The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible

"Come in," says Ralph. "You're the first one here."

Ralph has a calming, velvety voice. Which is appropriate--his day job is as a psychotherapist. The Bible study meets in his office, which is everything you'd want in a shrink's office: black leather chairs, indirect lighting, dark wood everywhere. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders weighs down one shelf, The Sex Atlas another. And Ralph himself looks pleasingly shrinkish: bald except for a fringe of gray hair, dressed in a dark green corduroy jacket, a blue sweater, a red tie, and chinos.

"I'm glad you found us," he says. "It's not what your average gay man in New York is doing on a Friday night."

I chuckle.

"The New York Times wrote us up in the eighties, and that's how they started the article," he says.

Ralph has arranged a dozen seats on the edges of the room, each with a thick blue Bible on top. It's more than we'll need. Most of the regulars are out of town, so only three diehards show up: a stout songwriter who grew up in Florida; a square-jawed architect; and a dance teacher at a New Jersey college who takes copious notes.

They are all members of Evangelicals Concerned, an organization that Ralph founded in 1975 for gay and gay-friendly evangelicals. It's not a massive movement: Ralph has two thousand people on his mailing list. But its existence alone was a surprise.

We begin. Ralph appoints the dance teacher to read some verses from Hebrews 3 out loud. Ralph stops him to discuss. "Faith is not merely intellectual assent," Ralph says, taking off his wire-rimmed glasses to punctuate the point. "You have to be willing to act on your faith. In other words, talk is cheap. Except in therapy."

Ralph returns his glasses to the end of his nose. He's not overbearing, but he's definitely in charge. He's the analyzer, the parser, the one who knows the original Greek words.

"Go on," says Ralph.

The dance instructor reads a verse that likens Moses to a house and Jesus to the builder of a house.

This is an important verse. It's at the heart of Ralph's theology: Jesus isn't just a great prophet. He isn't, as Ralph says, "the fairest flower in the family of humanity." He is God, and the Resurrection was literal. Ralph quotes C. S. Lewis here: "A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic--on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg--or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice."

In short, Ralph is theologically conservative. That's what makes him an evangelical. The Scriptures' social and humanist message is important, but Blair puts the emphasis on the divinity of Christ itself.

The ninety-minute session glides by without a single mention of homosexuality. If an evangelist from Thomas Road Baptist Church happened to drop in, he might not even notice anything different. Well, let me revise that. Ralph and his group do, at least, fulfill one gay stereotype: They know a lot about clothes.

At one point, the conversation drifts to buttons, and the dance instructor starts throwing around terms like placket--which apparently means the part of a man's shirt that covers the buttons.

The architect tosses in a factoid about Eisenhower-style jackets, which were truncated to save fabric in World War II. They had no skirt.

"The skirt," he explains to me, "is the part of a man's blazer worn below the waist." He looks at Ralph: "You wear a skirt almost every day."

Ralph smiles.

After Bible Study, we go out for chicken kebabs at a Turkish restaurant and I get a crash course in Ralph's life. He grew up in a moderately religious Presbyterian home in Ohio. He knew he was gay early on, certainly by high school. He also knew he loved religion.

In his high school library, he found a catalog for Bob Jones University, the fundamentalist college. He was drawn to it, he says with a laugh, because it was bright yellow. "All the other catalogs were dull colors, black and white."

He liked Bob Jones U's emphasis on Christ, and enrolled in 1964. It didn't go smoothly. For starters, Ralph got chewed out by an apoplectic, finger-wagging Bob Jones Sr. for defending Reverend Billy Graham, who was considered too liberal. "I thought he was going to have a heart attack," he says.

Ralph didn't come out of the closet at Bob Jones U. He went public slowly, steadily, as he crisscrossed the country attending other seminaries and grad schools. He started Evangelicals Concerned in 1975 after the president of an evangelical college took him out to dinner in New York and confessed that he was a tormented, closeted gay man.

Of course, Ralph's organization is controversial. And at first blush, it makes about as much sense as an Association of Vegan Burger King Owners. It's at once inspiring and depressing. Inspiring that they have found one another, and depressing because they are part of a movement in which the majority thinks of their sexuality as sinful.

But Ralph says that you have to distinguish between evangelical Christianity and the religious right. The religious right's obsession with homosexuality comes "out of their culture, not out of Scripture."

"But there do seem to be antigay passages in the Bible," I say.

"Yes, the so-called clobber passages," he says. "But I call them the clobbered passages."

Ralph's argument is this: The Bible does not talk about loving samesex relationships as they exist today. Jesus would have no problem with two men committed to each other. One of Ralph's pamphlets has this headline on the front: "What Jesus Said about Homosexuality." You open up the pamphlet, and there's a blank page.

Ralph says that if you look at the Bible's allegedly antigay passages in historical context, they aren't antigay at all. They are actually antiabuse, or antipaganism. Consider the famous Leviticus passage: "You shall not lie with a male as with a woman, it is an abomination."

"In biblical times, there was no parity between men and women. Women and children were just a little bit above slaves. To lie with a man like a woman was to disgrace him. It's what soldiers did to their conquered enemies, they raped them."

That famous Leviticus passage is actually merely saying: Do not treat your fellow man disgracefully.

Or take another commonly cited passage in the New Testament, Romans 1:26-27. Here the Apostle Paul rails against those who gave in to "dishonorable passions."

". . . Their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural, and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in their own persons the due penalty for their error."

Ralph says that Paul is preaching here against pagan cultic practices-- the loveless sex that went on in the idolatrous temples of the day.

I hope Ralph's right. I hope the Bible doesn't endorse gay bashing. But even if it does, there's another tack religious people can take. This one I learned from Ralph's acquaintance in the Jewish world, a man named Steven Greenberg. Greenberg is the first out-of-the-closet Orthodox rabbi in America. Like Ralph, he's an extreme minority. Most Orthodox Jews still believe that Leviticus bans same-sex relationships of any kind. Your average far-right Orthodox Jew is just as antigay as your average far-right evangelical; in 2006 the ultra-Orthodox Jews held violent demonstrations in protest of a planned gay pride march in Jerusalem, an event that was eventually canceled.

I call Greenberg. He has plenty to say about the Bible and homosexuality. But the point I find most fascinating is this: God and humans are partners in a quest to reveal new meanings of the Bible. The letters of the Bible are eternal, but not its interpretation.

"The whole Bible is the working out of the relationship between God and man," says Greenberg. "God is not a dictator barking out orders and demanding silent obedience. Were it so, there would be no relationship at all. No real relationship goes just one way. There are always two active parties. We must have reverence and awe for God, and honor for the chain of tradition. But that doesn't mean we can't use new information to help us read the holy texts in new ways. We don't have to sit back and passively accept that Leviticus bans sex between men at all times and in all ways if other convincing ways of reading can be found."

Or put it this way: Greenberg says that God is like an artist who is constantly revising his masterpiece. Sometimes He nearly erases his whole work, as with the Great Flood. Other times, He listens to what humans say. Moses, for instance, argues with God and convinces him to spare the lives of the complaining Israelites. "It sounds strange to say it," the rabbi says, "but in the Bible, God is on a learning curve."

Greenberg tells me, "Never blame a text from the Bible for your behavior. It's irresponsible. Anybody who says X, Y, and Z is in the Bible--it's as if one says, 'I have no role in evaluating this.'"

The idea that we can work with God to evolve the Bible's meaning--it's a thrilling idea. It makes me think back to Mr. Berkowitz and his shoes and the whole issue of religion providing freedom from choice. Greenberg is at the other end of the spectrum from Mr. Berkowitz. He says that just because you're religious doesn't mean you give up your responsibility to choose. You have to grapple with the Bible.

Give thanks in all circumstances . . .

--1 THESSALONIANS 5:18

Day 263. I feel myself becoming an extremist--at least in some areas. Like with my obsession with gratefulness. I can't stop.

Just now, I press the elevator button and am thankful that it arrives quickly.

I get onto the elevator and am thankful that the elevator cable didn't snap and plummet me to the basement.

I go to the fifth floor and am thankful that I didn't have to stop on the second or third or fourth floor.

I get out and am thankful that Julie left the door unlocked so I don't have to rummage for my King Kong key ring.

I walk in, and am thankful that Jasper is home and healthy and stuffing his face with pineapple wedges.

And on and on. I'm actually muttering to myself, "Thank you . . . thank you . . . thank you."

It's an odd way to live. But also kind of great and powerful. I've never before been so aware of the thousands of little good things, the thousands of things that go right every day.

Sometimes my thank-yous are directed at no one in particular. It's more of an appreciation than a thanks. A reminder to myself: "Pay attention, pal. Savor this moment." But other times, when I'm in a believing phase, my thanks have an addressee. I'm thanking God, or the universal laws of nature--I'm not sure which--but it gives the act of thanking more weight.

And he lifted up his eyes on his disciples, and said: "Blessed are you poor, for yours is the kingdom of God."

--LUKE 6:20

Day 264. In terms of stereotype busting, it's hard to beat Ralph Blair and his group of gay evangelical Christians. What could possibly top that? Evangelical Christians who don't believe in Jesus? Evangelical Christians who worship Poseidon? I don't know.

But I do want to spend some time with another group of evangelicals who, in their own way, have camped out far from the tent of Pat Robertson and Thomas Road Baptist Church. They're called the Red-letter Christians.

I'd never heard of the Red-letter Christians before my biblical year. They're still much smaller than the conservative evangelical lobby. They don't have TV shows with millions of viewers and 1-800 operators standing by. They don't have their own universities with facilities like the LeHaye Ice Hockey Arena. And, yet, even since the start of my year, I've watched them gain more and more national prominence.

The Red-letter Christians are a loose-knit, like-minded group of preachers, the most prominent of whom are a Philadelphia-based pastor named Tony Campolo, and Jim Wallis, the founder of Sojourners magazine and author of God's Politics. Bono is an honorary member.

Wallis writes in Sojourners about how he came up with the name. He was doing an interview at a Nashville radio station, and the DJ said:

"I'm a secular Jewish country music songwriter and disc jockey. But I love your stuff and have been following your book tour." He told me he loved my "riffs" and would like to spend an evening together just to get some lines for new music. "You're a songwriter's dream." Then he told me he believed we were starting a new movement, but noticed we hadn't come up with a name for it yet. "I've got an idea for you," he said. "I think you should call yourselves the Red-letter Christians, for the red parts of the Bible that highlight the words of Jesus. I love the red letter stuff."

In their own way, the Red-letter Christians are literalists. They probably would avoid that label, since the word has such negative connotations. And, true, they accept more figurative language in the Bible than, say, the Robertson camp. But they are literal in the sense that their goal is to return to the plain, primary, simple sense of Jesus's words, what Merriam-Webster's' entry for literalism calls "the ordinary meaning of a term or expression."

When Jesus said that you should invite the poor, the maimed, the lame, and the blind to your banquets, then you should. When Jesus talked about nonviolence, we should take him at his word. The problem with a lot of religion, says Campolo, is that people have "interpreted the Gospel so much, we've started to believe the interpretations instead of what Jesus said."

Campolo looks a bit like New York Yankees manager Joe Torre, but balder and with clunky glasses. He was, along with Rev. Jesse Jackson, one of Bill Clinton's spiritual advisers during Lewinskygate.

I call up Dr. Campolo, and I immediately like him because he addresses me as "Brother."

"Many of us in the evangelical community believe that evangelical Christianity has become captured and enslaved by the religious right," Campolo says right off the bat. "Its loyalty seems to be more to the platform of the Republican Party than to the radical teachings of Jesus."

Campolo and the Red-letter Christians claim not to be liberal or conservative, Democrat or Republican. Which may be true, but their social policies definitely are more MoveOn.org than Fox News. They're antiwar, anticonsumerism--and above all, antipoverty.

They point out that there are more passages in the Bible about the poor than any other topic save idolatry--several thousand, in fact. "The Christian call is to share," says Campolo. "There's nothing wrong with making a million dollars. There is something wrong with keeping it."

Some megachurch pastors subscribe to a doctrine called the Prosperity Gospel. The idea is this: Stay faithful, go to church, pay your tithes, and God will bless you by making you rich. God wants you to be successful. God has nothing against a Gulfstream jet and a private tennis court. The Red-letter Christians call this heresy. "Christianity is not a watered-down version of middle-class morality," says Campolo.

As for homosexuality, Campolo is no Ralph Blair. He doesn't endorse gay marriage. But . . . at the same time, he believes it's not a major Christian issue. It wasn't what Jesus preached about. It's not something on which we should waste spiritual capital. Jesus was concerned with breaking down barriers and embracing society's outcasts.

At the end of our conversation, Dr. Campolo calls me Brother again, which I love. If I were in the punditry business, I'd guess that Campolo and his movement will keep gaining steam. They may never fill Madison Square Garden with their sermons, but they'll become a powerful force. They've already gotten enough press to inspire a backlash from those who've been called Black-letter Christians. These are Christians who say the Red-letter Christians ignore troublesome passages that don't fit their agenda. Jesus may have a message of mercy, but he also has a message of justice. They cite his words in Matthew 10:34: "Do not think that I have come to bring peace on the earth. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword."

Regardless, the Red-letter Christians are just one of the cracks in the Republican-evangelical love affair. Some evangelicals don't necessarily go as far as to embrace progressive politics but say instead that churches should stay out of politics. The New York Times ran an article in 2006 about Rev. Gregory A. Boyd, a pastor of a Minnesota megachurch. As the article says, Boyd "first became alarmed while visiting another megachurch's worship service on a Fourth of July years ago. The service finished with the chorus singing 'God Bless America' and a video of fighter jets flying over a hill silhouetted with crosses. 'I thought to myself, "What just happened? Fighter jets mixed up with the cross?"'"

He gave a series of sermons saying that Christians should not seek political power but instead seek to have "'power under' others--winning people's hearts by sacrificing for those in need, as Jesus did." A thousand members of Boyd's flock were offended enough to leave the congregation. But another four thousand stayed on.

Jesus said to him, "If you would be perfect, go, sell what you possess and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me." --MATTHEW 19:21

Day 268. I bought The Purpose-Driven Life today. This is the guide to a Christian life by Hawaiian-shirt-wearing megachurch minister Rick Warren that has been on the New York Times best-seller list for about a half decade now.

When I get it home and start to read it, the first thing I notice is that Warren has copyrighted the phrase "Purpose-driven." It has a little (r) after it. This makes me angry. Did Jesus copyright "Turn the Other Cheek"(r)? Did Moses trademark "Let My People Go?"

But then I see that, in fine print, it says that Warren gives away 90 percent of the Purpose-driven profits. Ninety percent. He reverse tithes. Now I just feel small. It reminds me that I have to finish my own tithing for the year. I go online and donate the final chunk of my 10 percent to a place called Warm Blankets Orphan Care International, which builds orphanages in Asia. The Bible commands us to take care of the fatherless, plus this charity got the maximum four-star rating on Charity Navigator's website.

As with that first tithing back in September, I feel a mixture of God's pleasure and my own pain. But I think, or hope, I felt less pain than before. It comes back to the idea of surrendering. I still haven't been able to fully surrender my spirit or emotions, but I have at least surrendered some of my bank account. I have to embrace the surrender.

But I won't say another word about it. I've already violated Jesus's teaching: "When you give alms, sound no trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in synagogues and in the streets, that they may be praised by men."

Love . . . keeps no record of wrongs.

--1 CORINTHIANS 13:4-5 (NIV)

Day 270. There's a passage in the New Testament that I keep coming back to. I think about it every day. It's not nearly as famous as the Sermon on the Mount or the Good Samaritan parable. It's mostly known for being read at weddings.

In the passage, the Apostle Paul is writing to the Corinthians and tells them, "Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs."

I think this passage speaks to me because I violate this one so literally, especially that last part.

I keep a record of wrongs.

It's in my Palm Treo in a file I've labeled "Stuff." I figured the name "Stuff" was vague and dull enough that if someone found my Treo on the subway, he or she wouldn't bother to look at the file. Because I know it's not something I should be proud of.

The problem is, Julie is always insisting that I have a terrible memory. She says I'm constantly getting things wrong. I respond that my memory is about as good as her memory--decent but not great. And that she gets things wrong a lot, too. Then she demands an example, and I can never think of one. So I've started to keep a list.

I'm aware of the irony that I have to consult a list to prove that I have a decent memory.

Here's a sample from my list:

* Vichyssoise is a potato soup like I said, not a fish soup like Julie said.

* The animated android Max Headroom did commercials for Coke like I said, not Pepsi like Julie said.

* We saw an Irish movie called Waking Ned Devine on our second date like I said, not another charmingly quirky movie called Saving Grace.

You get the idea. I've actually put my list into action only one time. This is because it's kind of difficult to look at the list in public without exposing the secret of the list's existence. During an unpleasant argument about who left the microwave door open, I sneaked into the bathroom, clicked on my Treo, then reemerged with an example of the time she left the keys in a rental car, and we had to call Avis.

In short, the exact kind of thing Paul was preaching against. I decide that not only should I erase my "Stuff" file, but I should confess to Julie about its existence. So that's what I'm doing.

When I show Julie my list, she looks at it for a good ten seconds without talking.

Then she laughs.

"You're not angry?"

"How could I be angry?" she says. "It's just so heartbreaking that you need this."

"Well, I have trouble remembering things in the moment."

I take the Treo back from her, highlight the "Stuff" list, then press delete. I feel good. I've cleaned the slate on my Treo, and I've cleaned the slate with Julie. I know it may seem like a small thing, but the "Stuff" incident made me realize my worldview is too much about quantification. It consists of thousands of little ledgers. Everything--people included-- comes with a list of assets and liabilities. When I forgive, I file away the other person's wrongs for possible future use. It's forgiveness with an asterisk.

The Hebrew Scriptures encourage forgiveness--Leviticus tells us not to "bear any grudge"--but it's fair to say that it's a bigger theme in the New Testament. Start over. Be born again. Become a new creature in Christ.

Consider Jesus' parable of the prodigal son. Here's how the New Catholic Dictionary describes it:

The story of the son who took his portion of his father's goods and squandered it by riotous living. When reduced to the depth of misery and obliged to eat the husks thrown to the swine, he bethought himself of his father and resolved to return to him penitent. The father was watching for him, greeted him affectionately, and killed the fatted calf to make merry over his return. The elder son resented the father's rejoicing. The father silenced him by the reminder that: "thou art always with me, and all I have is thine, but . . . thy brother was dead and is come to life, was lost and is found.

When I first read the parable of the prodigal son, I was perplexed. I felt terrible for the older brother. The poor man put in all these years of loyal service, and his brother skips town, has a wild good time, then returns, and gets a huge feast? It seems outrageously unfair.

But that's if you're thinking quantitatively. If you're looking at life as a balance sheet. There's a beauty to forgiveness, especially forgiveness that goes beyond rationality. Unconditional love is an illogical notion, but such a great and powerful one.

The eyes of the Lord are in every place, keeping watch on the evil and the good.

--PROVERBS 15:3

Day 271. A spiritual update: Back when I was in seventh grade, I had this delusion. I thought that the girls on whom I had crushes might be watching me. Not at school, mind you. They ignored me there. But in my room, when I was alone, they were watching. I wasn't sure how the logistics of this worked (psychic powers? Hidden cameras like The Truman Show?), but it put a lot of pressure on me.

I had to make sure to act cool in case Kim Glickman was observing. I'd put on a David Bowie LP not because I wanted to hear Bowie but because I wanted Kim to think I wanted to hear Bowie. I'd brush my teeth in a rakishly nonchalant manner, just so she knew I was cool even when doing dental hygiene. Maybe she likes the tortured artists, I thought. So sometimes I'd channel Sid Vicious and do something crazy, like throw my three-ring school binder across my room and watch the pages splatter on the floor. (I'd then spend fifteen minutes cleaning up and putting the pages back into the rings.)

Sad, I know. Luckily, I got over that in ninth grade. But now I'm starting to have a similar feeling. Kim can't see me. But maybe something can. Something is keeping track of my life, of all of our lives. My existence is not a meaningless collection of actions, so I should take seriously every decision. I don't know what the payoff will be, if anything. But someone is writing this all down in the Book of Life.

When they had rowed about three or four miles, they saw Jesus walking on the sea and drawing near to the boat. --JOHN 6:19

Day 272. My brother-in-law Eric does not embody the biblical virtue of humility. He's a prideful man.

He's Harvard educated, as he'll remind you not infrequently, and he's distressingly smart, as he also makes clear. He'll lecture you on everything from SALT II treaties to the symbolism in Zola's novels. I'm sure if Eric were around in biblical times, he'd have been chief architect of the Tower of Babel.

These days, Eric is getting his PhD in social psychology at Columbia, which means he says things like this: "Humans are a fascinating species." As if our struggles are all for his intellectual amusement.

When I went on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, Eric was my phone-a-friend. It seemed the most obvious choice. But when I called him at the $32,000 level, he choked. It was one of the most bittersweet moments of my life--bitter because I lost $32,000, but sweet because I thought he'd get taught a lesson: Pride goeth before the fall.

That lesson didn't quite pan out. The Millionaire fiasco didn't seem to dent his ego one bit. He still enjoys tormenting me with his superior knowledge. And the unfortunate thing is, the man reads everything.

Today, he's over at our apartment and gleefully telling me about the latest religion-themed article he read:

"So, did you hear about that study about Jesus walking on water?"

"No."

"This scientist says it's because the conditions in the Mediterranean at the time caused ice floes on the Sea of Galilee."

"I see."

Eric chuckles. He actually doesn't think that scientific explanations of miracles are worthy of serious discussion. They are, he says, more like crackpot science that tries to explain the physics of Road Runner cartoons.

But for me, such studies do present a problem.

The rivers of Egypt turning bloodred? It could have been red algae or volcanic ash. The darkness sweeping over the land? It might have been the khamsin, a hot wind of the Sahara, churning up the sand. When Moses sweetened the bitter desert water at Marah with a tree? He could have been using an ion exchange resin. Not that I know what that means. But it sounds convincing.

I don't need to hear scientific explanations of miracles. It plays too perfectly into my innate skepticism, which still runs deep.

I know plenty of religious people who see miracles as myths, not literal truth. They say that we don't need to believe that Joshua actually stopped the sun in the sky so he could finish a battle; the story can still have beauty and resonance even if Joshua didn't get a divine extension. And I imagine that, if I go religious at the end of this year, that's the camp I'll belong to.

But if I'm going to be literal, I must at least try to believe they happened and that God overturned the natural order. It's a heck of a mental hurdle and, as with creationism, one I'm not sure I can clear.

I take some measure of consolation from a book I just read. It's called The Battle for God by former-nun-turned-religion-scholar Karen Armstrong.

Armstrong makes the intriguing argument that people in biblical times did not believe the miracles happened. Or not in the same way that fundamentalists today do, anyway. Armstrong says that the ancients viewed the world simultaneously in two different ways. One was logos, the other mythos. Logos was the ancients' rational and practical side, the factual knowledge they used in farming or building houses. Mythos was the stories that gave their lives meaning. For instance, the story of the Exodus was not to be taken as factual but as a tale filled with significance about freedom from oppression. The ancients didn't necessarily believe that it happened exactly as told--with six hundred thousand people trudging through the desert for forty years. But it was true in the larger sense, in the sense that it gave context to their lives.

Fundamentalism, Armstrong says, is a modern phenomenon. It's the attempt to apply logos to mythos, to turn legend into scientific truth. I don't wholly buy Armstrong's thesis. It smacks of wishful thinking to me. I don't think the distinctions in the biblical minds were that black and white. But given the choice between her theory and fundamentalism, I'll take hers.

"Whoever strikes his father or his mother shall be put to death." --EXO D U S 21:15

Day 273. When Jasper wakes up from his nap, I go to retrieve him. He is standing at the edge of his crib, his hair sticking up in back, Alfalfa-style. In his hand he is clutching a plastic bowling pin, which is his version of a security blanket.

I lift him out. Jasper grins. It is a grin meant to convey that he is about to do something spectacularly witty--and then he hits me in the face with a bowling pin.

"Don't do that," I say. I have on my stern James Earl Jones voice.

He takes that to mean "Do it again, but harder." So he winds up and delivers another blow to my face. And another. These ones were powerful leave-a-red-mark-on-my-forehead hits.

"Jasper!" I say. "Say you're sorry."

Jasper just grins.

"You do not hit people in the face with bowling pins. It's very dan-

gerous. That's a no-no."

He looks at me bewildered, then angry. How could I not see the humor in a flawlessly executed bowling-pin-to-the-face maneuver?

"Apologize to me, please."

"No."

"Apologize."

"No."

This is going to be ugly.

The Hebrew Bible says that hitting your parents can be punishable by death. Instead I turn the other cheek. I ignore my son.

Ignoring a rebellious son is, coincidentally, a strategy recommended by a secular parenting book I read months ago. So I put him on the ground, turn my back to him, and cross my arms. I look like a model posing for the label on the Mr. Clean bottle.

He starts to whimper.

"Say you're sorry, and we can go play," I say.

"No."

"No hitting people," I say. I say it with decisiveness, confident that I have thousands of years of tradition behind me.

I keep my back to him. He grabs my leg.

"A. J.!" he says. "A. J.! A. J.!"

There's something ineffably heartbreaking about a two-year-old calling to his father, and the father not answering. And I am that father. It's killing me. But Jasper is still too stubborn to say he's sorry.

The Bible talks about the importance of punishing your kids if you love them. And I think there's something to that paradoxical advice. The best punishment should be a sacrifice--you sacrifice a pleasant afternoon, you sacrifice some in-the-moment affection, to give them a better future.

Jasper stomps, he sulks, he mutters to himself. It's the longest fight we've had. Finally, four hours later, he tracks me down in the living room and gives me a sad little downcast-eyes "Sorry."

"Great!" I say. "I'm so proud of you for apologizing. What should we play?"

But Jasper would not be playing with me tonight. He would play alone. He goes to bed all mopey and martyrlike. It probably sounds like a minor skirmish, but for me the War of the Bowling Pin was an epic one. The next morning at about seven-fifteen, I hear Jasper screaming into the monitor: "A. J.! A. J.!" I open his door, stick my head in. I pick him up, he gives me a grudge-free hug around the neck. Yes, our relationship survived my dispensation of justice. It's a good lesson for me. I still spare the rod, but I'm trying not to spoil the child.

Month Ten: June

Nor should there be obscenity, foolish talk or coarse joking, which are out of place . . .

--EPHESIANS 5:4 (NIV)

Day 277. "How was the birthday party?" I ask Julie.

She and Jasper had just returned from a party at a preschool on the

East Side.

"OK. But they had this rabbit for the kids to pet, and there was rabbit shit everywhere."

"Huh."

I am shocked at her language. And then I am shocked that I am

shocked. When I first met Julie, she rarely cursed, whereas I had no filter whatsoever. I chose a particularly adolescent curse word as my default computer password. I enjoyed watching TV with the closed

captioning, because the captioners sometimes type in the dirty words

that are bleeped out for the apparently more delicate hearing-unimpaired community.

But for the last two months, inspired by Orthodox Jews and evangelical Christians, I haven't used a single naughty word. And it startles

me when others do.

What is a biblically naughty word? Well, there are two genres: blasphemy and profanity. Blasphemy is the subject of the Third Commandment, which orders us not to take the Lord's name in vain. What does it

mean to take the Lord's name in vain? Is it when you say the word God

in any secular context? Or is it only when you invoke God's name while

lying under oath? Or is it uttering the word Yahweh, which might come

close to the pronunciation of God's holy name? All three theories have

their supporters.

If you want to be supremely safe, as I do, you should use the word

God only when praying or talking about the Bible.

As for profanity--the S-word and the F-word and regular old bodilyfunction-themed cussing--things are even less clear. In fact, as science

writer Natalie Angier points out, the Bible itself uses some adult language. In 2 Kings 18:27 the men "eat their own dung and drink their own

piss."(KJV) In Ezekiel 23:20, you can read some very salty language

about the size of Egyptian men's private parts.

Still, there are sections, especially in the New Testament, that indicate such language should be avoided. Consider the passage from Ephesians I put at the top of this chapter: "Nor should there be any obscenity,

foolish talk or coarse joking, which are out of place." Or this one from

Ephesians 4:29 (NIV): "Do not let any unwholesome talk come out of

your mouths."

So to be totally protected, I've scrubbed up my vocabulary. My current curse words are: fudge, sugar, and shoot. When I say one of my new

curse words, Julie usually responds with something like, "Hey, Opie!

You going fishin' this morning?" Or just whistling The Andy Griffith

Show theme.

She can mock me, but the weird thing is, I think my G-rated language

is making me a less angry person. Because here's the way it works: I'll get to the subway platform just as the downtown train is pulling

away, and I'll start to say the F-word. I'll remember to censor myself. So

I'll turn it into "fudge" at the last second. When I hear myself say "fudge"

out loud, it sounds so folksy, so Jimmy Stewart-ish and amusingly dorky,

that I can't help but smile. My anger recedes. Once again, behavior

shapes emotions.

"Fudge" seems clearly within bounds, but what about words like

"heck"? Those are more morally ambiguous, but probably should be

avoided as well. In the 1600s "criminy" was considered a curse word for

being too close to "Christ." Same with "gosh" and "golly" in the 1700s,

which were meant to evoke God and God's body, respectively. Later,

"Jiminy Cricket" and "Gee Willikers" were wicked code words for Jesus.

"Tarnation" began as an offensive combination of "eternal" and "damnation." And "heck" was an only slightly better alternative to "hell." A minister's daughter recently told me that when she was growing up, they used "Cheese and rice" instead of the name of her savior, which I imagine would also have been banned in the eighteenth century. Land mines lurk everywhere in the English language.

Jesus said to them, "Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's."

--MARK 12:17

Day 279. I've been dropping in on another evangelical Bible study class-- a straight one. They meet on Tuesday nights in the back room of the American Bible Society near Columbus Circle.

The dozen or so other members have been very welcoming of me, though a little perplexed at the same time, since I look more Jewish than your average diamond dealer on 47th Street. I'm glad they let me listen as we drill deep on a different passage from the Gospel of Mark each week. It's always humbling. I can keep up with them on the Old Testament--I can quote from Deuteronomy and Proverbs--but I'm still a third-string minor leaguer when it comes to the New Testament.

Anyway, I bring this up because last week at Bible study, the coleader--a tall, precise, white-haired man named Kevin--was talking about how he tries to be a good and law-abiding person.

He told us that he was recently driving from New York to Ohio for business, and he had a battle with himself. He'd keep gunning his car up to sixty-five, then he'd feel guilty for breaking the law and slow back down to fifty-five.

"I said to myself, 'Do I really need to speed?' " he said. " 'What's it going to save me? An hour? Is it worth it in the long run to break the law?' "

There is scriptural justification for strict observance of civil law, speed limits, and otherwise. You can see it in one of Peter's letters to his followers in the New Testament, where he tells them to obey the emperor: "Be subject for the Lord's sake to every human institution, whether it be to the emperor as supreme, or to governors as sent by him" (1 Peter 2:13-14).

When I ask the pastor out to pasture Elton Richards about whether to obey every human institution, he cautions me: You can find the opposing idea in the New Testament as well. There's a story about Peter and the apostles preaching God's word, and they are told by the authorities to shut up. They do not. They say, in effect, "We answer to a higher authority."

Marcus Borg, author of Reading the Bible Again for the First Time, says the two themes run throughout the Bible. Call them the status-quo motif and liberation motif. Status-quo sections tell us to support our earthly leaders. God appointed our leaders, so we shouldn't question them--or even speak ill of them ("You shall not . . . curse a ruler of your people," Exodus 22:28). The liberation parts encourage God's people to throw off the yoke of oppression and flee the Pharaoh or his modern-day equivalents. They say that God is with the people, not the rulers.

So which to choose? Well, in the case of traffic laws, Bible study leader Kevin has got a point. I'm not doing any noble Gandhi-like civil disobedience by going seventy in a school zone. I'm just trying to get home faster to take a nap. This month I have pledged to try to really follow New York's street laws. To the letter. This has changed my life in a more dramatic way than I could have imagined. Just try not to jaywalk in Manhattan. It's almost impossible. I wait on the corner, usually alone, or, if I'm lucky, with a German tourist couple and a class of first-graders on a field trip to the aquarium. The rest of New York pedestrians see the traffic lights as helpful suggestions and nothing more.

I won't pretend it's fun. It's a pain in the butt. It takes me about 30 percent longer to walk anywhere. And it's another source of stupid--but increasingly frequent--arguments with my wife. Yesterday we got out of a cab in the middle of the block, and I refused to cross the street there. I walked to the end of the block, waited for the light to change, marched over the zebra crossing, then walked back up the other side. Conveniently, it was raining. Julie was waiting for me under an awning.

"Hope you had a nice walk," she said, her voice more tired than angry.

Driving is just as bad. Until I started to pay attention, I didn't even know speed limits existed in New York. I figured the rule was: Gun your car to get to the next light as fast as possible, then jerk to a stop. Then repeat. Or, more likely, sit in traffic and go 5 mph. But if you look hard enough, you can find them. Actual speed limit signs--30 mph on most avenues. So whenever we rent a car to visit Julie's brother in New Jersey, I've made sure to cruise at a nice, smooth 25 mph down Columbus Avenue.

When we get to the highway, things get more complicated. Often, I'm the only one putt-putting along at fifty-five, certainly the only one without a "World's Best Grandpa" bumper sticker. I should probably have my hazards on. Cars whiz by me. They honk. They swerve. The drivers look at me like I'm the lone Red Sox fan at a Yankees game. The first time I drove on the highway, I couldn't stop laughing--I'm not sure out of nervousness or out of the absurdity of it or both.

So, in general, the whole experience has been a pain. But there are two upsides.

1. I've come to see obeying traffic laws as an urban version of the Sabbath. It's an enforced pause. When I stand alone on the corner, I try to spend the time appreciating the little things New York has to offer. Look at that: The street signs have changed from yellow and black to a much more pleasant green and white. When did that happen? Or else I watch the FedEx truck drive by and notice the secret white arrow embedded in its logo (it's between the F and the E).

2. I have freedom from worry. No one I know has ever been arrested for jaywalking. But whenever I violated the Don't Walk sign, there was always a tiny, faint pang from knowing that I was doing something wrong. I no longer have that. I feel in control. It's that same feeling of cleanliness, of relief, that I get when I actually fold all the sweaters in my closet or clean out all the emails in my in-box.

. . . Not in the passion of lust like heathen who do not know God.

--1 THESSALONIANS 4:5

Day 286. Julie is seven months pregnant with the twins, and wildly uncomfortable. She can hardly move. She gets out of breath opening the refrigerator door. When I asked her a couple of weeks ago if she wanted to be intimate, she said the following: "I can't think of anything I'd rather do less."

No sugarcoating there.

Speaking of sex, I think I dismissed the whole lust issue too glibly. I

found a way to rationalize it. I told myself, well, the Hebrew Bible has prosex parts, so I don't have to bother with all that modesty business.

I took the easy way out. The truth is, there are plenty of sections of the Bible that do encourage restraint of the sex drive, sometimes even abstinence. Jesus says not to even think about other women aside from your wife: "You have heard that it was said, 'You shall not commit adultery.' But I say to you that every one who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart" (Matthew 5:27-8).

And the Apostle Paul implies that celibacy is the ideal; marriage is a second-best solution, a concession to our urges. As he says in Galatians 5:24: "And those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires." So I decide that I should try to be ascetic for my final few weeks, and, as Paul says, put to death my earthly nature.

My previous strategy of censorship didn't work. We saw that with the CleanFlicks fiasco. It was too passive. I have to attack lust head-on. I have to change my way of thinking about sex. So after much reading, I've developed four strategies.

Last night I had the chance to road test all four. I went to a fashion show that Yossi had invited me to. He said the designer is an Orthodox Jew who grew up in Brooklyn, and I figured, Orthodox fashion? Sounds pretty tame. Lots of bulky, shapeless, earth-toned dresses. Perhaps a scandalous glimpse of exposed ankle. I could handle that.

I know I am going to be tempted from the moment I arrive. The event is held in Chelsea at the Frying Pan, a rusty boat docked off 23rd Street. The crowd is thick, packing both sides of the catwalk. Yes, there is a sprinkling of Orthodox Jews, but mostly it is gorgeous twentysomething fashion types with back tattoos and bare shoulders/midriffs/thighs. (There is also a man in a pink suit, pink shoes, and pink bowler hat, and on said bowler hat, a tiny billboard--about the size of a license plate-- with a functioning electronic text scrawl. This did not make me lustful, but I thought you should know.)

I start out with strategy number one. Here you think of the woman in question as out of your league. You remember this advice from the medieval rabbi way back in the first month? You have to think of yourself as a peasant and her as a princess. She's so beyond your grasp, you can admire her aesthetically but not lustfully.

I try this out within the first five minutes. When Yossi and I take our place, we notice a woman with a small leopard-skin skirt, small bustier, and very large cleavage.

"You don't see that too much in Crown Heights," says Yossi.

Interestingly, this strategy has gotten much easier for me with my current appearance. A year ago I might have deluded myself that I had a shot at Leopard-skin Bustier Woman. Nowadays, not so much.

Strategy two: Think of the woman as if she were your mother. This is another tip from the medieval rabbi. So I do it. I think of Leopard-skin Bustier Woman as my mom, and I feel revulsed. I feel like Malcolm McDowell in A Clockwork Orange undergoing the Ludovico technique. This is more effective than strategy number one, and also more disturbing.

Strategy three: Recite Bible passages to yourself.

After a few minutes, the fashion show itself starts, and the temptations get worse. The models aren't hidden behind modest muumuus. They stomp down the runway with their exaggerated hip swivel, wearing alarmingly skimpy outfits that look like kimonos during a fabric shortage. One dark-haired model has no shirt or blouse whatsoever. The only thing around her chest is what appears to be an extralarge rubber band.

Here I try strategy number three. This one I picked up from a book called When Good Men Are Tempted, a guide to controlling your lust, by an evangelical Christian named Bill Perkins. He suggests you recite Bible passages: "I've found that memorizing large sections of the Bible gives me a safe mental focus when I'm tempted. By the time I recite a paragraph or two to myself, my spirit is strengthened, and my mind is cleared."

So I do that. I mouth to myself one of the verses he suggested. It worked, in a way. My brain was so busy with its recital project, it didn't have time to focus on the rubber band. The meaning of the passage is almost beside the point. I could have probably recited the lyrics to The Mikado and gotten a similar benefit. It's all about keeping your mind distracted.

The show ends, and I tell Yossi I should probably go. He says, "You sure you don't want to just hang around for a few minutes?"

"Well, just a few minutes."

We bump into a friend of Yossi's. She is blond, Israeli, cute, and very drunk.

"She has a weird fetish," Yossi whispers to me. "She likes to fondle payot."

As in the side locks? Yossi nods.

Oh, man. Yossi introduces me to her.

"I'm very drunk," she says.

I smile noncommittally.

Was she checking out my side locks? I think so.

Here, I try out strategy number four: Do not objectify. This one I got from downloading an excellent sermon about lust by a Unitarian minister. The minister suggested that you can battle your urge to objectify women by focusing on them as a complete person. So I look at Fetish Girl and think about everything but her body: her Israeli childhood, what might be her favorite novel, how many cousins she has, whether she owns a PC or a Mac.

But she won't stop looking at my payot. This isn't working. In a panic, I switch to the less evolved but more efficient method: Think of her as your mom. I feel nauseated. Victory.

I've also noticed a strange phenomenon. I figured it'd get more and more difficult to suppress my sexuality. I figured it'd be like water building up behind a dam. But quite the opposite: it's more like my sex drive has evaporated. I'm sure it'll come roaring back like a dragon--to use the metaphor in my book When Good Men Are Tempted. But for now, it's pleasantly tranquilized.

And it makes me feel spiritually spotless. It makes me realize I have a hidden Puritan streak. On some level, I do consider sex dirty, or else why would I feel so buoyant when I've stamped it out? There's something lovely about putting your libido in storage.

And there's another advantage: The thousands of watts of energy devoted to sex are suddenly free for other pursuits. Sublimation is real. I've never been so productive as I have been in these past weeks. I can crank out two thousand Esquire words a day on this no-sex diet.

"Lord, how often shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him?" --MATTHEW 18:21

Day 287. Tonight, at nine-fifteen, Julie leaves our bedroom door open. I have repeatedly asked her not to do this. I can't sleep unless the room is Reykjavik-level cold, so I always shut the door at seven and flip the air conditioner on high. Julie, who could sleep anywhere and anytime, always forgets, leaves the door open, and lets my precious cool air slip out.

I snap at her. "Please shut the door!"

Huh. That came out a little too sharply. To soften things, I throw in a biblical literalism joke. "I forgive you this time. But if you do it another four hundred eighty-nine times, I won't forgive you."

Julie shuts the door without asking me to explain my wryly cryptic statement. So let me do it here.

I was referring to a passage in Matthew 18: "Then Peter came up and said to him, 'Lord, how often shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? As many as seven times?' Jesus said to him, 'I do not say to you seven times, but seventy times seven.'"

In other words 490 times.

When I first made my list of biblical rules, this was actually part of my plan. I'd take everything literally, even those sentences that were clearly metaphorical. I would forgive someone 490 times, despite the fact that Jesus almost surely meant you should forgive an infinite number of times.

I revised that plan for a couple of reasons. First, it would involve chopping off various parts of my body (see below), which I was reluctant to do. Second, it soon became clear that I could make my point--that biblical literalism is necessarily a selective enterprise--without intentionally warping the meaning of the Bible.

But here is a sample of the even more bizarre life I could have led:

* I could have plucked out my eye, since Jesus says, "And if your eye causes you to sin, pluck it out; it is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye than with two eyes to be thrown into hell" (Mark 9:47). This is generally interpreted by Christian leaders to mean that you should get rid of those things in your life that cause you to sin. "If you are addicted to internet pornography, you should consider getting rid of your computer," says Dr. Campolo. Though as with most passages, there have been people who have taken it at its word. A psychologist of religion named Wayne Oates writes of mental patients who attempted to pluck out their eyes in literal compliance with Jesus's words.

* I could hate my parents, since Jesus says, "If any one comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple" (Luke 14:26). Here the idea is that given the difficult choice between God and your family, you should choose God--not that Jesus condoned parent hating.

* I could avoid uttering the word good for the rest of my year, in literal adherence to this passage from Luke 18:18-19: "And a ruler asked him, 'Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?' And Jesus said to him, 'Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone.'"

This approach reminds me of one of my dad's wacky practical jokes: He'll start pouring a glass of water for one of my friends and tell the unsuspecting chump "just say when." The chump will say "Stop," and my dad will keep pouring. The chump will say "That's enough!" and my dad will keep pouring. My dad will keep pouring till the water spills over the edge of the glass and splashes on to the table. Then my dad will look at him in faux bewilderment and say: "You never said 'when.'" A classic.

And here's the amazing thing: Those who overliteralize the words of God get mocked in the Bible itself. I learned this while reading a book called Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism by retired Episcopal bishop John Shelby Spong, who refers to the following passage in the Gospel of John:

In reply Jesus declared, "I tell you the truth, no one can see the kingdom of God unless he is born again."

"How can a man be born when he is old?" Nicodemus [a Pharisee] asked. "Surely he cannot enter a second time into his mother's womb to be born!" ( John 3:3-4, NIV).

Nicodemus is like a sitcom dunderhead here. Born again? How is that possible? How can an adult squeeze back into his mother's uterus? He can't see that Jesus's words were figurative and poetic, and he becomes the butt of a joke.

"The truth will make you free." --JOHN 8:32

Day 290. Ever since my lying spree on the Falwell trip, I've recommitted myself to extreme honesty. In response, Julie has come up with a way to make my honesty more palatable. She's started to ask me a singularly terrifying question: What are you thinking about? We'll be walking to the playground, and she'll spring it on me:

"Hey. What are you thinking about?"

I can't just respond "nothing much." I have to tell the truth, the unvarnished truth.

"I'm thinking about that rude guy at the Judaica store on Broadway, and how I should have told him, 'You just became a villain in my book.'"

"Sounds like vengeance. Isn't that biblically forbidden?"

Julie loves her new trick. It's as if she's found a peephole into my soul and can discover who she's really married to, no deceptions. Or, as she puts it, "I feel like I've picked up a chance card in Monopoly."

We'll be unpacking groceries, and suddenly I'll hear: "What are you thinking about?"

"Oh, business stuff."

She's not falling for that. "What business stuff?"

"That I wish I could time travel back to 1991 and buy up hundreds of internet names like flowers.com and beer.com and cabbage.com, then I could sell them for millions of dollars to the flower and beer and cabbage industries, and then I'd never have to work again." (This is an alarmingly common fantasy of mine.)

"That's the saddest daydream I've ever heard. Plus, that's greed."

She's right. I'm wasting my time with greedy and angry thoughts. Not always, mind you. Sometimes, when Julie pops the question, I'll be thinking about something noble, like the environment or our son's future. In fact, compared to my prebiblical life, the percentage of brain space allotted to gratitude and compassion has inched up. But I still have way too many thoughts like this:

"What are you thinking about?"

"The Bible, actually."

"What about the Bible?"

"The story of Esther."

"What about the story of Esther?"

"Well . . . what it would be like to be the king in the Esther story and get to spend the night with each of the most beautiful women in the kingdom, like a test-drive or something, and then get to choose your favorite."

"You've really evolved."

In the last couple of days, I've been focusing on cleaning up my brain. It's possible that God is monitoring my thoughts, but it's certain that Julie is. So I've commanded myself to think positive thoughts. And today, it paid off.

"What are you thinking about?"

"How lucky I am to have a healthy wife and a healthy son and two so-far-healthy babies."

Julie pretends to gag. But it was true, that's what I was thinking.

Of making many books there is no end . . . --ECCLESIASTES 12:12 (NIV)

Day 292. I've got a decent biblical library going now. Perhaps a hundred books or so. And I've divided them into sections: Moderate Jewish. Fundamentalist Jewish. Moderate Christian. Fundamentalist Christian. Atheist. Agnostic. Religious cookbooks.

I've tried to keep the conservative books on the right side and the liberal ones on the left. When I started my year, I thought that nothing would go to the right of my Falwell collection. But of course, I was wrong. I just got in a book called A Handbook of Bible Law by a man named Charles Weisman.

I'd try to summarize it, but the subtitle does a pretty good job, so I'll just type that in: An Indexed Guide to over 1500 Biblical Laws, Commandments, Statutes, Principles, Admonishments, Exhortations & Guidelines under 22 Different Subject Headings.

When I found The Handbook of Bible Law: An Indexed Guide to over 1500 (etcetera, etcetera), it seemed the perfect Fodor's guide to my spiritual trek. All the laws in one place! It was so well organized, I figured it might be worth talking to the author. So today I Googled Charles Weisman, and I found out that he probably does not want to hear from me. And vice versa.

Weisman runs a small publishing company in Burnsville, Minnesota, that distributes such gems as The International Jew, a collection of antiSemitic rants originally published by Henry Ford. You can also buy a tome called America: Free, White & Christian, and books about how the "white Adamic race have [sic] been the innovators and builders of all advanced civilizations throughout history." You get the idea.

And when Weisman publishes The Handbook of Bible Law, it's not out of academic interest. He wants a theocracy in America now.

Weisman's got company. There are thousands of beyond-the-pale fundamentalists who want to set up a biblical government based on both Testaments. As in a society that executes homosexuals, adulterers, and blasphemers. As in one that shuts down every synagogue, mosque, and moderate church. They are the American Taliban. Not all are racist like Weisman--in fact, most claim not to be--but all scare me. Unlike mainstream Christians, they don't believe that Christ's death voided much of the law. And unlike mainstream Jews, they don't mute the harsher Hebrew Bible passages, the executions for adultery and blasphemy and the like.

So they are on the fringe, yes. But perhaps not as much as I'd hoped. The movement is called reconstructionism or dominionism (the differences are subtle, but as far as I can tell, dominionism is for the slightly less-extremist extremist). And writers such as Garry Wills and Salon's Michelle Goldberg argue that dominionism has undue influence on some more respectable members of the Christian right. It's an influence they say far outweighs their numbers: Dominionists were a driving force behind the home-schooling movement and have helped shape Pat Robertson's worldview.

They're doing what I'm doing, but they aren't doing it as part of a spiritual quest/book project. They make me appreciate the comparative graciousness of the Falwell folks even more.

They will pick up serpents . . . --MARK 16:18

Day 297. If you want to slam Christian biblical literalism, I've noticed, the go-to epithet is "snake handler." As in "The religious right is filled with knuckle-dragging snake handlers."

In fact, most evangelical Christians I met disapprove of snake handling. But it's easy to see why this small sect has become shorthand for religious extremism in America. You watch the Appalachian snake handlers on the Discovery Channel, and they look as weird as the guy on Coney Island who hammers six-inch nails into his nostrils, or Nick Nolte after a couple of vodka tonics.

I knew the basic idea behind serpent handling. I'd once assigned an Esquire article on the topic to Dennis Covington, a writer who penned a wonderful serpent-handling memoir called Salvation on Sand Mountain. As Dennis explains, the serpent handlers take their inspiration from a passage spoken by Jesus in Mark 16:17-18, which reads: "And these signs will accompany those who believe: in my name they will cast out demons; they will speak in new tongues; they will pick up serpents, and if they drink any deadly thing, it will not hurt them . . ."

Most Christians read the phrase "they will pick up serpents" to be a metaphor: Faith will help you overcome life's "serpents," its challenges and bad people and temptations. The serpent handlers don't see it as figurative. They show their devotion to Jesus by picking up snakes-- venomous snakes--during their services.

You may criticize them for a loopy interpretation, but one thing is for sure: These are not the type of biblical literalists who had a preconceived political agenda and then dug up a few Scriptural passages to back up that agenda. They simply read a passage in the Bible and did what it said. They are the ultimate literalists. I needed to visit them.

I called up a man named Jimmy Morrow, whose phone number I got from a professor of religion at the University of Tennessee. Jimmy was happy to hear from me and told me to come on down anytime.

"Will I have to handle snakes?" I asked.

"Absolutely not," said Jimmy. "You can come to the church for one thousand years and not handle a single snake."

After church, "if all goes OK," Jimmy says he's having a picnic, and I'm invited. If all goes OK. That's a scary concept. These snakes are real. Though it's uncommon, people do get bitten and die--more than sixty of them in the last century.

So, on a Saturday night, I fly to Knoxville, Tennessee, wake up in the morning, and drive ninety minutes to Del Rio, one exit past the WalMart. I pull into the driveway of the Church of God with Signs Following. It's a small, wooden one-room structure. Outside a white-painted sign quotes Mark 16:17-18.

Jimmy arrives minutes later. He hugs me and invites me inside. He's a tall, gray-haired fifty-one-year-old with a big, jutting Clintonian chin. And he has the thickest accent I've ever heard. It takes me a while to adjust my ears--for the first half hour, I have to strain the same way I do when Shakespearean actors first start spouting their Elizabethan English.

Jimmy is the humblest fundamentalist you'll ever meet. Even his slightly stooped posture radiates humility. "I'm just a mountain man," he tells me. He peppers his speech with a lot of "Well, I think" and "It's my interpretation."

"I just tell the word of God, and people can take it or reject it," says Jimmy. "I've had Mormons here--I treat 'em good. I've had people from Finland here--I treat 'em good. I don't say anything against 'em. Just tell 'em the word of God."

Jimmy was saved when he was thirteen. He saw a snake in the road, and the snake tried to bite him, but "God locked the snake's jaws. So that's when I knew it was true." Since then, he's amassed what he believes is the largest archive of serpent handling material in the world. He unlocks a large church closet to show me. It's crammed with yellowed newspaper clippings, black-and-white photos, and videotapes of National Geographic documentaries. Here you can read about how serpent handling started--in 1908, when a Tennessee preacher and ex-bootlegger named George Hensley heard the word of God. You can read about how, since then, it's spread to nine states and Canada, with about two thousand followers.

Jimmy gets out his Bible. It's the King James Version, and nearly every passage has been highlighted in one color or another: pink, yellow, blue. He shows me Mark 16:17 and reads it so fast that it sounds like it's one long word.

I ask Jimmy what else serpent handlers believe. Some practitioners also drink strychnine because the passage says, "if they drink any deadly thing, it will not hurt them." They also avoid jewelry in accordance with 1 Timothy 2:9--". . . Women should adorn themselves in modest apparel, with shamefacedness and sobriety; not with braided hair, or gold, or pearls, or costly array." Some greet each other with a "holy kiss"--a kiss on the cheek or mouth--as instructed by Romans 16:16.

Jimmy's handled thousands of poisonous serpents. Most of them he picks up in the mountains right outside his house. He's taken up copperheads, cottonmouths, rattlers, an eight-foot king cobra, and a "two-step Vietnamese viper." Which is? "If you get bit, you fall in two steps. But God gave me victory over him."

He has been nailed, though. Twice. First in 1988. "It was just like a blow torch. I couldn't sleep for five nights. It throbbed like a toothache." The second time, in 2003, a northern copperhead got him in the chest. But he didn't feel a thing.

Jimmy built this church himself. It's a simple church: There's a linoleum floor, an electric organ, some wooden benches, and a dozen or so tambourines, some with crosses on them, one with a Fisher-Price turtle. Since I told him I'm Jewish, he points out a Bible passage on his wall written in Hebrew. "We believe the Jews are the chosen people," he says.

The Church of God with Signs Following doesn't quite fit into my oversimplified liberal versus conservative evangelical schema. Politically, Jimmy's a fan of LBJ-style Democrats. Theologically, he's more in line with Robertson, with an emphasis on end times.

The parishioners are trickling in. And I do mean trickle. Only about a half dozen show up, which makes me kind of sad. Jimmy doesn't seem to mind. "One time nobody showed up. I still got up on the pulpit and preached. And this guy walking by, he stuck his head in and said, 'What are you doing? No one's here. No one can hear you.' And I said, 'Well, you heard me, didn't you?'"

A couple of minutes past eleven, Jimmy asks his friend Matthew to do a warm-up sermon. Matthew steps up. He's young--twenty-eight-- and looks a bit like the actor Steve Buscemi. He walks back and forth, his key chain jangling from his belt. He starts to preach.

"People say to me, 'I keep the Ten Commandments.' That's good. But there are many other commandments besides those ten. We should keep everything the Lord says."

Matthew's voice fills the church. He preaches hard, hunched over, his back almost parallel with the ground, as if he were doing a Groucho Marx impersonation.

"I've heard people say the Bible means this or the Bible means that. But, my friends, the Bible means exactly what it says. If God wanted it changed, He would have had the prophets change it."

"C'mon!" says Jimmy, who is sitting on a chair behind the altar. He lifts his hands in the air. "Amen!"

Matthew's carrying a blue handkerchief. Every minute or so, he wipes his brow or the saliva from the corner of his mouth. He's working on three hours of sleep--he preached late last night at another church.

Matthew was supposed to talk for only a few minutes, but it's been twenty minutes, and he's going strong. He jumps from topic to topic, wherever God takes him: healing, the chastening hand of God, his son's injured leg, Jesus' mercy, the war in Iraq ("We shouldn't be in Iraq, and God will punish President Bush").

The Catholic and Lutheran services I've been to have been like wellorchestrated Bach concertos. This is like Ornette Coleman free jazz. All spontaneous.

"I was trying not to get started again," says Matthew, "but I believe in obeying the Holy Spirit . . . huh."

Matthew punctuates every sentence with a pronounced exhale. Huh. In the beginning, it was distracting, but now it seems sort of natural.

"Today is the day for salvation, huh. Right here in this church, huh."

It's been an hour now. Jimmy is stamping his feet. Jimmy's wife, who is sitting behind me, is weeping and saying "Praise Jesus." Another woman a few pews back is speaking in tongues. "Shamamamamama," she says. Then her body jerks. "Shamamamam."

I feel myself getting hypnotized by those repetitive huhs. I feel like the top of my head is being swept upward. For a minute, everything fades to white except for Matthew and his shirtsleeves and his blue handkerchief and his godly riffs.

I snap myself out of it. It was too much. How could I come back to New York and tell Julie I was saved at a serpent-handling church in Tennessee? I force myself back down. I'm not ready to surrender yet.

Matthew preaches for an hour and a half before the Spirit moves him to stop. The warm-up act has gone on so long, there is no need for Jimmy's main event. Jimmy wraps up the service by anointing his parishioners with olive oil. Jimmy feels badly that I had come all the way down and missed the big show. Not a single snake had been handled, no strychnine drunk.

"Let me see if the Holy Spirit moves me," he says. From under the altar, Jimmy slips out a wooden box with a clear plastic top. Inside, a copperhead, about three feet long, slithers over itself, flicking its tongue.

Jimmy tells me he takes good care of the snakes. "I clean 'em, care for 'em, water 'em, and feed 'em mice." And afterward, he lets them go back to the mountains. (Regardless, my animal rights activist aunt Marti was furious at me for coming down here at all.)

Jimmy sits on a bench and closes his eyes. "Ha-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta," he says. He's speaking in tongues, a descending scale. "Ha-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta. Oh, thank you Jesus Ha-ta-ta-ta."

Jimmy opens his eyes and reaches down for the copperhead. He picks it up with one hand near the head, one near the tail, moving his hands in slow little circles. "Ha-ta-ta-ta." The snake just flicks its tongue. He does this for a minute, holding the serpent at eyes level. Then slowly, carefully returns the snake to its box. Jimmy is out of his trance. The weird thing is that his appearance has completely changed. He looks happier, fuller, transformed from two minutes ago. Maybe that's how Moses glowed when he came down from the mountain.

"How did the snake feel?" I ask.

"Not cold and slimy. More like velvet."

"And what did you feel?"

"It's joyful," says Jimmy. "Like a bucket of warm water pouring over your head."

I don't handle the copperhead myself. I had promised Julie I wouldn't. If I really needed to fulfill that literal part of the Bible, she pointed out I could always handle a garter snake, since the Scriptures never specify venomous snakes.

Afterward, Jimmy takes me to a picnic at his friend's house. We eat cake and chicken and look at his friend's brightly colored Chinese bird. We talk about family and black bears and the Apocalyptic times we live in. And then Jimmy hugs me and tells me I have to come down and stay with him for longer.

As I drive back to the airport listening to a country song about Moses's showdown with the pharaoh on AM radio, two things strike me: First, when you're there, when you're in that one-room church, serpent handling doesn't seem as bizarre as I had expected. It's like a great quote I once read: Religion makes the "strange familiar and the familiar strange." Here the strange had been made familiar.

My second thought is: I wish Jimmy would stop handling snakes. My college anthropology professors would be appalled. So would Ralph Hood, the religion teacher who hooked me up with Jimmy in the first place. He wrote a culturally relativist essay about how serpent handling is a valid mode of worship, how it lets the handler embrace life by conquering death. Judge not, lest ye be judged.

But I still have my risk-reward mind-set, and here the risk to Jimmy's life cannot outweigh the reward of transcendence. He's one of my favorite people from this year, and almost every Sunday, he's tempting death. And why? Because of a literalist interpretation of Mark 16:18--a passage that some New Testament scholars argue was not in the original Scriptures. I want Jimmy to find transcendence through dancing or hymn singing or Sufi spinning. Anything.

Well, there's an old mountain saying that Ralph Hood quotes: "If you don't believe in serpent handlers, pray for them." That I can do.

Month Eleven: July

"If any one thirst, let him come to me and drink." --JOHN 7:37

Day 306. I spend the morning at the Holy Apostles Soup Kitchen again. I've been studying who gets which job and why. I've noticed something: The beverage station--which is the very first stop in the main room, right next to the front door--is almost always given to . . . a hot female volunteer. Is this a coincidence? Or are they trying to give the place a little sex appeal?

My hunch is the latter. Which could be unbiblical. Aren't we supposed to be concerned with the spirit, not the flesh? I am stationed right next to today's official pretty lady. I pour the pink lemonade, she hands it out. She's a short, blond woman in a yellow T-shirt, the leader of a church youth group from Abilene, Texas. She hands out lemonades with a "Have a great day" and a smile out of a cruise line commercial. She seems to be doing well, but the soup kitchen elders can be tough. "Don't step forward when dispensing the lemonade," snaps a veteran volunteer. "It slows up the line. Just hand it to them."

The blonde nods, chastened.

There's almost always a church youth group at the soup kitchen. I have yet to see an atheists' youth group. Yeah, I know, religious people don't have a monopoly on doing good. I'm sure that there are many agnostics and atheists out there slinging mashed potatoes at other soup kitchens. I know the world is full of selfless secular groups like Doctors without Borders.

But I've got to say: It's a lot easier to do good if you put your faith in a book that requires you to do good. Back in high school, my principal--a strict guy who wore disconcertingly festive pink glasses--started something called "mandatory volunteering." Every week students had to spend two hours doing good if they wanted to graduate.

We students were outraged. Mandatory volunteering is oxymoronic! You can't legislate morality! It must be cultivated naturally. Plus, the policy came from the administration, so it had to be wrong.

But I wanted to graduate, so I went to a soup kitchen and cleaned trays. And it wasn't so bad. Looking back, I realize that mandated morality isn't such a terrible idea. Without structure, I would have been at home playing Star Raiders on Atari 800 or scouring at my dad's censored Playboys. Maybe Congress should take a page from my high school--or Mormon missionaries or the Israeli army--and require good citizenship from Americans. You graduate high school, and you get shipped off to AmeriCorps for a year--it's the law.

Make an incense blended as by the perfumer . . . --EXO D U S 30:35

Day 309. Only two months left to go, which freaks me out. I have way too much to do. There are dozens of commandments I have yet to follow. And despite my shepherding and locust eating, I still haven't submerged myself enough in a primitive lifestyle. This month I vow to do just that. So I take out my thin, brown hardcover copy of Daily Life in Biblical Times, and get to work:

* Incense. I've started burning myrrh every morning. As you probably know, myrrh is one of the three gifts the wise men brought to Jesus. It's also mentioned several times in the Old Testament-- God told Moses to make a sacred anointing oil using myrrh, along with cinnamon, aromatic cane, cassia, and olive oil (the recipe is so holy, you were exiled if you used it for nonsanctioned purposes).

I bought my myrrh at a shop on Broadway, a cramped place filled with oriental rugs and brass jewelry and a surly guy behind the counter who was angry that I was wasting his time by having the gall to purchase items from his store when he had important sudoku to attend to. The myrrh comes in several congealed cones the size of a chocolate truffle, and I light one on the kitchen table when I wake up.

Julie scrunches her face and says, "It smells like a cathedral in here."

Yes. That's exactly what it smells like: the nave of Notre Dame or St. Paul's. It's not a frivolous smell. It smells old and serious and holy.

* Hospitality. They knew how to treat a visitor back in biblical times. If you're looking for the best host in history, Abraham has to make the short list. When three visitors appeared at Abraham's tent door, he ran and got them veal, cakes, and milk. He sat them under the shade of a tree. He stood nearby while they ate, just in case the veal was undercooked or they ran out of cakes.

This turned out to be a clever move. The strangers revealed themselves to be divine, so Abraham's hosting was not for nothing.

The zeal for hospitality continues in the present-day Middle East. When I was in Israel, it got to be oppressive, quite honestly. I peeked into a shop in the Old City section of Jerusalem, and the shop owner insisted that I come in, sit down, and have tea with him.

"I'd love to, but I actually have to run."

He looked at me like I had just taken a golf club to his car's windshield.

"Sit down and have tea."

It was not a request. I sat down and had tea.

Food and drink aside, the proper biblical host offered something else: water for the guest's feet. Everyone wore sandals, it was desert conditions--it's a nice thing to do. For the last two weeks, I've been trying this out.

"Come in!" I said to Julie's friend Margie. "Can I offer you food? Drink? Care to wash your feet in a bowl of water?"

In modern times, this always comes off creepy, no matter which gender I'm offering it to. I've realized that foot washing is a surprisingly intimate and private thing, like gargling. In other words, no one's taken me up on foot washing. Margie went the furthest: She agreed to have a bowl of water brought out, but it just sat there forlornly on the table.

* Olive oil lamp. An olive oil lamp isn't just biblical, you'll be happy to know. It's also environmentally friendly. As it says in the appropriately named web magazine TreeHugger, "Olive oil lamps are a pleasing way to light your home. Olive oil is a renewable, nonpetroleum fuel which burns without fumes or odor. You can also burn any vegetable oil, or liquid fat, or grease in these lamps."

I ordered a replica of an ancient "Samaria" lamp from Israel; it's terra-cotta, about the size of a grapefruit, comes with a thick white wick, and looks like a genie might puff out of it at any minute.

I use it at night. I'm typing right now by olive oil lamp. The flame is solid and steady and casts a healthy glow over the table, but it's also disturbingly high. I can't figure out how to properly adjust the wick, so I've got this thing that could be carried in the opening ceremonies of the Olympic Games. I burn through a lamp full of olive oil in a half hour. Perhaps it's not so economical after all.

* The robe. I've been wearing white for a few months now--or offwhite, by now--but I started to feel that wasn't enough. Before the end of the year, I wanted to sample some real biblical attire. I ordered a white robe off eBay, but when I tried it on, I looked like I was about to sing in a gospel choir. It wasn't working at all.

The only genuine-ish biblical robe that didn't cost several hundred dollars was at a Halloween costume store. There it was, next to the Roman emperor togas: a shepherd's robe. It is white, with a V-neck, a belt rope. It's surprisingly comfortable. A man rarely gets to walk around in public with his legs unencumbered by pants. It's a nice change.

When I took it for a spin this week, I learned that a robe is a polarizing garment. At times I was treated as if I were a D-list celebrity--two Austrian teenagers asked to have their photo taken with me. At other times, I engendered not just the usual suspicion but flat-out hostility. As I was passing this man on the street, he looked at me, snarled, and gave me the finger. What was going through his mind? Does he hate shepherds? Or religion? Did he just read Richard Dawkins's book?

I've felt absurd many times throughout in the last ten months, but wearing a white man-skirt was a particularly embarrassing part of the experiment. My beard has drawn attention, but it is also--paradoxically--protective, since it shields my face. A robe is not. A robe makes me vulnerable.

My friend Nathaniel told me about a rabbi in nineteenth-century Lithuania who required his students do ridiculous things. He'd make them go into a bakery and ask for a box of nails. Or go into a tailor and ask for a loaf of bread. The idea was that he was trying to break down their ego, which he saw as a hurdle to true spirituality. That's what I try to think of when I walk around with my shepherd's robe, which sometimes billows up like Marilyn Monroe's white dress: I am breaking down the ego.

* The slave/intern. My slave-slash-intern started a couple of weeks ago. And it could be among the top ten best things that ever happened to me.

I've had assistants before, but this is a whole other league. Kevin is a nice boy from Ohio. He's well-scrubbed, has dark blond hair, and looks like he stepped out of a commercial for herpes medication (I mean that as a compliment, by the way; they always cast the most vigorous American types, you know?). He's also part of an a cappella group that sings Jay-Z tunes. I heard them on his iPod, and they're really good.

And, man, has he thrown himself into this role of biblical slave. Yes, he does a lot of regular intern stuff, like researching, making phone calls, and data entry (he set up an eBay account for me so I could sell some of my possessions--mostly DVDs and flannel shirts--and donate the proceeds to charity). But he also sends emails like this:

"Need any shopping done? Any baby clothes or things like that?"

Or:

"I'm willing to work eight hours a week or eighty."

I felt a bit guilty at first, but that faded soon enough. It's hard to complain when a guy zips off to the hardware store whenever a lightbulb blows out.

He also sent me this email yesterday: "If I can use your kitchen--mine's too small for these purposes--I'd love to bake you a loaf or two of Ezekiel bread tomorrow morning or afternoon, so that you can enjoy them over the weekend and on the Sabbath. Is this OK?"

Today I come home from a meeting, and Kevin is in my kitchen, his hands covered in flour, mashing a mixture of grains with a mortar and pestle. Ezekiel bread is one of the few recipes in the Bible. God told the prophet Ezekiel to bake a bread made with wheat, barley, beans, lentil, millet, and spelt. Kevin's Ezekiel bread was quite good. It reminded me of a less-crunchy graham cracker. Kevin later confessed that he tweaked the biblical recipe and added honey, but I felt it would be petty to rebuke him.

"Maybe we should give some to your neighbors," Kevin says. "That would be the biblical thing to do."

We knock on some doors, but no one's home. Well, actually, my neighbor Nancy is home, but she calls out from inside: "I'd love some, but I have a cracked rib, so I'm not getting up." I remind myself: I've got to get to work on that Hendrix proposal when she's better.

Kevin says he'd like to take a portion of bread to give away on his walk home. He reminds me of the good servant in Jesus's parable. The parable says that a master left for a trip, and gave five bags of money to his good servant and five to his bad servant. The good servant invested the money and doubled it to ten bags. By contrast, the bad servant buried his bag of money, which meant no increase at all. A good servant is proactive. Kevin would have doubled the money, maybe tripled it.

If a man begets a hundred children . . .

--ECCLESIASTES 6:3

Day 314. We go out to a Chinese restaurant with Julie's dad and stepmom. Julie is big enough now that the top of her stomach juts out at a ninety-degree angle, pretty much parallel with the table. She slides into the booth with impressive grace.

The waiter takes our orders. I get the steamed vegetables--bland but biblically safe. A few weeks ago I decided to make my Berkeley-based aunt Marti proud and go vegetarian. It wasn't so much an ethical decision as a pragmatic one. It's just so much easier to keep the Bible's food laws if you steer clear of the animals. Plus, according to the Bible, the human race started out as vegetarian--Adam, Eve, Cain, Abel, right on up until Noah, who was the first to eat flesh. So avoiding meat has scriptural backing.

I've also tried to cut out eggs. This is because of something I learned while interviewing a Karaite, a member of that sect of Judaism that follows the Bible as strictly as possible. "Let me drop an atom bomb on you," said this Karaite; his name is Nehemiah Gordon, and he runs the Karaite website, the Karaite Korner. "You can't follow all of the Bible literally because we can't know what some of the words mean."

In Leviticus 11, there's a list of birds that are abominations: the eagle, the vulture, the osprey, the pelican, and so on. Problem is, those birds are just our best guesses. The true identity of the birds have been lost in the haze of time. So to be safe, some Karaites don't eat eggs or poultry at all. It's a profound insight--and it has made my diet even more extreme.

Anyway, that was my dinner: vegetables that had been steamed into tastelessness. The conversation consisted mostly of Julie's stepmom trying to console Julie about the overload of Y chromosomes in our household.

"If you have another baby, I bet it's going to be a girl," she said. When we get home, I ask Julie about the helpful tip.

"You think we should?"

"No. Absolutely not," she says. "These ovaries of mine are done." "My thoughts exactly."

"Though we do have a frozen embryo at the clinic, right?" I don't know. Do we have another frozen embryo? I can't believe I

don't know. I should have been on top of that. The next day, I call the clinic and get a nurse on the phone. No, we have no embryos left. Nothing survived besides the two in Julie's swollen belly. Which is a relief. I don't have to figure out what to do with an extra embryo. One fewer moral decision to make.

The ethics of embryos--stem cells and abortion--are, of course, incredibly complex. Reasonable people disagree. And, frankly, the debate is beyond the scope of this book. So I won't try to argue for one side or the other. You can probably guess my position--it's typically liberal. But I will say this: When I read the Bible, it didn't seem to support either side. Religious tradition, church doctrine, rabbinical interpretation-- those all weigh in on stem cells and abortion, and weigh in mightily. But the literal words of the Bible are, I believe, neither pro-life nor pro-choice.

Some pro-life advocates disagree. They point to several passages to prove that life begins at conception. Among them:

For thou didst form my inward parts; thou didst knit me together in my mother's womb. (Psalms 139:13). (This passage is cited to prove that God is working on the fetus even as it is in the womb, thus making the unborn child sacred.)

The Lord called me from the womb, from the body of my mother he named my name (Isaiah 49:1). (Here the prophet Isaiah says that God made him sacred him before he was even born. Again, God is at work in the womb.)

And when Elizabeth heard the greeting of Mary, the babe leaped in her womb, and Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit (Luke 1:41). (Here John the Baptist's pregnant mother meets the Virgin Mary, also pregnant. John the Baptist jumps for joy--which is cited to show that unborn children have emotions.)

To base a major ethical decision on passages like these seems overreaching. They're too vague. They can be interpreted any number of ways-- and, naturally, pro-choice Christians and pro-choice Jews do just that. But pro-choicers go further, which I wasn't expecting. They cite passages of their own. I read an article called "The Bible Is Pro-Choice" from a journal called Humanist Perspectives. The article talks about this quote from Ecclesiastes 6:3.

If a man begets a hundred children, and lives many years, so that the days of his years are many, but he does not enjoy life's good things, and also has no burial, I say that an untimely birth is better off than he.

Here an untimely birth is interpreted as a phrase for miscarriage. This is meant to show that sometimes it is better that a life not be lived at all.

And there's also a controversial line in Exodus 21:22. This one says that if a man hurts a woman while she's pregnant and she loses her offspring, the man is liable. His punishment: He shall be fined some money. This, it's argued, shows that the unborn child is not considered a person. If it were a person, the man's punishment would be more severe. He'd be put to death.

Naturally, the pro-lifers have rebuttals to this. And their opponents have rebuttals to the rebuttals. (If you want to see a more in-depth look at the back-and-forth arguments, I recommend a website called Reli giousTolerance.org.) The abortion and stem cell debates always remind me of a William Blake quote. I wish I could say I read the quote while perusing Blake. Heck, I wish I could say I read the quote while reading a book by a Yale Divinity School professor. The sad truth is, I read it in a book called Don't Know Much about the Bible. But it's still a great quote:

Both read the Bible day and night, But thou read'st black where I read white

He who is glad at calamity will not go unpunished. --PROVERBS 17:5

Day 324. I don't know what's happening to me. My friend Paul emailed me a YouTube video. I clicked it open. It showed a female newscaster reading some stock market news, when suddenly a huge stage light falls, smacking her on the head. She crumples off her chair and out of sight.

All the viewer comments said "LOL" or "laughing my ass off." But I didn't get it. It just seemed upsetting. I spent twenty minutes on Google trying to find the name of the poor newscaster so I could email her a getwell-soon or hope-you-win-your-lawsuit note. I couldn't track her down.

What's going on? What kind of an overly virtuous sap am I turning into? Next I'll be renting Pay It Forward.

By day the heat consumed me . . .

--GENESIS 31:40

Day 332. It's a hot, hot New York summer weekend. I'm sweating heavily in my beard and tzitzit. Jasper's face is lobster red. So when our friends--who have a plastic blow-up kiddie pool in their courtyard--invite us over, it sounds like a good idea.

Jasper's right now splashing around in the pool with their daughter Lily, and he's having the time of his two-year-old life. He's laughing like Ray Liotta in Goodfellas. He's showing us how he can jump from one side of the pool to the other. I, on the other hand, am not having the time of my life. It's not good, this jumping. He's going to break his kneecap, crack his skull--something. I want to dial 9-1 and keep my finger poised over the other 1 in preparation for the inevitable disaster.

After three minutes of watching, I can take it no longer. I slip off my shoes, roll my white pants up to my calves, get up from the table, and step into the kiddie pool.

"What are you doing?" Julie calls out.

"I'm spotting our son," I say as I wade toward Jasper. "Helmet," says Julie.

"Really?"

"Yes, helmet."

Fudge. Maybe she's right. Remember the example set by God, I tell

myself. Remember that he gave humans free will. Which was a crazy generous thing to do. But God knew that humans are part-divine, so He wanted to give us the divine ability to make decisions. And just as importantly, to make mistakes.

So I should do the same with Jasper. Slowly, reluctantly, I step out of the kiddie pool. I sit down on a sticky white plastic chair and watch Jasper. Who eventually smacks his butt on the pool bottom, appears dazed for about ten seconds before returning to jumping like a maniacal monkey.

Month Twelve: August (and Some of September)

Honor widows who are real widows.

--1 TIMOTHY 5:3

Day 336. Today, I met my great-aunt Joelle for lunch. Joelle's the only other religious member of our family besides my Orthodox aunt Kate. She's a practicing Catholic who happily thanks God, even when surrounded by agnostics like my family. She's a former actress and singer (when our family sings "Happy Birthday to You," her vibrato gives it a professional sheen), and the single most talkative person I've ever met. Her husband--a sweet navy veteran--died a few months ago at their house in Miami.

The Bible says to comfort widows, which was one of the reasons I invited her to lunch. But as is often the case, I think she was more helpful to me than I was to her. She talked about God's love, His unconditional love. "Sometimes I can't believe how much God loves me. I think, 'How can He love me that much? I don't love myself nearly as much as He loves me.'" Even if life turns sour, or Joelle botches something, she can count on the unconditional love of God.