Editorial colleagues asked me to join in this symposium on changed agendas since September 11.

Right to the point:

How has your focus or agenda changed?

The cultural historian in me focuses through an observation of José Ortega y Gasset, which I will paraphrase. Decisive historical changes come less through wars, terrible cataclysms, and ingenious inventions. It is enough, instead, that the sensitive crown of the human heart incline its horizon, as from optimism to pessimism, heroism to utility, war to peace.

So I focus on that "sensitive crown of the human heart," as well as we can discern it by response to reportage, conversation, research, and listening to one's own heart. In my view, the basic change in the inclination in "our" heart is from security to insecurity. Permanently. We have joined the human race. At mid-century Reinhold Niebuhr called America a gadget-filled paradise suspended in a hell of global insecurity. The terrorists cut the cord by which we were suspended. Here we are, with most mortals, never again free to live with old illusions of security. My agenda is to try to chronicle something of the responses to insecurity as a culture-wide, perhaps global, phenomenon.

How has the agenda for religion/faith changed?

It is back to basics. Not for years have I heard more citizens, more congregants, ready and eager to discuss fundamentals of theodicy—a zone in which there are not good answers to questions—and existential living in the face of evil around us, within us. "Where is God?" "What is faith?" "How do we deal with religion as inspirer of terror, of self-criticism, of hope?"

I am next year to write the Penguin Viking Lives series book advertised as "Martin Marty on Martin Luther." Research for it gives me license to explore the paradoxes, ambiguities, and uncertain certainties of that medieval, never-modern figure who can still disturb our peace. My angle, in part: theologians and biographers for years have said that it is hard to get to the heart of Luther's outlook because he has solutions to problems we "moderns" don't have. Non-Lutherans, non-Christians, may not buy his solutions, but his search for security, for meaning, for grace, suddenly finds immediate resonance.

What are the initial implications for the religion-health-ethics agenda?

The unfolding drama will find more people projecting their issues against a cosmic backdrop. Some will get angrier at the God they don't believe in; some will take simple refuge in affirmations of faith; most will find their questions acquiring greater scope, demanding a larger repertory of options in response.

For example, there will not be as much "ethics-talk" divorced from "meaning-search" as before. Meaning here has to do especially with suffering. If for some decades division of labor determined that theologians and pastors addressed suffering while ethicists took on ethics, there will now be more crossing of boundaries. This means that fewer will be content with reductionist language in ethics, or with determining what is good and true and beautiful in abstract, distanced, only-principled terms, confined to "secular rationality"—though we need all the "principles" and "rationality" we can summon!

Instead, I picture more "thickness" in medical-ethical discourse. By thickness I mean: as we listen to the voices of faith, we cannot assure that we will find universal solutions to ethical questions dealing with justice, autonomy, and the like. But there will be more realism, more connection with the lived lives of patients and caregivers. We are all, in the time of terror, patients. We are all, in such a time, called to be caregivers. No one can get by on "thin" approaches. Supplementing and complementing secular rationality will be ever more listening to the voices of community, tradition, scripture, memory, affection, and hope.

One hopes.