Leaders across major faiths answer question: Has religion lost its bite?

Our take: Dallas Morning News faith blogger Bill McKenzie posed the following question: Has modern religion lost its bite? Presbyterian, Jewish, Baptist, Latter-day Saint, Buddhist, Pagan and other religious leaders responded.

I heard a wonderful interview on Terry Gross Fresh Air show on NPR last week, featuring a new novel by author Christopher Beha. Now, I confess I havent read his work, What Happened to Sophie Wilder. But the interview dealt largely with the role religion plays in his work. The walkaway point was that he used the novel to describe how religion has become more therapeutic than challenging.

Nothing wrong with a faith comforting or guiding one through a rough patch, but I do think he raised an interesting issue. Has faith been boiled down into tenets that mostly make us feel good about ourselves? Or, to put it another way, has modern religion lost its ability to make us feel uncomfortable about parts of our lives?

Ironically, a day or so later I read a passage by the late Oswald Chambers, who said:

The teaching of Jesus hits us where we live.He educates us down to the last scruple. The Spirit of God unearths the spirit of self-vindication; He makes us sensitive to things we never thought of before.

Now, Im not asking you to get into the teachings of Jesus, if they are not part of your tradition. But I would like to hear your thought about this question:

Has modern religion lost its bite?

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