Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein, founder and President of the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews:

In recent years, "mainline" Protestant denominations have become vocal critics of Israel. They take every opportunity to condemn the Jewish state while ignoring the threat posed to Israel — and free societies everywhere — by Islamist terrorism and the culture of death that produces suicide bombers. This year, the United Church of Christ (UCC) is preparing to jump on the anti-Israel bandwagon. This 1.4-million member group will be considering three resolutions at its denominational meeting in early July — two recommending divestment from Israel and another condemning the security fence that has saved so many Israeli lives.

Last year, the Presbyterian Church (USA) approved similar measures, putting a huge strain on Jewish-Christian relations. Meanwhile, evangelicals continue to rebuild the bridges that mainliners tear down by expressing their solidarity with Israel and the Jewish community through financial support, prayer and advocacy.

One of my reasons for joining American Baptists is their independence from any man's creed. Though worship and study is conducted through responsible and guided interpretation, it is to come from the Bible. The American Baptist Churches of the United States of America leans significantly to the left on matters of market and foreign affairs but their policy statements and resolutions are little more than chatter at the coffee table, congregational churches by no means bound to national declarations.

This sort of news — Christians abandoning Israel for the sunken ganglands where Arabs, not Jews, see that Arabs suffer — fortifies two of my beliefs: that I am a Christian first and denominationalist second; and that evangelicals are this country's most faithful bedrock.

Driving home from work one night last week through the subdivision near the office, I saw a terrible scene: a young girl mounted on a bicycle that had just tipped over. She wasn't hurt, of course; but she was learning to balance and had no one to help her. Memories abound from the days, over two decades ago, when my father would give me a running start down the sidewalk and let me ride until I pitched over into the grass — one end to the other, back and forth. Where was the girl's father? Her mother? An older sibling? Not to be seen, and as I drove past, a little crushed, she awkwardly pulled the simple machine up from its resting place on the concrete.

I just looked out my eighth-story window and in the parking lot, a South Asian fellow is pushing his daughter slowly, carefully, while she steers her pink-and-white rider. Around and around they go.

ON THE WAY: Now the father is pushing her and running along as she totters forward. She's closer than I thought.

I'm confident now that my reflection on Pope John Paul II, written a fortnight ago, was neither a fleeting sensation nor an unintentional reply to the commotion. Karol's death reminded me to consider the inalterable difference between opinion and belief, preference and object. That Joseph Ratzinger and I are of different Christian churches makes for inevitable disagreement. But considering what I've put forth in my work over three years, there is more like than unlike:

On Monday, Ratzinger, who was the powerful dean of the College of Cardinals, used his homily at the Mass dedicated to electing the next pope to warn the faithful about tendencies that he considered dangers to the faith: sects, ideologies like Marxism, liberalism, atheism, agnosticism and relativism — the ideology that there are no absolute truths.

"Having a clear faith, based on the creed of the church, is often labeled today as a fundamentalism," he said, speaking in Italian. "Whereas relativism, which is letting oneself be tossed and 'swept along by every wind of teaching,' looks like the only attitude acceptable to today's standards."

Two apart can share a destination. To Benedict XVI.

I've held my tongue these last days, watching and judging Pope John Paul II's final week in silence. There are debates I join carefully and infrequently; there are matters I avoid altogether out of regard for the subject, this weblog's readers and my own inability to gather thoughts without a cut from ardor's brambles. After all, I left the pope's church to become an American Baptist nearly three years ago for, if you were to ask me in person, strong reasons.

That divergence stands. But the few criticisms of the church I've written over these two-and-a-half years have done good for neither the church nor myself. If not means, do we have the same end?

Such an ecumenist as this last pontiff must be moved, from his view atop the heights of Paradise, by the depth and sincerity of a memorial to his life and work — in sentiment and action — from the hearts of so many men. The relativist accepts all followings as loosely as his own, a buzzing crowd of permissive minds; while the pluralist conjoins all practices by the principle they share, a unification — a figure concord. As the professorial George Melloan writes in the Wall Street Journal today, "For John Paul, 'human dignity' was everything." It was for him, as it is for us all.

Melloan is one of many this week from whom I've learned a lesson. John Paul, peace be with you.

I try to catch dinner with my folks at least once a week, and we try to center the event around television shows we all enjoy, from time-shift tapes of Star Trek: Enterprise and JAG to the first season of Have Gun, Will Travel on DVD. Tonight, after Enterprise, we assembled my father's Kodak slide carousel and an ancient Da-Lite projector screen, and took in a narrated show of the slides my father has been revisiting.

Most of them were from the late Sixties or early Seventies; my father as a college student in Syracuse, New York or my parents as newlyweds in Washington, D.C. Some I hadn't seen before; others were old favorites.

My father doesn't remember what he and his brother had argued over. What he does remember, thanks to the photographic process, is the stroke of his artistic revenge.

We went through two slide trays; the second held a surprise. Towards the end of the show, my father turned to a slide of an ink design of an eagle's outline, white on black, a music staff and notes inside the positive space.

"Do you recognize this?" asked my father. He went one slide further, and I did: the image in front of us now was a design I had made for the same occasion three years after someone's creation of the preceding image.

My high school's old band director, now nearly ten years retired, had a favorite fishing spot up in Gravenhurst, Canada, and in the course of his travels met and made friends with the resort town's band director. Every three years thereafter, goes the legend, his best bands would take a trip up to Gravenhurst in the winter and host Gravenhurst's bands in the spring. The triennial fell on my freshman and senior years; I played well enough to join the highest-level band my freshman year and ended up making the trip twice. In this photograph students of the 1996 wind ensemble, the orchestra, and accompanying chaperone parents had just entered Gravenhurst's high school after a seven-hour bus trip. Tired, hungry, expectant, impatient.

When my father turned the projector to this slide, I jumped up, walked to the screen and began naming nearly every face from a decade ago. The fellow in the upper left-hand quadrant wearing the Fedora is my good friend Ed — who slept in our host family's computer room, discovered an installation of classic Myst on the PC and played it until near dawn each night we spent in Gravenhurst.

That's me in the center wearing a green jacket with, yes, an Empire Strikes Back sleeve patch.

READING, WRITING, WRONG: The powers that be reminded me that the trip is triennial. So adjusted.

Call it the joy of unintended consequences. My father gave a Canon flatbed scanner to my mother for Christmas. By early February, the two of them finally cleared enough room on their upstairs office desk for the flatbed, pulled the device out of the box and hooked it up. This week my father began testing the scanner's ability to read slide positives and, drawing from a box of pictures snapped four decades ago, found himself a project.

For the last two days he's sent me a pair of images attached to an e-mail whose subject line has done nothing to help me recognize what I've found on my computer screen.

The first pair was of "Moondog." Moondog? I asked my old man today: Moondog, he told me, was a Manhattan panhandling poet-eccentric of some sort. Searching the net tonight, I found a goodly amount of information on the man, including a 1970 Upstate magazine article that matched my father's description, if a bit more gracefully. I also learned that Moondog was a musician of a suitably unique oeuvre.

Here's Moondog standing, according to my father, "at the corner of Avenue of the Americas and 54th Street, just nearby Black Rock."

Dad took these photographs right before he left for college in 1966.

It's the faint traditionalism in me that demands cold winters, hot summers and smooth transitions during spring and autumn, but today's sixty-degree high-pressure system was the perfect, brief respite from weeks of snow and ice — especially since a frigid low is on its heels.

The coin changer in my apartment's laundry room predictably went bust the one day I intended to break a ten for quarters. Murphy's Law; can't complain, simply marvel. Sack of dirty clothes in one hand and detergent bottle in the other, I took the elevator to the first floor and walked out into the building's parking lot to raid my car's tollbooth change.

It's been months since I've approached the front door without a coat, and having come straight from laundry, my top was but a button-down and tie.

Had I brought a coat, I would've been a little hot.

We'll have spring soon enough. I may take a walk tonight, anyway.

What a beautiful evening.

THE FOLLOWING MORNING: Two inches of slushy white to brush off of the car, tiny flakes falling in early-mid morning. That's the Great Lakes winter I know!

Two years ago I found myself at odds with Valentine's Day, though in hindsight my pen's poison appears to have been directed not at the holiday but at the public display of affection — true enough, today I still prefer modesty.

Funny, though, that last week I should tell my friend Danny O'Brien how unsympathetic I was to John Derbyshire's appreciation for syrupy sonnets for snogging in national publications. No fanfare came of my day but the entire evening I've been under the spell of a buoyant charm. The goofy, lovey-dovey stuff suddenly amuses me. Might I be running a temperature?

Talking to another child's mother at his son's bus stop, John Derbyshire learned that the woman's own son was found drawing helicopters on bombing runs. The mother received a punitive call — not because the sketches were done at inappropriate times but because the school refused to accept a child's pencil having depicted two-dimensional, incendiary violence.

I couldn't help but send a note.

How times have changed. Twenty years ago, when I was in second grade, the class' redheaded instigator brought a millimeter-precise toy grenade (with metal pin) in his backpack one morning and, before gym class, set it under his chair where our teacher, Mrs. Jones, would quickly "find" it. How did she respond? The good, old-fashioned way. Upon our return, she gathered us around and told us about her harrowing sprint down the hall carrying a live explosive for the school's janitor to defuse.

And what happened to the grenade? asked the redhead, now aware his little prank had been outsmarted. Safe and sound where it couldn't hurt anyone, said Mrs. Jones. In her desk. Until June.

I had been petitioning the proper authorities for what they generously provided — wisdom, courage, guidance, grace — more directly than usual over the past few weeks. Holiday blues don't hit me. In the first hours and days of President Bush's triumph, I was more determined than celebratory; ever careful of fleeting, besotting euphoria that can trip a man up on his next step. Even so, the familiar questions stood in line by mid-December: Where exactly am I? Should I be here? Where am I going? Should I head there? Uncomfortable, unavoidable. Luckily, I had not seen this place in quite some time; but return was inevitable and, anyway, this is the time of year to audit books.

Tonight was the officer installation dinner for my Republican organization. I, alongside a reconstituted board of directors, was reelected as president. Our club has aged and shrunk but very few members have given doubt or discouragement much attention, and we're still lauded as one of the most active and close-knit in Cuyahoga County. This evening was no exception. We hoped for a good turnout: turnout was better than we hoped. If the number of attendees wasn't the best in years, the mood certainly was. The juxtaposition of new faces and those not seen for auld lang syne brought hope, prospects, memory and reverence to a single occasion. We had our city's lone Republican councilman; the city's finance director; our state senator; a school board old hand; two good men from the county party; and the young fellow who challenged Dennis Kucinich's Congressional seat, Ed Herman, who in his address reminded us that victory is commencement, not a denouement.

Conversation was thoughtful; dinner was delicious. I've always thought myself a shade shy but with an amateur knack for the microphone, fitting well this night as master of ceremonies. The audience, of course, lighthearted and warm, gave me the spirit.

My parents were in attendance. After the ceremony, Ed and my silver-bearded father swapped stories about what sounded like business, politics and the damned-if-it-isn't coincidence that Ed spent time near the Astoria home in which my father grew up.

Ubaldis, one and all, end nights spent with good friends and neighbors quite happily. I'd received my requested item in full, an answer, evanescent if only from my mortal faith, though strong enough to last me through the months: This is where I belong. The last verse of a song my friends and I used to sing on stage, a song about the riches of the simple life, rang: What's the world without another George Bailey?