On the mound, God is always with Mariano Rivera, in victory and defeat. But baseball is a boys’ game, not a calling. And now, as he prepares to hang up his cleats, the greatest closer baseball has ever seen is embarking on his real mission.

****

As anyone who follows baseball knows, Mariano Rivera has built his career on one pitch. A cut fastball, or “cutter,” it travels at 90 or 92 miles an hour, and then, a few feet before it reaches home plate, it moves half a foot off course, a trick of physics that looks like telekinesis. Rivera’s cutter is virtually unhittable, by consensus and by the numbers, but the wasteland of broken bats that litter the plate when he is on the mound is all the proof anyone needs. A Rivera inning has thus been compared to a horror movie: The excitement is sharpened, not dulled, by the fact that everyone—the players, the ticket holders, and Rivera himself—knows exactly what’s coming. Consistency and predictability may be the dullest of virtues, but in Rivera, the anchor reliever for a nearly two-decade Yankees dynasty who will retire at the end of this season at 43, consistency itself is manifest as a superpower.

Three months into his final season, Rivera’s hagiography is already being written. He has, for seventeen years, been the Yankees’ closer, the specialist who arrives in the ninth inning to protect a tight lead, and at this he is better than anyone else who has ever played the game. With 21 saves so far this season, he is pitching as well as he ever has, at an age when other ballplayers have long since withered, and after a long winter recovering from surgery for a torn ACL, an injury that cut short his 2012 season and has ruined many players much younger than he. His teammates speak of him as a giant, and they express gratitude for the privilege of merely being able to walk in the clubhouse where he has walked; atop the Yankees’ Olympus, populated by Ruth, DiMaggio, Gehrig, and Mantle, there’s already a name tag on Rivera’s throne. Sportswriters see him as a mystery, for while other closers have had brilliant seasons, even stretches of three or four, no one else has ever been as good for as long, not nearly. In trying to explain his unprecedented and ruthless two decades of dominance, they’ll cite Rivera’s natural athleticism and the simplicity of his mechanics and they’ll mention the advantages of having been tutored and coddled during his long career by the rich, paternalistic Yankees organization. Rivera acknowledges these things with gratitude—all true, he says. But in his view, his greatness has no earthly source.

“Everything I have and everything I became is because of the strength of the Lord, and through him I have accomplished everything,” he tells me as we sit shoulder to shoulder in the Yankees dugout on a temperate, breezy spring day last month. “Not because of my strength. Only by his love, his mercy, and his strength.” It is the first of several conversations about God I have with Rivera, over several weeks, and in each meeting I find myself struck by how eager he is to put baseball aside and speak openly, and at length, about his faith. Even as Rivera denies that his talent belongs to him, I steal a look at his magic right arm. “You don’t own your gifts like a pair of jeans,” he says.

By that reasoning, I venture, you might say that even the cutter doesn’t belong to you.

“It doesn’t,” he answers, nodding emphatically. “It doesn’t. He could give it to anyone he wants, but you know what? He put it in me. He put it in me, for me to use it. To bring glory, not to Mariano Rivera, but to the Lord.”

Sportswriters often discount athletes’ religiosity as a sideshow, and the secular viewers of cable TV may prefer the bloodless scrutiny of slo-mo video than to give credit to divine causes, but the full story of Rivera’s career is unmistakably a story about faith. On the mound, Rivera is implacable, a warrior with the Buddha’s face. But talking about faith with Rivera is like opening a bottle; years of feeling come out. He speaks less like a theologian than like an enthusiastic believer, channeling all his considerable charisma, curiosity, and preternatural seriousness into the conveyance of passion. His is not a questioning faith but a conviction, invulnerable to attacks from skeptics and doubters, and so his answers to existentially vexing questions can sound to some uncomfortably neat. But Rivera isn’t worried about rationalist complaints because it is in certitude that he finds his strength.

Baseball is full of nutters and head cases, and closers are among the nuttiest of them all—the game’s wildest men and drama queens, the gloaters and the long-haired fist pumpers. Closers employ all kinds of mental tricks to shut down the voices in their heads: They pretend they’re back in the minors where nothing really counts, or they visualize blondes behind home plate. But Rivera doesn’t need tricks. His eye is on a bigger prize, which is to say Heaven, and that has a way of placing more quotidian anxieties about stats, standings, and contract deals into perspective. “At the end!” he says with so much suppressed excitement I think he might explode. “That’s where I want to become a giant. That’s where it counts. It doesn’t matter now.” The certain knowledge that God is at his side, even on the mound, gives Rivera a kind of mental equilibrium that most players (and most people) can only yearn for, a profound mixture of fatalism and personal responsibility best captured by the AA mantra, the “Serenity Prayer”: “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.” Rivera likes to win—“everybody does,” he says—and he believes that giving his life to Christ puts him on the right team. “As long as you cross the [finish] line with the Lord, you’re a winner.”

His faith does not relieve the pitcher of his responsibilities; he is no puppet, and God isn’t calling the pitches, Rivera tells me, laughing at the suggestion. The fact that his gifts come from God increases his obligation to honor them with the hard work and discipline for which he is famous, he says. When Rivera botches a save, it’s his failure—but it’s also part of God’s mysterious plan. “You have to do your part,” he says. “And he will do everything else. You have to be there. Sometimes it doesn’t go your way, but it doesn’t mean that he’s not in control. Sometimes it doesn’t go my way. I have lost the World Series. I have lost games in the regular season. I have lost games in the playoffs.”

It’s a two-tiered system, in which God controls ultimate outcomes from Heaven while down in the stadium Rivera takes perfect aim to win. Too many people claim a religious faith only when it’s convenient, Rivera says, when they want something or when they’re in a particular bind. “When you’re talking about the Lord, it’s your creator. Everything. Your lord. Your master. Your owner. Your everything. I do believe that if you call God our Lord, it means he rules over you. And sometimes we don’t let him do that. We don’t let that happen. We call him Lord, yes, but on circumstance. Not on everything. And how come if he’s our Lord, we don’t allow him to rule over everything?” The question is rhetorical. “Sometimes, we want to take charge, and that’s when everything goes wrong. I can tell you. When you think, Oh, I have it. I’m in control. Guess what? You are not.”

“God allows me to perform without putting too much stress on myself,” says Rivera’s teammate and fellow Christian Andy Pettitte. For Rivera, more crucially, his faith in a perfect, ordered universe permits him to fail. Jorge Posada, the former Yankee catcher who is one of Rivera’s closest friends, believes that Rivera’s mental agility in the face of disappointment is the best evidence of the strength of his faith—better than the tattered Bible he carries with him always or the Bible verse (Philippians 4:13: “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me”) the folks at Nike have embroidered discreetly on his cleats (so discreetly that even up close I have to strain to see it). “People have to fail, and through his faith he’s able to do that a lot better than most,” Posada told me. “It’s so hard in the game of baseball, you are failing a lot. He’s a freak of nature. He’s able to put his failures behind him so quick.” Posada is thinking of two spectacular failures in particular, when Rivera lost the lead in the fourth game of the 1997 division series against the Indians and blew the seventh game of the 2001 World Series against the Arizona Diamondbacks. “I asked him, ‘How did you bounce back from ’97, how did you bounce back from 2001?’ ” Posada marveled. “I can’t do that. I still think about the mistakes we do in life.”

Rivera loves the Gospel, but when it comes to baseball, he takes an Old Testament view. If winning is an honor to God, then perhaps creating a paralyzing fear in opponents is an even greater one. In the Yankee dugout, I ask Rivera what part of the Bible he likes the best. He answers immediately: He relates to the Hebrew Bible’s King David, the poor shepherd boy who saved his people by throwing a rock at the head of a monster. He was, Rivera says in his quiet, Spanish-inflected voice, “a killer.” David grew up into the rich and powerful King of Israel, a man who was a lover, a poet, and a warrior, who pleased God, the Bible says, even as he failed to live up to his commandments. “This was a man, yes, who made a lot of mistakes, but he always knew who his source was,” Rivera tells me. David fell in love with Bathsheba as he spied her bathing and then, wanting her, sent her husband, Uriah, into battle, knowing he would meet his death. The illicit union produced a son, and God expressed his disapproval by making that baby sick. When the baby was ailing, the great king wept and fasted. But when he died, David stopped grieving, to the surprise of his servants, got up, and went back to work. “The baby dies,” Rivera says. And King David? “Wakes up. Wash it off. Shave. Eat. Get ready. And move forward. Never look back. Never ask once again.”

(Photo: Martin Schoeller)

I ask Rivera how it felt to lose the 2001 series, and he answers that God was in charge that day as he is on all others. “I did my best. I did everything within my power. I did everything within my power to win that game for us. Guess what? Didn’t happen. And you think I’m going to start like a child, Oh oh oh, I be crying? No, I did my best. My best wasn’t enough that day. I looked my boss into his eyes, and I said, ‘Boss, I did my best and my best wasn’t enough today.’ I can sleep comfortable and move forward.”

From his spot in the shade, Rivera contemplated the ancient story of David as he gazed upon the field, where his teammates were beginning batting practice. He had to go to work—bosses matter to him, as do punctuality and politeness.

There are those who feel that America’s pastime is like a religion, its parks, cathedrals, and its players like actors in a Passion play. “I don’t think that way,” Rivera says. “You get paid to play this game, and you have to produce, otherwise you won’t get paid. So it is a job.” When asked about his impending retirement, a crisis point in the life of any pro athlete, he says, “I can’t wait.”

When the season ends, after what he hopes will be his sixth World Series win, Rivera will devote himself to working in an actual church—his church, the wreck of a long-ago Presbyterian congregation purchased from the City of New Rochelle in 2011 and renovated, he says, at a cost of $2.5 million. It doesn’t look like much now—a stone shell with a shingled roof surrounded by heaps of dirt—but Rivera says it will be open for business in a month or two. New stained-glass windows were recently installed, he says, and inside the sanctuary, “that church is glowing, a kind of yellow-goldish color because the sun hits the stained glass and it looks, oh my God, fantastic.” The church is named Refugio de Esperanza, or Refuge of Hope. Clara, Rivera’s wife, will be its pastor. She is not yet ordained, but then that is not so unusual for a church like this one.

The Riveras already have a Christian-Pentecostal congregation waiting in the wings, a group of several dozen people who have been worshipping weekly at their home in Purchase for years, an organic outgrowth of an informal Bible study they started with a few other couples. “My house is kind of small,” he explains. “We only fit like 50 people, 60 people tops. Forty, average. We have whites, we have blacks, we have Hispanics. We’ll have all kinds. It don’t matter. As long as you love Christ, we in it. And if you don’t love him, we will work with you so we put you on the right path.” During the season, Rivera often worships in a ­Sunday-morning “Baseball Chapel,” led in the clubhouse by pastor George ­McGovern, but he comes to Clara’s services when he can, according to friends, sitting in the back row with his hand in the air, tears streaming down his cheeks.

But when Rivera says “church,” as in “My plan after baseball is to focus on church,” he means something much bigger than a new space to pray in. What he has in mind is a brotherhood (and sisterhood) of Christ, a spiritual and material outreach without boundaries, giving help to whoever needs it wherever they are, in the form of school supplies, haircuts, hot meals, Thanksgiving turkeys, toys at Christmas, college scholarships, bed sheets and bath soap for Sandy victims, and on and on. (The Mariano Rivera Foundation already donates between $500,000 and a million dollars each year.) He wants to keep funding church start-ups, as he’s already done in Mexico, the Dominican Republic, California, and Florida, not to mention New York. “In Panama, we have done I don’t know how many,” he says. Here, he wants to buy the building next to the church in New Rochelle and make it into an after-school program for at-risk kids. He and Clara are even talking about starting a seminary. Refuge of Hope, then, is more than a bricks-and-mortar retirement hobby; it’s a dream of a network of congregations and charities and pastors of the kind that used to be called, quaintly, a denomination.

This is not as outlandish as it sounds. Rivera is part of a huge, transnational religious movement, in which Latinos are turning away from religion in its institutionalized, hierarchical forms, especially Catholicism, and embracing the more intimate, do-it-yourself Pentecostal church. Like the vibrant tent revivals of the nineteenth-century American frontier, this is a grassroots phenomenon, fueled by transient populations of migrant workers, who are seeking a more emotional and immediate connection with God than what’s on offer in more established congregations. House churches like the Riveras’ are commonplace, and so are women pastors. Pentecostalism puts its focus on the Holy Spirit, the part of the Trinity that dwells within people and acts like an inner guide; it’s an emotional faith. At a typical Hispanic Pentecostal church you won’t see congregants passively listening to a minister sermonize, and you probably won’t see the lyrics to a hymn printed on a drop-down video screen. You’ll see lots of people underlining in their Bibles, and when they sing, they’ll be on their feet, praying with their whole body. Pentecostals tend to believe in healing, visions, and miracles, and some describe being baptized by the Holy Spirit, known as “speaking in tongues,” which looks to an outsider like nothing more than a protracted orgasm, with keening and babbling and uncontrolled shuddering or twitching. “I haven’t been baptized with the Holy Spirit,” Rivera says. “But I have seen it, and it’s beautiful. That’s what I want.”

Rivera hears the spirit talking to him “all the time,” he says—in dreams, in songs, and through the Bible. He also hears the spirit in prayer. When he reaches the mound, he always turns his back to the catcher for a minute and gazes down at the ball in his hand, and at that moment, he’s praying “that God watch not only me but my teammates. That no one get hurt,” he says. “The key is your heart,” Rivera says. “God don’t hear words.” Here he brings his hands up near his ears and, with his famous long fingers, makes jabbering mouth motions. “He goes direct to your heart and sees what is there.”

At one of our meetings, as sports reporters milled about the Yankees dugout, we found ourselves discussing Saint Augustine’s Confessions—the testimonial, written around 400 A.D., of a wayward young man who, weeping under a fig tree, hears a voice commanding him to read the Bible, a moment that changes him forever. “Saint. Saint,” Rivera repeated. “What is that?” Rivera was pretending not to understand: He has a reformer’s disdain for Catholicism’s hierarchical embellishments, including its catalogue of saints, which, he says, encourages men to worship other men. “When I read the Bible, I read that the Lord is jealous. He’s alone.” But when Augustine wrote his Confessions, I say, the Catholic Church was the only game in town. No, Rivera says. There was a church before that: the church of Jesus.

Like many Evangelicals, Rivera knows the Bible backward and forward, but he doesn’t use it like a hammer. His presence in the clubhouse is light and teasing—­protective of younger pitchers, flirtatious with older women, warm with the numerous Yankees serfs who hang around waiting to fetch water and pack bags—and he sees it as his job to guide others, not to force them. “He’s not one of those people,” says Posada, who is Catholic. “If you sit down with Mariano for a long time, you’re going to hear a lot of quotes and a lot of things that the Bible says, but he doesn’t preach.” He does, however, believe the Bible is the Word of God, which makes him inflexible on certain matters. According to the second Book of Samuel, David had a best friend, a soul mate, whose name was Jonathan and whose love he treasured “passing the love of women.” Did you know, I asked Rivera during our first interview in the dugout, that some modern scholars argue that David and Jonathan may have been lovers?

“Lovers, meaning, lovers what?” he asked.

“Sexually,” I said.

Rivera threw his head back and laughed. Well, he said, the Bible doesn’t say that. Men can love each other, he said, looking out at his teammates on the field, and even lay down their lives for each other, without it being a sexual thing. On the question of homosexuality in sports, he gave a politician’s answer, accommodationist-sounding but firm in its conviction. “You want to be that, hey, you be it. If that’s going to make you happy, you be it. I do respect that. But I don’t share it,” he said. “If it’s the right thing to do—the Bible doesn’t tell me that.”

The next day, the locker room was dim and quiet, and I found Rivera sitting on a folding chair, tying his shoes. From behind, he looked like a movie still: the shaved head, the lanky frame, the No. 42 emblazoned on his back. When he turned around, he gave me his famous high-school-boyfriend smile, shook my hand, then ran off somewhere. I dawdled around his locker and wondered what it must be like, for a man like him, in a locker room like this, full of egotists and sinners, some of whom likely tolerate his saintliness and the adulation of the press only because of his extraordinary human ability. About steroids, Rivera says, “God has given you everything you need. ”

Rivera believes, along with most conservative Evangelicals, that the only way to Heaven is through Jesus. But what about the Jews, the atheists, the hedonist rookie, the lapsed journeyman, and the agnostic reporters who worship Rivera but not his God? Within minutes, Rivera unexpectedly came bouncing back and I ask: Would a loving God really condemn good people for not believing in him?

God doesn’t accept excuses, he says. “Someway, sometime, you’ve heard about Jesus. Even if you live in China, you would have heard. The Bible says we’re all going to be judged.” About his teammates in particular, Rivera says, “Christ came for the sinners, not for the saved. You don’t go to the doctor if you’re healthy.”

Every converted Christian has a once-was-lost-now-am-found narrative, and Rivera is no exception. Most stories about his early years draw on a kind of romanticized poverty, in which he learns from his father working on a fishing boat about respect and determination and in his spare time plays baseball, using a mitt improvised from a milk carton (in one version I heard, from a minor-league friend, it was the crushed cardboard from a case of beer). In truth, back then, Rivera loved soccer much more than baseball and when asked recently could not name a single major-league pitcher from his boyhood.

Rivera hints at a dark period during his late teenage years, about which he will say very little: “I was doing the wrong things. It was just bad. If I kept going that way, I would have been dead,” he says. “The crowd I was hanging with wasn’t the right crowd. And with that, I’ll leave it like that.” It was around that time his cousin Vidal introduced him to the idea of an unmediated faith, which spoke to him in a way his childhood Catholicism had not. “He started talking about Christ and relationship and what he did for us on the Cross, and I said, ‘Wow.’ I was intrigued. I started reading the Bible and searching and find out who Christ was and is.”

When he was 20, the Yankees signed Rivera for $3,000, and he commenced the vagabond life of a minor-league player, living in Tampa, Greensboro, and Columbus over the next five years and traveling home to Panama in the winter to see his family and Clara, whom he knew from childhood and married in 1991. In those years, Rivera may have had his distractions, but to those around him, he seemed already completely focused on getting to the major leagues. Wherever Rivera sat on the bus was the quiet section, remembered his occasional roommate in the minors, Ron Frazier, and when the other guys went out after games to drink and play pool and chase girls, Rivera stayed in and got his rest. “I was one of those guys who drank beer and played pool,” says Frazier, now a high-school teacher on Long Island. “He would talk to me. He would say, ‘You got to keep your priorities straight.’ I just knew then and there he had it right.”

Nothing about Rivera’s major-league start, however, portended his awesome career. He had an operation on his elbow in 1992, and a full recovery was uncertain. And even though his fastball gained tremendous velocity in 1995, reaching around 95 miles an hour, he was far from a sure thing. He was called up that spring, when he was already 25 years old, an age at which many pitchers are beginning a decline they can only forestall with pitcherly savvy. “Another shabby outing by another young pitcher,” wrote Jack Curry in the New York Times in June. Even Rivera’s voice comes down through the decades as wavering, the sound of a rookie trying to act brave. “When I got in there, I had to be in control. I tried to be in control,” he told reporters in September after facing off against the A’s. Today, Rivera has disdain for the word trying, a verb he thinks indicates a less-than-total commitment. During one of our conversations, I was fiddling with my voice recorder and apologized for making him wait. “Don’t say, ‘Sorry, sorry,’ ” he told me, teasing. “Just get it done.”

In 1996, he earned a permanent spot in the Yankees bullpen, and the team won the World Series; by the next year, he was working full time as their closer. But off the field, life was a work-in-progress. He still had not given himself to God. “The commitment level as a younger man sometimes is a little bit different, a little bit difficult,” says Pettitte, who was Rivera’s peer in the minors and has watched his faith mature. “Sometimes you’re a little more distracted and not as focused on what you want your walk to be.” And maintaining a long-distance relationship with his wife and children (the oldest of three sons, Mariano Jr., was born in 1994) was tough on the family. While he played in the minors—and for his first several years in the majors—Rivera thought of himself as “living” in Panama with a job that took him frequently out of town, almost like the migrant workers who share his faith. For Clara, coming from a close-knit Panamanian family, Westchester, and the world of professional baseball, was an entirely alien universe. “I won’t say she was lonely,” Rivera says. “But we didn’t have no one here. No one.”

One day, soon after Rivera’s debut, from their apartment in New Rochelle, Clara reached out to a woman she’d heard about through relatives, a leader in a Pentecostal denomination called the Church of God of Prophecy. This woman and her husband became Clara’s American support system, and soon Mariano’s as well—they prayed together, read the Bible, and even helped the Riveras set up their house. Rivera calls them “his spiritual parents”; the wife he calls “Mami.” It was Mami who eventually brought Mariano to God. “It was personal. Beautiful,” Rivera says. Today, whenever the Riveras go on vacation, they do so with 40-odd people, including parents both biological and spiritual. “I’m always with my family,” Rivera says. “Where I go, my family goes.”

We are sitting together during our final meeting, once again huddled in the Yankee dugout. I had come to see these conversations as a kind of Bible study, but this time, he seemed distracted. It was nearly a hundred degrees in the sun, and the season had settled into the long, hot stretch when opening day is long behind you and the playoffs are still more than a hundred games away. “I’m tired,” he said as he scooched up next to me on the bench, then inched rightward to get a better view of the opposition while they took their practice swings.

When I ask him what brought him to God, he says that, like everyone, he’s vulnerable to temptation. “When we’re still alive, when we’re still breathing, we will go through temptations,” he told me. “The thing is how we’re going to get through it. Again, we all fail. We all fall short.” But his view of his own born-again experience isn’t transactional: A person gives himself to God because he understands at his deepest core that he needs salvation. “Lord, here I am” is how he describes the moment. “I’m a sinner. I’m a sinner. Guess what. I’m surrendered to you. I don’t want to do it no more—whatever I’m doing that doesn’t please you, take it away from me. I surrender to you. Come, dwell in me.”

Rivera found his cutter shortly after being born again, and this, he says, is no coincidence. The story has been told before, but it bears repeating here. In the spring of 1997, Rivera was a conventional fastball pitcher, hurling heat straight at the plate and mixing that up with breaking and off-speed pitches. But during pitching practice one day, he suddenly found that he could not make his fastball stay on course. He had been having a tough spring, he says, thinking too much and feeling pressure to always be perfect. And here was this ball, out of nowhere, seemingly with a life of its own, and Rivera completely unable to control it. The bullpen catcher thought he was messing around, and the mystified pitching coach worked with Rivera for weeks, trying to help him get the ball to settle down. But he couldn’t. Or it wouldn’t. And so finally, according to Sports Illustrated, Rivera said, “I’m tired of working at this, let’s let it happen.” To me, he said only this: “In God is purposes.”

As part of his farewell tour, Rivera has been visiting with small groups of people connected with opposing ball clubs on the road—thanking hot-dog vendors and the group-sales guy for working hard. I saw him do this at Citi Field, on Memorial Day, before the first game of the Yankees’ series against the Mets. “It’s an honor and a privilege,” he began.

For seventeen years, Rivera has been perhaps baseball’s humblest hero, always thanking God in an understated way. He’s not in the news for beating up his model girlfriend or falling out with his agent—in fact, he’s hardly in the news at all. He doesn’t bad-mouth the people who write him checks. He has off days, but never slumps.

And now, in this victory lap, his discomfort with the spotlight shows. It is easier for him to be history’s greatest closer than it is for him to reveal himself, because he sees that making a display of his humility puts that all-important humility in doubt. Having lived in New York for nearly twenty years, he knows, on some level, that the fans, and even his teammates, are drawn more to his superstardom than they are to his innermost thoughts; the beliefs are of interest only because he’s so great. “I don’t want people to think that I do [church work] because I want attention,” he told me. “I don’t ever want that. I do it because it comes from my heart and not for the publicity.”

At Citi Field that day, the event had a staged feeling; it was heartfelt but also for show. The Mets returned the honor the following evening, asking him to throw out the first pitch—an exceptional, gracious gesture for an active pitcher on an opposing team. Later that night, he entered the game to pitch for real, with the Yankees ahead 1-0 in the ninth. The lowly Mets struck quickly, getting three consecutive hits off Rivera and stealing the game. It was the worst outing of Rivera’s career. And it was humbling. It may have been part of God’s plan, but with reporters later that night, the pitcher took full responsibility.

Hedge fund billionaire Paul Tudor Jones made controversial comments regarding women on Wall Street, saying babies are a ‘killer’ to a woman’s focus. Cosmopolitan’s Joanna Coles, Alexandra Lebenthal and New York Magazine’s Lisa Miller discuss with Joe Scarborough.

Traditionally, an international collegiate experience has meant immersion in another culture: the art and architecture, yes, but also the frisson of kissing in a foreign language and, after a bottle or two of vin rouge, barfing au bord de la Seine. So Jessica was somewhat surprised to find, upon her arrival in the United Arab Emirates, that her peers, 450 undergraduates from around the world, devote much of their free time to homework. “The hallways,” says Jessica, are “very quiet.” When they aren’t studying, she says, NYUAD students engage in the kinds of organized fun one might find at a well-appointed summer camp. Within the dorm, there’s Ping-Pong and video games and kitchens on every floor. There are two gyms: one staffed with hot, muscled trainers and another for women only, in case scoping hot trainers is against your religion.

Jessica’s culture shock is attributable, in part, to the idiosyncrasies of Abu Dhabi—in a million ways, the opposite of New York. Drinking is prohibited without a license. Public displays of affection, even between married people, are frowned upon. (Last month, a British woman was arrested for being alone with a man who was not her husband.) As guests in the Emirates, the students are expected to abide by local laws and customs, no matter what their hormones might urge them to do. When they leave the dorm, the women dress modestly, their shoulders and legs covered, and though circumstance might tempt them, they understand very well that jail or deportation might result should they bend the rules too far. A year into her tenure, Jessica still chafes at the blandness of the available entertainment. “We go to a restaurant with a group of friends or the mall or the Corniche [a beach], and that’s it,” says Jessica. “We’re in our own little bubble. I don’t feel like I’m in the Middle East at all.”

And perhaps that’s the point. NYU Abu Dhabi opened its doors to students in 2010 amid much controversy, the first major outpost in what NYU president John Sexton calls the “Global Network University.” The idea, broadly put, is to track down the brightest students in the whole wide world and entice them to Abu Dhabi with hotel-quality bed linens and free scuba-diving lessons—not to mention gobs of scholarship money. If American students like Jessica yearn for a more immersive year-abroad experience, or New York-based faculty worry making a deal with the Abu Dhabi government implicitly condones its human- and civil-rights abuses, well, that’s not John Sexton’s problem. He has taken untold millions of dollars from the emirate ($50 million to start), thereby staking his reputation and the future of his university on a vision of an interconnected, international system of educational ­franchises—a similar campus opens in Shanghai this fall—tasked with turning the valedictorians of today into the global leaders of tomorrow.

It is no wonder, then, that NYUAD administrators may act a little overprotective of their charges. Last year, Jessica and some friends organized a trip to Beirut. When school officials got wind of their plans, the students were brought in for what Jessica calls “a casual conversation revealing concerns.” Already under pressure from her anxious parents to cancel the trip, Jessica relented and went to Istanbul instead, understanding that more than her safety was at stake. “Of course, it would look very bad for the university,” she says, if a student were to get hurt off campus, somehow, in a revolutionary event. “The university definitely doesn’t promote travel to areas where the tensions are high. A lot of students want to go to Jordan, Beirut, Israel. They will pay students to not go.”

But even Jessica would say that being sheltered has certain upsides. Compared with any frat-centric American university or to the streets of Manhattan after midnight, NYUAD is very safe. Also, at a school this tiny, you always know where your friends are. So at eleven o’clock on a recent Wednesday night, the hour at which the kids in Manhattan are just heading out, Jessica corrals three of her fellow students in a study room to talk with me by Skype about life at NYUAD.

She and Bailey Theado are the group’s Americans; both New Jersey natives, they are enrolled at NYU on Washington Square and are only sojourning on the Abu Dhabi campus. The other two, Mastewal Terefe and Daria Karaulova, raised in Ethiopia and Moscow, respectively, are based in Abu Dhabi, and they’re exactly the kind of students who get a free ride at NYUAD, dubbed “The World’s Honors College.” Brainy and ambitious, they are as articulate as debate-team captains and neat as pins.

Only the Americans complain about their lack of liberty, and when pressed, they concede that the compensations on offer by the university are pretty sweet. “There’s this sailboarding thing,” says Bailey, smiling wide on Skype. “Horseback riding. Deep-sea diving. That’s another reason that I came here. It’s like, ‘Oh, wow, there’s so many resources.’ ” Jessica and Bailey talk about life at NYU with the hard-bitten nostalgia of urban survivors: bedrooms so tiny you can’t fit a suitcase under the bed; miles to walk to class; miserly cafeteria workers who count out the chicken pieces on the Caesar salad. “Here,” says Bailey with seeming wonder, “it’s really nice.”

Sexton himself helps to set the tone. The University president is omnipresent at Abu Dhabi, flying there regularly and teaching a class on the Supreme Court. Most of the NYUAD kids call him by his first name. A kind word from “John” factored into Daria’s decision to attend NYUAD. At a meeting of prospective students, she says, “I told him, ‘My father doesn’t want me to go here,’ and he said, ‘What’s his number? I’ll call him.’ I said, ‘My father doesn’t speak English,’ and he said, ‘That’s not a limit for me.’ ”

This hothouse atmosphere makes the American students both jealous and squeamish. “It was really weird for me to come here, where everyone has such a personal relationship with the university president,” observes Bailey, who with other New York students recently had a meeting with Sexton to voice concerns of second-rate treatment. “How is that supposed to make me feel? It’s like, ‘How do we fit in here? Are we enough for the World’s Honors College?’ ”

Daria defends the president. “It’s like any other start-up organization. It wouldn’t work if he didn’t make it personal.”

Obviously, Sexton cares. He cares so much that, with the help of the government, he’s building his Abu Dhabi students a new campus, due to open in 2014, on nearby Saadiyat Island, with ocean views. Neighbors will include the Guggenheim (Abu Dhabi), the Louvre (Abu Dhabi), and a professional golf course, all so students can kick back in high-end seclusion as they prepare to one day lead.

Which just goes to show that evil may not have a single face, but it can be reliably found within one kind of body: that of an angry man in his late teens or twenties. Three days before they killed twelve classmates, one teacher, and themselves at their Colorado high school in 1999, Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris partied on prom night, looking outwardly “like normal young boys about to graduate,” Dave Cullen wrote in his 2009 book Columbine. “They were testing authority, testing their sexual prowess—a little frustrated with the dumbasses they had to deal with, a little full of themselves.” Adam Lanza, Timothy McVeigh, Jared Lee Loughner, James Eagan Holmes, Seung-Hui Cho—some of these villains were afflicted with mental illness, some of them drawn to extremist ideologies. It was easy to distance ourselves from each of them with a variety of alienating labels: autistic gun nut, domestic terrorist, sociopath, embittered immigrant loser. But they have three things indisputably in common. Their gender. Their youth. And a willingness to hate, which forensic psychiatrist Michael Welner distinguishes from simple anger. “You have to be hateful of everyone to kill anyone,” he says. “A person who will undertake a spectacle crime or a mass killing, that is one of the defining qualities: They don’t care that anyone can be killed.”

Angry. Young. Men. The description doesn’t explain the motivations behind every notorious bloodbath, but it’s a place to start—perhaps the only place to start. Men have testosterone, an aggression drug, coursing through their veins; levels rise under stress, and young men have more of it than older ones. (Give testosterone to female rats, and they will become uncharacteristically violent.) Moral development isn’t complete in humans until about age 21—“This is why we don’t put the 14-year-olds in charge,” says Sam Harris, a neuroscientist and moral philosopher. And men are likelier than women to act out vengeance, partly because their brains do not propel them to seek help, to pick up the phone or see a shrink, when enraged. And that male proclivity to assert power through violence has been true for males, and not for females, for millions of years, which is why when you give your 4-year-old daughter a toy sword to play with, she may just turn it into a fairy wand and go on with her day.

The willingness of men to imagine themselves as warriors is rooted in a protective impulse that can get distorted through culture and especially trauma, says family therapist Michael Gurian, and the resulting mental illnesses caused by trauma too often go untreated in men. These criminals have broken selves, says Gurian, and their culture abets their appetite for violence. The terrorist or the mass murderer believes, because his white-supremacist or Islamist or boxing world tells him so, that he can fill his emptiness with a sensationally violent act. “These crimes are very much about the evolution of masculine identity,” says Welner. Gurian explains the mind-set like this: “I develop a self by destroying. I will now go destroy. That will hopefully create in me enough of a self that I will have some power. I will have some status. I will show people.”

But what do they show? All these murderous men have something they want to prove: a devotion to Allah, a fuck-you to the world, a dexterity with explosives, a political objection or a nationalist passion. But the more of them we meet, the less they seem to be fringe ideological actors and more like various avatars of a single type. Dzhokhar, so far, is a puzzle. A look at the horrifying and banal Twitter feed reported to be his shows a boy who liked Breaking Bad and followed college basketball, listened to Eminem and Dr. Dre and knew a song from Rent, who was passingly familiar with the works of the political theorist Edmund Burke. “Dzhokhar is a sweet boy, innocent. He was always smiling, friendly, and happy,” a man describing himself as a cousin told the Boston Globe last week. “I don’t know how he is involved in this.” The boy who spent hours Friday night hiding in a boat in Watertown could have been one of the charming 19-year-olds at your last backyard party.

But the man was searching for a graduate program in which he might investigate God’s grace full time, thereby earning an advanced degree. He’d already been to seminary, but the formal religious education, he said, “didn’t take.” At the same time, the psychology programs to which he applied were skeptical of his area of interest. One suggested that he study “inspiration” instead. This man knew that God’s grace was real. But he was distressed to find that he couldn’t shoehorn it into an academic department.

While reporting on American religion, I’ve been blessed to meet people like the funeral director, the faithful whose hearts are moved and confused by God. These actual people — and not the yellers or the posturers, the outraged or the politically jaded — have fed my interest in this subject for decades. Religion, as it is lived every day, as it consoles and irritates and puzzles folks, is one of the most important forces in American life, and it will continue to be my motivation even as I stop writing in this particular space. This will be my last regular column for The Washington Post.

Ninety-two percent of Americans say they believe in God, according to Gallup, and I’ve come to understand that when they affirm this belief, they are not, for the most part, talking about anything having to do with the culture-war issues that make the news.

Most people of faith don’t care if Mitt Romney is a Mormon; they care if he’s qualified to lead. (In fact, white evangelicals, the group most often cited as having a problem with Romney’s faith, voted for him overwhelmingly in 2012; it turned out that they mistrusted John McCain, whom they suspected of being a private secularist, much, much more.) Most of the religious faithful never gave a thought to whether Catholic institutions should have to provide birth-control coverage to their employees until a small group of conservative activists made it a “religious liberty” issue. Most Americans like their birth control and are glad to have coverage themselves. Culture warriors have always been a small but vocal minority. Constant news and the online competition for clicks makes them louder, but amid the shouting, the search for meaning is lost.

In private, people want something to believe in. And religion, or the desire for religion or even the loathing of religion, reflects that fundamental human quest. When the world is a terrible place, does faith console you? Or does it look like a mean joke, or a trick? And how do you arrive at that answer?

The personal, day-to-day struggle with these questions, and others like them, are what the story of religion is really about. I think often of an interview I did with the Bible scholar Bart Ehrman, who told me that the problem of theodicy — Why would a loving God make, say, an earthquake that killed hundreds of thousands of poor and innocent Haitians? — finally turned him into a nonbeliever.

“I just got to a point where I couldn’t explain how something like this could happen, if there’s a powerful and loving God in charge of the world,” he told me. “It’s a very old problem, and there are a lot of answers, but I don’t think any of them work.”

Also, in private, even the most convinced believers hold an inconsistent faith. Religion, as it is expressed in most people’s lives, is not the two-dimensional phenomenon you see on television, represented by racist or homophobic pastors, or polygamous sects, or atheist autodidacts.

I think often of a woman I met a decade ago who was a ardently conservative evangelical Christian and also a sort of feminist pioneer: one of the first women to graduate from the University of North Carolina’s law school. Or friends of mine, ardently pro-choice, who when pregnant nevertheless feel that they are carrying “a life.” Or the young Southern Baptist who called into a radio show I was on to voice support for same-sex marriage.

Religion in real life is never letter-perfect. It is no surprise that one of the most popular columns I wrote for The Post was about Ezekiel Emanuel, a former National Institutes of Health department chief who is an atheist and also keeps kosher.

And so, because I can, I use this bully pulpit to issue a heartfelt plea. When someone expresses certainty about religion — they say they know about God; they know what God thinks; they know what God has to say about gays or working mothers or birth control or the budget; they know there is no God — don’t believe it. Even Mother Teresa had doubts.

Doubt, from a journalist’s perspective, is where the story is. But it is also the starting point for a real conversation about the things we value most, and in America at this particular moment, that conversation could not be more necessary.

New York Magazine’s Lisa Miller, Cosmopolitan’s Joanna Coles and Debora Spar of Barnard College speak about Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg’s “lean in” argument, and how it differs from a new “lean out” trend seen among some women.

But within the ranks of the UUA over the past few years, there has been some quiet unrest concerning a small but activist group that vociferously supports polyamory. That is to say “the practice of loving and relating intimately to more than one other person at a time,” according to a mission statement by Unitarian Universalists for Polyamory Awareness (UUPA). The UUPA “encourages spiritual wholeness regarding polyamory,” including the right of polyamorous people to have their unions blessed by a minister.

UUA headquarters says it has no official position on polyamory. “Official positions are established at general assembly and never has this issue been brought to general assembly,” a spokeswoman says.

But as the issue of same-sex marriage heads to the Supreme Court, many committed Unitarians think the denomination should have a position, which is that polyamory activists should just sit down and be quiet. For one thing, poly activists are seen as undermining the fight for same-sex marriage. The UUA has officially supported same-sex marriage, the spokeswoman says, “since 1979, with tons of resolutions from the general assembly.”

Conservative opponents of same-sex marriage have long used the slippery-slope argument: If states are permitted to let two men or two women marry, then what’s to stop them from giving the same privilege to two men and one woman, or two women and one man? Or six? Or 12? Once you legitimize same-sex marriage, sociologist Peter Berger wrote on his blog in 2011, “you open the door to any number of other alternatives to marriage as a union of one man and one woman: polygamous (an interesting question for Muslims in Germany and dissident Mormons in Arizona), polyandrous, polygenerational – perhaps polyspecies?”

The Unitarians are so liberal that they’re playing right into conservative hands. And the conservative blogosphere has responded predictably: First Things has taken disapproving note of the trend, as has the American Conservative.

The debate also makes the whole denomination look silly. “Unitarian Universalism is so broad-minded that it has become flat-headed,” Michael Durall, then an editor of a UUA magazine (he no longer works with UUA groups), wrote in 2004. “This is an abdication of leadership leaving Unitarian Universalism vulnerable to ridicule. Jay Leno would have a field day with this one. Do we truly want to send the message to children, youth (especially!) and adults that having multiple sexual relationships is condoned by UU churches?”

The UUPA has received its share of attention over the years – a PBS interview, a San Francisco Chronicle article – but mostly it has caused anguish and dissent among Unitarians. In 2007, a Unitarian congregation in Chestertown, Md., heard a sermon by a poly activist named Kenneth Haslam, arguing that polyamory is the next frontier in the fight for sexual and marriage freedom. “Poly folks are strong believers that each of us should choose our own path in forming our families, forming relationships, and being authentic in our sexuality.”

Over coffee last week, a friend of mine who is studying to become a Unitarian minister wondered aloud how she would feel if folks in a future congregation asked her to perform a polyamorous commitment ceremony. She is a traditionalist; she’s glad, she says, that the issue hasn’t come up.

• This Is (and Is Not) the ‘Retro Wife’
  The Atlantic Wire, Mar 21, 2013
  The reactions to New York magazine’s recent “Feminist Housewife” piece by Lisa Miller should surprise no one. They are as wide and varied as are the ways in …
• ‘Feminist Housewife’ Writer Lisa Miller Is Trying to Make ‘Lean Out …
  Jezebel, Mar 21, 2013
  New York Magazine writer Lisa Miller is doing some TV appearances to promote her bogus trend piece about the “legions” of “feminist housewives” who are …
• There’s Nothing Retro About the Retro Housewife If She Gets to Choose
  The Atlantic Wire, Mar 18, 2013
  If there’s one thing I think I know about feminism, it’s that every woman should have the right to pursue being whomever she wants to be. So why is New York magazine’s new feature, “The Retro Housewife,” in which Lisa Miller discusses how feminists are “having it all” by “staying home” so controversial?
• Don’t Tell Me I Can’t Be a Feminist House Husband
  American Scene, March 19, 2013
  Into the ever-churning vortex of debate about leaning in/having it all comes Lisa Miller’s New York cover story bogus trend story about “the feminist housewife,”
• Feminist Housewives Are Not Taking Over the Country
  Slate, March 18, 2013
  The New York Times columnist Ross Douthat once tweeted that New York Magazine is secretly a socially conservative rag. This week’s cover story—a bomb thrown into the work/family debate ignited by Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In—is about “feminist housewives…
• Women Profiled in ‘Feminist Housewives’ Piece Say ‘New York …
  Jezebel, Mar 22, 2013
  After I called “bullshit” on writer Lisa Miller’s New York story, taking Kelly Makino … Makino contacted me, saying the magazine took her quotes out of context and …
• The Many Myths About Mothers Who ‘Opt Out’
  The Atlantic, Mar 25 2013
  Women don’t leave the workforce simply because they’re desperate to stay home and take care of their kids—their motivations are much more complicated than that.
  Nanette Fondas Mar 25 2013, 5:31 PM E
• Have You Heard? Feminism’s Over!
  The American Prospect, Mar 21, 2013
  At least this is the point of the latest “trend” piece in New York magazine by Lisa Miller. Let’s get the debunking out of the way. The essential problem with Miller’s …
• Margaret Wente: Alternative advice to high-flying women: Lean back
  Globe and Mail, Mar 23, 2013
  Her new book, Lean In, is a smart, strategic guide for women who want to … moves but the full embrace of domesticity,” Lisa Miller writes in New York magazine.
• The Retro Wife Opts Out: What Has Changed, And What Still Needs To
  Huffington Post, Mar 19, 2013
  This week, New York Magazine, in an article titled “The Retro Wife,” reports that … uninterested in the metaconversation about ‘having it all’,” Lisa Miller writes, …
• Campbell Brown: ‘Breast milk flying everywhere,’ – How do you lean …
  MSNBC, Mar 21, 2013
  Lisa Miller, author of this week’s New York magazine piece, “The Retro Wife,” Morning Joe co-host Mika Brzezinski, BBC’s Katty Kay and Joanna Coles, …
• The Complex, Often Idealistic Reasons Feminists Become …
  The Atlantic, Mar 20, 2013
  Lisa Miller’s recent cover story on “feminist housewives” in New York magazine seemed to irritate people like sandpaper on a sunburn. In her story, Miller …
• The Mommy Wars
  RushLimbaugh.com (subscription), Mar 20, 2013
  One from New York Magazine, one from the UK Daily Mail, and they’re both about feminists who say ….. This is the author of this New Yorker piece, Lisa Miller.
• Why The Opt-Out Story Won’t Die
  Buzzfeed, March 18, 2013
  New York focuses on the slice of well-educated, wealthy women who choose to stay home — and ignores the vast majority who don’t have a choice. It’s a tried-and-true way to stir up controversy.
• There’s Nothing Retro About the Retro Housewife If She Gets to …
  The Atlantic Wire, Mar 18, 2013
  So why is New York magazine’s new feature, “The Retro Housewife,” in which Lisa Miller discusses how feminists are “having it all” by “staying home” so …
• Breaking News: You Can Be A Feminist And A Stay-At-Home Mom
  The Frisky, Mar 19, 2013
  I expected the worst when I heard that that New York magazine would be writing an … Instead, I found “The Retro Wife,” by Lisa Miller — while light on factual …
• Is the Newsweek Rabbis List good for the Jews?
  The Jewish Journal of Greater L.A., Mar 14, 2013
  But a short while later, Ginsberg invited Sanderson to his office in New York. … “I’m Lisa Miller, the religion editor of Newsweek, and I want to print the list.” … Rabbis” since the demise of Newsweek magazine’s print edition, is due out soon and …

On March 20th, Norah O’Donnell, Gayle King and Charlie Rose host a roundtable featuring New York Magazine’s Lisa Miller, Cosmopolitan’s Joanna Coles and Debora Spar of Barnard College speaking out about Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg’s “lean in” argument, and how it differs from a new “lean out” trend seen among some women.