An employee was not entitled to work entirely from a home office as an accommodation under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) because the central components of her job required her to work on the employer's site, ruled the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

Beverly Rauen was employed as a software engineer by United States Tobacco (UST). Her primary duties involved monitoring contractors' work at one of the employer's facilities. During the late 1990s, Rauen suffered successive bouts of rectal and breast cancer. During each period of illness she went on short- and long-term disability leave and ultimately returned to work in January 1999.

Upon her return to work, Rauen asked to work from a home office because her sickness and treatments caused her extreme fatigue and required very frequent restroom use as well as ostomy care.

UST offered to let her work from home most days, but to come into the office one day per week. Rauen rejected this and other proposed accommodations.

Rauen continued to work full-time, filed a charge of disability discrimination with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) and, ultimately, filed suit against UST. The trial court dismissed the case, finding that, because Rauen could perform the essential functions of her job without accommodation, she was not entitled to any accommodation at all.

The 7th Circuit declined to decide the question of whether any accommodation is reasonable for a person who can perform all the functions of her job. Rather, the court more narrowly ruled that Rauen's specific requested accommodation was not the "very extraordinary" case where a home office would be reasonable. Her main duties required "teamwork, interaction and coordination of the type that requires being in the work place," the court said. That she could perform all the essential functions of her job without accommodation further tipped the balance away from the reasonableness of her request.

I HAVE A CONFESSION TO MAKE: I'M A BIT OF A NERD. Have probably been one since the age of 5, when I took up bird-watching in my family's backyard with the intensity of an ornithologist--using my binoculars, bird encyclopedia and a special composition book to take copious notes. Did I mention that I also play the violin, am utterly fascinated by cloud formations, and can spend hours researching a matter to its minute details, just for the sheer thrill of learning?

Still, for more years than I care to remember I tried to carefully conceal this part of me from the men I dated. As far as I could tell, guys liked fun party girls, not those of us who spent our downtime devouring the latest nonfiction opus. Men wanted women who swayed their hips and oozed sensuality, not the ones who were more likely to be found in the library than at the local dance club.

So I decided very early on that I should neatly pack away the geek in me and play the fun-loving party girl. I foolishly thought I could squeeze myself into some mold of what I imagined men liked. I didn't see it as frontin'--just a repackaging for marketing purposes. But at the root of it was a lack of self-confidence about who I was, a subconscious fear that someone would not love me--quirks and all.

My existence as a fractional being--at least when it came to dating--was frustrating and exhausting. Pretending to be something you're not saps your energy. You censor every response and action lest the real you slip out. You begin to feel as if a piece of you is missing. Worst of all, failing to show your authentic self can ruin your chances at finding true love, even as it strips away your spirit. "If you're a chameleon who adapts to whatever someone else wants you to be, you don't truly have a sense of self," says Audrey B. Chapman, Ph.D., a Washington, D.C., relationship therapist and author of Seven Attitude Adjustment for Finding a Loving Man (Pocket).

After a string of Mr. Wrongs and unfulfilling short-lived relationships, I finally began to understand the pitfalls of my masquerade. This was not the pathway to the love I deserved. As I stood in the middle of a midtown Manhattan nightclub with a very handsome Mr. Wrong one evening, surveying the array of gyrating dancers and watching cigarette smoke swirl above the crowd like nimbus clouds, my simmering dissatisfaction with the situation turned to anger at myself. I had had enough. This was not my scene. I was not having fun. No, Mr. Deejay, I vowed to myself, I will not wave 'em like I just don't care.

STOP PLAYING THE ROLE

In the years since my self-emancipation, I've met several men I've made a real connection with--one of them I ultimately married. But I've also come across countless other women who've been afraid to keep it real in their relationships. The posturing is sometimes subtle (pretending you're confident and fulfilled when inside you're screaming with boredom), sometimes severe (lying to your partner about your sexual history). But in every instance, the pretender is the one shortchanged. "You will never find real love if you aren't being real yourself," Chapman says. Instead you could be setting yourself up for a string of counterfeit courtships, failed marriages and an unending trail of suffocated relationships that never had a chance to truly breathe. "These relationships don't last because people eventually find out you aren't who you say you are," explains Larry E. Davis, Ph.D., author of Black and Single: Meeting and Choosing a Partner Who's Right for You (Noble Press).

Two years ago, Denise Bradford *, 26, of New York City was headed down the aisle before she eventually put the brakes on the relationship. Somewhere after the marketing executive's two engagement parties and before choosing bridesmaid dresses, she had a moment of clarity. "I didn't really love him, nor did I want the life he wanted," she recalls. "I was totally faking it." Bradford says that instead of being genuine about her relationship expectations and personal goals, she had simply said yes--to a life of white picket fences in suburbia when what she really wanted was a third-floor walk-up in the city; yes to having children soon after marriage when she dreamed of attending graduate school; yes to love when she really wasn't feeling him.

"On paper he was every woman's dream--good job, good looks, good gifts, good family stock. But I didn't love him the way he loved me," she says. "I kept hoping my feelings would catch up with my words and actions, but it didn't happen. I had to stop lying to myself." Bradford stopped dwelling on society's idea of a "good catch," admitted she was still recovering from a previous breakup, and found the courage to be true to herself. She has decided to wait until she finds what she really wants in a partnership.

N 1868 General U.S. Grant remarked that the United States possessed three great parties: "The Republican, the Democratic, and the Methodist Church." More recently my colleague Stanley Hauerwas quipped that "long after Christianity is dead and gone, the United Methodist Church will still be flourishing." When I share those wisecracks with my preponderantly Methodist seminary students, they invariably react with nervous laughter. There is just enough truth in them to make the comments worrisome as well as funny. David Hempton's brilliantly provocative book tells us why.

The book holds two aims. The first is to look at Methodism as an international enterprise--a global empire of the spirit. The second is to penetrate beneath the surface of Methodist institutions to grasp the "heart of something both elusive and important." Both aims assume that Methodism has been more than the sum of its parts.

Hempton, professor of church history at Boston University, pursues those goals in eight tautly argued essays. He explores how Methodism grew from a barely perceptible impulse in the Church of England in the 18th century to a foremost expression of Christianity in the modern world; how the mixing of Enlightenment rationality and evangelical enthusiasm resulted in Methodism's perennial doubleness of vision; how the Methodist message was heard, internalized and enacted in a bewildering variety of social and geographic locations; how opposition from outsiders fostered strength while conflict between insiders fostered weakness; how money was raised, spent and symbolized; how women and racial and ethnic minorities found nourishment in the Methodist message; how the movement managed to circle the globe completely; and finally, how a gaggle of theories about secularization might help us understand Methodism's decline in the latter half of the 20th century. Though the eight chapters interlock, each stands as an independent essay. Since I teach in a trinitarian divinity school, it seems apt to try to convey the flavor of the whole by focusing on three chapters.

The first chapter, "Competition and Symbiosis," asks a disarmingly simple question: How did it happen that a religious revival that first took root among the "flotsam and jetsam" of English society in the 1730s became, in just 150 years, one of the major religious movements of modern times? At the beginning of the 20th century, Methodism posted 9 million members, 36 million adherents and 150,000 ministers and lay preachers. It owned more than a half billion dollars worth of property, including hundreds of schools on six continents. Methodist steeples graced the skylines of villages, towns and cities everywhere. More important, John Wesley's theological children had moved to somewhere near the center of the culture in most of the English-speaking world. As late as 1950 Methodists in the U.S. alone numbered nearly 10 million members and claimed 6.4 percent of the population. In the 2004 election three of the four candidates for the nation's top jobs were Methodists. So again, how did all that come about?

Hempton is too subtle to give a single-cause answer, but he does suggest that evolutionary biology offers a clue. The secret lies in the symbiosis between the organism and the environment. More precisely, Methodist growth took place not in isolation but as an integral part of the New World order of the 18th and 19th centuries. Though Methodism remained a subspecies of the old Anglican establishment, it proved able to adapt to popular demands for seriousness over frivolity, cooperation over competition, compassion over force, and egalitarianism over deference. Hempton admits that Methodists' special packaging of means and ends--evangelical conversion, emotional assurance, entire sanctification, itinerant preaching, bottom-up associationalism, top-down connectionalism, communal discipline and national regeneration--is well appreciated, less well appreciated is how all of those ingredients worked together to create an elastic, mobile, aggressively expansive movement. Methodism survived as the fittest of the many religious options available.

MANY OF US are fond of referring to "American religion," as if that were a thing to be described. But anyone who has spent much time on the ground (or in churches) knows that there are lots of ways in which that term has to be modified, and one of the most significant modifiers is regional. I have lived in six of the eight regions identified in the Religion by Region series, and who I am religiously, and who people think I am, has varied enormously according to where I was living.

As a kid in Missouri, I was a Baptist, and that identity said not only that I belonged to an important church but that I was on the right side of the great eternal divide, ready to defend my salvation against the other contenders around me. When my family moved to Arizona, I joined the tail end of the white evangelizers who hoped to bring faith and education to the Native American and Mexican laborer population that surrounded us. In southern California, our next stop, people thought we were from Texas and just figured we were one more in a trail of exotic breeds that seemed to flourish on the Pacific shores. What they didn't know was that Southern Baptists and other evangelicals were becoming an institutional force to be reckoned with.

More than a decade later, when I was a pastor's wife on the other coast, the people who heard "southern" and "Baptist" seemed to assume that meant "snake handler" and closed the door as quickly as possible. Then, when we actually moved to the South, we experienced the cognitive dissonance of being assumed to be part of the irresistible evangelical mainstream while practicing a form of Baptist life that eventually got our church kicked out of the denomination.

Now I live in New England, and I'm an American Baptist--part of the "mainline," but we're anything but mainstream and powerful. People are polite about our religious identity, but no one assumes that our church will make the news. The pages of our local paper are largely reserved tar the doings of the Roman Catholic Church.

Who makes the news--and why and how--is part of the story this series seeks to tell. In part, it is an attempt to educate the public, including reporters, on the unique religious history and ecology of America's regions. With funding from the Lilly Endowment, the Leonard E. Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College in Hartford undertook the massive task of assembling scholars and data and producing eight books, each containing both demographic overviews and focused essays on the features that distinguish each region's religious life. Mark Silk and Andrew Walsh, the center's director and associate director, persuaded an impressive array of historians, sociologists and religion scholars to contribute their formidable insight.

As with any edited collection, some chapters are better than others, but on balance, there is plenty here to reward readers who want a closer look at the role of religion in the particular places that make up this extremely varied nation. Each volume includes introductions and conclusions that draw out common regional themes. There is also a general overview chapter that presents the necessary numbers--from ethnic and educational patterns to just how many Baptists or Catholics or, for that matter, Sikhs and Muslims there are in the U.S. The remaining chapters address the distinct practices and histories of the dominant groups and include a variety of essays that take up such topics as the roles of southern religious women, patterns of new religious immigration, and even the religious urban geography of Chicago. Taken together, they constitute an encyclopedic introduction to the myriad stories that make up "American religion."

THE QUALITY of this team of authors and editors was essential, because the statistical data from which they had to work simply cannot tell the whole story. The absence of a national religious census in the U.S. means that we are always confined to filling in numerical gaps with educated guesswork. Each of the sources used here provides a wealth of information, but each has significant limits as well--and the three do not overlap perfectly. The North American Religion Atlas (NARA) depends on the 2000 membership numbers compiled by the Glenmary Research Center (a decennial project undertaken since 1950). For many groups, these numbers provide a fairly accurate county-by-county picture, but to the extent that a group provided sketchy data (lots of round numbers always raise questions) or no data at all, these "adherent" numbers fail to reflect the actual religious composition of a given area.

For instance, Samuel Hill argues convincingly that many of the religions that thrive in Appalachia are precisely the sort that don't look kindly on anyone who wants to count them. The high number of presumed "nonadherents" in those counties distorts the picture.

WHAT ARE THE limits of religious freedom? The Supreme Court will take up that recurrent question on November 1 when it hears arguments in a case involving O Centro Espirita Beneficiente Uniao Do Vegetal, a small sect that blends Christianity with South American spiritism. As a central act of their faith, UDV members ingest a tea called hoasca, brewed by mixing two plants unique to the Amazon basin (uniao do vegetal is Portuguese for "union of the plants"). They believe that hoasca connects them to God.

This practice has landed the UDV--which has 8,000 members in Brazil and 135 in America--in trouble with the U.S. government. Hoasca contains a small fraction (just over one hundredth of 1 percent) of a naturally occurring hallucinogen called dimethyltriptamine (DMT), which is prohibited under federal drug laws. This amount, although small, is sufficient to alter the drinker's state of consciousness. The UDV imported its hoasca from Brazil until May 1999, when customs officials confiscated a shipment and federal prosecutors threatened the group with criminal charges.

The UDV sued the government in federal court, alleging that it had violated the First Amendment's "free exercise of religion" clause and the 1993 Religious Freedom Restoration Act. After a two-week hearing, the judge ordered, pending a full trial, that the government allow the UDV to import and use hoasca subject to controls designed to prevent its spread to a broader market of recreational users. After the court of appeals upheld this injunction, the government successfully petitioned the Supreme Court for a review.

The case of Gonzales v. UDV raises a long-standing question: when a general law enacted for a legitimate purpose, like the drug law, conflicts in a particular case with a religious practice, should the law give way and exempt the practice? The Supreme Court has vacillated on this issue.

In 1879, holding that Mormons could be prosecuted for engaging in polygamy, the court reasoned that government cannot "excuse ... [illegal] practices" on the basis of religious conscience, lest "every citizen ... become a law unto himself." But in the 1960s and '70s the court, emphasizing the fundamental nature of free-exercise rights, held that government cannot substantially restrict those rights, even when enforcing a general law, unless it can show "interests of the highest order" that would be undermined were an exemption granted.

In 1990 the court changed course again, in another case involving sacramental drugs: the ritual ingestion of peyote from cactus plants by members of the Native American Church. The majority in Employment Division v. Smith held that in most cases, a "neutral law of general applicability" can be applied to religious conduct no matter how serious the burden it imposes, and even if it serves no strong interest whatsoever. The court's opinion, written by Justice Antonin Scalia, called an exemption from an otherwise valid law a "constitutional anomaly" and said that judges lack competence to balance religious interests against social interests and so determine which practices to exempt.