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New NIH chief: Turn science into better care, fast
By Associated Press | Monday, August 17, 2009 | http://www.bostonherald.com | Healthcare
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WASHINGTON — An influential geneticist who wears his faith on his sleeve says that as the new director of the National Institutes of Health he won’t inject his religious convictions into medical research while pushing cutting-edge science into better bedside care.

"The NIH director needs to focus on science," Dr. Francis Collins told The Associated Press on Monday. "I have no religious agenda for the NIH."

In taking the reins of the NIH, Collins — best known for unraveling the human genetic code — said he wants a practical focus for the nation’s premier research agency, that new discoveries may even help save precious health care dollars.

"We should be completely bold about pushing that agenda," Collins said — not just for U.S. health, but for global health, too.

"Here we are at a circumstance where I think our country is seeking maybe to redefine our image a bit in the world, from being the soldier to the world to being perhaps the doctor to the world. I’d like to see that happen," he said, in his first interview before greeting employees of the $30 billion agency.

The Bush administration drew criticism for allowing religious ideology to guide some decision-making, such as curbs on the NIH’s funding of research involving embryonic stem cells.

Collins is well-known for finding common ground between belief in God and science, without letting his evangelical Christian beliefs influence his 15 years of research at the NIH. He led the Human Genome Project that, along with a competing private company, mapped the genetic code that he famously called "the book of human life." Remarkably for Washington, Collins’ team was ahead of schedule and under budget.

The folksy Collins, who explains the complexities of DNA in language the average person can understand, at the time called it "awe-inspiring to realize that we have caught the first glimpse of our o

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science health spirituality

Home Burials Offer an Intimate Alternative
Cheryl Senter for The New York Times

Chuck Lakin assembling a pine coffin in April on his home workbench in Waterville, Me.

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By KATIE ZEZIMA
Published: July 20, 2009

PETERBOROUGH, N.H. — When Nathaniel Roe, 92, died at his 18th-century farmhouse here the morning of June 6, his family did not call a funeral home to handle the arrangements.
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The home funeral for Nathaniel Roe, 92, who died in Peterborough, N.H., on June 6. His family handled the arrangements.
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Mr. Lakin works with a wood plane and a practiced eye.
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Mr. Lakin’s bookcase coffin, which is two seven-inch-deep boxes hinged together.
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Instead, Mr. Roe’s children, like a growing number of people nationwide, decided to care for their father in death as they had in the last months of his life. They washed Mr. Roe’s body, dressed him in his favorite Harrods tweed jacket and red Brooks Brothers tie and laid him on a bed so family members could privately say their last goodbyes.

The next day, Mr. Roe was placed in a pine coffin made by his son, along with a tuft of wool from the sheep he once kept. He was buried on his farm in a grove off a walking path he traversed each day.

“It just seemed like the natural, loving way to do things,” said Jennifer Roe-Ward, Mr. Roe’s granddaughter. “It let him have his dignity.”

Advocates say the number of home funerals, where everything from caring for the dead to the visiting hours to the building of the coffin is done at home, has soared in the

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spirituality

Separation anxiety
A traveling professor chronicles the church-state divide, with results that prove both comedic and unsettling
The author believes the inclusion of the phrase “under God’’ makes the Pledge of Allegiance unconstitutional. The author believes the inclusion of the phrase “under God’’ makes the Pledge of Allegiance unconstitutional. (Chris Clark/The Grand Rapids Press via Associated Press)
By Joe Rosenbloom
July 5, 2009

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Jay Wexler, a law professor at Boston University, lectures on church-state issues of sufficient constitutional weight to reach the US Supreme Court. During a sabbatical, he sets out to parlay his lecture notes into a book that even people who would rather drink hemlock than read Supreme Court opinions might enjoy.
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HOLY HULLABALOOS: A Road Trip to the Battlegrounds of the Church/State Wars
By Jay Wexler
Beacon, 251 pp., paperback, $20

If the project sounds problematic, with great yawn-inducing potential, Wexler pulls it off stunningly in “Holy Hullabaloos: A Road Trip to the Battlegrounds of the Church/State Wars.’’ To augment his lecture notes, he embarks on a series of road trips to places “where landmark church/state cases had started.’’

He travels about the country, interviewing people who are linked to a dozen or so of the landmark cases. He calls on worshipers at the CloudWater Zendo Buddhist temple in Cleveland (the city instituted a school-voucher program that the Supreme Court upheld in 2002). He interviews the chaplain of the US Senate (the object of several futile court challenges to the prayer that opens its sessions). And so on.

The tour-guide device might have bombed in a lesser writer’s hands. It works for Wexler because of his gift for filtering arcane legal sludge into clear explanations, his keen eye for detail, and his self-mocking, zanily irreverent sensibility.

Between the comic moments, Wexler critiques how the Supreme Court has defined the sep

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Arts and Culture,Catholicism,Evangelicalism,Islam,Judaism
Religion thriller: Michael Jackson & faith
Email|Link|Comments (16) Posted by Michael Paulson July 1, 2009 03:18 PM

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I was wondering how long I could hold out before blogging about Michael Jackson, and now I know the answer: six days.

In those days since the King of Pop died, I've now seen so many items about his faith that my head is starting to spin. He was a Jehovah's Witness. A Muslim. He accepted Jesus before he died. The Vatican loved him, but was that right? There's even a Jewish angle of sorts. Not to mention the unending discussion of what it means to call him an icon, or an idol. Some folks have suggested that his funeral will shed some light on his final faith practices, but I'm not holding out much hope for that.

Here is a brief Michael Jackson religion roundup. Make of it what you will:


* Jackson was raised a Jehovah's Witness, and there have been a variety of unconfirmed reports that at some point he was disfellowshipped by the Witnesses. Back in 2000, Jackson penned an essay for Beliefnet about his relationship to the Sabbath, and in it he discussed doorbelling to preach for the Witnesses:

"Sundays were my day for 'Pioneering,' the term used for the missionary work that Jehovah's Witnesses do. We would spend the day in the suburbs of Southern California, going door to door or making the rounds of a shopping mall, distributing our Watchtower magazine. I continued my pioneering work for years and years after my career had been launched."


* Jackson's brother Jermaine is a Muslim, and there were some reports during Michael's life that he, too, converted to Islam. The Times of London rounds up the evidence in an item headlined, "Was Michael Jackson Muslim?"; there was also a roundup on Global Voices. Imam Zaid Shakir blogged about Jackson's conversion to Islam, and then retracted his blog item, concluding, "There have been many reports throughout the media con

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spirituality entertainment

Vatican’s Celestial Eye, Seeking Not Angels but Data

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By GEORGE JOHNSON
Published: June 22, 2009

MOUNT GRAHAM, Ariz. — Fauré’s “Requiem” is playing in the background, followed by the Kronos Quartet. Every so often the music is interrupted by an electromechanical arpeggio — like a jazz riff on a clarinet — as the motors guiding the telescope spin up and down. A night of galaxy gazing is about to begin at the Vatican’s observatory on Mount Graham.
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An image of a spiral galaxy 102 million light-years from Earth taken by the Vatican Advanced Technology Telescope in Arizona.
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The Vatican observatory at Castel Gandolfo, the pope’s summer residence, in 1946.

“Got it. O.K., it’s happy,” says Christopher J. Corbally, the Jesuit priest who is vice director of the Vatican Observatory Research Group, as he sits in the control room making adjustments. The idea is not to watch for omens or angels but to do workmanlike astronomy that fights the perception that science and Catholicism necessarily conflict.

Last year, in an opening address at a conference in Rome, called “Science 400 Years After Galileo Galilei,” Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the secretary of state of the Vatican, praised the church’s old antagonist as “a man of faith who saw nature as a book written by God.” In May, as part of the International Year of Astronomy, a Jesuit cultural center in Florence conducted “a historical, philosophical and theological re-examination” of the Galileo affair. But in the effort to rehabilitate the church’s image, nothing speaks louder than a paper by a Vatican astronomer in, sa

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science space spirituality

The Joy of Less
By Pico Iyer

“The beat of my heart has grown deeper, more active, and yet more peaceful, and it is as if I were all the time storing up inner riches…My [life] is one long sequence of inner miracles.” The young Dutchwoman Etty Hillesum wrote that in a Nazi transit camp in 1943, on her way to her death at Auschwitz two months later. Towards the end of his life, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “All I have seen teaches me to trust the creator for all I have not seen,” though by then he had already lost his father when he was 7, his first wife when she was 20 and his first son, aged 5. In Japan, the late 18th-century poet Issa is celebrated for his delighted, almost child-like celebrations of the natural world. Issa saw four children die in infancy, his wife die in childbirth, and his own body partially paralyzed.

In the corporate world, I always knew there was some higher position I could attain, which meant that, like Zeno’s arrow, I was guaranteed never to arrive and always to remain dissatisfied.

I’m not sure I knew the details of all these lives when I was 29, but I did begin to guess that happiness lies less in our circumstances than in what we make of them, in every sense. “There is nothing either good or bad,” I had heard in high school, from Hamlet, “but thinking makes it so.” I had been lucky enough at that point to stumble into the life I might have dreamed of as a boy: a great job writing on world affairs for Time magazine, an apartment (officially at least) on Park Avenue, enough time and money to take vacations in Burma, Morocco, El Salvador. But every time I went to one of those places, I noticed that the people I met there, mired in difficulty and often warfare, seemed to have more energy and even optimism than the friends I’d grown up with in privileged, peaceful Santa Barbara, Calif., many of whom were on their fourth marriages and seeing a therapist every day. Though I knew that poverty certainly didn’t buy happiness, I wasn’t convinced that money did either.

So — as post-1960s cl

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spirituality

The Joy of Less
By Pico Iyer

“The beat of my heart has grown deeper, more active, and yet more peaceful, and it is as if I were all the time storing up inner riches…My [life] is one long sequence of inner miracles.” The young Dutchwoman Etty Hillesum wrote that in a Nazi transit camp in 1943, on her way to her death at Auschwitz two months later. Towards the end of his life, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “All I have seen teaches me to trust the creator for all I have not seen,” though by then he had already lost his father when he was 7, his first wife when she was 20 and his first son, aged 5. In Japan, the late 18th-century poet Issa is celebrated for his delighted, almost child-like celebrations of the natural world. Issa saw four children die in infancy, his wife die in childbirth, and his own body partially paralyzed.

In the corporate world, I always knew there was some higher position I could attain, which meant that, like Zeno’s arrow, I was guaranteed never to arrive and always to remain dissatisfied.

I’m not sure I knew the details of all these lives when I was 29, but I did begin to guess that happiness lies less in our circumstances than in what we make of them, in every sense. “There is nothing either good or bad,” I had heard in high school, from Hamlet, “but thinking makes it so.” I had been lucky enough at that point to stumble into the life I might have dreamed of as a boy: a great job writing on world affairs for Time magazine, an apartment (officially at least) on Park Avenue, enough time and money to take vacations in Burma, Morocco, El Salvador. But every time I went to one of those places, I noticed that the people I met there, mired in difficulty and often warfare, seemed to have more energy and even optimism than the friends I’d grown up with in privileged, peaceful Santa Barbara, Calif., many of whom were on their fourth marriages and seeing a therapist every day. Though I knew that poverty certainly didn’t buy happiness, I wasn’t convinced that money did either.

So — as post-1960s cl

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spirituality

Young Muslims struggle in 2 worlds
College graduates worry that Islam seen as dangerous

By Michelle Boorstein, Washington Post | June 6, 2009

WASHINGTON - Many had just entered high school in the days after the Sept. 11 attacks and now, eight years later, they are leaving college and entering the workforce. Young Muslims are part of a generation that appears markedly different from their parents in career choices, assimilation, and views of their religion.

Their youth has often been affected by the experiences of family members who have contended with the mistrust and wariness many Americans have of Islam. They are struggling with how to live their faith, from how to dress to whom to date, in a broader American society that frequently views them with suspicion.

Pollsters and researchers are just beginning to study this group of young people, almost three-fourths of whom are first- or second-generation American. One of the group's biggest issues, Altaf Husain said, is their concern that Islam is viewed as dangerous.

"There will be a silent majority among Muslim youth who say: 'I'm just not up for that. I won't be my religion's spokesperson. I'll just be spiritual in my private life,' " said Husain, a popular activist and social worker who writes about Muslim youth and speaks on college campuses.

Still others, however, are finding new avenues of activism.

Many of their parents came to the United States to study engineering, medicine, and the sciences. But many in this generation are drawn to politics, journalism, and public service, researchers said. The aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks and the Bush administration's counterterrorism policies, which many Muslims opposed, have motivated many of them in their 20s to pursue newly established public-policy internships and fellowships created in government and the private sector.

"We're realizing we don't have the voice we need in American politics," said Nadia Sheikh, 22, who graduated last month from Georgetown University and hopes to go to law school. She h

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spirituality society

Thomas Berry, Writer and Lecturer With a Mission for Mankind, Dies at 94
By ANDREW C. REVKIN

Thomas Berry, a Roman Catholic priest who called himself a “geologian” and whose influential writings were an early call to humanity to save nature in order to save itself, died in his birthplace, Greensboro, N.C., on Monday. He was 94.

His death was announced by his foundation on its Web site, www.thomasberry.org.

Dr. Berry’s books and lectures inspired a devoted lineage of academicians and environmentalists to explore the interface of religion, human nature and ecology. Although he had a wide-ranging love of religious traditions, he preferred not to be referred to as a priest, said Mary Evelyn Tucker, the co-director of the Yale Forum on Religion and Ecology and Dr. Berry’s longtime editor.

Dr. Berry left the monastic life for decades of study of global cultural and religious history and then, beginning in the 1980s, wrote a string of books relating cultural and spiritual evolution to the natural history of the planet and the universe.

“Thomas Berry was the earliest and most important voice to describe the profound importance of the disconnection between humans and the natural world, and what that could mean for the future of our species,” Richard Louv, an educator and author of “Last Child in the Woods,” said Wednesday in an e-mail message.

Dr. Berry believed that humanity, after generations spent glorying in itself and despoiling the world, was poised to embrace its role as a vital part of the larger, interdependent “communion of subjects” in the cosmos. The result, he wrote, would be a new era, which he called the Ecozoic, following 65 million years of the Cenozoic era.

In this new era, he hoped for concrete changes like population control (he criticized the Catholic Church for not doing more in this regard) and respecting and preserving the habitats of all living things as a fundamental right.

As Dr. Berry explained in a 2006 interview with the filmmaker Caroline Webb, “From here on, the primary judgment of

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spirituality

The call to have a family and serve God

By Jeff Jacoby, Globe Columnist | May 24, 2009

'I would like to have a family and at the same time serve God."

By all accounts, the man who recently spoke those words is more than capable of doing both. The Rev. Alberto Cutié, a 40-year-old Roman Catholic priest, built a devoted international following through his service as pastor of the St. Francis de Sales parish in Miami Beach, his immensely popular Spanish-language radio and television ministry, and his widely distributed advice column. "Father Oprah," he was nicknamed, both for his gifts as a broadcaster and his empathy for the struggles so many face when it comes to love, sex, and relationships.

Such struggles, it turns out, were of more than just academic interest to the telegenic priest. Cutié's career imploded this month after a magazine published photos showing him kissing and embracing a brunette on the beach. In the uproar that ensued, Cutié admitted that he and the woman were in love, and that for nearly a year he had been struggling to resolve his feelings for her with his commitment to the church. The Archdiocese of Miami had little choice but to suspend him from his parish and media duties, and Cutié is now faced with an agonizing decision. Does he leave the priestly vocation that means so much to him and for which he has shown such flair? Or does he break with the woman he loves and yearns to share his life with?

Inevitably, the scandal in Miami has reopened the longstanding debate over celibacy and the Catholic priesthood. Cutié himself has said that he does not want to become an anti-celibacy "poster boy" - "I believe that celibacy is good, and that it's a good commitment to God," he told CBS - but it is hard not to wonder whether the Catholic Church loses much more than it gains by continuing to deny its priests the blessings of marriage.

Certainly many Catholics have their doubts. According to a recent Rasmussen poll, US Catholics are almost evenly divided on the issue - 40 percent say priests

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spirituality

For gay couples, married matters
Most say they feel more committed, accepted by peers

By Stephen Smith, Globe Staff | May 24, 2009

Five years after the first same-sex weddings in Massachusetts, gay and lesbian couples express deeply traditional reasons for deciding to wed and cite equally conventional benefits flowing from marriage, according to a study being released this week.

A significant majority of the 558 gay men and women surveyed said that since marrying, they feel more committed to their spouses, more accepted in their community, and more likely to be open about their sexual orientation at work.

The survey indicates that there is something universal about the legal protections and social advantages afforded by the institution of marriage, said the study's authors from the University of California, Los Angeles as well as independent researchers. And it suggests, they said, that a ritual once scorned even by many same-sex couples has the power to ease discrimination.

"This really helps us confirm and makes us understand why same-sex couples demand marriage - if it's just about the legal rights, why wouldn't they be happy with civil partnerships?" said Stephanie Coontz author of "Marriage, A History."

"They want access to that word that is so highly valued by our society and by other people.

"It is one thing not to invite your child's girlfriend or boyfriend to dinner," said Coontz, a professor at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash. "It is quite another thing not to invite the spouse."

Same-sex marriages began in Massachusetts on May 17, 2004, after the Supreme Judicial Court declared that gay and lesbian couples had the right to wed. The ruling ignited a political and social maelstrom in Massachusetts and beyond, but since then four other states - Connecticut, Iowa, Maine, and Vermont - have extended marriage rights to same-sex couples. Lawmakers in New Hampshire are currently debating whether to make their state the next to do so.

The study was prepared and paid for by UCLA's William

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spirituality psychology

Big Pulpit
By N. R. KLEINFIELD

THE sloped main sanctuary fits 3,195 and could pass for a concert hall: cushioned chairs, a band, almost no religious adornments. The spire-less exterior is so utilitarian that when it first appeared in this East New York, Brooklyn, neighborhood, across from auto fixit shops, people thought it was the telephone company.

By 8 a.m. on Sunday, a jaunty worship song got the faithful swaying, clapping, rocking the house. Hallelujah! Then the offering and mellower music and bulletins about bus service. The goings-on shimmered on three big screens, interrupted, when necessary, by alerts for parents to report to the Kiddie Kingdom.

And then the Rev. A. R. Bernard, sheathed in a pinstriped suit, climbed the steps to the plexiglass pulpit of the Christian Cultural Center, the nondenominational church he founded nearly 30 years ago with 20 folding chairs that has swelled into the city’s largest, with 31,600 members. He fiddled with his laptop and Bible and looked out. He began to talk.

Thin-faced and scholarly, the pastor slid back in an upholstered chair beside his desk. It was a midweek afternoon, and he was talking about marketing, about customer service. Because what he does is peddle a product. Not a proprietary product, of course, but the same product as every minister: a relationship with God.

“We all get our meat from the same warehouse,” he said. “Lamb is lamb. Beef is beef. It’s how we prepare it.”

His upbeat brand of evangelism is what brings more than 10,000 predominantly black middle-class worshippers to the eastern edge of Brooklyn each week. His gift for translating Scripture into common-sense relevance “where the Bible meets the road that we walk on today,” as he put it, has produced an organization with an operating budget of $18.5 million on an 11.5-acre campus. The sweep of it all has elevated him, at 55, to one of the nation’s spiritual pillars: head of the Council of Churches of the City of New York, courted by politicians, listened to on radio and television by legi

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spirituality

For sure, no one believed that the world would cure itself of religious mistrust simply because Khulood Saleh brought along a copy of the Koran that once belonged to her Yemeni grandmother, or because Ben Davar came with a wine cup for Jewish rituals that his great-grandmother had bought in Russia long ago. Nor would universal healing arrive with the Sabbath candlesticks from Poland that had been in Rina Lubit’s family for five generations or with the khimar, a scarf to cover a Muslim woman’s face, that was handed down from Tayssir Abdullah’s great-grandmother in Yemen.
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But just as surely, there was every reason to feel that the world stood a chance of becoming a better place if more people were like these schoolchildren who gathered Wednesday evening at the Museum of Jewish Heritage — A Living Memorial to the Holocaust, in Battery Park City.

For the last few years, the museum has sponsored a program to bring together Jewish and Muslim children, most of them on the cusp of becoming teenagers. The idea is as simple in theory as it is difficult to put into practice: breed understanding and tolerance at an early age. Make “the other” not seem so other.

Roughly a dozen students each from the fairly small Solomon Schechter School of Manhattan and the even smaller Islamic Leadership School in the Bronx joined throughout the academic year for a series of field trips and other events. Together, they went to a synagogue and a mosque. They studied customs and artifacts important to each other’s religion.

As it turned out, the museum event took place a couple of hours before four men described as Muslim would-be jihadists were arrested in the Bronx and charged with conspiring to bomb synagogues and attack military targets. On Thursday, Shireena Drammeh — who, with her

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spirituality

A touch of home
At Bangor's airport, the gateway back for many troops, greeters make sure they get the warmest of welcomes

By David Filipov, Globe Staff | May 24, 2009

BANGOR - As a chaplain in the US Army's First Cavalry Division, Captain Edward Tolliver just spent nearly a year in Iraq as the guy to whom soldiers came for advice, comfort, or just a welcome face. But on a recent May evening in Bangor International Airport, Tolliver was the one receiving the comforting embrace.

Moments after the chaplain had landed on American soil for the first time in 11 months, Kay Lebowitz, 93, spotted Tolliver tucking into a Maine lobster roll. She rushed over, wrapped him in her firm hug, told him she was proud of him, and added, as she has been saying to troops in this airport almost every day for the past six years: "Welcome to Bangor!"

America's wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have receded into the background of a country troubled by domestic economic matters. Yellow ribbons have largely disappeared from trees. Support-our-troops magnets have disappeared from most cars. And men and women in uniform filter through many airports unnoticed.

Not in Bangor, the easternmost major US airport, and a stop for planes transporting troops to and from both war zones. Here, Lebowitz and a diehard band of volunteers have made it their business to greet every single soldier, Marine, sailor, and airman or woman who passes through the gates for the layover. Since 2003, when the Maine Troop Greeters, as they call themselves, began their vigil, they calculate that they have cheered, chatted up, and shaken the hands of more than 841,000 troops.

Some of the greeters are World War II veterans who want the current troops to experience the kind of welcome they received more than 60 years ago. Some are Vietnam veterans who want to ensure that today's active servicemen and women are spared the indifferent, and often angry, welcome some of them endured when they touched down on US soil. Some are military parents seeking to compensate for the l

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spirituality psychology

Gay Marriage Slow to Draw an Opposition in N.Y.
By JEREMY W. PETERS

ALBANY — Assemblyman Dov Hikind of Brooklyn was feeling distressed.

The State Assembly had just voted to legalize same-sex marriage, after gay rights groups flooded the Legislature with visits, phone calls and e-mail messages. Where, he wanted to know, was the other side?

“Wake up! Where are you?” Mr. Hikind, an outspoken opponent of gay marriage, said in an interview. “It’s the bottom of the ninth, two outs, and you’re losing — big time.”

As the Legislature considers whether to make New York the next state to legalize same-sex marriage, social conservatives have been largely missing from the debate in Albany.

The interest groups working to legalize marriage for gay couples have been laying the groundwork for more than four years, lobbying lawmakers and funneling hundreds of thousands of dollars to their campaigns. And last week they began running television commercials in three of the state’s largest media markets promoting same-sex marriage as an equal rights issue.

Their opponents, who are just beginning to organize, say they feel outgunned and underfinanced.

The difficulties in New York echo those that conservatives have faced throughout the Northeast. Over the last six weeks, Vermont, Maine and New Hampshire have all moved to allow gay couples to wed.

The region has been challenging for opponents of same-sex marriage, in part, because the measures are being decided by state legislatures — not voter referendums where the opponents’ ability to motivate large numbers of voters, rather than influence institutional players, has been an advantage.

“It is the lack of a proposition or referendum,” the Rev. Samuel Rodriguez, president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, said. “There is a disconnect within the constituencies. Many of them really have no idea how to present their grievances.”

In New York, the National Organization for Marriage, whose resources have been stretched thin from other campaigns in the Northeas

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spirituality

Dan Brown’s America
By ROSS DOUTHAT

The movie treatment of his novel, “Angels and Demons,” is cleaning up at the box office this week. The sequel to “The DaVinci Code,” due out in November, might buoy the publishing industry through the recession. And if you want to understand the state of American religion, you need to understand why so many people love Dan Brown.

It isn’t just that he knows how to keep the pages turning. That’s what it takes to sell a million novels. But if you want to sell a 100 million, you need to preach as well as entertain — to present a fiction that can be read as fact, and that promises to unlock the secrets of history, the universe and God along the way.

Brown is explicit about this mission. He isn’t a serious novelist, but he’s a deadly serious writer: His thrilling plots, he’s said, are there to make the books’ didacticism go down easy, so that readers don’t realize till the end “how much they are learning along the way.” He’s working in the same genre as Harlan Coben and James Patterson, but his real competitors are ideologues like Ayn Rand, and spiritual gurus like Eckhart Tolle and Deepak Chopra. He’s writing thrillers, but he’s selling a theology.

Brown’s message has been called anti-Catholic, but that’s only part of the story. True, his depiction of the Roman Church’s past constitutes a greatest hits of anti-Catholicism, with slurs invented by 19th-century Protestants jostling for space alongside libels fabricated by 20th-century Wiccans. (If he targeted Judaism or Islam this way, one suspects that no publisher would touch him.)

But Brown doesn’t have the soul of a true-believing Enemy of the Faith. Deep down, he has a fondness for the ordinary, well-meaning sort of Catholic, his libels against their ancestors notwithstanding. He’s even sympathetic to the religious yearnings of his Catholic villains — including, yes, the murderous albino monks.

This explains why both “The Da Vinci Code” and “Angels and Demons” end with a big anti-Catholic reveal (Jesus had kids with Mary Ma

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spirituality books

Words of Wisdom
A small Somerville publisher helps the Dalai Lama share his teachings

By Johnny Diaz, Globe Staff | May 17, 2009

SOMERVILLE - Walk inside the offices of Wisdom Publications in Davis Square and the Dalai Lama's smiling face greets you in every room. The Tibetan Buddhist leader's image adorns book covers, photographs, and posters inside this nonprofit, which is literally a publishing house: The offices are in a two-story 1920 mansard-roof Victorian house.

Welcome to the Dalai Lama's primary publisher in Boston and one of the largest English-language Buddhist-dedicated literary companies in the world, selling 200,000 books a year from a catalog of 300 titles in 34 languages. The Dalai Lama's books are regular top 10 best-sellers in the company's collection: In all, Wisdom has published 14 books with the Dalai Lama, who is believed to be a manifestation of the Buddha of compassion and a reincarnation of 13 previous Dalai Lamas.

"He is our biggest celebrity author," said Tim McNeill, Wisdom's publisher and chief executive who this month released the Dalai Lama's newest book, "The Middle Way; Faith Grounded in Reason," which was hand-delivered to the spiritual leader during his recent speaking engagement at Gillette Stadium in Foxborough.

Although McNeill knows the Dalai Lama and even had him as a houseguest years ago in Brookline, the two maintain a long-distance but collegial professional relationship. McNeill speaks regularly with the Dalai Lama's principal English translator, Thupten Jinpa, on literary projects.

"You don't hang out with the Dalai Lama and have beers," joked McNeill, 58. "He's arguably the head of state. Is he friendly? Does he recognize me? Did he say a prayer for me when my mother was dying (of cancer)? Yes. I consider him a teacher of mine."

McNeill first crossed paths with the Dalai Lama in 1972 in the city of Dharamsala, India. In his early 20s, McNeill was traveling through Asia and Ireland when a fellow traveler suggested he visit India's community of Tibetan monks. I

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Hopes and Habits Persevere at Churches Gone, but Not Destroyed
By PAUL VITELLO and CHRISTINE HAUGHNEY

During the peak of the real estate boom, one of New York’s largest landowners unloaded more than $100 million worth of property — and might have sold more if not for the parishioners who clung to their churches and blocked the bulldozers.

The seller was the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York, which closed more than two dozen houses of worship and schools between 2003 and 2008. It sold development rights to a handful of properties, leased others and padlocked the rest in an effort to narrow a local budget gap, while confronting nationwide trends like low attendance, a priest shortage, the rising cost of maintaining century-old buildings, and a new demand for churches in the far exurbs.

Some people watched as their old churches were demolished.

Many more enlisted help from lawyers, politicians and historic preservationists, and in many cases wrestled the archdiocese to a Pyrrhic standstill. Today, their churches — a half-dozen in Manhattan and one in the Bronx — still stand, but are locked tight, unused, while the altars, pews, statuary and stained-glass windows of some have been removed piece by piece for use in other churches.

None of this necessarily changes now just because a new archbishop, the affable and ever-smiling Timothy M. Dolan, has taken over from Cardinal Edward M. Egan, the flinty administrator who engineered the archdiocese’s “consolidation,” as the sell-off and closings were called.

But people tied by mystic cords to aging churches — people who pray on sidewalks in front of padlocked church doors for two years of Sundays, for example — take heart according to intangible calculations of their own.

“Look! He’s waving! That’s more than I expected,” said Zaida Rodriguez, turning to a friend outside St. Patrick’s Cathedral last month, gauging what she hoped was Archbishop Dolan’s positive reaction to her sign: “Our Lady Queen of Angels in East Harlem Welcomes Our New Archbishop Timothy Dolan

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Angels, demons in O'Malley's realm
Film version of novel draws more tourists to cardinal's other church

By Michael Paulson, Globe Staff | May 15, 2009

The scene is not one any cardinal wants to consider: a prince of the church, his bare chest branded with a cultish symbol, burned to death as he hangs spread-eagle above the altar in a Roman church.

But, in a strange confluence of popular culture and Boston Catholicism, that very scene in this weekend's grisly blockbuster movie, "Angels & Demons," takes place in a charming baroque church in Rome, Santa Maria della Vittoria, which is overseen by Cardinal Sean P. O'Malley, the Roman Catholic archbishop of Boston.

O'Malley, like many Catholic prelates, has taken a generally dim view of the wildly successful Dan Brown oeuvre, which portrays the Catholic Church as a powerful and monied institution at odds with history and science. The Vatican has been less critical of "Angels & Demons" than Brown's more famous bestseller, "The Da Vinci Code," in part because its subject matter is less theological and in part to avoid generating free publicity for the film.

O'Malley's posture toward author Dan Brown (a real-life resident of Exeter, N.H.) and Robert Langdon (the fictional hero of both books who supposedly teaches "religious iconology" at Harvard) is more complicated. Although the cardinal has called the books outrageous, his church in Rome, which is somewhat off the beaten path despite housing a spectacular and rapturous Bernini sculpture, also benefits from their success, because tourists donate money.

But the benefit goes only so far.

"I am not getting any royalties," O'Malley noted wryly.

"It was only after I took possession of the church that the friars told me that they were on the 'Angels & Demons' tour and that there were streams of Americans coming through the church, more than ever," O'Malley said in an interview this week. "If people are visiting the church, I don't think that's a bad thing. I just hope they don't believe a lot of the things that Dan B

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Brandeis calling

By Alex Beam, Globe Staff | May 15, 2009

It's a buoyant feeling to worship in a church that is full, packed, bursting at the seams. Not a very common experience these days, as you know.

This month a friend told me that Father Walter Cuenin, who was forced to leave the large Our Lady Help of Christians parish near my home, had set up shop at Brandeis University. She said his new, small congregation was thriving. I went. It was.

For obvious reasons. Cuenin, who has twinkling blue eyes and a Marine Corps-style brushcut, is a charismatic preacher, the rare man or woman who speaks from the pulpit and commands your attention. I couldn't help thinking: liberal priest hounded from his job by the Boston Archdiocese lands on his feet at Brandies, which calls itself "the only nonsectarian, Jewish-sponsored college or university in the country." Who woulda thunk it!

Yet there it is. "I'm very happy at Brandeis," Cuenin told me a few days after I worshiped with him at Brandeis's Bethlehem chapel. (Brandeis's three chapels - Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish - were built around a pond on the Waltham Upper Campus "in such a way so that when the sun sets, no one chapel casts a shadow on another," according to the university's website.) "The university invests a lot in the students' spiritual life," Cuenin continued. "There are Protestant and Muslim chaplains here, as well as rabbis."

Ministering to students has its own challenges, of course. Cuenin officiates at a 7 p.m. Sunday Mass as well as at a 10 a.m. service, "because most of the kids are asleep in the mornings. When they say, 'Let's meet at 10,' they generally mean 10 o'clock at night, which is sometimes tough to arrange."

In addition to the chaplaincy, Cuenin also helps arrange panels and seminars on such subjects as "Interfaith Dating" - a hot topic - and "We Are What We Eat," a forum on dietary restrictions in different religions. Cuenin has a long track record of interfaith work, which meshes well with his Brandeis assignment.

Working with hi

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