August 26, 1998

As a mother I am very happy, but on the other side I am not happy. I feel the pain of Mrs. Biehl. I am not glad because of what my child has done," said Evelyn Manqina, the mother of Mongezi Manqina, after South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) granted her son amnesty on July 28. Manqina was one of the four young men who killed Amy Biehl, a 26-year-old Fulbright scholar, in the Cape Town township of Guguletu during the final days of apartheid.

You should know there's a ghost in the basement." My friend Frank levels me with his eyes, checking out my reaction. "She's a good spirit, but she occasionally scares the dickens out of my cat. You'd have to cater to her whims."

In the course of my career as a sociologist of religion I made one big mistake and had one big insight (arguably not such a bad record). The big mistake, which I shared with almost everyone who worked in this area in the 1950s and '60s, was to believe that modernity necessarily leads to a decline in religion. The big insight was that pluralism undermines the taken-for-grantedness of beliefs and values. It took me some time to relate the insight to the mistake.

Yehezkel Landau and Tom Getman recently met over lunch in East Jerusalem to discuss political and spiritual issues. As friends and colleagues in reconciliation projects in both the West Bank and Israel, they challenge each other's views, meeting regularly to probe the causes of division and conflict. The increasing hostility between Palestinians and Israeli Jews pushes them to seek common ground for themselves and their friends. The following exchange of letters arose out of that luncheon engagement.

Dear Tom,