Despite Freud's dyspeptic view of religion - and in a consumer and market-driven American culture where the dollar ranks up there with God - religious belief remains an integral part of the landscape, from Christian conservatives to New Age practitioners. In Freud's 19th and 20th-century Europe, the religion he spoke of was predominantly based on Judeo-Christian tradition. In 21st-century America, it wears many different faces - Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, in addition to Catholic, Jewish and Protestant.

  One of these faces is a strain of Christian fundamentalism that disturbs some thoughtful people and perplexes onlookers from Europe and other countries where such fundamentalism simply doesn't exist. Even former presidential candidate John McCain, who espouses essentially the same political agenda as the Christian right, saw fit to skewer Christian conservative leaders Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson as intolerant idealogues pursuing "political tactics of division and slander."

  I'm no fan of John McCain, but I think he was on to something when he said - in a speech delivered in Virginia Beach, Va. - that "political intolerance by any political party is neither a Judeo-Christian nor an American value. The political tactics of division and slander are not our values."

  The problem is that McCain, by targeting Falwell and Robertson, is committing the same transgression he accuses them of. But what Falwell didn't acknowledge in his response to McCain's attack is that McCain said the same thing about Louis Farrakhan and Al Sharpton, so he wasn't necessarily singling out the Christian right.

  When Freud talks about intellect going out the window when religion comes in the door, I confess that I immediately think of the Christian right (and after that I think about the Taliban of Afghanistan and other fundamentalist sects that have subjugated people around the world). I can't help it, because I was brought up in a fundamentalist religious environment, and I understand how intolerant such a belief system can be. After I left home for college and began to use my critical faculties, I couldn't support the beliefs I'd been raised with.

  One of my most embarrassing memories dates from the time I was "saved" by a Bible-thumping revival preacher who convinced me that I was a sinner bound for hell unless I accepted Jesus as my savior. So I did. And then I became deeply concerned about my Jewish grandparents and their afterlife destination. When they made their annual visit from New York to our south-side Virginia home, I pulled out my Bible and cornered my grandfather, using chapter and verse in an attempt to "save" him. I cringe when I think of how, with all my childish ardor, I told my grandfather he would burn in hell if he didn't also accept Jesus. Understandably, he was offended, and I was hurt that my love and concern had fallen on deaf ears. This caused a rift between us that took years to mend.

  The misunderstanding between my grandfather and me was a microcosm of what can happen on a much grander scale when people judge each other's beliefs. After McCain's speech Falwell, in a newsletter to his supporters, announced that he is organizing a new political crusade - "People of Faith 2000" - to mobilize religious conservatives. He intends to bring 10 million new religious conservative voters to the polls. In his letter, Falwell says that liberals and civil libertarians have "demonized and marginalized" people of faith. Despite the fact that I am deeply wary of Falwell's agenda and the intolerance I've seen in the Christian right, I think he, too, has a point. In fact, he and Sen. McCain may be saying the same thing, from different vantage points - that division and marginalization have no place in a pluralistic society such as ours. The person on the Christian right who frightens me most is not Jerry Falwell, who wants to engage in the political process, but Paul Weyrich, a founding father of the Religious Right and, along with Falwell, of the Moral Majority and the Christian Coalition. Weyrich writes, in an article in Christianity Today, that the Christian right has lost the "culture war."

  I find it disturbing that he uses militaristic language to discuss his concerns. He goes on to say, "I think we have to look at a whole series of possibilities of bypassing the institutions that are controlled by the enemy." What enemy? He only refers to "Political Correctness," which he calls "Cultural Marxism." He believes the US is on its way to being dominated "by an alien ideology... bitterly hostile to Western culture," and, by extension, to the Judeo-Christian tradition. My hunch is that he's upset by the diversity of the current American religious landscape. The Immigration Act of 1965 opened the doors to Asians and Middle Easterners who brought their religious traditions with them, including a growing Muslim presence.

  In a study commissioned by the Interreligious Information Center of New York, "Religion in America at the Turn of the New Century," a number of leading religious thinkers were interviewed about the future of religion in America. They concluded that there is a trend toward seeing faith as a private matter; that no one group is likely to hold a monopoly on the body politic and the media that the mainline Protestant churches once did; and that religion will not be a major challenge to the nation's central values of getting and spending. There also appears to be a lack of the kind of social activism that brought religious groups together in the 1960s to fight racism and other forms of social injustice. Weyrich may or may not have seen this study, but he's clearly seen the trends himself and is reacting against them.

  As a response to the failure of the Christian right to achieve its political agenda, Weyrich advocates separating from the society at large and its institutions - home schooling, for example, and setting up private courts. How is that different from Farrakhan's Nation of Islam or even the White Supremacist movement?

  We've seen the heartbreak and havoc that sectarian strife has wrought in other parts of the world, Northern Ireland being but one example. As the religious landscape of the US becomes ever more fragmented, it's imperative that we try to respect and understand each other's beliefs and practice a politics of inclusion.

  Though small in physical stature, when Sister Helen gets cranked, she's bigger than Michael Jordan, more powerful than Alan Greenspan, able to leap rhetorical heights in a single phrase. Born in Baton Rouge, La., she speaks with a light Cajun inflection. As she leans toward a Duke Law School audience, her face becomes animated; her left forefinger punches the air. "And I'm asking you law students," she admonishes, "whatever professional house you build, make sure there's a room in it for poor people, because they've got nobody."

  The poor people she's talking about are those who can't afford legal representation - who have no powerful advocates to right the wrongs they may suffer or to defend them adequately in court.

  This impassioned advocate for death row inmates captivated 150 listeners crammed into a seminar room on March 22. I was one of them, and when it was over, I not only wanted to be like her; I wanted to be her. I wanted to feel the same passion that infuses everything she says and does. That passion, Sister Helen says, was kindled when she met Patrick Sonnier, the first in a series of five death row inmates whom she would counsel and then accompany to their executions. Sister Helen says when she met Sonnier in person, she was stunned to see a human being, not a monster, behind the mesh screen. She recalls Sonnier saying, "Sister, you drove two and a half hours to see me. Thank you."

  "The best grace we can be given in our lives," she says, "is to be blessed with passion. When we are given passion about something, it carries us. When you are in the presence of suffering and injustice, your soul cannot remain neutral; you quicken; you become alive. I caught on fire." The fire was ignited when Sister Helen, as spiritual adviser, was the only one left in the death house with Sonnier and watched as 1,900 volts of electric current coursed through his body. Her fire was ignited because it was Sonnier's brother who actually did the killing, and he got life while Patrick Sonnier got the electric chair.

  Make no mistake; Sister Helen is no apologist for the heinous and brutal acts of some of the men she's counseled on death row. She also works with families of the victims as well as families of the executed. And she agrees that we all must feel outrage at the taking of another human life. But she's also a realist - the daughter of a lawyer - who understands that what passes for a criminal justice system in this country has executed innocent people and let the guilty go free, because the former didn't get much in the way of legal defense and the latter could afford the best the country has to offer.

  Even Johnnie Cochrane, media-star member of O.J. Simpson's defense team, admits the system is deeply flawed. Sister Helen reports she was on a panel with Cochrane when he quipped: "You have your O.J.s and you have your nojays."

  You won't find Cochrane passing up big legal fees to defend the nojays, but you will find Sister Helen and a number of dedicated legal professionals working on their behalf, trying to inject some justice into a system that discriminates against the poor and African Americans.

  That's what makes the death penalty such a travesty. Setting aside arguments that no civilized nation should be in the business of death or that the death penalty is more about revenge than justice, we should pause to consider whether executing the guilty is worth the price of exterminating an unknown number of the innocent, a number that some estimate to be in the hundreds.

  Because of the diligent work of journalism and law students in Illinois on behalf of death row inmates, the terrible truth emerged that 13 innocent people had been sentenced to die in that state, leading Governor Ryan, a Republican, to declare a moratorium on the death penalty. Reporters wrote an investigative series about Illinois' death row and found that lawyers who were suspended or disbarred had represented 33 percent of death row inmates.

  When asked about the fact that he presides over the state with the highest execution rate in the country - 211 since 1976 when the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty - and if he shared Ryan's concern about the death penalty, Texas governor and GOP presidential candidate George W. Bush glibly replied, "it's an Illinois problem. In Texas, we do it right."

  It was the same sanctimonious Bush who said he would pray for the executed Carla Faye Tucker, after he refused to grant her a pardon, despite overwhelming public sentiment that she was a changed person who didn't deserve to die. And on Feb. 24, Texas executed 62-year-old grandmother Betty Lou Beets, whose defense counsel neglected to mention in court that she had been an abused child and an abused wife. Despite 2,000 calls to his office urging him to grant a reprieve for Beets, Bush was unmoved.

  It's easy to hide behind the law and take a politically popular stance. So much for compassionate conservatism. But public sentiment may be changing. A recent Gallup Poll shows that although a majority of Americans still support the death penalty, the number has been gradually decreasing, especially when respondents are presented with the alternative of life without parole. The American Bar Association also has called for a moratorium on the death penalty, because of the arbitrariness of who gets the death penalty and who doesn't.

  Shortly after the execution of Betty Lou Beets, the London Observer wrote: "The rate at which the United States executes its citizens has gathered a gruesome momentum. Since 1976, there have been around 600 executions, of which almost 500 took place in the 1990s... the name of Betty Lou Beets... will, we hope, haunt George W. Bush throughout his tub-thumping presidential campaign. She was his 120th victim, a psychologically damaged woman whose incompetent lawyer was subsequently jailed for a felony.... "

  The message here is that we look barbaric to the rest of the civilized world. Given the fact that we also execute the mentally incompetent and people that committed crimes when they were still children, we should plead guilty to barbarism.

  Unexpectedly, I was ambushed by an intense feeling of longing that brought tears to my eyes.

  "Well, I must want to pair off with somebody," I thought. "After all, it's tough being single in a married world." But somehow, I knew that wasn't it. The feeling was too overwhelming. It seemed to fill up the universe. I let myself be with this feeling for a while, and then came the "aha" moment: What I was longing for was my mother's love, now missing in my emotional life, like the gaping hole left by a sturdy tree that has been uprooted.

  There was one less person in the world who loved me. It was that simple and that profound.

  Being loved is something I'd taken for granted as my birthright. That should be the nature of the relationship between a parent and child - should be, but sadly, sometimes is not. I feel that intense love for my twin sons in ways they'll only understand when they become fathers. The need to nurture and protect persists long after the children are capable of taking care of themselves. I try to explain this to my college-student offspring when they complain that I'm being overly anxious about their health and welfare. "It's my job to worry about you," I reply. "I can't retire just because you don't live at home any more."

  I became apoplectic when my son Matt casually mentioned that he and his band were traveling in an old van with no seatbelts in the back. "You can't go on another band trip until you get some seatbelts installed in that thing," I spluttered, knowing full well that I had no power to enforce that edict. A couple of weeks later, Matt announced that his band had a newer van fully equipped with seatbelts.

  It was a hollow victory, since they'd planned on getting a better van anyway, but I was touched that Matt had so gracefully accepted my tenacious need to protect his strapping, six-foot-one frame. My sons were equally gracious at Christmas when I presented each of them with the same peculiar present, among some other gifts they'd asked for. When Andy unwrapped his mystery package, a quizzical look - a kind of what-has-she -done-now expression - flitted across his face. "Wow, Mom," he said. "This is ... what is this anyway?"

  "It's a life hammer," I said, calling on all my persuasion skills to sell him on the gift. "You keep it mounted in your car, and if you ever get trapped - say the car is burning and you're trying to get out - all you have to do is use the hammer to shatter the glass. In the handle there's a razor that can slice through the seatbelt." I was feeling pleased with myself that I had snuck another protective device over on them.

  "Ooookay," he replied, giving Matt a conspiratorial look. Then I realized that I'd have to follow up to make sure they would actually put the life hammers in their cars. The protection business requires constant vigilance. The fact is, where protecting my sons is concerned, I can't help myself. The instinct is bred in the bone, imprinted on me from my own mother. We're a family of worriers. My mother worried and prayed for me every time I took a trip or made a visit to the doctor, and I have to carry on my mother's tradition. Like a talisman, I worry ahead of time to prevent the thing I worry about from happening to the people I love.

  In a book just out titled, A General Theory of Love, the authors - three psychiatrists - explain that "the neural systems responsible for emotion and intellect are separate, creating the chasm between them in human minds and lives." Well, that explains it. I have no intellectual control over my love for my children and my occasional overweening need to protect them. Nor do I have any control over the men I'm attracted to.

  The authors confirm, through science, what we already know: that love and attraction is not a conscious choice. Love emanates from the limbic brain, which nestles between the reptilian brain, the part that controls our breathing, and the neocortex, the part that thinks. The limbic brain is the storehouse of emotions, instincts and hormones as well as our memories of being nurtured, our preferences and grievances. The limbic brain chooses our love objects. This works fine when we cherish our children, adore our pets and coo at babies. But it sometimes leads us astray when we choose adult love partners.

  As the authors of A General Theory of Love remind us, "Most people will choose misery with a partner their limbic brain recognizes over the stagnant pleasure of a 'nice' relationship with someone their attachment mechanisms cannot detect." This begs the question: Is there hope for the limbically love-challenged? Yes, say the authors. You can retrain your limbic choice by sticking with someone who is caring, wise and responsive. If you hang around this good person long enough, you just might "fall" in love with him or her.

  The guide explains that some 250 inmates were shot to death here, most of them members of Nazi resistance groups. Nearby looms a wooden platform and gallows. I'm told that hundreds of prisoners were buried in mass graves beneath this very ground. More than 600 bodies were exhumed in 1945 and re-buried, some in the adjacent cemetery, which serves as a monument to the Jews and Christians who met death in this prison yard.

  This year, May 4 is designated as the Day of Remembrance for victims of the Nazi holocaust. Although it was two years ago that I visited Terezín during a trip with my sons to the Czech Republic, I will never forget that experience.

  The trips most deeply etched in my memory have always contained a moment of epiphany, and the scene in the prison yard was such a moment. Its impact was visceral, in a way that reading about the holocaust or even seeing films of its atrocities can't replicate. My sons and I were mute as we walked through the prison camp and execution yard. What we were feeling was beyond words.

  Like almost every place in Eastern Europe, Terezín (also known as Theresienstadt) has a long and colorful history. It was built as a fortress in the late 1700s to protect Bohemia during the Prussian-Austrian wars. What is now the town of Terezín was then known as the Main Fortress; the prison camp was the Small Fortress and had always served as a jail for military and political opponents of the Hapsburg monarchy. Archduke Ferdinand's assassin, who lit the fuse that set off World War I, was imprisoned in the Small Fortress. But it was the Nazis who brought infamy to the town. My sons and I were surprised that anyone would still live in Terezín, given its history. After the Nazis occupied Bohemia and Moravia, the Prague Gestapo took over the Small Fortress in 1940. During the war, some 32,000 prisoners passed through the fortress, mostly Czechs but other Eastern Europeans as well. The notorious Nazi prison camp slogan "Arbeit Macht Frei" (loosely translated, "Work Will Make You Free") is still visible in bold letters painted over the arched entrance to the first courtyard, which housed cell blocks A and B.

  More than 1,500 inmates were imprisoned in the courtyard at any given time - in 17 mass cells with up to 100 prisoners in each and 20 solitary cells. Today, in the dim slant-rayed silence of the mass cells, harsh wooden bunks still line the walls. It's hard to imagine that the Gestapo could cram 100 people in a room not much bigger than a couple of two-car garages back to back.

  In November 1941, the Nazis created a Jewish ghetto in the Main Fortress, which, for most of its inhabitants, was only a temporary way station to the gas chambers of Auschwitz-Birkenau. Between 1941 and 1945, some 140,000 men, women and children from all over Europe were deported to the ghetto. The Nazis also used Terezín for propaganda abroad. They made a film of the ghetto and the prison. For the film, they built communal showers and sinks at the Small Fortress to show the world that the town and even the prison were humane places where inmates and residents were well cared for and happy.

  We watch this film in a theater of the ghetto museum. Jews, yellow stars of David sewn on their sleeves, are shown laughing and playing soccer at the town's stadium. Prison inmates are brushing their teeth at sinks in the shower room. But in truth, Nazi guards almost never allowed prisoners to shower or maintain any level of hygiene. Torture and disease - including an outbreak of typhoid fever - killed 2,500 inmates during the war years, in addition to those who were executed.

  Perhaps saddest of all in the ghetto museum are the drawings made by the children of the Terezín ghetto, colorful pictures of the homes they'd been ripped from, dreamy drawings of happier times. The teacher who helped the children express their feelings through art was taken away and gassed at Auschwitz.

  We are relieved when the tour is finished. It's almost too much to bear. I remind my sons that had we lived there at the time, we, too, might have shared a similar fate - since my father was a Jew. That's all the Nazis would have needed to round us up. "I'm glad we saw it, but I'm really ready to get out of here," they both say.

  Back in Prague, we meet my friend Sergei, a Russian who works for Radio Free Europe (RFE), which is located in the old Parliament building at one end of Wenceslas Square. The irony is not lost on me that this Soviet-era building, which once housed the party bosses, is now the home of RFE. When Czechoslovakia deconstructed into Slovakia and the Czech Republic, the Parliament building was no longer used for matters of state. After we check in with security, Sergei gives us a tour of the building, telling us that security is tighter since two of his colleagues have been murdered in the past year, one shot in the head as she emerged from the subway stop just opposite the building. I turn and look uneasily out the window at the metro station. "It wasn't a robbery," he reassures me. "Nothing was taken from her. The authorities think it was an assassination."