This past Sunday an interfaith service was held in the Denver convention center, prior to the Democratic National Convention. The service opened with a reading of the Metta Sutta by University of Colorado student Kathryn Ida.

The Metta Sutta is a favorite for reading at interfaith services, partly because it is beautiful and partly because it doesn't require knowledge of Buddhist doctrines to understand.

Yesterday I emerged from the Manhattan subways in Times Square in time to see a big "Free Tibet" march on 42nd Street. There were monks, ethnic Tibetans, and native New Yorkers of all forms. My daughter took these two photos of the march with her camera phone. You can't see it in the photos, but the march stretched for several blocks.

If anyone knows specifically which group organized the march, let me know.

Americans are backing away from mixing religion and politics, according to a new poll from the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press. For the first time in more than a decade, a majority of the American public thinks that religious institutions should stay out of political affairs.

Most of the shift in opinion has been among conservatives. "Four years ago, just 30% of conservatives believed that churches and other houses of worship should stay out of politics." Pew says. "Today, 50% of conservatives express this view." Conservative opinion on this matter is now much closer to liberal and moderate opinion, which has not much changed.

The biggest shift of opinion has been among social conservatives. The very people who were most keenly interested in using government to impose their values -- opposing same-sex marriage, for example -- are the same group showing the biggest shift in opinion in favor of keeping religion out of politics. Any ideas why that might be true?

Nicholas Kristof's column in the New York Times today contains a sentence about the Chinese "goddess of mercy," Guanyin (Kwan yin), that I don't think is accurate. But maybe Kristof is right and I'm wrong. Kristof writes,

When the first Westerners arrived and brought their faith in the Virgin Mary, China didn’t have an equivalent female figure to work miracles — so Guan Yin, the God of Mercy, underwent a sex change and became the Goddess of Mercy.

You may know that Guanyin is a manifestation of the Bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara. My understanding is that until the time of the early Sung Dynasty (960–1126), the bodhisattva was portrayed in art as male. From the 12th century on, however, in much of Asia, Avalokiteshvara took the form of a mother-goddess of mercy.

During this time there were Nestorian Christians living within the Mongol Empire, but I don't believe the Nestorians venerated Mary. All the reference books says the first Catholic missionary to China was John of Montecorvino (1294-1328), who arrived in China in the early 14th century, when a female Guanyin was already well established in Chinese Buddhist iconography. For this reason I don't think there was a direct connection between Guanyin and Mary.

However, it is interesting to me that during the 10th through 12th centuries, when the image of Guanyin was becoming popular, the veneration of Mary also was on the rise in Europe. Was there some cultural cross-pollination the historians don't know about? Or some other factor that made mother goddesses particularly appealing during that time?