By RAY WADDLE

The December swirl of the spiritual calendar presses a question: Do you believe?

In Islam, the annual hajj (Mecca pilgrimage) occurred this week. Today marks the Wiccan winter solstice. Christmas arrives Tuesday. Kwanzaa begins Wednesday.

Do you believe?

Not long ago, conventional wisdom laughed at the question. Hobbled by a historic failure of imagination, generations of social analysts predicted the death of religion.

Today, every poll and headline confirm an obsession with God — and an unprecedented, media-enhanced global disagreement about what divine truth is.

Do you believe?

Interviewer/filmmaker Antonio Monda sensibly calls the question the most important on Earth, and he has chased down 18 leading creative artists to get answers.

Writer Nathan Englander: "The Bible is easily the most beautiful work ever written; whoever wrote it is God to me."

Architect Daniel Libeskind: "I invite those who do not believe in God to listen to Bach."

Director Martin Scorsese: "I took the Gospels very seriously. I wondered then and I still wonder whether I should quit everything and help the poor. But I wasnt, and I am still not, strong enough."

Monda teases responses from Spike Lee, Toni Morrison, Jane Fonda, Paul Auster, David Lynch, Salman Rushdie, Elie Wiesel and others for his new book, Do You Believe: Conversations on God and Religion (Vintage Books).

The endeavor goes against the official grain, which insists religion be publicly confident, unwavering, politically precise and savvy. These interviews glimpse the real life of private turmoil and second-guessing about God, also the struggle to move beyond cliché and formulaic answers.

Asked about his image of God, novelist Saul Bellow demurred: "I am afraid of banality, and I think it is a subject whose importance is diminished by conversation."

The tally: eight believers, five skeptics, five less certain.

One agnostic, historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., finds religion a dismaying subject "impossible to escape," especially its muscular alliances with conservative politics. He thinks faith should remain a private matter.

Mondo: "How does an agnostic like you face death?"

Schlesinger: "Paradise cant exist without an inferno. But I dont believe in either one. I believe that death is simply the end."

Schlesinger, 89, died in February.

The interviews are too short, but they focus questions that a high-spirited local Sunday school class might take up, a seekers group willing to face the fault line between official religious teachings and the private impulse to religious imagination. That tension between old and new, between patience and yearning, fuels the American dynamism of belief.

Do you believe?

In December, the question carries a special ache, a yearning for holy visibility and resolution — a pilgrimage to sacred ground, a new dawn, a freshly lit candle, a manger scene you can touch.