My letter to Newsweek:

I am sorry Linda Angeloff Sapienza had a bad experience with a charismatic branch of Christianity, and I understand her sense of alienation in the face of Bush's pious rhetoric, but I am taken aback by her implied contradiction in the sentence, "While my mother endeavored to bring me to God, my father taught me about the solar system and Newton’s laws of motion." The solar system and the natural world which Newton's laws of motion describe are God's fingerprints. "Physics and logic" are tools to explore the masterpiece, and the author, of creation. To me, walking and meditating, as Sapienza describes, is a good way to get closer to the very God her Sunday School classmates were looking for on folding chairs. But to place rationality at odds with the God of the mind, and consider faith just a superstition, is a strange exercise.

http://www.msnbc.com/news/665668.asp

The news of an runaway American youth joining the Taliban, and his father's pleas for mercy, put the current conflict there in perspective. Most of the Taliban fighters are in the same boat as the American: lost, confused, impulsive, drawn to a magnetic religious icon, and now full of regret. Much like the Jonestown cult that claimed so many Americans. Demons they are not. More like lost, pitiful, and downright sad.

Larry King Interview with American's father:
http://www.cnn.com/2001/US/12/03/ret.walker.king.cnna/index.html