A: In times of grief, speaking for myself, one can't hear about belief very much, I think. In times of grief, people often go to churches. They go for the worship. They go for the funeral. They go for a way to cope with the unimaginable. We don't have many ways to do that. People most often go back to those powerful, simple, enormously compelling means of dealing with grief.

A: Absolutely. That's, perhaps, the most important thing. What one can find in a time of grief has a lot to do with the sharing with other people, and also, I think, importantly, with a sense of a spiritual dimension in our lives.
 

A: In the Gospel of Mary, for example, Mary Magdalene appears not as a prostitute but as a disciple -- not only a disciple, but a special disciple who was entrusted with particularly deep understandings of the teachings of Jesus, as the Gospel of Thomas suggests about Thomas. In some of these other Gospels, we find women in very different positions, with very different kinds of respect -- as disciples, as apostles, as teachers -- than you find in the Gospels of the New Testament.