Religion

There's a joke that there is no such thing as a Jehovah's Witness bystander. That's because all believers must witness, which means preaching and knocking on doors. "You bear a certain degree of guilt if you don't," said Harry Thompson of Studio City, who added that he has been witnessing for decades. Thompson called it akin to a search-and-rescue operation.

She remembers being about 4 and, as her father worked in his study that doubled as a bedroom, hearing a knock on the front door. She answered and a tearful woman said, "Is the pastor here?" It was one of Sheila Schuller's first realizations that their small house in Garden Grove was also a sanctuary.

As he ran for the White House, John F. Kennedy assured skeptical Americans that he was "not the Catholic candidate for president," but rather a "candidate for president who happens also to be Catholic." In 1961, the year he took office, Catholics accounted for 18.8% of Congress. On Tuesday, when the 111th Congress is sworn in, about 30% of its membership will be Catholic, according to a recent analysis by Congressional Quarterly and the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life.

For decades now, liberals have been agonizing because conservatives seem to win even when polls show that the public generally disagrees with them. In their postmortems, liberals have placed blame on the way they frame their message, or on the right-wing media drumbeat that drowns out everything else, or on the right's co-opting of the flag, Mom and apple pie, which is designed to make liberals seem like effete, hostile foreign agents. It's understandable that liberals prefer to think of their subordination as a matter of their own inadequacies or of conservative wiles.

This small city's namesake military base was decommissioned after World War II, but over the years Fort Oglethorpe, population 7,000, has retained its utilitarian, base-town ambience. Public life here unfolds on two busy four-lane thoroughfares clogged with used-car lots, fast-food joints and pawnshops. All that's missing are the troops. What Fort Oglethorpe does not lack is churches -- enough churches, in an array of Protestant flavors, to deliver salvation to brigades of sinners.

After she was diagnosed with Stage IV breast cancer that had spread to her left lung, Gloria Bailey's doctors recommended she have a mastectomy followed by hormone therapy to fight the tumors that remained. She followed their advice, but had a nagging feeling about the regimen. "The Lord was just telling me, 'They're not being aggressive enough,' " Bailey recalled.

During the last days of Ramadan, Ahmad Chaudhry Nuruddin shut himself inside a small cubicle at the Bait ul Hameed Mosque with only a mattress, a chair and a few religious books. The slightly stooped 79-year-old strung a white sheet over the entrance to perfect his isolation. For the next few days, Nuruddin would follow the Islamic custom of I'tikaf, in which believers become virtual hermits, secluding themselves from the world to focus on the divine. "You spend your time remembering that God Almighty has created the world for the benefit of its people," he said.

With Sabbath candles burning and 14 guests seated around her dinner table, Joanna Arch held up a cup of kosher red wine and chanted the kiddish prayer in Hebrew: "God blessed the seventh day and made it holy because on it he rested from all his creative work."

I appreciate the prayers for what I now understand to be my hell-bound soul from readers appalled by God's recent letter in this space. Recall that the thrust of this little satirical note was my take that we've gone way overboard in sports with public, pious displays. I'm not a big fan of the kind of grandstanding shout-outs to Jesus we'll almost certainly see today from members of the Super Bowl's winning team.

The Obama administration is expected today to unveil a council of religious and secular advisors that will guide decisions on faith-based programs for a broad range of domestic and foreign policy issues.