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I received a phone call once from a good friend, a member of my congregation with whom I had been carrying on an extended theological conversation for several years. She was a believer on most days, she said, and she was absolutely unafraid to doubt and hold up to scrutiny everything she thought the Christian church insisted she believe. I’ll never forget that call and the conversation that followed. “I want to talk to you about something I don’t like at all about our worship service,” she said.

A judging scandal at the Olympic ice-skating rink may have seemed to many little more than an entertaining diversion in a season of terrorism and recession. But there was an important moral issue behind the story of alleged collusion. When Marie Reine Le Gougne indicated to her fellow judges that she had been pressured to favor the Russian skaters over the Canadians, she illustrated to what extent the sport as a whole rests upon the honesty of individuals.