Sometimes I fear the Catholic Church in the United States will soon be a conglomeration of grey heads, far-right political protesters, and assorted other people who resonate more with a nineteenth century ethos than with contemporary realities. The final report from the recently concluded synod in Rome – hopeful midway – is less encouraging at its conclusion.

My reflection this week, however, is about young Catholics. While the Vatican vacillates about accepting gays, the Pew Research Center reports that nearly 85% of self-identified Catholics (between the ages of 18 and 29) believe gays and lesbians should be accepted by society. And 75% are in favor of same-sex marriage.

One of my friends reacted to the Pew finding with the comment that “these young Catholics are hardly Catholic.” He may have a point. Another recent study indicates that 80% of today’s young Catholics will have left the Catholic Church by the time they are 23. Change in the wind….

In any event, I have gone back to re-read a book I may have mentioned earlier: Young Catholic America: Emerging Adults In, Out of, and Gone from the Church. (Oxford University Press) The book is based on the National Study of Youth and Religion, which in 2002 began to study the evolving religious values of 3,290 young Catholics, when they were 13 to 17 years old. They are now, of course, young adults between the ages of 23 and 27.

The book offers some sobering realities. Like climate change, we can begin to take things seriously or ignore the findings and let things – people – go.

• Young Catholics are less knowledgeable about their faith. They don’t understand it, and it doesn’t draw their interest.

• They are more lived-experience-based than church-teaching-based. Their own experiences and those of their peer group shape their understanding of Christian truth and value.

• While they tend to solidly affirm central Christian beliefs about Jesus Christ, they clearly disagree with the church when it speaks about human sexuality, gender differences, birth control, and abortion.

• In general the church does not play a big role in their lives; and they are increasingly less involved in it, e.g. regular liturgical participation.

• Like a growing number of Americans, young American Catholics see themselves as “more spiritual than religious.” Yes I know, this phrase invites a lot of reflection….

• Young American Catholics therefore are more open-minded about and tolerant of people who belong to other Christian traditions and other religions. The Catholic Church for them is simply one denomination among many. It may be of value today but perhaps not tomorrow.

Older Roman Catholics….and Roman Catholic leaders….have a lot to ponder these days. Putting heads in the sand is very tempting.

On October 11, 1962, Pope John XXIII opened the Second Vatican council, much to the dismay of his nemesis Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani, then head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Ottaviani would work hard to undermine and derail the work of the council. In the end, of course, John’s vision prevailed. History here offers a contemporary reminder.

Theological polarization at the managerial-hierarchical top of the institutional church is nothing new. Fifty-two years ago, it was Pope John and people like the Belgian Cardinal Suenens on the “progressive” side. Today we see Pope Francis and people like Cardinal Kasper in theological dissonance with “conservative” hierarchs like Cardinal Raymond Burke and the current head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Cardinal Gerhard Müller, who warn that adherents to the Kasper viewpoint are “heretics.” So what is going on here?

John Allen, formerly of the National Catholic Reporter and now at the Boston Globe and most recently as well at Crux, says it is the reappearance of “gradualism” in Catholic theology. In fact “gradualism” is a euphemistic way of saying that life changes, our understanding of life changes, and therefore our theological and ethical understandings change. Our developing understanding of the human condition has always had major theological and ethical implications. Fifty years ago, we called that “reading the signs of the times.”

Frankly, I really don’t like using the terms “conservative,” “traditional,” and “liberal” or “progressive.” They don’t help today. Many of my friends call me a “progressive” Catholic, yet I would contend that I am very much anchored in Catholic “tradition” and trying to “conserve” it.

A far better way of understanding contemporary Catholic polarization is to see two approaches to living-out our faith today: (1) a theology of unquestioning adherence to official doctrinal formulations — many more than a thousand years old; and (2) a theology that reflects on contemporary lived-faith experiences.

Cardinal Müller would strongly uphold the first approach. Cardinal Kasper the second. Although it is still difficult to clearly read what is gong on at the Synod in Rome, there are indications that more than a few bishops would now align themselves with Kasper rather than Müller.

This past Thursday, October 9, the head of the Canadian Bishops’ Conference, Archbishop Paul-André Durocher, for instance, said he saw a major shift — a new starting place for theological reflection — by bishops at the synod.

What’s happening within the Synod, Durocher observed, is that we are seeing a more inductive way of reflecting; starting from the true situation of people and trying to figure out, ‘what is going on here?’….We are finding that the lived experience of people is also a theological source…a place for theological reflection.

Not all Catholics and Catholic organisations, like “Voice of the Family,” are pleased with the life-based approach of people like Archbishop Durocher.

This morning, October 14, I read the reactions of Patrick Buckley, Voice of the Family’s Irish representative. He writes:

The Synod’s mid-way report represents an attack on marriage and the family. For example, the report in effect gives a tacit approval of adulterous relationships, thereby contradicting the Sixth Commandment and the words of Our Lord Jesus Christ on the indissolubility of marriage.

The report undermines the Church’s definitive teaching against contraception, by using the coded language of ‘underlin[ing] the need to respect the dignity of the person in the moral evaluation of the methods of birth control.’ This language is the code of those who wish to reduce the Church’s doctrines to a mere guide, thus leaving couples free to choose contraception in so-called ‘conscience.’

The report accepts wrongly that there is a value in the homosexual orientation. This contradicts the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith’s 1986 Letter on the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons.

Nevertheless….the days of the flat-earth society are over. (Even Medieval Latin has been finally jettisoned as Vatican-speak meeting language.) Lived-experience theological reflection is contemporary and real; and it challenges completely the rigid doctrine-based-rule-of-life approach of people like Cardinal Burke and groups like Voice of the Family. Their theology often leads to archaic solutions for contemporary problems, because it is so closed-minded and rigidly unchanging.

Catholic belief and official Catholic teaching do and must always change. We are discovery people, always on pilgrimage. And we believe that the Spirit of Christ had not abandoned us.

Unchanging Catholic teaching? Not my experience, actually. I remember when official teaching said women were inferior to men, that Protestants (like my Dad) were followers of a “false religion,” that the “ordained” were, thanks to their sacramental character, intrinsically superior human beings and on a higher spiritual plane than “ simple lay people.” I remember when the “insidious Jews” were denounced as “Christ-killers.” And I will never forget when eating a hamburger on a Friday was a one-way ticket to hell, unless one got to confession….But…..we grow in our understanding….and we move on.

A word of warning: when reflecting about doctrine-based belief and contemporary-life-based belief, I am not saying it is matter of choosing one system over the other. It is both and…… The “and” is that each theological approach must critique and help clarify the other. That is no small task. It demands and requires mutual respect, clear and open dialogue, and a great deal of humility. No one has all the answers. We travel toward the truth….and we must travel together. That is the nature of a community of faith.

I really don’t know what will finally result from the current Synod in Rome. I don’t know what the lasting impact of Pope Francis will be. I have no doubts however that contemporary Roman Catholic management people have now accepted the fact that theological pluralism, like multilingualism, is now a contemporary Catholic reality.

Who knows what this will bring?

I had a dream last night….A future head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith went on Vatican radio and television and solemnly proclaimed: “Progress in Catholic belief is now our most important product.”

Several images of highly motivated young men and women passed through my old head this past week.

The first was of John Condon, at his grave outside Ypres, Belgium. John was a fourteen years old soldier, killed in the “Great War.” I spent about fifteen minutes at his grave – alone and with old-man watery eyes. What motivated him? Who inspired him? He lied about his age so he could leave his parents and friends and go to war. What we’re his life dreams?

Later that day, my son, two very good friends visiting from Michigan, and I passed along the graves of tens of thousands and tens of thousands and tens of thousands of young men who gave their lives in WWI fighting the “enemy.” Their inspiration? Many of them, when one reads the notes they left behind, were highly idealistic….Others of course went because they had to.

On our Ypres visit that day, we stood as well at a mass grave — a bit larger than my living room — containing the remains of twenty thousand First World War enemy (German) soldiers. In their own way, they too were once young and idealistic. In another corner of the same cemetery, the somber graves of a group of soldiers, who had been the best and brightest graduates of the University of Berlin. The enemy.

Simultaneous memorials….The same day the four of us were visiting WWI burial sites In Belgium, my friends (high school and college classmates) back in Detroit were gathered for the funeral of our classmate and friend, Father Charlie.

Charlie and I were once idealistic young seminarians, answering our own calls and entering Detroit’s Sacred Heart Seminary at age fourteen. Answering our own calls took us in different directions. The calls nevertheless were real. About that I have no doubts. The year Charlie was ordained, my wife and I celebrated our engagement. We have now been married close to forty-five years.

Getting home and checking end-of-the-day news on my little iPad, I marvelled at the energy and courage of youthful pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong. Their leader a charismatic young man about sixteen years old. Who inspired these young people? From whence their courage to protest? What will they do when the protest is over?

The next morning’s newspaper had a major report about another kind of youthful protest. Driven by grievances, resentments, and frustrations, young second generation immigrants in Belgium, the Netherlands, France, and Germany who are now signing-up and becoming heartlessly savage and cruel young soldiers in support of the Islamic State. Their inspiration? Who motivated them? Why? All very young men and very young women. Leaving family and friends. For a cause they find noble?

Last night, before going to bed after a long and busy day, I read a few pages from the Gospel According to Mark. I thought about those other young young men and women – in their late teens – who followed Jesus from Nazareth. Today we call them disciples and apostles.

Where do young people today find their inspiration? Who or what motivates them? Who or what animates them to such a degree test they are willing to sacrifice their young lives?

And of course….what is our responsibility – as individuals and as church – in all of this?

Frankly, I have no simple answers…..

May Charlie, old friend and once also young and idealistic, rest in peace.

Trying to control radical religious fundamentalists, by bombing and shooting them, is like trying to control a forest fire, by burning down the entire forest — forgetting, of course, that sparks will be carried by the wind into neighboring forests.

This year we commemorate the centennial of the “Great War to End all Wars.” A major accomplishment of that First World War was setting the stage for the Second World War.

When will we begin to understand that increased military violence simply leads to a continual cycle of violent interventions, that never really address the root causes of conflicts: poverty, ignorance, social inequality, cultural blindness, religious discrimination, and economic imperialism?

What would the ethic of Jesus say about dealing with ISIS? How would that ethic have us respond to the situation in Iraq, Syria, and points East and West today?

I am not a professor of political science; but an historical theologian, who, necessarily, has studied a lot of wars and Christian violence over the years.

When, under Constantine, Christianity became the Roman Empire’s state religion, it lost much of its counter-culture influence. It quickly put on the breastplate and ideology of administrative torture and violence, for dealing with wayward people and various kinds of enemies.

After 1,700 years not much has changed. We have been stuck in cycles of violence, with little or no capacity to reflect and realize there can be other ways of dealing with violent and destructive human beings: non-violent resistance, better education and enlightenment, multi-cultural understanding and acceptance, inclusive governance and diplomacy, sustainable development, and community-level peace and reconciliation processes.

Perhaps we are slow learners. Arming some or all rebel groups in Syria makes about as much sense today as support for the Afghanistan “freedom fighters” did in the 1980′s. And……lest we forget……George Bush Jr’s invasion and military engagement in Iraq contributed to the current sectarian divides, and helped lay the foundations for today’s extremist ideologies, including the growth of ISIS.

If the West is going to send or drop anything in the Middle East, it should be humanitarian aid not more bombs and destruction. It should contribute to the building-up of the infrastructure instead of destroying it. It should halt the proliferation of (produced in the West and sold by Westerners) weapons in the region, promote education, promote broad-based access to unbiased knowledge and information, really work to eliminate poverty, and provide health care.

There are other ways to deal with ISIS. For example, ISIS has gained control of massive oil reserves in the Kirkuk area. Why not an international purchasing embargo that would stifle their resources?

There are other realistic and effective non-violent ways to proceed today.

Concerned individuals, groups, and nations have to be willing to work at it. It is analogous to environmental awareness and climate change policies. The United States and the United Nations need to put on their thinking caps. Christian, Islamic, and Jewish religious leaders (representing the three great Abrahamic religious traditions) need to commit themselves to serious reflection, study, dialogue, and mutual collaboration.

And of course…..Arabs and Muslims need to reflect about how such a violent fundamentalist Sunni death cult like ISIS could emerge in their midst; and they need to acknowledge their own responsibility for allowing this to happen……and their responsibility to correct the evil. They could have and should have seen it coming.

Another non-violent proposal. For starters, in every major city in the United States, England, France, Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands, civic leaders should begin inter-religious think-tanks and action-groups to deeply reflect, seriously discuss, and concretely plan how men and women today can live and learn together to defuse and counteract inhumane fundamentalist movements.

They should focus particularly on young people and ask themselves: What have we done and what are we now doing that motivates young men and women to become global terrorists and fundamentalist murderers? What is the appeal of radical fundamentalism? How did the image of God become so twisted into a vengeful and violent being, who delights in the torture and death of the “infidel”? Who, in fact, are today’s “infidels”?

Just as we have moved well beyond the eleventh hour in global warming, we have moved well beyond the eleventh hour in global violence. In both cases, we are all at fault. We all bear the burden of re-configuring the world around us.

Yes, one can bomb and kill fundamentalist fanatics. In the process, however, one risks turning oneself into an equally-evil counter-fanatic and accelerating the growth of still more fanatic fundamentalist movements.

We cannot run from today.

We all bear responsibility for tomorrow.

Not so long ago, one of my bishop friends slapped me on the back and told me to “brush up on my Spanish” because “Latinos are the future of the Catholic Church in America.”

My friend had a point, because right now most young Roman Catholics in the United States are Latinos. My friend can’t see the other side of the picture, however, because Latinos are now leaving the U.S. Catholic Church at a striking rate. Especially the young.

For years the Catholic Church, in the United States and in Latin America, has been losing members to evangelical Protestantism, and, especially, to Pentecostal and other charismatic churches. Now however, particularly in the United States, another form of faith-switching is underway: More American Latinos are leaving the Catholic Church and becoming religiously unaffiliated. A strange scenario: a rising percentage of American Catholics are Latino while a falling percentage of American Latinos are Catholic.

Nearly one-quarter of Latinos in the United States are former Catholics, according to the Pew Research Center. By comparison, about 10 percent of all Americans are former Catholics.

The religious affiliation of Latinos has great significance for researchers (like me) and others interested in the future of religion in the United States, because Latinos make up such a large and growing part of the U.S. population.

By 2030 more than 22% of the U.S. population will be Latino. By 2050, 29% will be Latino and 47% “white” with the percentage of “whites” going down quickly after that…. The times will certainly be “a changing.”

What I call the “Catholic eclipse,” will be striking among Latinos. According to the Pew Research Center, 55 % of U.S. Latinos identified themselves as Catholic in 2013, down from 67 percent in 2010. About 22 % of Latinos today identify themselves as Protestant — including 16 percent who say they are evangelical or born-again — and 18 % say they are “unaffiliated.”

Religiously “unaffiliated” Americans are a growing trend especially among younger Americans, who say they are “spiritual but not religious.” (If I were a bishop I would not denigrate them but spend a lot of my time and energy listening to these “unaffiliated.” They are our contemporary God-seekers and tomorrow’s “believers.”)

The Pew researchers find the rise in the number of Latinos, who say they are unaffiliated, particularly strong among Latinos under age 30. But this under-age-thirty unaffiliated trend is equally strong among “white” American Catholics as well.

The Pew Research Center’s Religion and Public Life Project has found that four out of five Catholics who have left the church and haven’t joined another church did so before the age of 24.

So what does all of this mean? I would say the Roman Catholic institutional church has a major Roman Catholic theological problem on its hands, that cannot be ignored by simply complaining that people are becoming “increasingly relativistic and secularized.”

Theology is faith seeking understanding.

A lot of people whom I call “God-seekers” are indeed seeking understanding for their faith and their “spiritual” searching. They are asking for bread. Far too often the institution — at all levels — still seems to excel in giving them lifeless old stones.

Forty years ago, when I was a somewhat younger fellow and DRE in Kalamazoo, Michigan, I found myself the only man at a table with seven women, during a diocesan conference on the role of women in the church.

When our small group gathered, for the first time, I was the first to start speaking. With a big smile and a lot of enthusiasm, I began talking about the terrific lecture we had just listened to. I spoke a bit too long. (Yes that happens.)

One of the women in our group, with obvious dislike for my long-winded observations, looked right at me and said: “Well isn’t that just what we need in a conference on women in the church: another pontificating phallus? Why can’t you let us women speak? Why can’t you really listen to what women are thinking and saying?” Some criticism stings….

I thought about my Kalamazoo pontificating experience, a few days ago, as I read about Cardinal Gerhard Müller’s ongoing criticism of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious.

The CDF Prefect claims over and over that LCWR is promoting doctrinal errors, radical feminism, and heretical gnosticism. LCWR leadership continues to assert that the Cardinal Prefect doesn’t listen and is simply unable and unwilling to try to understand what they are saying. Last week L’Osservatore Romano — the voice of the Vatican — carried an interview with Cardinal Müller. “We are not misogynists,” he said. “We don’t want to gobble up a woman a day…” he quipped.

A humorous remark? A serious statement of ecclesiastical management style? Or simply a way to avoid confronting the issues?

Does Pope Francis have a similar style? Early in his papal ministry, when asked about misogyny in the church, he joked that the first woman was “taken from a rib.” More seriously the Bishop of Rome then observed: “Priests often end up under the sway of their housekeepers.”

And the point is?

In less than a month, we will witness (more or less depending on which news source one follows) the Synod on the Family. Great preparations. Numerous consultations around the world. Great hopes raised.

This week we have been informed that over one hundred and seventy-five celibate male clerics will be entitled to vote. No women will be able to vote of course, although there will be some lay women and men as “observers.” The voice of the faithful? Vatican II’s sense of collegiality?

At some point truly genuine dialogue has to begin. In so many ways today, women, around the world, continue to be gobbled up; and there is nothing comical about it.

In her most recent column in the National Catholic Reporter, Jamie Manson observed: “…. the truth of the matter is, women are indeed being ‘gobbled up’ by poverty, lack of education, inadequate health care, slavery, and sex trafficking. They and their children bear a disproportionate burden of the hunger, violence and discrimination that shatter this world every day. And all of these injustices are rooted in the misogynistic idea that women are not of equal value, ability, and dignity to men, an idea that the hierarchy, with its blind insistence on preordained gender roles, perpetuates.”

Patriarchy in a church environment — well in any environment — has a negative impact and creates an environment more susceptible to the abuse of women than one characterized by mutuality and shared leadership between men and women.

The virtue of mutuality must replace subjugation. The virtue of harmony must replace man-over-woman power-struggles.

Certainly in the church, men need women not as subordinates but as partners. It started that way, actually, in our Christian beginnings….

Mary of Magdala, for instance and not one of the “apostolic” guys, was charged with proclaiming that Jesus had been raised from the dead. No small proclamation. Early Christians were counter-cultural….and more much more inclusive and woman-friendly than later “fathers” of the church.

The Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, however, has put the Leadership Conference of Women Religious under male hierarchical control. What happened to woman-friendly counter-cultural and inclusive Christian leadership?

Sometimes our contemporary Catholicism becomes curiouser and curiouser.

In an event….let serious and respectful dialogue truly be encouraged at every level in the church, starting of course in our own parishes and neighborhoods……

Last week I was having a friendly chat with a fellow about Sister Elizabeth Johnson’s book Quest for the Living God. I had recommended the book for an adult faith-sharing discussion group, that will resume in October. My friend said: “That feminist heretic! Absolutely not!” I asked if he had ever read anything written by Elizabeth Johnson. He said “no!” I asked if he knew that she was a distinguished professor of theology at Fordham University. He said: “No…but I know she is just another one of those dangerous and radical feminists.” I asked how he knew all that…..No response at first. Then he muttered: “Rome doesn’t like her.”

Ignorance is not bliss. And there can really be no excuse for ignorance among supposedly intelligent and well-educated people.

Maybe a lot of us men — whether we wear neckties, Roman collars, or red skull caps — need to keep quiet and really listen before speaking so authoritatively.

Patriarchal paternalism and misogyny are still very much alive in our church. They are not Christian virtues.

As reported in Belgian newspapers and the Belgian Catholic press service, Kerknet, this morning (September 5), Bishop Johan Bonny of Antwerp has written a long letter to the Vatican about his personal expectations for the Synod on the Family, which takes place from October 5 to 19 in Rome.

Obviously he cannot anticipate what will happen there but he has indicated what he would like to see happen.

Johan Bonny has been Bishop of Antwerp since October 2008. Many church observers would like to see him succeed Archbishop André-Joseph Léonard as Archbishop of Mechelen-Brussels and thus Primate of Belgium.

As a bishop, Bonny said that he has experienced a decades old gap between what the church teaches and the perception and attitudes of most believers. This gap arose particularly with Pope Paul VI’s encyclical Humanae Vitae in 1968. Bonny insists that gap must now be closed by a church that truly is collegial in its decision-making and truly listens to people.

Bonny hopes that the October synod, will begin to effectively close the gap. That will only happen, he says, if the church once again becomes the traveling companion of the faithful and listens carefully to their concerns about the complex life situations in which they find themselves.

In his twenty-three page letter, the Roman Catholic Bishop of Antwerp pleads for understanding for those who are divorced, those who are living together without marriage, those who are civilly married and homosexual, and those who have become or would like to become parents through in vitro fertilization.

There are good reasons for suspecting that Bishop Bonny’s letter will be given serious consideration by the Vatican. Cardinal Walter Kasper, close friend and theological advisor to Pope Francis, is also a personal friend of Johan Bonny. They met in 1997, when Bonny was one of his closest collaborators in Rome.

That Bishop Bonny’s thinking is very similar to the thinking of the German is therefore no coincidence; and the German cardinal has a great influence on the Pope.

With Bishop Bonny’s letter, the October Synod is truly starting to take on new interest.

Religious fanaticism is perverse, a sinister mutation from, already unhealthy, religious fundamentalism.

Right now the cutthroat Islamic State is foremost in the news. A few centuries ago, Christian fanaticism in the Crusades would have made the headlines and evening news. They were equally brutal, barbaric, and certainly not very Jesus-like as they raped and killed Muslims and Jews to rescue the Holy Land from the “infidels.”

In the “Peoples Crusade” an army of around 10,000 men, women and children set off in the early summer of 1096 for the Rhine valley. The fired-up crusaders massacred thousands of Jews in the German cities of Speyer, Worms, Mainz, and Cologne, all in God’s holy cause. When the crusaders captured Jerusalem in 1099, they killed Muslims, Jews, and even native Christians who threatened their control of the Holy Places. Another rage of Christian fanaticism came a few centuries later with the Spanish Inquisition.

After Osama bin Laden’s fatwa in 1998, the world started looking at Muslim fundamentalism and radical “jihad.” Bin Laden’s fundamentalist concept, however, was far different from the actual meaning of the term. (Fundamentalists in all religions adapt — and even fabricate — parts of their traditions to fit their immediate goals and ideologies.) Within an authentic understanding of Islam, “jihad” means struggling for a certain and generally positive spiritual objective. In the Qur’an “jihad” does not endorse acts of military aggression.

I often remind people, in my lectures about fundamentalism (and I have another big one in November), that Muslims once led the world in science, mathematics, literature, and philosophy. Most of my listeners, however, remain incredulous, because the media have done a good job of programming people to see Islam as sinister and destructive; and of course because Muslim fundamentalists and fanatics have excelled in terrorism and violence, tarnishing the image of Islam, and making Muslims, in general, despicable in the eyes of other communities.

Yes… I think one can really say that the biggest threat to peace and security facing the world today is the rise of religious fanaticism and extremism among some people who claim to be Muslims. To be sure, fanaticism is not confined to Muslims alone, but is found to exist in other religious groups, too. But what we are currently finding among Muslims looks much worse in magnitude.

So what should we do? What can we do? We can bomb and kill the fanatics. History, however, is quite clear that killing fanatics guarantees a new group of fanatics and turns the fanatic-killers into fanatics as well; and every bomb on a fanatic fundamentalist stronghold is a boomerang.

On August 27th, fifty-three Catholic and Protestant leaders sent a letter to President Barack Obama, to halt American airstrikes and pursue peaceful means to resolve the conflict. (See: http://ncronline.org/news/peace-justice/religious-leaders-encourage-obama-move-beyond-war-iraq-syria ) They suggest an eight-point program:

(1) Stop U.S. bombing in Iraq to prevent bloodshed, instability and the accumulation of grievances that contribute to the global justification for the Islamic State’s existence among its supporters.

(2) Provide robust humanitarian assistance to those who are fleeing the violence. Provide food and much needed supplies in coordination with the United Nations.

(3) Engage with the UN, all Iraqi political and religious leaders, and others in the international community on diplomatic efforts for a lasting political solution for Iraq; and work for a political settlement to the crisis in Syria.

(4) Support community-based nonviolent resistance strategies to transform the conflict and meet the deeper need and grievances of all parties.

(5) Strengthen financial sanctions against armed actors in the region by working through the UN Security Council. For example, disrupting the Islamic State’s $3 million/day oil revenue from the underground market would go a long way toward blunting violence.

(6) Bring in and significantly invest in professionally trained unarmed civilian protection organizations to assist and offer some buffer for displaced persons and refugees, both for this conflict in collaboration with Iraqi’s and for future conflicts.

(7) Call for and uphold an arms embargo on all parties to the conflict. U.S. arms and military assistance to the government forces and ethnic militias in Iraq, in addition to arming Syrian rebel groups, have only fueled the carnage, in part due to weapons intended for one group being taken and used by others.

(8) Support Iraqi civil society efforts to build peace, reconciliation, and accountability at the community level.

I would add that we all – Christians and Muslims and Jews — need to engage in local and broad-based educational programs that: (a) inform about authentic religious beliefs and traditions in all three Abrahamic religions; and (b) inform parishes, Mosque, and synagogue communities about the nature of religious fundamentalism and how to defuse it by practicing healthy religion.

Inter-religious dialogue is not just a polite and appropriate exercise. It is essential for our global life and security.

Approximately 92% of Americans believe in God; but have very different conceptions about who or what God is.

In 2010 by two Baylor University professors, Paul Froese and Christopher Bader, wrote a book about what Americans say about God and how their view of God says a lot about their politics and morality. Looking over some materials for a university course I am teaching this first semester, I took a look, once again, at their book: America’s Four Gods (Oxford University Press). The book was based on a 2005 survey of religious views; but the findings still resonate with more recent surveys done by Gallup and Pew.

The four American conceptions of God are: the Authoritative God, the Benevolent God, the Critical God, and the Distant God.

(1) Believers in the Authoritative God have strong convictions that God judges human behavior and acts on that judgment, punishing those who are unfaithful or ungodly. This judgment may be leveled via natural disasters or on a more personal scale through illness or misfortune. Approximately 31% of Americans believe in an Authoritative God.

(2) Believers in a Benevolent God see God’s handiwork everywhere: and they see the Benevolent God as mainly a force of positive influence in the world and less willing to condemn individuals. People with an Authoritative view of God are more likely to believe that God either caused a bad event to happen or allowed it to happen to teach someone a lesson. People with a Benevolent image of God are unlikely to see God’s hand in the tragedy itself and see evidence of God’s presence in stories of amazing coincidences or apparent miracles that saved people in the midst of the disaster. Approximately 24% of Americans believe in a Benevolent God.

(3) Believers in a Critical God see God as judgmental of humans, but reserving final judgment for the afterlife. Ethnic minorities, the poor, and the exploited often believe in a Critical God. Perhaps because those in need may not see the blessings of God in the here and now, they take comfort in the idea that God’s displeasure will be felt in another life. As one of my friends told me, when thinking about a prominent very wealthy but grossly immoral businessmen, “I take consolation in knowing that God will have the bastard burning forever in hell.” Approximately 16% of Americans believe in a Critical God, who will punish the sinful with an everlasting punishment in the next life.

(4) Believers in a Distant God view God as a cosmic force that set nature in motion. These believers feel that anthropological images of God are simply inadequate and often naïve attempts to know the unknowable. Believers in a Distant God can be regular churchgoers but value religious ritual only when it can be a path to peace and tranquility. Meditation, contemplation, and the beauty of nature are ways in which believers in a Distant God try to relate to the positive force guiding the universe. Approximately 24% of Americans believe in a Distant God. Most millennials would fall into this group. Among believers in the Distant God one finds, as well, the fastest growing “religious” group in contemporary America: they are those people unaffiliated with any organized religion. They consider themselves “spiritual but not religious.” (I see them as “seekers” and they are the group I focus most of my attention on these days.)

Adding to the complexity of America’s Four Gods is another religious trend stressed by the Baylor University professors, and further developed by Stephen Prothero from Boston University: increasingly, Americans are becoming religious illiterates — Protestants who can’t name the four Gospels, Catholics who can’t name all seven sacraments, and Jews who can’t name the five books in the Pentateuch. (I don’t think this religious illiteracy is restricted to just the United States however. One of my Catholic university students in Brussels told me a couple months ago that Pentecost was when the Holy Ghost made Mary pregnant through the visit of the angel Gabriel.)

Perhaps contemporary people, attracted by the four ways of packaging God, are becoming supermarket theists. Rather than drawing on healthy theological perspectives found in Christian tradition and the Scriptures, they are increasingly more inclined to buy the God that best suits their needs or, put another way, the God that best reaffirms their own ideologies. That certainly fits the Authoritative God understanding of the hate group, Westboro Baptist Church, in Topeka Kansas. They need a God who hates gays, hates Jews, and despises Catholics.

In any event, there is much to be done in the areas of religious education and catechetics. Serious thoughts as we look to the start of a new school year.

A well-known Israeli politician, Ayelet Shaked, has labeled all Palestinians as terrorists and recommended that mothers of Palestinians, since they give birth to “little snakes,” should be slaughtered. “They have to die and their houses should be demolished so that they cannot bear any more terrorists,” Shaked said, adding, “They are all our enemies and their blood should be on our hands. This also applies to the mothers of the dead terrorists.”

In the United States, a coalition of more than fifty religious leaders, led by mostly conservative Catholic, evangelical and Jewish activists, is calling on President Obama to sharply escalate military action against Islamic extremists in Iraq. They say “nothing short of the destruction” of the Islamic State can protect Christians and religious minorities now being subjected to “a campaign of genocide.” A key leader in the coalition is Robert P. George, a well-known Catholic conservative and political activist.

George drafted the 2009 Manhattan Declaration, a manifesto signed by Orthodox, Catholic and Evangelical leaders that “promised resistance to the point of civil disobedience against any legislation that might implicate their churches or charities in abortion, embryo-destructive research or same-sex marriage.”

Tragically, advocates of aggressive religious wars can still be found today in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. What these fanatic religious aggressors cannot legitimately claim, however, is that their positions are authentic expressions of their faiths. Every major religious tradition contains ethical principles that are incompatible with total war.

Religious xenophobia, nevertheless, is alive everywhere these days. Flying across the Atlantic, from Brussels to Chicago, a few months ago, a Muslim woman, wrapped up for prayer and praying, was sitting quietly in an aisle seat, a row in front of me. (All of a Muslim woman’s body must be covered during prayer, except for her face and hands.) A middle-aged businessman sitting next to me, nudged me and rather sarcastically whispered “Just look at her….Isn’t that disgusting.” I chuckled a bit and said “well what do you think about the lady two seats behind you?” (Behind him was a small and elderly Roman Catholic nun, saying her rosary, but equally wrapped up with only her forehead, eyes, nose, mouth and chin visible.) “She doesn’t bother me,” he said, “because she’s normal and good.”

For more than thirty years I have been studying the impact of religion and religions on political and cultural values. Religions can generate a lot of heat and hatred. (I learned a year ago that, if one wants a pleasant time while vacationing on the Dalmatian coast in Croatia, one does not ask or speak about the Serbs.) Religious people, in the name of their religion, can regress and virtue can become cruel inhumanity. The issue, however, is more fundamental than fanatical religion. It is about a human failure at being human.

Seeing the “other” as a threat to personal or group identity, security, or power. The other becomes the enemy. Life becomes a battle between “them” and “us,” and we have been watching it play out this month in Gaza, Iraq, Ferguson, Missouri….and at the Vatican, where the “them” is the Leadership Conference of Women Religious.

One can condemn, bomb, shoot, rape, or kill the “them” but such human violence always has a boomerang effect that slaughters “us” as well.

Apparent short-term solutions…with long-term destructive reverberations.

There is no quick solution; but, like combating Ebola, we have to research, think, and act. We have to start the process of seeing and accepting “them” as really part of “us.” The process is one of education and developing a sense of cultural and religious humility in our acceptance of the other’s right to be part of “us.”

Last year I spent an afternoon speaking to and with a group of sixty Imams in Brussels. The theme was freedom of religious expression. The event started very awkwardly, because I (unfortunately) had been introduced as an American Catholic theologian who had something to tell them. I walked to the microphone and could see a lot of angry eyes staring at me. So I cautiously started: “Actually I come today not as an American and not as a Catholic but as, like you, a son of the Abrahamic tradition which Islam honors as well as Christianity and Judaism. We are indeed brothers in a great religious tradition….”

The afternoon concluded on a positive note and I have been invited to return for another “discussion.” I insisted that Muslims have every right to live in peace and practice their faith and do not deserve negative and degrading rhetoric or actions. I insisted as well that Christians and Jews have every right to live in peace and practice their faith and do not deserve negative and degrading rhetoric or actions. I promised as well that in my parish I would hold a series of adult and youth information sessions about Mohammed and Muslim traditions. I asked them to do the same; and I met afterwards with four young women who are Muslim “catechists.” A small start….

When I told one of my friends what I was going to write about this week end, he said he was surprised that I was becoming a “soft old do-gooder-dreamer.” I chuckled and said I was indeed getting old but neither soft nor a “do-gooder”….just trying to do what I think Jesus of Nazareth would do in our situation: reaching out rather than striking out.

That is not easy. It is hard to do. The alternative of course is mutual destruction….