Marc Gellman

I rarely speak about or write about the Holocaust. I don't defend my reticence, but I have my reasons. Mainly I don't like the way the Holocaust is never just remembered and mourned, but so often manipulated and used.I don't like the way the Holocaust is used by some Jews as the paradigm of Christian attitudes toward the Jewish people.

Most clergy folk I know are suspicious of any holiday less than 1,000 years old. This leaves out Secretary's Day, President's Day and Mail Carrier's Day. However, amid the floral hype and chocolate pandering of most made-up holidays, Mother's Day is just fine with me and with all my fellow religion professionals.

Cars run on gasoline, windmills run on ... well, wind. And charities run on the goodness of the human heart and the tax laws.Half of what foundations and charities and churches and synagogues need to operate is about to be cut off.

From: MO@exodus.comTo: B16@vatican.comRe: What I learned from God about leading lots of people out of Egypt when most of them would prefer to be building golden calves.Mazel Tov Joseph--I'm sorry: mazel tov Your Holiness Pope Benedict XVI.

Mainly, I name babies. It's good work because there is always a fresh supply of babies and at the age I name them you just can't be disappointed with anything they've done.

The monumental pile of words and talk that have followed his death, like dry leaves skittering in the wind, have mostly missed the point. They are words for the death of a pope, and surely he was a pope.

Palm Beach has become the Wittenberg of America. Now, in its most audacious act of spiritual correctness and mythical animal abuse, the Florida town is nailing the Easter Bunny to the doors of The Gardens mall.The minority attack on the most benign religious symbols in our culture recently crested in the Ten Commandments case now before the Supreme Court, a display which is supported by almost 80 percent of Americans surveyed, according to one poll.

We are forced to face extraordinary moral issues mostly because ordinary people make their lives or deaths inescapable. The civil-rights struggle was always visible; but after the Mississippi murders of James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman in the summer of 1964, the struggle was inescapable.

Faith is the nitroglycerin of the world. In the right dose it can stop a heart attack, and in the wrong dose it can blow up a world. Recently, in two extraordinary and tragic events we saw the power of faith to kill and to make alive.Two weeks ago, Terry Ratzmann stormed out of his pastor's sermon at the Living Church of God, which meets at the Sheraton Hotel in Brookville, Wis.

I don't know if in another life 3,000 years ago Judge M.P. Mohaideen was in fact King Solomon, but I was stunned by the similarity of the case he faced to the famous Biblical case brought before Ole King Sol.

The Supreme Court is hearing arguments this week about whether public displays of the Ten Commandments violate the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the American Constitution.

The Sandra Dee movies--or if you prefer the Doris Day movies, or if you prefer the Annette Funicello movies--all showed us the American version of a 400-year-old romantic cultural tradition in which sex and love were inextricably linked and then also linked to marriage and then also to procreation.

However, I feel the stirrings of the saving radiant pixels of a new age. Who would have thought that the prophets for this generation of spiritually acceptable television would be a hip-hop rapper named Xzibit and an ex-J Crew model named Ty Pennington.

It all depends how I feel that day about what Harold said at the edge of Miriam's grave. Miriam died after 56 wonderful years of marriage to Harold. During that long time, they had become like one person with two bodies and one heart.

In the wake of the commemorations last week of the liberation of Auschwitz 60 years ago, I am still trying to shake off the abiding sense of dread that consumes me whenever I think about the Holocaust.

Note from Gellman: At the very last minute, I was informed by my all-knowing editor that Rolling Stone magazine has just decided to run the Bible ad that it had previously turned down.

Then the real terror hit me. It was a quiet terror I have felt in the presence of American 20-year-olds who are nowhere near to being the third in line to the British throne: Harry and many of the kids I see have no idea what they are doing, because they have no knowledge of history whatsoever.

This is a mystery not a problem. The French existentialist (that's two strikes) Gabriel Marcel wrote that there are only two kinds of questions we human beings can ask: problems and mysteries.