, with people, with tensions between people of different faiths. What an insight. What a wonderful book that I had claimed for my own soul game instead of feeling the big drama of God, in which I was very little.

PART TWO: How Not to Read the Bible 

Usually, when conservatives express their fear that Christmas is under siege, they at least manage to string together a few unconvincing anecdotes to support their position. You know the sort of thing: "Welcome to the No-Spin Zone. Ladies and gentlemen, secularists have reached a new low! This past month, a middle school in Eugene, Oregon canceled its planned nativity recreation, the condo board of the Kings' Arms luxury residential complex in Lee's Summit, Missouri, prohibited a resident from erecting a 15-foot high green and red neon cross, and the O'Shaughnessy's department store of Eagle River, Michigan, asked its sales associates to wish customers Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays." And soon enough, pressure from aggrieved letter-writers shows retail store managers just how unconscionable it is to express the hope that someone's holidays are happy. The crisis is averted, and once again, the free market bails out Christmas.

John Ridley, no conservative by any means, has a message for the lefties at the Huffington Post, uncontaminated by even the meager evidence typical of a Bill O'Reilly or John Gibson war-on-the-war-on-Christmas screed. Look, lefties, Ridley is signalling. The goyim aren't watching so there's no harm in admitting your reflexive hostility to religious, and particularly Christian symbols. That's the first step to recovery:

And yet, despite the fact the majority of us acknowledge Christmas in some way, in typically liberal fashion the fringe uses the censorship of political correctness to turn "Merry Christmas" in a verboten phrase.

And it's true. Saying "Merry Christmas" is a sure way to get yourself a visit from the Swarthmore Education Department Geheime Staatspolizei. And yet --- as many wise men have said --- Ridley's purpose is not so much to be a lonely liberal paladin standing up for the tyrannized Christan community in America, as to flatten the left's hypocrisies when it comes to religion generally. You see, liberals elected Jimmy Carter, a born-again dupe deep-fried in peanut oil. And liberals look the other way when the Obama campaign doubles as a gospel tour, or when Harold Ford films his campaign ads in church. But when Mike Huckabee sends the voters of Iowa a very special holiday message reminding them that Jesus Christ is his personal Lord and Savior --- there's no subtext there, ye of little faith; in non-election years, Huckabee personally sends a Christmas card to every resident of Iowa --- radical leftists like Bill Donohue and Ron Paul start saying intemperate things.

Ridley does have a point, to be fair, but it cuts more than one way. There is something inconsistent about liberals balking at Republicans' religious rhetoric but remaining conspicuously quiet when it comes from their own guys. And one way to resolve that inconsistency, of course, would be for liberals to insist that Democrats and Republicans alike be held to the same secular standards. Ridley counsels the opposite tactic:

If the far left were smart, instead of continuing to make religion a wedge issue, they would -- as Obama has smartly tried to do -- take religion off the table by displaying their faith.

Given the prevailing views in America, that's probably a smart play in the short term, but it's also a pre-emptive acquiescence to the transformation of American politics into an ecclesiastical enterprise. Then there's the small issue that not everybody has faith, and chiding the faithless for not displaying faith is a particularly ugly and exclusionary bit of political extortion. A further long-term problem with urging liberals --- and here I mean liberals in the broadest possible sense --- to display their faith is that no display will ever be ostentatious, gaudy, or tasteless enough to satisfy the voters who respond to Christian dog-whistling.

This bears some elaboration, because the pundit class, thunderstruck as it was by the tactical brilliance of Huckabee's Christmas ad, hasn't quite registered what it portends for future campaigns. Thanks to Huckabee, every candidate in every election during or near Christmas or Easter is going to have to do a Christian ad. Since matching Huckabeean (Huckabite?) sanctimony will take religion off the table, just as Ridley hopes, the next Huckabee will come up with something even more over the top. That's how nonsense like this escalates, and liberals who encourage Democrats to publicly adopt devotional poses are just as responsible as conservatives for the escalation. Think the flying cross and "Silent Night" background muzak were gauche? Wait until 2024, when all the presidential candidates in both parties will perform the stations of the cross in their springtime ad buys, with CGI realistic blood and violence to boot.

Incidentally, there is a fairly banal explanation of why liberals don't get their knickers in a twist when Democrats pander to credulous dimwits, but do turn a concerned glance towards Republicans who do the same. That reason is a near-mirror image of evangelical Republicans' willingness (at least until the Huckster came around) to be satiated by weird coded messages and invitations to eisegetical interpretations of stump speeches. The principle for both Democratic and Republican partisans is: "Look, so-and-so is one of us, and he (or she) is saying what he (or she) needs to in order to get elected. No need to worry."

So when Hillary Clinton says she opposes gay marriage for "personal" reasons, and refuses to explain any further, Democrats don't demand an explanation, any more than Republicans feel the need to press George Bush further on what he means by his denunciations of "activist judges."

Unfortunately for partisans who satisfy themselves that they alone in all the world know the deeply-held "true" beliefs of their favored candidates, incumbent politicians need to be re-elected, so waiting around for them to take a stand on controversial culture-war issues is bound to be a disappointing proposition. For example, as pro-gay rights Democrats should have learned a long time ago but still seem not to have, the Clintons will never pass up a chance to sell gay people down the river if they think it will gain them a marginal advantage on some front somewhere.

I’m such an anti-conformist I don’t spend Christmas eating Chinese food and seeing a movie. I had coffee and a bagel with a friend this morning (the kosher bagel place was hopping, of course) and then finished my grading for the semester, napped, and watched West Wing DVDs. My mother and I had a scintillating discussion about the clearance sales starting tomorrow.
Christmas Dinner: is it a fine line, or am I overly sensitive?
But the whole thing has me wondering if there’s a really appropriate way of celebrating someone else’s holidays.

There are a lot of reasons I don’t buy into the whole Jesus thing, but that’s doesn’t mean I’ve got a thing against Christians, and I’ve got mixed feelings about whether I’d be comfortable at a Christmas dinner (kashrut aside), or a midnight mass. On the one hand, I think it’s nice to be with friends when they’re celebrating whatever it is they want to celebrate, and I do have the day off and there’s nothing open, really. But it feels like a fine line between attending someone else's celebration of Jesus's birth, and celebrating that birth myself.

This goes back to my thing against religious voyeurism and how I don’t think prayer or religion should be spectator sports. I’m all for interfaith efforts and people working for better understanding between faith communities, but the idea of non Jews coming to, say, Kol Nidre because of the pretty music, or even just because they like me and they know it’s important to me seems really bizarre.

I don’t think I would be comfortable at an Easter dinner even though it’s just a meal (though the customary ham would pose a problem), and I really can’t get into any of the Christmas hoopla, either. Does anyone know of a great way to deal with Christian holidays in a way that doesn’t feel like too much of a shout out to Jesus?

Somehow it slipped under my radar that David Lewis had contributed an article to a new collection. Or, to be precise (Lewis died in 2001), Philip Kitcher, a philosophy professor at Columbia, edited and completed a draft manuscript that Lewis had been working on close to the time of his death. The book Lewis’ latest is published in is Philosophers without Gods, out from Oxford University Press this past August at propitious moment in light of the 2006-2007 atheism craze.

In any case, thanks to Benj Hellie at Brian Leiter’s blog, I managed to pick up the latest Harper’s, where Lewis’ piece, “Divine Evil” is excerpted (nothing online, sorry). Now, if there is anyone ideally situated to write a mind-changing piece on atheism and religion, or at the very least to contribute something new to the debate --- I doubt very much that Hitchens, Dawkins, Harris et al. would claim to have made novel arguments --- that person is David Lewis. (For those who are unfamiliar with Lewis --- and I imagine that describes most of Jewcy’s readers --- Lewis was one of the two or three most influential American philosophers, and unquestionably the most prolific metaphysician, of the last 50 years. It would be impossible to complete a degree in philosophy at an English-speaking university without encountering his work, and I can think of only one other of his contemporaries of whom that’s true.) So you can imagine how excited I am to see that Lewis has posthumously intervened in this debate, and I hope it’s on the side of clarity, rigor, and --- if you’ll pardon the expression --- paradigm-shifting.

The Harper’s extract is quite brief, but contains the basic outlines of Lewis’ argument. And sure enough, it doesn’t disappoint. It is innovative, clearly argued, and on major points entirely persuasive (or so say I). The idea is that, according to the tenets of (small-o) orthodox Christianity, the Christian god perpetrates evil infinitely worse than all the evil perpetrated in the history of the universe. If we believe that those who admire evil are themselves evil (as we presumably do viz. neo-Nazis for example), then worshipers of the Christian god, by the lights of their professed theological beliefs and commonplace moral intuitions, are evil. What’s worse, non-believers in full knowledge of the fact that Christian belief is evil, who nevertheless admire some believing Christians, participate in evil vicariously. I can anticipate some objections, which I’ll get to presently, though if I can anticipate them, Lewis probably could have too, so the full piece may well address them. Lewis’ case, and my response and my effort to place it in a larger context below the fold:

Continue reading...

Last week the NY Times ran an article about how Megachurches are getting so big that they're doing things like buying shopping centers, which is fine, except when a church owns a store that makes money there's a question about whether they have to pay taxes on that property. Here's an excerpt from the article:Death, Taxes: and Megachurches?

Among the nation's so-called megachurches - those usually Protestant congregations with average weekly attendance of 2,000 or more - ChangePoint's appetite for expansion into many kinds of businesses is hardly unique. An analysis by The New York Times of the online public records of just over 1,300 of these giant churches shows that their business interests are as varied as basketball schools, aviation subsidiaries, investment partnerships and a limousine service.

At least 10 own and operate shopping centers, and some financially formidable congregations are adding residential developments to their holdings. In one such elaborate project, LifeBridge Christian Church, near Longmont, Colo., plans a 313-acre development of upscale homes, retail and office space, a sports arena, housing for the elderly and church buildings.

Indeed, some huge churches, already politically influential, are becoming catalysts for local economic development, challenging a conventional view that churches drain a town financially by generating lower-paid jobs, taking land off the property-tax rolls and increasing traffic.

But the entrepreneurial activities of churches pose questions for their communities that do not arise with secular development.

These enterprises, whose sponsoring churches benefit from a variety of tax breaks and regulatory exemptions given to religious organizations in this country, sometimes provoke complaints from for-profit businesses with which they compete - as ChangePoint's new sports center has in Anchorage.

Mixed-use projects, like shopping centers that also include church buildings, can make it difficult to determine what constitutes tax-exempt ministry work, which is granted exemptions from property and unemployment taxes, and what is taxable commerce.

And when these ventures succeed - when local amenities like shops, sports centers, theaters and clinics are all provided in church-run settings and employ mostly church members - people of other faiths may feel shut out of a significant part of a town's life, some religion scholars said.

I was reading this trying to think about whether I would feel comfortable working out at a gym that was owned by a church, and I don't think I would. In fact, I know I wouldn't. Later on in the article there's a point where a business manager at one of the big churches owns up to the church's motives:

Mr. Rieder, the church business manager, paused when asked whether people of other faiths would have felt comfortable at the event.

"We try not to discriminate in doing community service," he said. "There are Muslims and other non-Christians here, of course. And we do want to convert them, no doubt about it - that's our mission. We don't discriminate, but we do evangelize."

The same quandary confronts Pastor Clauson in Anchorage. "There is nothing inherently alienating about what we're doing economically," he said. "An Orthodox Jewish youngster or a conservative Muslim child encountering our programs would find zero intimidation."

Nor does he want his community to become divided along religious lines, he said. But at the same time, "we definitely want to use these efforts as an open door to the entity that we feel is the author and creator of abundant life - Jesus."

He added, "It's a tough balancing act."

Emphasis mine. Full Story

I can tell you right now I would never set foot in a mall or a sports complex that let me know I was going to get the Jesus spiel along with my purchases or basketball game.

This is a complicated issue on the tax front, and also on the ethical front. What happens when a church dominates the fitness scene in one town? Or owns the mall, or the movie theater? Would you shop there? And does the Starbucks that the church brought in need to pay taxes?

I know that Megachurches have been a good thing in a lot of ways, but this scares the shit out of me.

Most people my age would take a trip to a village ruled by fortunetellers for its ironic value, but when I pulled up to the spiritualist community of Lily Dale, New York, I genuinely believed I would reach the ghost of my father. After all, I had in the past.

My father died when I was 20. We held the funeral service in the same Roman Catholic Church where he had been an altar boy. All three of his wives—two Jewish and named Linda, one Catholic and named Ginny—and all six of his children sat in the front row. As the rest of our dad’s family stuck out their tongues for communion and made the sign of the cross, my Jewish brothers Paul and Daniel and I stayed in our seats. The priest talked about how we’d be reunited with my dad in heaven, and I wondered whether this applied to us as Jews. If someone had told me that forsaking my Jewish beliefs meant I’d see my father again, no doubt I’d have done it.

Song of faith: The single of "Only the Good Die Young" Here was my basic understanding of the two faiths present in my family: one focused on what happened when you were alive, and one on what happened after you were dead. So once someone close to me was dead, I shifted from a Jewish to a Christian point of view. The night before my father was buried I prayed to God to be reunited with him, and I fell asleep fantasizing about blasting Billy Joel’s “Only The Good Die Young,” his favorite song, from a boom box outside his funeral. I hummed it under my breath during the service, clutching the crucifix the priest had given me in one fist and the hand of my six-year-old brother in the other. Losing my father convinced me that Christianity was like magic life insurance: Believe and there was no death.

Once I started thinking about the afterlife, I began to notice all the opportunities society offers to connect with the dead, from the five-dollar fortuneteller living next door to me in a basement apartment in the West Village to the young man in pancake makeup who came on TV every afternoon with the promise of “crossing over.” Because my father’s religion was all about saints and spirits and holy ghosts, it was easy for me to believe in his spirit. Suddenly I found profundity in things that had once seemed invisible or ridiculous to me before his death.

I'm not the only one willing to pay for a conduit to the Great Beyond. Around the country, an entire movement has been summoned up to service the needs of bereaved relatives desperate for one last chance to commune with the dead. TV psychic John Edward (watch him here) has managed to cash in on the trend twice, starring in shows on the SciFi Channel and Lifetime. Even science is getting into the game: University of Arizona psychology professor Gary Schwartz has published The Afterlife Experiments, in which he scrutinizes published, peer-reviewed studies of mediums to figure whether they pass muster with the scientific method. They do indeed, he says.

Ten years after my father’s death, I decided it was time to see whether he was still with me. I wanted to hear from him, but even more, I wanted confirmation that he was hearing me every time I spoke to him silently, with my eyes closed. And consulting a spiritualist medium didn’t feel like a compromise to my Jewish identity. It was my Jewish mother who’d long ago given me faith in after-death communication.

Just after my father died, on a trip to England, my mom met with a man named Mr. Molinari, a medium at the Hogwarts-esque London College of Psychic Studies (LCPS). At dinner the next day she insisted I visit him as well.

Medium not-so-rare: Once you start looking for them, psychics are everywhere I protested. I was about to be 21 and what had happened seemed so unreal to me—my healthy, 54-year-old father rendered paralyzed and speechless, then dead, of a spontaneous brain hemorrhage—that I had to work constantly to convince myself of the reality of it. If I was ever to "get over it," I couldn't allow myself to believe contact was possible.

A waiter appeared at our table with a silver platter of marzipan fruits. I had always hated the chalky paperweights—simulacra of more delicious things. My mother reached for a "grape," then offered the tray to me.

"Yuck!" I said, "I hate marzipan."

"Fine by me," she said, in a singsong voice, "But Daddy loved it."

"OK," I said, gesturing up to heaven, "Daddy, if you like marzipan, tell me tomorrow."

At LCPS the next day, Mr. Molinari gestured for me to follow him into a musky room on the third floor. "Different mediums work different ways,” he said. “I see things. I am going to close my eyes, and I want you to do the same. Then concentrate on nothing. Just be here and give me a minute. Then I'll tell you what I see."

He had a soft British accent and he didn't seem at all the type of person to be involved with the dead. If I saw him on the street, I probably would've taken him for a small business owner—the kind of man who runs the family sweet shop. I closed my eyes and put my hot palms on my knees, thinking, Please God let this be real.

First, Mr. Molinari saw a woman. He thought it was my grandmother, and she said my apartment needed plants. Disappointing. Then another woman, this one all in black. With her was, according to Mr. Molinari, “Your father.”

Chills. I was a reasonably young girl—anyone would assume both my parents were still living. And my mother had promised she'd told Mr. Molinari nothing. She'd made my appointment over the phone, giving the receptionist just my first name, so as not to give anything away. I stayed silent, waiting for more. He said some cheesy things, the sort of things a person would think a grieving child would need to hear—be strong, follow your heart, your father will always be with you—but then there was a surprise.

"One more thing before you go," said Mr. Molinari, "And I must admit, this has me confused. Your father is holding out a tray of those little fruits Italians make out of almond paste, and he says, "This is not just for proof, but also to remind you to treat yourself once in a while.’ Do you understand what that means?"

Afterlifeville, USA: The gates of Lily Dale Wow, right?

This story has served me many times in the past eleven years, most recently to justify my trip to Lily Dale. Founded in the mid-1800s, this town of small, ramshackle, pastel-colored Victorians—more summer camp than gothic hideaway—about an hour southwest of Buffalo, in Chautauqua County, not far from Lake Erie, is the home of the spiritualist movement. While its members consider themselves a congregation, they are much more focused on connecting with the dead than with God.

Driving there with my friend Betony, who also doesn’t not believe in ghosts, I was sick with anticipation. I had reserved a reading via email and immediately regretted it because, as all my friends said, “She can just Google you then!” But I didn’t care if my medium had access to facts about me—if she said something authentic, I would recognize it.

We rang my medium’s doorbell, but no one stirred. Inside the screen door was a little podium covered in pamphlets with the medium’s headshot and posters listing her upcoming talks, as if she were a life coach rather than a conduit for the dead. I motioned to one of the more ridiculous posters and whispered, “Maybe it’s best if I miss this appointment!”

Just as we were skulking out the screen door, we heard a frantic voice coming from inside. “Just a second! I hear you!” A plump, sixtyish lady with thinning white hair and the face of the fairy godmother in Disney’s Cinderella emerged from the house, radiating heat.

“I was answering some emails because I assumed you had cancelled. You’re late. Which one of you is Rebecca? Come on in. You,” she said, motioning to Betony in an oddly accusatory fashion, “can sit outside here, or you can go over to the Crystal Cove and do some shopping.” She said “Crystal Cove” with the same anticipatory tone one might use for “Barneys Warehouse Sale.”

Betony scurried off and I entered the inner sanctum, which was a heavily calicoed room punctuated by a loud yet ineffective air conditioner. My medium, shiny with sweat, opened the reading with a prayer and asked in a snobbish, world-weary tone whether I wanted to connect with any loved ones. “Of course,” I answered, sounding more hostile than I meant to. “Why else would I be here?”

“Well, I also provide general advice and guidance,” she said, clearly a bit insulted I hadn’t grasped her role as a New-Age shrink.

Getting into the spirit of things: A ghostly urbanite I wish I could say this bumpy beginning was in no way indicative of the amazing insights revealed by my medium as she became a conduit for my father. I wish I could tell you she’d given me news direct from Daddy: he had heard everything I said to him in ICU, he loved my New York apartment, he’d left me a fortune in a Swiss bank account and here was the number.

But our reading, which was five minutes shorter than I had paid for ($60 bucks), consisted of my medium telling me my maternal grandmother was in the room (Rosie is not dead, thank God) along with my brain-injured brother (he’s not dead either!). Then she asked me about my ghostwriting projects in New York and bragged about her own, insisting we compare rates. Finally, she asked me who my agent was.

I left the reading livid. Betony could tell immediately by my expression that my medium had been a sham, but I think we were both surprised by how emotional I was. It was clear I’d really believed I would hear from my dad.

On our second day at Lily Dale, we stopped at a yard sale in front of a church. Among the piles of trinkets, LP’s, old toys and dresses was a solitary 1980’s-album-cover button: a young Billy Joel, leaning against a brick wall. Betony pressed it into my palm and said, “Your dad sent this to you.”

After all the little moments like this—the time I got lost in a part of Queens I’d never been to, only to end up at the cemetery where my dad is interred, the time I put a dollar in a slot machine I knew he’d love, and hit the jackpot—why did I need to pay someone to connect with my father when it was so clear I was already connecting with him myself? Commodifying something this ethereal was vaguely pathetic.

I still believe there is some life beyond this one—I just finally see through the people who claimed to be the gatekeepers to it. I’ll admit that I’m mystified by the persistence of my belief amidst such convincing proof to the contrary. But believing in a dead loved one is just faith, and what is faith if not the refusal to buy what everyone else is selling?

* * *

ALSO IN JEWCY:

Professors Out to Prove the Paranormal
YouTube's Top Psychics
Five Skeptic Blogs for Unbelievers

Rebecca Diliberto has previously covered beloved-but-irrational phenomenons in her stint blogging The Secret. She's previously written about being the child of intermarriage in "The Play-It-Down Jew."