House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her counterpart, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, have pledged to fellow Democrats, in hardly uncertain terms, to do their best to end the party’s marathon nominating war, like, yesterday—at least, certainly before it reaches the national convention in August.

On a San Francisco talk radio show Thursday, Reid said he’d spoken with Pelosi and party chairman Howard Dean and all three agreed they should take steps to avoid a contest drawn all the way out to August. “We all are going to urge our folks next week to make a decision very quickly,” he said. According to The New York Times, Reid later bested that vow, telling another group in L.A. that the nominee “would be known by Wednesday”—the day after the bookending primaries in South Dakota and Montana.

He and Pelosi both have stayed neutral so far, but Pelosi, the highest-ranking Democrat, promised Wednesday to The San Francisco Chronicle editorial board that she’d “step in” absent a resolution in June. Slightly more circumspect than Reid about more immediate action, Pelosi added vaguely that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton “cannot take this fight to the convention. It must be over before then.”

A speedy resolution, of course, is what Pelosi and her party preferred from the beginning. And Obama, apparently, is betting on its imminence; he told reporters Wednesday that, as far as he’s concerned, the general election begins Wednesday. But the possibility that Clinton could drag the race out—likely for better rather than worse—to its bitter, internecine end still has conservatives like Rush Limbaugh, with his Operation Chaos, rooting for her. It’s effectively impossible, however, for Clinton to reach 2,026, that magic number of delegates necessary to clinch the Democratic nomination before the convention. (Using the Times’s handy calculator, even if Clinton repeated her all-time best performance—her 77 percent floor wiping in Arkansas—she’d still need 83 percent of the remaining superdelegates.)

Nevertheless, Clinton has dug her heels in, ensconced for the long haul. The Times also reported yesterday on her campaign’s threefold endgame strategy: (1) though she can’t eclipse it, cut into Obama’s delegate lead by lobbying to seat as many delegates as possible from Florida and Michigan, whose standing at the convention was stripped away after their states’ parties moved the primaries up in violation of DNC rules; (2) add to her lead in the popular vote with a strong finish in Puerto Rico’s primary on June 1; and (3) persuade superdelegates to join her side, as she aimed to do yesterday with this letter and memo, by stressing both (1) and (2) as well as the Electoral College argument, a calculus based on the logic that, come November, Clinton would outperform Obama by winning more states (both blue and red) in the general election. This is particularly persuasive, she hopes, for Democrats who’ll never forget how their candidate won the popular vote in 2000 but lost under the state-by-state Electoral College system.

The result of (1) doesn’t look good, given even the best-case scenario for her (seating half the penalized delegates) theorized yesterday by party lawyers. The DNC’s Rules and Bylaws Committee meets Saturday to determine how many of the two rogue states’ delegates to seat. Clinton’s supporters have promised to “flood it” in protest.

In newsstands this week, both The New Yorker and The New Republic have high-profile articles claiming that al Qaeda is unraveling because its ranks are turning against the terror group’s brand of senseless slaughter—and, moreover, as a result, that it’s inspiring moderates within Islam to unite against the fundamentalist/jihadist wing.

Writing in The New Yorker, Lawrence Wright, author of The Looming Tower, the Pulitzer Prize–winning history of al Qaeda, says that, as current al Qaeda leaders wage violent jihad on the West, the group’s popularity is declining “in places where it formerly enjoyed great support.” He focuses specifically on Sayid Imam al-Sharif, a.k.a. “Dr. Fadl,” the influential founder of Egyptian Islamic Jihad—the organization that assassinated Anwar Sadat before partnering with al Qaeda—whose writings Wright says “indoctrinate recruits and justify killing.” (News of al-Sharif’s book-length recantation made a splash when it first appeared last July in The Guardian.)

Al-Sharif also appears in The New Republic’s piece—the cover story—which talks about the growing number of big-name “jihadists” (though how much they still qualify as such might be debatable) who are “alarmed by the targeting of civilians in the West, the senseless killings in Muslim countries, and . . . barbaric tactics in Iraq” that are trademarks of al Qaeda’s militancy. These erstwhile terrorism apologists, the piece argues, may not have “suddenly switched to particularly progressive forms of Islam or fallen in love with the United States,” but they have expressly renounced al Qaeda’s violent ideology, like its bloody-drenched attacks on innocent civilians, particularly Muslim passersby in Arab countries. “Their anti-Al Qaeda positions,” the story says, “are making Americans safer” because these deserters can “effectively debate” the terrorist organization’s leadership like Osama bin Laden.

“While there is undoubtedly some truth in their argument that—as we can see in Iraq—the mass killings of Muslims by al Qaeda are clearly turning increasing numbers of Muslims against it,” writes The Spectator’s Melanie Phillips, “the authors’ apparent naivety and ignorance have nevertheless led them to some dangerously wrong conclusions.”

She argues that Wright as well as Peter Bergen and Paul Cruickshank, authors of The New Republic story, are slipping into a “trap of believing that the only extremists are al Qaeda and others who support terrorism,” thus “extol[ling] as moderates those who oppose al Qaeda and terrorism”—an “entirely false and indeed lethal dichotomy.” Islamists exist, she says, especially in England, who oppose al Qaeda’s presence in certain places (Iraq, England, etc.) as a tactical mistake but still want to return to a worldwide Caliphate, overturning Western democracy with sharia law.

As other pundits have noted, when two left-leaning magazines simultaneously run major pieces chronicling al Qaeda’s hemorrhaging (even if they explain it as internal disintegration as they downplay any buckling from external U.S.-led pressure), that must portend good for the War on Terror.

This weekend, many greeted with apoplectic reprehension Hillary Clinton’s invocation of Robert F. Kennedy’s 1968 assassination to justify staying in the Democratic presidential race, with the media playing up its discomfiting present-day tie-in as evidencing her win-at-any-costs attitude and flippancy to concerns over Barack Obama’s safety. (He’s now had Secret Service protection for more than a year).

But even some conservatives have admitted that Clinton’s remarks, like others she’s made campaigning, were misconstrued. (Clinton’s reasoning for staying in the fight, in full context, to The Argus Leader went like this: “My husband did not wrap up the nomination in 1992 until he won the California primary somewhere in the middle of June, right? We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California. I don’t understand it.”) Critics of the media’s coverage say the incident is really more evidence that both she and John McCain are victim of excessive media nitpicking while Obama—recently called, in a rare attack, a “one-man gaffe machine” by ABC News’s Jake Tapper—has had, and continues to create, his share of gaffes, cringe-worthy one-liners and faux pas that often are glossed over by reporters.

While the media has skewered Clinton (deservedly) for things like ”sniper”-gate and now RFK-gate, and raked McCain over the coals for confusedly claiming that Iran, a predominantly Shiite country, was training members for al Qaeda, which is Sunni, Obama has managed to almost silently dole out a variety of mistakes, from the relatively minor (mistaking the name of the town he’s speaking in) to the arguably less minor (claiming he would both shun and meet with Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, after decrying his connections to the terrorist group FARC).

Two weeks ago, stumping in Missouri, Obama said of Arabic translators in Iraq, “We only have a certain number of them, and if they are all in Iraq then it’s harder for us to use them in Afghanistan.” Only problem: Arabic speakers wouldn’t be of much use around Afghanis, who speak Pashtu, Dari, Farsi and a dozen other languages, but rarely Arabic.

Aside from the now infamous 57 states he said he’s campaigned in (which spawned a unique flag lapel pin that he might actually wear), Obama apparently also frequently has misspoken or mistaken the name of the town he’s stumping in. Four times in a speech last week he called to Sunrise, Fla., semi-famous for its role in the 2000 presidential recount, as “Sunshine”; the week before, he turned Sioux Falls, S.D., into “Sioux City” and, days later, after tornadoes devastated Kansas, killing 12 people, summed up the tragedy: “Ten thousand people died—a whole town destroyed.”

The more evenhanded of critics have pointed out, regarding Obama’s mostly inconsequential gaffes, that it’s not the media’s nitpicking that they object to (that is, McCain’s age and inability to recall that Iran is Shiite under pressure probably is fair game) so much as the need for a uniform standard.

A group of Southern Methodist University professors and Methodist pastors has mounted a last-ditch effort to block the policy institute portion of the George Bush presidential library. The 11th hour has probably gone by for preventing the Bush library and an associated museum. But opponents, made up primarily of clergy who are Iraq war critics and adversaries of the Bush administration’s social conservatism, or those who believe his presence on campus—particularly through a heavily funded partisan Bush Institute run by the George W. Bush Foundation—would sully the Methodist name, are re-training their ire on the think tank after the broader beef with the whole library didn’t come to much.

The group says the Bush Institute would be “utterly unacceptable,” pointing to former Commerce secretary and Bush confrere Donald Evans’ characterization of it to The New York Times: dedicated to “the domestic and international goals of the Bush administration,” including compassionate conservatism and the War on Terror.

Besides now having amassed almost 12,000 petition signatories, their indefatigable ringleader—Andrew Weaver, a Brooklyn Methodist minister and SMU Perkins School of Theology grad who has been a media fixture since the affair began, sending out almost daily e-mail blasts—heads a group that has hired a Maine public-relations firm to lobby churchgoers and bishops through ads in Methodist publications. Weaver says Bush, who is also Methodist, “has acted in profoundly immoral and destructive ways in office while claiming to be a devout Christian.” He’s also said that the presidential library is “a ruse. The real piece George Bush and Karl Rove want is the think tank, and putting half a billion dollars on campus will absolutely overwhelm that school. And, worse, without any oversight you’ll have the Paul Wolfowitz and Scooter Libby Distinguished Chair in Political Ethics.”

Weaver’s claim has been that the proposed Bush Institute’s approval isn’t a foregone conclusion. The all-important date, he says, will be in mid July, when the United Methodist Church holds its South Central Jurisdiction meeting. Opponents contend no part of the Bush library, think tank or otherwise, can happen without approval from the delegates. Officially, SMU disagrees, saying it has already received approval from the church, though faculty (like a group of Perkins professors who objected in 2006) do not. Methodist Church officials say the deal is pretty much finalized; one bishop told the Times that the College of Bishops “has already given its blessings to the project,” allowing SMU to sign a 99-year lease on all Bush-related facilities, renewable up to 249 years.

Texas Monthly’s Paul Burka says the issue is complex, even if the institute goes through. “Some professors will likely hold joint appointments,” he writes. “How can the university assure that the work of its faculty at the institute will be up to scholarly standards? There will have to be provisions for peer review. The other issue is . . . whether SMU will have any say over the institute that is located on its campus. The last word that I got from university officials was that SMU was asking for representation on the Bush Foundation board.”

John McCain’s campaign said Wednesday that the senator will meet on Friday with two, possibly three, potential running mates for November, The New York Times reports.

The names surfacing from the Times’s anonymous Republican sources were two Southern governors, Bobby Jindal of Louisiana and Charlie Crist of Florida, as well as the possibility of Mitt Romney.

The punditry’s ongoing speculation over who’d best round out the GOP ticket largely has been based on several areas: age, ticket diversity, conservative bona fides and, in line with the Maverick himself, some reformist or nonconformist credentials. While Crist appeals to McCain because of his early and vocal support of the senator’s campaign and his ability to deliver Florida to him at a crucial juncture in the GOP race, many conservatives feel he falls short in these other areas.

Someone like Jindal, meanwhile, satisfies those areas but in the process also highlights his weaknesses: He is 36, which would make him the youngest vice presidential candidate ever (paired with McCain, 71, the oldest presidential candidate ever); he’s constantly labeled a brilliant reformist, but this title carries baggage in an election where the Republican nominee’s conservative roots are questioned; and as a Catholic convert from Hinduism who speaks openly about his faith, he presumably could make inroads with the Religious Right that McCain has often butted heads with, though the combination of lapsed Hindu and practicing Catholic may not play out that well with this demographic.

Though his resume is littered with the impressive turn-around of Louisiana’s Medicaid program as secretary of the state’s Department of Health and Hospitals and an advisory post to the Department of Health and Human Services in the Bush administration, Jindal has only four years of elected public service experience, three as a U.S. representative before moving to the governorship, a post he’s held for just a year and half. That makes him nearly a decade younger (and less experienced by several years) than Barack Obama, who constantly gets flak for being an unseasoned neophyte.

Like the electability problems plaguing McCain, no veep pick is likely to win total approval from the GOP’s base. “Crist is only 51,” writes Rod Dreher, “but he’s got snow white hair, and I can’t imagine that the image he would project with the septuagenarian McCain is what the GOP nominee wants when going up against Barack Obama. Shallow? Maybe. But this kind of thing matters.” Romney is still seen by many as damaged goods or to bring little of value to the ticket.

Another candidate whose name has been bandied about is dedicated McCainiac Sen. Joe Lieberman, who’s even been given the green light by conservatives like Bill Kristol and Newt Gingrich. On Fox & Friends Wednesday, Kristol talked the senator up again, revisiting points he made before a conservative Jewish audience in February (Lieberman should be “McCain’s preferred running mate”) and in March (the “most obvious way McCain could upend the normal dynamics” in November would be “a bold vice presidential choice” like the “hawkish and principled Democrat like Joe Lieberman”). He’s also extolled the benefits of a McCain-Jindal ticket in his New York Times column.

Lieberman, technically an Independent Democrat who caucuses with the Democrats after winning a hard-fought re-election where most of the Democratic Party apparatus—including Barack Obama—backed his primary opponent. Lieberman, meanwhile, seems to be trying to distance himself from the Democratic Party. Earlier this week, he gave a speech widely lauded by conservatives, and adapted into this Wall Street Journal op-ed, in which he bluntly scolded the Democratic Party as having “lost its way.”

Albert Einstein — the physicist who would probably be chagrined to learn that both atheists and creationists use his words to defend their belief systems — wrote a little-known 1954 letter labeling the Bible “pretty childish.” Now, in the words of The New York Times, the letter has “poured gasoline on the culture wars between science and religion.”

Experts estimated the letter would go for no more than $15,000, but it went for $404,000 at a Thursday auction by Bloomsbury in London. Put in perspective, the paper in which Einstein and Michele Besso posit a calculation that later became a bedrock of the General Theory of Relativity went for $398,500, the Times says.

“The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honorable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish,” Einstein wrote in the letter, which had been privately owned and known to only a few devoted Einstein scholars. Underscoring, again, the volatility of the roiling science-versus-religion debate, it reopens—and, some hope, nails shut—Einstein’s personal views that most now recognize as too tepid to construe a defense of organized religion or creationism and too strong to back atheism. “A little known letter written by him, however, may help to settle the argument—or at least provoke further controversy about his views,” The Guardian says.

For years, his reams of quips and aphorisms on God and religion have provided fodder to antitheists like Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins on one side and the Discovery Institute on the other, all trying to invoke Einstein as an expert witness. But the letter—with its hardest-hitting punch in the above quotation—strikes a greater blow for the no-God camp.

Einstein’s enigmatic views on religion and God have spawned rigorous debate over where the scientist nonpareil actually stood on everything from the historicity of Jesus (authentic, he said, minus miracles and the Resurrection) to how an all-loving, omnipotent God and theodicy could coexist (irreconcilably, he said).

Born into a non-practicing Jewish family, Einstein nonetheless embraced Judaism until, as a teenager, he began turning to a brand of deism close to Spinoza’s quasi-pantheism. He famously wrote: “Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.” He said he “believe[d] in Spinoza’s God, who reveals himself in the lawful harmony of all that exists, but not in a God who concerns himself with the fate and the doings of mankind.” Fanatical atheists, he wrote in another letter, “are like slaves who are still feeling the weight of their chains which they have thrown off after hard struggle. They are creatures who—in their grudge against traditional religion as the ‘opium of the masses’—cannot hear the music of the spheres.”

In his eponymous Einstein biography, Walter Isaacson quotes the Nobel laureate: “I’m not an atheist. I don’t think I can call myself a pantheist. The problem involved is too vast for our limited minds.” It’s these “continual references to God,” the Times says, that have “led some wishful thinkers to try to put him in the camp of some kind of believer or even, not long ago, to paint him as an advocate of intelligent design.” The letter doesn’t help creationists much, but the wishful thinking and willful misrepresenting of Einstein’s views on God are on the other side as well—and with the same fanaticism. This could be why, as the Times also reports, one of the letter’s top bidders was none other than Richard Dawkins.

Republicans are said to be “panicked” after their third loss this week in a series of special elections to fill open Congress seats gave Democrats a welcome-to-reality hat trick in one-time securely conservative districts.

Tuesday in Mississippi, Travis Childers trounced Greg Davis in a 54-to-46 vote. The first two races were in Louisiana, where Don Cazayoux won a seat in the GOP’s grip for 33 years, and Illinois, where Bill Foster took former House Speaker Dennis Hastert’s seat. Intra-party grumbling, reported by The Wall Street Journal and others, is growing over whether this might be a preview of what price loyalty to the Bush administration will exact in November. Newt Gingrich is worried. Former National Republican Congressional Committee chair Tom Davis wrote in a 20-page memo that this year’s election atmosphere “is the worst since Watergate.”

Media are writing Republicans’ obituaries, and Barack Obama has cited Childers’ win as proof that he, too, can do well in conservative areas. The New York Times seems to agree, saying that Childers’ win “appeared to call into question the belief that [Obama] could be a heavy liability for his party’s down-ticket candidates in conservative regions.”

But in what ways is Obama actually like Childers? Or like Cazayoux and Foster? Though neither media nor Republican officials are looking closely at what kinds of Democrats are claiming victory in once solidly Red America, the answer may not suggest much for Obama’s electoral hopes; the victors are, in fact, atypical candidates—not partisan hardliners, but more in the mold of Virginia Sen. Jim Webb, the pro-life former Reagan Navy secretary whose strong veep potential has been bandied about for an Obama ticket.

In Mississippi, Childers ran on a pro-life and -guns platform. The GOP put its weight behind Greg Davis, even loosing a slew of ads trying to tie Childers, six degrees–style, to Jeremiah Wright (Childers has backed Obama). This gambit appears to have backfired, much as the North Carolina GOP’s ad tethering Wright to the two Democratic gubernatorial candidates did.

Don Cazayoux, too, is proudly pro-life and -guns. Media reported he also got a boon from opponent Woody Jenkins; besides Jenkins’ almost myopic stumping about abortion to the exclusion of other also-pressing issues, discomfiting ties to David Duke surfaced alongside news of liens on his business for failing to pay taxes. (The pollster Bernie Pinsonat put it this way: “If you can’t beat Woody Jenkins, I don’t know who you can beat.”)

Bill Foster most closely embodies a typical Democrat. He was endorsed by NARAL Pro-Choice America. But even he counts himself a fiscally conservative Blue Dog.

Considering this or not, the GOP is blaming the losses on weak candidates. But could it be less about Republicans’ weaknesses and more about these specific opponents’ strengths—strengths that don’t necessarily have anything to do with the Democratic Party. Economically populist, culturally conservative, Washington-outsider types concerned with climate change and religious freedom like Cazayoux look suspiciously like the politicians many on the Right now argue could be the GOP’s future.

In his column yesterday, The New York Times’s David Brooks, lately on a neuroanthropological kick, tackles the religious implications of modern neuroscience, saying its research portends disaster for orthodox believers—Christians, Jews, Muslims—although perhaps accommodating a generalized belief in some non-God supreme being.

“This new wave of research will not seep into the public realm in the form of militant atheism,” he writes. “Instead it will lead to what you might call neural Buddhism.” According to Brooks, neuroscience is moving the atheism-theism debate from culturally entrenched—thanks to the tireless militancy (and bestselling polemics) of antitheists like Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins and the other Four Horsemen—to irrelevant.

Because neuroscientific advances take what Christians call religious experiences and demystify them physiologically into, say, an increase in blood flow and synaptic activity in one’s prefrontal and parietal cortices, a worldview informed by modern neuroscience doesn’t have to be averse to God per se—just to a personal, miracle-working God like Christianity’s.

These recalibrated emphases on neuroscientific studies could shift the atheism-theism debate from believer and nonbeliever to Bible (or Quran) believer and Buddhist (or Wiccan, or Scientology) believer. That is, writes Mary Martin at Animal Person, cognitive scientists are “merely explaining that the feelings associated with god might not come from outside us,” and, in turn, helping to validate nontheistic religions.

Much of Brooks’ thinking appears predicated on his belief that people are hardwired “for fairness, empathy and attachment”—a belief, he suggests, that flies in the face of the theory that genes are wholly “selfish.” But few researchers subscribe to a genes-aren’t-selfish belief. Most of them, explains National Review’s John Derbyshire, a Hitchens-caliber antitheist, believe “deep instincts for fairness, empathy and attachment” are simply “‘cold’ survival strategies” passed directly from those selfish genes.

Derbyshire agrees with Brooks for different reasons. “We are more and more accustomed to high evidentiary standards in our work and leisure—if only from watching courtroom dramas on TV or doing quality control and evaluative work,” he writes. “It’s hard to believe the average hasn’t been creeping up, and will continue to do so. This saps away at faith in the magical and miraculous . . . Reflective people will indeed turn to a sort of ‘neural Buddhism,’ some kind of organized system of spirituality that doesn’t require us to believe in incredible occurrences in the remote past, or in the individual personality surviving death.”

Brooks maintains that, right now, “[i]n their arguments with Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, the faithful have been defending the existence of God.” But that “was the easy debate”: He predicts the real challenge will come “from people who feel the existence of the sacred”—i.e., again, like Buddhist nontheists—“but who think that particular religions are just cultural artifacts built on top of universal human traits.”

Though Jewish, Brooks demurs from joining the hand-wringing, saying he’s “not qualified to take sides” even though he is watching the neuroscience science community “joining hands” with mysticism “in unexpected ways”—by which he presumably means “any at all.” The result, he argues, is a new science-based movement that emphasizes “self-transcendence” over “divine law or revelation.”

Orthodoxy will be under attack more than ever, as a defense is laid for neural Buddhism. “Orthodox believers,” he says, are going to have to defend particular doctrines and particular biblical teachings. They’re going to have to defend the idea of a personal God, and explain why specific theologies are true guides for behavior day to day. . . . We’re in the middle of a scientific revolution. It’s going to have big cultural effects.”

As proof of where this path leads, Brooks cites a prescient Tom Wolfe essay from Forbes in 1996, written well ahead of the curve, lamenting neuroscience’s Nietzschean move to bury God and make science soulless, sending “modern man plunging headlong back into the primordial ooze”—the very move cheered by Hitchens and the anti-Expelled crowd, particularly Dawkins, who appears in the film.

Controversy-laden Canadian pastor Gretta Vosper’s Christ-less Christian theology—in vogue now after the release of her new book espousing it—has met with endless mockery, but not everyone is convinced it’s a trivial matter serious believers should dismiss like a “freakshow,” as Beliefnet’s Rod Dreher calls it.

“Protestantism evolves with every generation,” laments one concerned blogger, Jesse Cone, an Orthodox. “It has already begun to morph into more subtle forms of this monstrosity. This in turn has left thoughtful Protestants with a choice—and it was this pushed me towards Orthodoxy—do I succumb to ‘popular monotheism’ or find a tradition that is stable? Is it about community or Christ?”

Vosper’s Christianity, after all, only differs from Moralistic Therapeutic Deism in terminology—meaning it’s a sort of next step (the final step?) in a progression to build up a church without “a god,” Jesus, any traditions or catechism or moral absolutes. It’s already common among American youth; 61 percent of respondents to this 2007 LifeWay Research survey said the God of the Bible is “no different from the gods or spiritual beings” of other world religions.

In an interview with Canada’s National Post, David Giuliano, who heads up Vosper’s United Church of Canada, considered Canada’s most liberal mainline denomination, said if he were her, he would’ve left the ministry. Predictably, though, he told the paper “it is not his job to condemn,” adding the church “is structured in such a way that complaints have to come from the congregation.” So far, no congregant has complained. (Giuliano did make sure the Post understood he thought the word “Christian”—one that “carries the baggage of colonialism and other ills”—should “probably be phased out” in favor of “Follower of the Way” or “Follower of Jesus.”)

Defending her pro-church stance, Vosper says sticking with one “is extremely important because it can be a transformative element in individuals’ lives and communities”—a role nonspecific to Christianity, played by every religion, including the Church of Oprah, the satirical term for the religious mishmash Oprah embraced after leaving Trinity United Church of Christ (yes, that Trinity) more than two decades ago.

In Vosper’s With or Without God, which was “officially launched” this week, she dismisses Jesus as a “Middle Eastern peasant with a few charismatic gifts and a great posthumous marketing team.” Vosper likewise puts zero stock in the Virgin Birth, the necessity of sacraments or creeds, the veracity of any of the miracles or—the coup de grace—that Jesus was the Son of God.

Vosper pastors West Hill United Church (Web address: simply coolplace.ca). Its tagline: “A place to find yourself.” Short of “Being the Spirit,” the church refuses to say what it believes in for fear of alienating someone. “Jesus Christ” is excised from hymns and replaced with “glorious hope.” In fact, nothing “Christian” seems to remain at all. “There is no single meaning for the word god,” Vosper writes at her blog. “In other words, what do you mean when you ask me if I believe in god? Without knowing what you mean by that word, I simply can’t answer you.”

New York ran a feature in April on the growing squabble among atheists over whether they need to bond communally in order to have the strength and clout of a “church.” Vosper’s gospel must indeed be good news to them.

Since endorsing John McCain in February, Texas megachurch pastor John Hagee has been backpedaling out of decades’ worth of anti-Catholic statements. From labeling Hurricane Katrina the “judgment of God against the city of New Orleans”—dished out because of the city’s homosexual subculture—to penning a book that explains how “the Roman Church shaped the policy of the Third Reich,” Hagee had the marks of McCain’s own Jeremiah Wright. (The McCain camp even pulled an Obama when the senator explained his relationship with the pastor: “He says that he has never been anti-Catholic, but I repudiate the words that create that impression.”)

An uproar came from Catholic League President Bill Donohue, who linked to a YouTube clip of Hagee where, equipped with an ominous pointer, he calls the Catholic Church the “Whore of Babylon.” The biggest stir, though, has come from guys like New York Times columnist Frank Rich. Running with Hagee’s pro-Israel stance, Rich scoffed that his “rantings may tell us more about Mr. McCain’s policy views than Mr. Wright’s tell us about Mr. Obama’s.”

But Hagee’s interview last week with Deal Hudson, director of InsideCatholic.com, may help explain for Rich and others why McCain-Hagee is not really analogous to Obama-Wright (besides the fact that the mostly areligious John “Agents of Intolerance” McCain didn’t sit in Hagee’s Cornerstone Church for 20 years listening to his sermons). Hagee categorically denied that his “Whore of Babylon” bit refers to the Catholic Church, saying in his eschatology it instead pertains to the post-Rapture Church, but he also told a personal story that Hudson said shows “another side of the man who has now become a symbol of anti-Catholicism.”

In the 1990s, Hagee bought a Catholic girls’ school—San Antonio’s first, founded in 1851—run by Ursuline sisters, who had to sell the property because they’d become too old and too few to maintain it. The sisters couldn’t reach a deal with the archdiocese, so they offered it to Hagee. Hudson says:

Hagee was then told that the delay in selling the property had meant the sisters had to draw on their retirement accounts to live. Hagee then said, “I want to buy this school by the close of business tomorrow.”

Hagee, the sisters, and their attorneys met the next morning. The Ursulines’ attorney said, “Shall we tell Reverend Hagee the real problem?” . . . The attorney for the sisters explained that the archdiocese had expected them to move out of the convent immediately after it was sold and asked what Hagee wanted the sisters to do.

“My plan would be to give them a five year lease to the convent, and I will charge them ten dollars a year. We will pay all utilities and up-keep.” Hagee then took a 50-dollar bill from his pocket and paid the lease himself. One sister looked at the attorney and said, “Let’s get this thing done.”

The following Sunday, Hagee sent his church bus to the Ursuline convent, picked up the sisters, brought them to his church, and seated them in the front row for both services (5,000 attend each service). “I thanked them publicly for their lives of sacrifice and devotion to Jesus Christ. The congregation gave them standing ovations because the campus we bought was the fruit of their labor, a testimonial of their commitment to Christ.”

Hagee let the Ursuline sisters stay in the convent for twelve years, free of any cost. “Our children hugged them,” he said. “They would reach out and grab them by the hands. They were very precious to us for what they had done with their whole lives which had been invested in building this wonderful school. We were glad to honor them as long as they walked on this earth.”