My brother is now seventy. His hands are burled with arthritis. Some days he walks with difficulty.

My brother sits today at his computer and pounds, literally pounds, the elegantly argued e-mails (political argument) he posts to an electronic community in darkened rooms across America. (I imagine darkened rooms because correspondents are anonymous and because so many of these colloquia are nocturnal.) My brother’s politics are left wing, Democrat, in an easy-going way; lots of saints (FDR, Harry S. Truman, Adlai Stevenson). My brother’s faith is that technocrats will lead us through a sea of red tape and partisan obstruction to the Shining City on the Hill. My brother’s mind has long since turned against religion, particularly Christianity, particularly Roman Catholicism, and the Evangelical Protestants he calls “Christo-Republicans.” My brother is an atheist, though that drab noun hasn’t nearly enough pixels to portray my brother’s scorn. He calls himself an “anti-theist”; he called himself that one Christmas evening, at the holiday table, as if he were the tipsy, freethinking uncl

My brother had been at the seminary for two years when, in his weekly letter, he informed our parents that he was coming home. | Without losing any noticeable stride, my brother went on to college and law school and beautiful women. | I noticed my brother sent copies of his e-mail to his nephews and nieces, as well as to our siblings. The wonder is not that he knows so much about Church history, but that such matters continue to preoccupy him. Why not let it go? | I wrote to my brother a few years ago. I told him I was bored with his e-mails about religion. Bored with his scientific perspective, as he calls it. Bored with political faith. I asked him to stop.