Given the direction of American society, is it becoming harder or easier to be a good orthodox Christian or Jew and a good American? (In most ways, yes. The decline of public morality hardly needs commenting on. The deeper problem is that we have lost the vocabulary of moral absolutes, and increasingly, the only “thou shalt not” our pluralistic society recognizes is, “Thou shalt not impose your values on others.” This, of course, is only applicable to religious believers. A believer may keep his or her quaint devotions, but is expected to have the decency to keep them in the closet. And for many of us, the rot in the institutions that are supposed to be guarding the religious traditions leaves us feeling alone and abandoned. On the other hand, as Father Joseph Wilson says about Catholics, no Catholic who wants to know what their own Church teaches and believes needs to depend on priest and bishop; he can go straight to an online bookseller and buy whatever he likes, and he can easily find like-minded Catholics on the Internet. Technology, then, can serve to renew Tradition. But in my experience — yours may differ, and I hope it does — it is next to impossible to find any guidance in living an authentically religious life from one’s parish. Much religious life in America today seems to have accommodated itself quite nicely to the culture. Which makes it harder to live in an orthodox fashion. What are you supposed to do when the only doctrine ever heard from the pulpit is “I’m OK, You’re OK,” and you cannot be certain what anybody else in your church believes, other than the near-certainty that they believe they have the sovereign right to decide for themselves — that they are their own Pope?)