I had never been kind to Linkous as a listener or a critic. I found his music depressing, and I arrogantly dismissed what he did as an exploitation of the adolescent impulse to glamorize isolation and despair. I hadn't considered that the reality of emo fans' glorification of depression does not justify an assumption that an emo singer-songwriter such as Linkous was reveling in gloom only to seek glory. He was genuinely depressed, and he gave voice to his suffering in what I recognize now as a body of veraciously dreary songs centered on hopelessness and disillusion.

I am so coarse, the things the poets see
Are obstinately invisible to me.
For twenty years I've stared my level best
To see if evening-any evening-would suggest
A patient etherised upon a table;
In vain. I simply wasn't able.

In 1958 the Archbishop of Canterbury, Geoffrey Fisher, appointed both Eliot and Lewis to a commission charged with reviewing the Psalter. In the following years Eliot and Lewis met each other regularly during the meetings at Lambeth Palace which resulted in The Revised Psalter (1963). Now that they had gotten to know each other personally, a friendship came into being. 'You know I never liked Eliot's poetry, or even his prose. But when we met this time I loved him, Lewis told his private secretary Walter Hooper in the last summer of his life. The greetings in his letters to Eliot changed from 'Dear Sir' to 'Dear Mr. Eliot' to 'My dear Eliot.' After a conference in Cambridge of the Psalter-commission, Lewis and Eliot even had lunch together, with their wives, Helen Joy Davidman and Valerie Fletcher. According to Hooper, Lewis could have been talking about Eliot and himself when he wrote in the fourth chapter of The Four Loves.'

Pop quiz: What's the largest U.S.-based international relief and development organization?

It's not Save the Children, and it's not CARE — both terrific secular organizations. Rather, it's World Vision, a Seattle-based Christian organization (with strong evangelical roots) whose budget has roughly tripled over the last decade.

World Vision now has 40,000 staff members in nearly 100 countries. That's more staff members than CARE, Save the Children and the worldwide operations of the United States Agency for International Development — combined.

...

The American view of evangelicals is still shaped by preening television blowhards and hypocrites who seem obsessed with gays and fetuses. One study cited in the book found that even among churchgoers ages 16 to 29, the descriptions most associated with Christianity were "antihomosexual," "judgmental," "too involved in politics," and "hypocritical."

Some conservative Christians reinforced the worst view of themselves by inspiring Ugandan homophobes who backed a bill that would punish gays with life imprisonment or execution. Ditto for the Vatican, whose hostility to condoms contributes to the AIDS epidemic. But there's more to the picture: I've also seen many Catholic nuns and priests heroically caring for AIDS patients — even quietly handing out condoms.

One of the most inspiring figures I've met while covering Congo's brutal civil war is a determined Polish nun in the terrifying hinterland, feeding orphans, standing up to drunken soldiers and comforting survivors — all in a war zone. I came back and decided: I want to grow up and become a Polish nun.

Some Americans assume that religious groups offer aid to entice converts. That's incorrect. Today, groups like World Vision ban the use of aid to lure anyone into a religious conversation.

Some liberals are pushing to end the longtime practice (it's a myth that this started with President George W. Bush) of channeling American aid through faith-based organizations. That change would be a catastrophe. In Haiti, more than half of food distributions go through religious groups like World Vision that have indispensable networks on the ground. We mustn't make Haitians the casualties in our cultural wars.