Lance Armstrong has a 17th-century, 15-foot Spanish fresco of the crucifixion hanging on the wall of his Austin mansion. This doesn't mean - and some of you Armstrong acolytes might want to sit down for this - that Lance is Jesus.

Some historians trace the start of the War on Terror to November 4, 1979, the day the hostages were taken in Tehran.

To build an empire - or win seven Tour de Frances in a row - you must have a Lone Star-size ego and a dash of megalomania.

Instead, it is the reality that the God-forsaken one experienced in an eminent way because no one can even approximately experience the abandonment by God as horribly as the Son, who shares the same essence with the Father for all eternity.

Our crucifixes exhibit the pain, but they veil, perhaps necessarily, the obscenity: but the death of the God-Man was both.

A dead Christ I must do everything for; a living Christ does everything for me.