Faith

They gathered in the shadow of the Cathedral Basilica of SS. Peter and Paul, Philadelphia's main Catholic church, in an amen chorus of support for nuns. "For Sister Marie Timothy, who assured me I didn't have an attitude problem and that I was a strong woman in the making," said a school nurse. "For Sister Evelyn, who put my feet on the path of demonstrating in Washington in 1972," said a baby boomer. "To Sister Mary Paul, for teaching us the mysteries of sex in middle school!"

So many parents and alumni of St. Denis Catholic School in Havertown supported merging with friendly CYO rival Annunciation B.V.M., the marriage should have gone off without a hitch. Instead, parishioners hoping to embrace the past and future in a name were told the regional school would honor the late Cardinal John Foley. The decision was, in their pastor's words, "nonnegotiable. " Children voted on a mascot, only to have their choices (Cardinals, Falcons, or Phoenixes)

It was a chilly fall day, so Brother Lewis Wilmer lit a fire in the stove. His intentions were good, but the stove, apparently, was not. Smoke filled the room, and the first meeting of what was to become St. John's African Methodist Episcopal Church in Wayne ended abruptly. The fire of faith burned a bit more efficiently in the hearts of the seven or eight devout believers who had gathered that day in a public meeting hall on the corner of Lancaster and Pembroke Avenues. Undaunted, they went on to establish their church in Wayne's working-class black community.

As people across the region gather to worship this weekend, many will utter prayers of thanks that their church, temple or tabernacle is still standing. They are luckier than many worshippers in the South. There, burned-out shells are all that's left of more than 40 black and multiracial churches destroyed by arson. These outrages have prompted many acts of goodness. Volunteers are clearing away debris and sharing their churches. Architects and engineers are offering their services.

Bill Maher demands proof. What he gets as he spans the globe interviewing religious fundamentalists of various faiths are testimonials offering no tangible evidence of a deity. Don't tell him it's called faith precisely because there is no tangible evidence. The millennial incarnation of Doubting Thomas, Maher - controversialist and host of HBO's Real Time - is a devout skeptic. And he is undeterred. In Religulous (rhymes with ridiculous ), he impiously demands that true believers - Christian, Jew, Mormon, Muslim, even the pothead priest at Cannabis Ministry in Amsterdam - tell him why they believe.

One of the many fascinating things about evolution is that it generates disputes that can help us all better understand what science is and how it differs from religion or other areas of human endeavor. Just such an enlightening dispute cropped up recently between two readers who were kind enough to let me share some of their correspondence. It all started when Elisa Winterstein wrote a letter to The Inquirer, stating that scientists rely on faith just as religious people do by accepting the idea of abiogenesis - the notion that life arose from non-living matter.

George W. Dunham's Sept. 15 response to the imaginary outrage of evolution theory is the usual denial and fall-back on accepted authority. He starts out by seeing a need for a counter opinion, then tries to discredit opinion in general. He seems to be trying to make out that his faith is fact and that everyone else's fact is faith. The purpose of any theory in science is to account for what is observed, using what information is then available. Even an incomplete theory is deemed better than none.

With those words recently on Facebook, Anne Rice delivered a wake-up call for organized religion. The question is whether it will be recognized as such. "I remain committed to Christ as always," she wrote, "but not to being 'Christian' or to being part of Christianity. It's simply impossible for me to 'belong' to this quarrelsome, hostile, disputatious, and deservedly infamous group. " The author, famed for her vampire novels, made a much-publicized return to the Catholicism of her youth after years of calling herself an atheist.

Like many atheists, Stuart Burgh (letters, April 17) reveals an almost complete ignorance of Christianity and faith. Only a person unaware of the Reformation would cite the King James Bible as authority for the Roman Catholic Church, as this was the translation of King James I, a bitter enemy of Catholicism. And "Sunday" derives from the Germanic goddess of the sun, Sunna, not Ra, an Egyptian god. Also, the so-called "gospel" of Judas is rejected by Christians due to its having been written centuries after the death of Jesus, while the New Testament canon was completed by 100 A.D. (And Judas admitted his guilt in Christ's death by committing suicide.

INSIDE JAROMIR Jagr's locker stall, in the bowels of the Wells Fargo Center and any arena where the Flyers play, a small memento is wrapped in blue felt. It is a trifold, no more than 6 inches in length. It sits next to Jagr's hockey tape, stick wax, and various weights and braces and training contraptions. It does not stand out, except for the shine reflecting off the gilded hand-painted faces of the Eastern Orthodox Church's Holy Trinity, and the fact that religious icons in hockey dressing rooms are rarer than Stanley Cup-clinching goals.

It turns out that there is at least one question on which Mitt Romney is not a flip-flopper: He has a utopian view of what an unfettered, lightly taxed market economy can achieve. He would never put it this way, of course, but his approach looks forward by looking backward to the late 19th century, when government let market forces rip and a conservative Supreme Court swept aside almost every effort to write rules for the economic game. This magical capitalism is the centerpiece of Romney's campaign, and it may prove to be his undoing.

A little more than two years after 9/11, I went to a meeting of folks looking to promote Muslim-Jewish reconciliation. The December night was cold, icy, and wet, and the mosque where we met, which had been a tire factory, still looked like one, complete with a rubble-strewn parking lot. I suppose there were about six or eight of us there, not really sure where to go or what we were going to do; a lot was made up as we went along. It was as grassroots a movement as you will ever find.

The new Broadway musical "Leap of Faith," which opened Thursday night, is really "The Music Man" in a revival tent. A con-artist comes to a backwater town and in this case, he's not a phony musician, he's a phony preacher. And he doesn't get the whole town involved in a marching band, he turns them into a band of believers who march to his collection plate. And there you have it — a formulaic musical right down to the easy-to-see love affair that will develop between the preacher man and the no-nonsense woman who's the town sheriff and his nemesis, the boilerplate subplot that involves trouble and the unrealistic ooey-gooey ending.

A deeply offensive comparison I found the commentary "Film's dystopia rings familiar" (Friday) deeply offensive. To compare President Obama's administration, which is trying to bring better health care to all of our citizens and to prevent banks from using our savings in very risky financial deals, to a regime that requires children to kill each other is beyond the pale. It is on the same level as those who have called Obama a Hitler. The author seems to have a searing personal hatred for Obama, not a reasoned argument against his policies.

WASHINGTON - He was described as the "evil genius" of the Nixon administration, and spent the better part of a year in prison for a Watergate-related conviction. His proclamations after his release, that he was a new man, redeemed by his religious faith, were met with more than skepticism by those angered at the abuses he had perpetrated as one of Richard Nixon's hatchet men. But Charles "Chuck" Colson spent the next 35 years steadfast in his efforts to evangelize to a part of society scorned just as he was. And he became known perhaps just as much for his efforts to minister to prison inmates as for his infamy with Watergate.

People lose their faith while they're in college. Or so former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum contends. Santorum, who is challenging Mitt Romney in the Keystone State's Republican presidential primary this month, has claimed that "62 percent of kids who enter college with some sort of faith commitment leave without it. " Surveys do show that young people increasingly claim no religious affiliation, although they also show weakened faith among...

What would happen to gasoline prices if commodities traders investing hundreds of billions of dollars could bet only that oil prices could go one direction - up - in the future? If your response is that no one in his right mind would design a market like that, you'd only be partly correct. You'd be right because it would mess up the market, big time, and be a recipe for volatility. Oil prices would regularly be pushed up beyond the natural results of supply and demand - the fundamental forces that, in balance, are supposed to produce what economists call efficient pricing.

THERE HAS never been a time when I didn't think of myself as Catholic. When my father died at the age of 43 from a virulent form of cancer, and a lady at our local parish sternly said, "It's God's will, you need to accept it," I wasn't tempted to leave the church. I just left that parish. When my feminist college friends told me that Mass had "cult-like" aspects, I reminded them that raising Lanterns and chanting in Greek (Bryn Mawr traditions) were not like meetings of the 4-H Club, either.

LAHORE, Pakistan - It was barely 4 a.m. when 19-year-old Rinkal Kumari disappeared from her home in a small village in Pakistan's southern Sindh province. When her parents awoke, they found only her slippers and a scarf outside the door. A few hours later her father got a call telling him that his daughter, a Hindu, had converted to Islam to marry a Muslim boy. Only days later, Seema Bibi, a Christian woman in the province of Punjab, was kidnapped along with her four children after her husband couldn't repay a loan to a large landlord.