Tiger Woods is back, and the world is watching. Some are watching for the golf, others for the story of recovery and redemption in play. Me, I'm watching for the Buddhism.

If you recall, just a couple of months ago Tiger held that rather strange and staged "mea culpa" press conference, the one where he apologized all over the place and then pointed to Buddhism as the rock upon which he was going to stand. Tiger hasn't mentioned Buddhism since, but that doesn't mean he hasn't made good on his intention to return to his religious roots. Come to think of it, was that Tiger's deceased father or was it the spirit of Buddha speaking to Tiger in that kinda creepy but somehow fascinating Nike commercial?

How do you ignite a firestorm of conversation about God? These days the best spark is a controversial statement, such as the one delivered by news pundit Britt Hume about Tiger Woods.

Of course, it helps that Hume is fairly well-known as a former national news anchor who is in "retirement" but still does occasional news analysis for Fox News. If you or I had made a plea for Tiger to embrace Christianity as Hume did on Fox News Sunday this week, few would have noticed or cared. But Hume made his remarks on a national stage about an already famous person whose bizarre encounter with a tree and a golf club--and whose subsequent submersion into a strange kind of Howard Hughesian privacy--has everyone talking.

When I was in junior high school, a buddy of mine invited me to join the on campus Christian Club.  Realizing that students who participated in an on campus club got a “go to lunch 5 minutes early” pass, I jumped at the offer.  Our lunch lines were horrendous!  The student-led club was basically a Bible study that met once a week, with the occasional guest speaker thrown in.  I wasn’t raised in the church, but I was struck by the good company and became interested in what the big deal was about God and church and stuff.

This buddy of mine then invited me to attend church with him.  So, on Sunday mornings, he would bike to my house and then the two of us would pedal through the morning fog for Sunday services.  It was on one of these treks that my friend realized I did not own a Bible.  A few days later, my friend passed down his own well-worn Bible.  The dedication page was covered in white-out, and over the crusty paste he had written my name as the owner of the Bible and scrawled his name on the “From” line.

Earlier this week, I watched a podcast of a recent Larry King Live interview with Sharon Stone, and I have not been able to stop thinking about two things she said.

Responding to King's question about how she is handling the fact that she does not have custody of her older son, Stone responded by saying, "Well, I’m a Buddhist. I think that helps. I think that in my way of understanding life, that I understand that everybody has their own destiny, even Roan. And so I recognize that Roan has his path in life. When he’s with us, we try to love him up as much as we possibly can."

Interestingly, later in the interview, King asked her about a medical scare she had a few years ago, when her vertebral artery tore and she hemorrhaged into her brain. "At first, they missed it. So I ended up bleeding into my brain for a very long time, nine days, in fact, before they understood what was happening to me. And it was just really very much by the grace of God that I survived."

I was still contemplating her earlier comment about how her Buddhist beliefs helped her accept her son's destiny when I heard her refer to the fact that "it was just really very much by the grace of God" that she survived.