KAREN HUMPHRIES SALLICK (Tibetan Buddhist Practitioner): The mandala is a teaching and meditation tool so that we can focus on evoking in ourselves the Buddha nature that we Buddhists believe you have inside you.
A sand mandala is made typically from precious stones that have been hand-ground and then hand-dyed. The sand goes in a funnel. They’ll rub it and the sand will come out. That’s how they put these layers of sand down to create these beautiful, spiritual forms of art.
One can use the mandala as an aid to meditation helping you through the process of eliminating emotions that are unhelpful to you so that you can then uncover and evoke what’s in the center.
There are thousands of mandalas, and, in fact, even for one type of mandala there are several ways to do it, depending on how much time the monks have. You can take five days. You can take a month to build a mandala. Every aspect of the mandala has meaning.
The very center is the representation of Chenrezig, the Buddha of compassion. Tibetan Buddhists actually believe that His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama is the reincarnation of Chenrezig.
The next ring outside of the central figure of compassion are representations of four different Buddhas. The Buddha for eliminating hatred is represented by a thunderbolt. Then we have a jewel that represents the deity that can eliminate suffering. Then we have a wheel of knowledge or dharma, the deity that represents the elimination of ignorance. And then the last is a green sword that cuts through jealousy.
The next circle are lotus leaves. If you’ve ever seen a statue of a Buddha, they are often sitting on a lotus flower, so the family of Buddhas that are represented in the center are sitting in a ring of lotus.
Then outside of that is the vadra ring of protection from negative thoughts.
Finally, in the very outside ring — fire, and that fire is to burn through ignorance to enlightenment.
The dissolution is actually a very important part of the mandala process, because it really is showing the nature of impermanence. As Westerners, we get so attached to things. So here’s this beautiful mandala that these monks have worked five days on. And, with no emotion whatsoever, they reach their hand into the middle and just mess it up. And then they’ll sweep it up with brushes, and they’ll place it into a vase.
The mandala will be brought to the water. The deities in the mandala will then go into the water as a blessing, back to the Earth.
The Tibetans believe that anyone who watches the building and dissolution of a mandala actually accumulates merit and can begin to evoke that Buddha nature, being the most compassionate we can be.
SIMPSON: Implies inflation. It implies the people who are going to loan us money want more interest for it. It will be a different lifestyle for Americans, and inflation will eat through the system, and the little guy will be the guys most hammered.
ABERNETHY: Solving the debt problem is not only an economic and political challenge. The crisis raises basic philosophical and moral questions about the kind of government and society Americans want. Last April, the conservative majority in the House of Representatives passed a budget for next year proposed by the chair of its budget committee, Paul Ryan. He outlined his plan to the American Enterprise Institute.
TONY HALL: We need to get our fiscal house in order, but not on the backs of the poor and hungry. They didn’t get us into this current mess, and hurting them is not the way out of it.
CAMPBELL: That’s just wrong. The wealthy have recovered to pre-recession levels. Are they investing in jobs? No.
ABERNETHY: But all the moral debate has not made compromise easy.
ABERNETHY: Alice Rivlin was the director of the budget offices at both Congress and the White House. She served on two budget commissions. She says last year there were unofficial focus groups in 26 cities that were asked to work on the debt problem. When they heard the facts, Rivlin says, each of them was able to work out a plan. Not all of them came up with the same solution, but no one failed to reach agreement on something. It seems to be quite different for Congress and the White House, raising the question whether the federal government can compromise and act on an issue as difficult as this one, with so much moral passion and partisan ideology. 
LAWTON: And that’s a big issue on the campaign trail, too, which is really heightening all of the political rhetoric on Capitol Hill out on the campaign trail. So many of the GOP candidates are out there really appealing to the conservative base, talking about these issues. Michele Bachmann, the new GOP candidate, who is an evangelical Christian, very much reaching out to her base saying I’m not going to support, I’m not going to vote for any debt ceiling measure that doesn’t include dramatic spending [cuts]. And of course, you know, religious conservatives are so important for the GOP during this period because about forty percent of Republican primary voters are self-identified evangelicals, so everybody’s sort of reaching out to them, seeing it as a big stepping stone. 
PROFESSOR JOCELYNE CESARI (Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Harvard University): There is this idea that the state has a responsibility in France to control and regulate religion that otherwise can lead to civil war.
POTTER: They may not want to hide it, but in some cases they’re being forced to. Over the past decade, the French government has clamped down on the display of religious symbols. Since 2004, students have not been allowed to wear headscarves, large crosses, or skullcaps in public schools. The result: new Muslim schools like this one, where every girl in this 11th-grade class wears a headscarf. “We come because we can wear it,” one of them says.
POTTER: Despite the new laws, a very public display of religion takes place every Friday in this Paris neighborhood. Two streets are closed to traffic so thousands of Muslim men can pray outside a mosque that’s much too small to hold them all, largely because of property costs. France has just 2,000 prayer rooms and a few dozen full-sized mosques. While the community solicits donations to build new ones, the local government allows this public exercise of religion, to the annoyance of some non-Muslims. There are other chinks in the wall of secularism. Religious schools can receive state funding. Most national holidays come from the Catholic Church calendar, and once a year Catholics from all over flood the streets of Paris as they leave on a three-day, 75-mile pilgrimage to the Cathedral of Chartres.
BOBINEAU: Be careful.
CESARI: What they are expecting from Muslims is this kind of very loose connection with no particular affiliation to Islamic organization, with no particular desire to dress differently or to eat differently, but okay, you can be buried as a Muslim or you can marry in your—you can have a religious ceremony in your mosque. This would be okay.
SEVERSON: It’s a place where homo sapiens and dinosaurs live together in harmony, where Adam and Eve explore the Garden of Eden, and Noah builds an ark loaded with creatures small and large, even dinosaurs. Ken Ham now has plans to build his own ark, a really big one, much longer than a football field, all part of a huge theme park called the Ark Encounter. He says his ark will have the same dimensions as the one described in the Book of Genesis.
SEVERSON: What it is is a tax rebate that would allow the ark park to recoup more than $37 million in sales taxes. Under Kentucky’s Tourism Act, any company that promotes tourism is entitled to a rebate. The Creation Museum is considered a nonprofit ministry, but the ark park is intended to return a profit to its private investors. Pastor Phelps and other religious leaders argue that the tax break would violate the separation of church and state.
SEVERSON: Kentucky’s Democratic governor supports the tax incentives. He says he wasn’t elected to debate religion, he was elected to create jobs, especially in hard-hit communities like Williamstown near where the ark park will be located and where a majority of the unemployed have been out of jobs for over two years.
DAN PHELPS: They’re doing it on the aegis of saying that this will bring a lot of jobs to the state, and it might bring a large number of low-paying jobs to the state, but it’s definitely hurt the image of Kentucky. Jay Leno has already joked about Kentucky and the ark on his monologue on at least two different occasions.
HAM: Yes, I would say that churches aren’t doing their job if they’re not teaching the Book of Genesis as it is meant to be taken, because many churches, unfortunately, have taken man’s ideas of millions of years of evolution and then they reinterpret the Book of Genesis., and what we would say is, while we wouldn’t question their Christian testimony in regard to their salvation, we would say that they are really undermining the authority of God’s word.
LAWTON: Well, they are nonbinding, and the bishops say that they don’t have the authority to discipline or impose penalties, that only the pope can discipline a bishop. So therefore they say this has to be part of the “fraternal correction,” and it is sort of voluntary.