The Apocalypse as an ‘Unveiling’: What Religion Teaches Us About the End Times
For people of many faiths, and even none at all, it can feel lately like the end of the world is near.
Shamain Webster, who lives in the suburbs outside of Dallas, has seen the signs of a coming apocalypse for a while now, just as the Bible foretold.
Kingdom would rise against kingdom, Jesus taught his disciples in the Book of Luke. Ms. Webster sees widespread political division in this country. There will be fearful events, and great signs from heaven, he said. She sees biblical values slipping away. A government not acting in the people’s best interest. And now this — a pandemic.
But Ms. Webster, 42 and an evangelical Christian, is unafraid. She has been listening online to one of her favorite preachers, who has called the coronavirus pandemic a “divine reset.”
“These kinds of moments really get you to re-evaluate everything,” she said. As everyone goes through a period of isolation, she added, God is using it for good, “to teach us and train us on how to live life better.”
For people of many faiths, and even none at all, it can feel lately like the end of the world is near. Not only is there a plague, but hundreds of billions of locusts are swarming East Africa. Wildfires have ravaged Australia, killing an untold number of animals. A recent earthquake in Utah even shook the Salt Lake Temple to the top of its iconic spire, causing the golden trumpet to fall from the angel Moroni’s right hand.
But the story of apocalypse is an old one, one of the oldest humans tell. In ancient religious traditions beyond Christianity — including Judaism, Islam and Buddhism — it is a common narrative that arises in moments of social and political crisis, as people try to process unprecedented or shocking events.
The original word in Greek — apokalypsis — means an unveiling, a revelation.
“It’s not just about the end of the world,” said Jacqueline Hidalgo, chair of religion at Williams College. “It helps us see something that is hidden before.”
As a pandemic thrusts the United States and much of the world into a new economic and social order, those who study and practice religion see deeper truths being unveiled.
The crisis is revealing health care inequalities, class divisions and the fact that the most important workers in American society are among the least paid, said Jorge Juan Rodríguez V, a doctoral candidate in the history of religion at Union Theological Seminary.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/02/us/c ... 778d3e6de3
INTERFAITH ISSUES
The World Is Empty Now. How Should We Fill It?
The void created by this crisis may be an unexpected gift.
My church is empty this Easter. In lieu of greeting the usually joyful parishioners this day, my clergy colleague and I celebrate the ancient rites of our religion six feet apart from each other, as an iPhone live-streams to self-isolated viewers at home.
Like so much else in this bizarre time, the emptiness is foreign and unsettling. Yet we all know the urgency of this disruption. The church, like every other gathering place, has emptied itself so that we may live.
The images of empty public spaces around the world are shocking outward signs that reflect the interior emptiness so many feel right now. Millions are being deprived of the chance to work, socialize and support one another in person. Physically isolated and emptied of our usual lives, we are being forced to face ourselves in a way that few alive today ever have before.
Yet the void created by this crisis may be an unexpected gift. This emptiness presents to us a mystical and uncluttered view of life as we have been living it until a few weeks ago. Life will never be the same. Each day, it becomes more apparent that this is a once-in-a-lifetime chance to consider a fundamental question about the spirit and morality of our way of living: Having emptied ourselves, what do we really want to fill our world with once it is time to rebuild?
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/11/opin ... 778d3e6de3
The void created by this crisis may be an unexpected gift.
My church is empty this Easter. In lieu of greeting the usually joyful parishioners this day, my clergy colleague and I celebrate the ancient rites of our religion six feet apart from each other, as an iPhone live-streams to self-isolated viewers at home.
Like so much else in this bizarre time, the emptiness is foreign and unsettling. Yet we all know the urgency of this disruption. The church, like every other gathering place, has emptied itself so that we may live.
The images of empty public spaces around the world are shocking outward signs that reflect the interior emptiness so many feel right now. Millions are being deprived of the chance to work, socialize and support one another in person. Physically isolated and emptied of our usual lives, we are being forced to face ourselves in a way that few alive today ever have before.
Yet the void created by this crisis may be an unexpected gift. This emptiness presents to us a mystical and uncluttered view of life as we have been living it until a few weeks ago. Life will never be the same. Each day, it becomes more apparent that this is a once-in-a-lifetime chance to consider a fundamental question about the spirit and morality of our way of living: Having emptied ourselves, what do we really want to fill our world with once it is time to rebuild?
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/11/opin ... 778d3e6de3
Google translation of the original article in Portuguese:
https://the.ismaili/portugal/o-poder-du ... %A7%C3%A3o
The lasting power of prayer
In all religious traditions and cultures, prayer is a universal expression of worship and piety. It is the most elementary manifestation of religious life. In a hadith, the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him and his family) states: "Everything has a face and the face of religion is prayer".
"Your Lord says: Call for Me and I will answer you"
Holy Qur'an 40:60
"Prayer is a daily necessity, a direct communication of the spark with the universal flame"
- Imam Sultan Muhammad Shah, Memories of Aga Khan
Conducted individually and collectively, prayer, in its infinite varieties and manifestations, provides believers with regular and direct means to find and communicate with the sacred. It is through this language and these recurring conversations of the soul that the relationship between the sacred and the human is nourished and sustained.
"Therefore, remember Me," proclaims Allah in the Qur'an-e-Sharif, "(e) I will remember you" (2: 152). Prayer is, therefore, the most basic expression of faith and the recognition of the existence of a higher power to which one is intimately connected and imperatively dependent.
Forms and Functions of Prayer
Like religious practices in general, prayer encompasses a wide variety of forms and types in the world's religious traditions. It is performed formally and spontaneously, individually and collectively, privately and publicly, loudly and quietly, at home or in specially designated spaces. Prayer can take the form of reciting verses from sacred books, the singing of religious songs and poetry, the repetition of sacred words, the movement of the body at a particular pace, or silent contemplation.
Formal canonical prayers usually take place at prescribed times and places and follow a fixed set of rituals. They are usually held in the context of a congregation, a meeting of believers, but they can also be recited on their own.
This multiplicity and plurality of forms and expressions of piety and prayer has existed in the Muslim context since the time of the Prophet and continues to this day in the diverse geographical, linguistic and cultural contexts in which more than a billion Muslims reside. There is a coexistence of an incredibly rich variety of prayers and other devotional practices that have evolved throughout Muslim history that fostered the connection between an individual and what he / she considers sacred, be it God, Prophet, Imam, etc.
Prayer is necessary for the practice of faith, according to the Qur'an. His prayer verses demonstrate the relationship that the Qur'an expresses between Allah and human beings. Believers are urged to remember their Creator and to be constant in offering prayers. Being All-Hearing and Omniscient, Allah receives the prayers of those who invoke Him:
“I am close to answer the call of the caller, when he calls me…” (2: 186)
In Shi'a Ismaili tariqah of Islam, under the guidance of the Time Imam, we find a variety of prayers through which we can submit to the Divine. This includes collective practices that we observe in Jamatkhanas and individual practices in which we can get involved at any time of the day.
Mawlana Hazar Imam explained the importance of prayer in a speech at Peshawar University in 1967, warning that:
“The day when we no longer know how, nor do we have time or faith to bow in prayer to Allah, because the human soul, which He told us is eternal, is no longer important enough for us to spend an hour of our daily time in search of profit, it will be a day without sun of despair. "
Through our personal prayers, we find hope, comfort and courage to face our difficulties and adversities. We can draw strength from prayer, practiced alone or with our family, and seek divine grace, mercy and assistance.
https://the.ismaili/portugal/o-poder-du ... %A7%C3%A3o
The lasting power of prayer
In all religious traditions and cultures, prayer is a universal expression of worship and piety. It is the most elementary manifestation of religious life. In a hadith, the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him and his family) states: "Everything has a face and the face of religion is prayer".
"Your Lord says: Call for Me and I will answer you"
Holy Qur'an 40:60
"Prayer is a daily necessity, a direct communication of the spark with the universal flame"
- Imam Sultan Muhammad Shah, Memories of Aga Khan
Conducted individually and collectively, prayer, in its infinite varieties and manifestations, provides believers with regular and direct means to find and communicate with the sacred. It is through this language and these recurring conversations of the soul that the relationship between the sacred and the human is nourished and sustained.
"Therefore, remember Me," proclaims Allah in the Qur'an-e-Sharif, "(e) I will remember you" (2: 152). Prayer is, therefore, the most basic expression of faith and the recognition of the existence of a higher power to which one is intimately connected and imperatively dependent.
Forms and Functions of Prayer
Like religious practices in general, prayer encompasses a wide variety of forms and types in the world's religious traditions. It is performed formally and spontaneously, individually and collectively, privately and publicly, loudly and quietly, at home or in specially designated spaces. Prayer can take the form of reciting verses from sacred books, the singing of religious songs and poetry, the repetition of sacred words, the movement of the body at a particular pace, or silent contemplation.
Formal canonical prayers usually take place at prescribed times and places and follow a fixed set of rituals. They are usually held in the context of a congregation, a meeting of believers, but they can also be recited on their own.
This multiplicity and plurality of forms and expressions of piety and prayer has existed in the Muslim context since the time of the Prophet and continues to this day in the diverse geographical, linguistic and cultural contexts in which more than a billion Muslims reside. There is a coexistence of an incredibly rich variety of prayers and other devotional practices that have evolved throughout Muslim history that fostered the connection between an individual and what he / she considers sacred, be it God, Prophet, Imam, etc.
Prayer is necessary for the practice of faith, according to the Qur'an. His prayer verses demonstrate the relationship that the Qur'an expresses between Allah and human beings. Believers are urged to remember their Creator and to be constant in offering prayers. Being All-Hearing and Omniscient, Allah receives the prayers of those who invoke Him:
“I am close to answer the call of the caller, when he calls me…” (2: 186)
In Shi'a Ismaili tariqah of Islam, under the guidance of the Time Imam, we find a variety of prayers through which we can submit to the Divine. This includes collective practices that we observe in Jamatkhanas and individual practices in which we can get involved at any time of the day.
Mawlana Hazar Imam explained the importance of prayer in a speech at Peshawar University in 1967, warning that:
“The day when we no longer know how, nor do we have time or faith to bow in prayer to Allah, because the human soul, which He told us is eternal, is no longer important enough for us to spend an hour of our daily time in search of profit, it will be a day without sun of despair. "
Through our personal prayers, we find hope, comfort and courage to face our difficulties and adversities. We can draw strength from prayer, practiced alone or with our family, and seek divine grace, mercy and assistance.
For Sale: The Hair of the Virgin Mary
What does a supposedly secular world want with the creepy (and probably fake) remains of medieval saints?
Excerpt:
The market for this kind of item is not limited to Christianity. Buddhist monks in several countries fight against the stealing of sacred artifacts, and during the last decade the authorities in Thailand put in place stricter measures to protect temples from tourists and smugglers. The illegal traffic of Hindu idols is widespread.
The growing demand for items whose essential value is devotional rather than material is hard to reconcile with the classic narrative of the secularization of the modern world, summed up by Max Weber about a century ago: “The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the ‘disenchantment of the world.’” The main feature of Weber’s vision was its irreversibility — but a world ineluctably rationalized and intellectualized shouldn’t have much interest in venerating eerie remains of medieval saints, fake or not.
The digital exhumation of the age-old relic business may seem more in line with the theory of the “desecularization” of the modern world, pioneered in the late 1990s by the Austrian-American sociologist Peter L. Berger. According to him, the contemporary world is “as furiously religious as it ever was.”
Professor Berger’s hypothesis applied universally, but he also cited faster demographic growth in the religious global South as evidence of an accelerating trend in certain areas of the world — and indeed by 2050, a Pew study projected, the religiously unaffiliated will decline significantly as a share of the world’s total population. But it’s hard to square a world of religious fervor with the decades-old crisis of organized religions, especially in the West.
Both the long-accepted secularization theory and the more recent desecularization one have significant supporting evidence, but neither of them fully captures the strange mixture of religious yearning and rationalist tendencies that seem to characterize the contemporary world.
We might be able to draw a different narrative. In this story, religious impulses didn’t just vanish with modernity, to be fully replaced by the secularizing forces of enlightened rationality. Instead, perhaps, they sank miles below our collective consciousness and waited there, dormant, only to resurface more frequently than we might think, in unconventional forms.
“We are just at the beginning of a new age of religious searching, whose outcome no one can foresee,” wrote the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor at the end of his monumental 2007 book “A Secular Age,” in which he attempted to chart an alternative path to the binary clash between belief and unbelief.
The fragmented contemporary religious landscape in the West, at least, looks to be quite in line with Mr. Taylor’s observations. While organized religions are shrinking, religiosity is in full force.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/15/opin ... ogin-email
What does a supposedly secular world want with the creepy (and probably fake) remains of medieval saints?
Excerpt:
The market for this kind of item is not limited to Christianity. Buddhist monks in several countries fight against the stealing of sacred artifacts, and during the last decade the authorities in Thailand put in place stricter measures to protect temples from tourists and smugglers. The illegal traffic of Hindu idols is widespread.
The growing demand for items whose essential value is devotional rather than material is hard to reconcile with the classic narrative of the secularization of the modern world, summed up by Max Weber about a century ago: “The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the ‘disenchantment of the world.’” The main feature of Weber’s vision was its irreversibility — but a world ineluctably rationalized and intellectualized shouldn’t have much interest in venerating eerie remains of medieval saints, fake or not.
The digital exhumation of the age-old relic business may seem more in line with the theory of the “desecularization” of the modern world, pioneered in the late 1990s by the Austrian-American sociologist Peter L. Berger. According to him, the contemporary world is “as furiously religious as it ever was.”
Professor Berger’s hypothesis applied universally, but he also cited faster demographic growth in the religious global South as evidence of an accelerating trend in certain areas of the world — and indeed by 2050, a Pew study projected, the religiously unaffiliated will decline significantly as a share of the world’s total population. But it’s hard to square a world of religious fervor with the decades-old crisis of organized religions, especially in the West.
Both the long-accepted secularization theory and the more recent desecularization one have significant supporting evidence, but neither of them fully captures the strange mixture of religious yearning and rationalist tendencies that seem to characterize the contemporary world.
We might be able to draw a different narrative. In this story, religious impulses didn’t just vanish with modernity, to be fully replaced by the secularizing forces of enlightened rationality. Instead, perhaps, they sank miles below our collective consciousness and waited there, dormant, only to resurface more frequently than we might think, in unconventional forms.
“We are just at the beginning of a new age of religious searching, whose outcome no one can foresee,” wrote the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor at the end of his monumental 2007 book “A Secular Age,” in which he attempted to chart an alternative path to the binary clash between belief and unbelief.
The fragmented contemporary religious landscape in the West, at least, looks to be quite in line with Mr. Taylor’s observations. While organized religions are shrinking, religiosity is in full force.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/15/opin ... ogin-email
Book
Mysticism in East and West
The Concept of the Unity of Being
Proceedings of the First Loyola Hall Symposium,
held on 20–21 February 2013 in Lahore, Pakistan
Thomas Würtz and Christian W. Troll, S.J.
Foreword to the Loyola Hall Symposia Series
The Jesuit Centre Loyola Hall in Lahore was founded in the year 1962 by Father Robert Bütler S.J. from Switzerland and two German Fathers Alphonsus Schockaert, S.J. and Heinrich Schulz, S.J. In 2012 the Jesuit community celebrated its 50th jubilee.
During the quarter century of his activity in Pakistan, Fr. Bütler dedicated himself to Christian-Muslim dialogue at a scholarly level. For this purpose he founded the Metaphysical Society in which Muslim and Christian thinkers debated about philosophical and theological questions, with a focus on Muslim and Christian mysticism.
A few years after Fr. Bütler’s return to Switzerland in 1986, the Jesuit Superior Fr. Vernon Buyser took the initiative to preserve the scholarly work of Fr. Bütler. This wish was highly appreciated by Mr. Ikram Chaghatai, who then published Fr. Bütler’s writings, including his translations of Islamic mystical literature, in a single volume called Trying to Respond (1994).
It was Fr. Bütler’s wish that Loyola Hall continue to promote interreligious understanding. Since the Jesuit community living at Loyola Hall today shares the vision of Fr. Bütler, the Francis Xavier Foundation in Zurich and the Institute for Social and Development Studies in Munich provided a
scholarship, which included field study in Pakistan as well as the arranging of an interfaith dialogue event.
The book can be accessed in pdf format at:
https://www.academia.edu/7051842/Mystic ... view-paper
Mysticism in East and West
The Concept of the Unity of Being
Proceedings of the First Loyola Hall Symposium,
held on 20–21 February 2013 in Lahore, Pakistan
Thomas Würtz and Christian W. Troll, S.J.
Foreword to the Loyola Hall Symposia Series
The Jesuit Centre Loyola Hall in Lahore was founded in the year 1962 by Father Robert Bütler S.J. from Switzerland and two German Fathers Alphonsus Schockaert, S.J. and Heinrich Schulz, S.J. In 2012 the Jesuit community celebrated its 50th jubilee.
During the quarter century of his activity in Pakistan, Fr. Bütler dedicated himself to Christian-Muslim dialogue at a scholarly level. For this purpose he founded the Metaphysical Society in which Muslim and Christian thinkers debated about philosophical and theological questions, with a focus on Muslim and Christian mysticism.
A few years after Fr. Bütler’s return to Switzerland in 1986, the Jesuit Superior Fr. Vernon Buyser took the initiative to preserve the scholarly work of Fr. Bütler. This wish was highly appreciated by Mr. Ikram Chaghatai, who then published Fr. Bütler’s writings, including his translations of Islamic mystical literature, in a single volume called Trying to Respond (1994).
It was Fr. Bütler’s wish that Loyola Hall continue to promote interreligious understanding. Since the Jesuit community living at Loyola Hall today shares the vision of Fr. Bütler, the Francis Xavier Foundation in Zurich and the Institute for Social and Development Studies in Munich provided a
scholarship, which included field study in Pakistan as well as the arranging of an interfaith dialogue event.
The book can be accessed in pdf format at:
https://www.academia.edu/7051842/Mystic ... view-paper
Churches Were Eager to Reopen. Now They Are a Major Source of Coronavirus Cases.
The virus has infiltrated Sunday services, church meetings and youth camps. More than 650 cases have been linked to reopened religious facilities.
PENDLETON, Ore. — Weeks after President Trump demanded that America’s shuttered houses of worship be allowed to reopen, new outbreaks of the coronavirus are surging through churches across the country where services have resumed.
The virus has infiltrated Sunday sermons, meetings of ministers and Christian youth camps in Colorado and Missouri. It has struck churches that reopened cautiously with face masks and social distancing in the pews, as well as some that defied lockdowns and refused to heed new limits on numbers of worshipers.
Pastors and their families have tested positive, as have church ushers, front-door greeters and hundreds of churchgoers. In Texas, about 50 people contracted the virus after a pastor told congregants they could once again hug one another. In Florida, a teenage girl died last month after attending a youth party at her church.
More than 650 coronavirus cases have been linked to nearly 40 churches and religious events across the United States since the beginning of the pandemic, with many of them erupting over the last month as Americans resumed their pre-pandemic activities, according to a New York Times database.
“There’s a very fine line between protecting the health and safety of people, and protecting the right to worship,” said George Murdock, a county commissioner in northeastern Oregon, where the largest outbreak in the state has been traced to a Pentecostal church in a neighboring county. “It’s one we’ve been walking very nervously all along.”
While thousands of churches, synagogues and mosques across the country have been meeting virtually or outside on lawns and in parking lots to protect their members from the virus, the right to hold services within houses of worship became a political battleground as the country crawled out of lockdown this spring. In May, the president declared places of worship part of an “essential service” and threatened, though it was uncertain he had the power to do so, to override any governor’s orders keeping them closed.
But now, as the virus rages through Texas, Arizona and other evangelical bastions of the South and West, some churches that fought to reopen are being forced to close again and grapple with whether it is even possible to worship together safely.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/08/us/c ... 778d3e6de3
The virus has infiltrated Sunday services, church meetings and youth camps. More than 650 cases have been linked to reopened religious facilities.
PENDLETON, Ore. — Weeks after President Trump demanded that America’s shuttered houses of worship be allowed to reopen, new outbreaks of the coronavirus are surging through churches across the country where services have resumed.
The virus has infiltrated Sunday sermons, meetings of ministers and Christian youth camps in Colorado and Missouri. It has struck churches that reopened cautiously with face masks and social distancing in the pews, as well as some that defied lockdowns and refused to heed new limits on numbers of worshipers.
Pastors and their families have tested positive, as have church ushers, front-door greeters and hundreds of churchgoers. In Texas, about 50 people contracted the virus after a pastor told congregants they could once again hug one another. In Florida, a teenage girl died last month after attending a youth party at her church.
More than 650 coronavirus cases have been linked to nearly 40 churches and religious events across the United States since the beginning of the pandemic, with many of them erupting over the last month as Americans resumed their pre-pandemic activities, according to a New York Times database.
“There’s a very fine line between protecting the health and safety of people, and protecting the right to worship,” said George Murdock, a county commissioner in northeastern Oregon, where the largest outbreak in the state has been traced to a Pentecostal church in a neighboring county. “It’s one we’ve been walking very nervously all along.”
While thousands of churches, synagogues and mosques across the country have been meeting virtually or outside on lawns and in parking lots to protect their members from the virus, the right to hold services within houses of worship became a political battleground as the country crawled out of lockdown this spring. In May, the president declared places of worship part of an “essential service” and threatened, though it was uncertain he had the power to do so, to override any governor’s orders keeping them closed.
But now, as the virus rages through Texas, Arizona and other evangelical bastions of the South and West, some churches that fought to reopen are being forced to close again and grapple with whether it is even possible to worship together safely.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/08/us/c ... 778d3e6de3
Erdogan Signs Decree Allowing Hagia Sophia to Be Used as a Mosque Again
The decree came after a Turkish court revoked the site’s 80-year-old status as a museum and is likely to provoke an international furor.
ISTANBUL — President Recep Tayyip Erdogan issued a decree Friday ordering Hagia Sophia to be opened for Muslim prayers, an action likely to provoke international furor around a World Heritage Site cherished by Christians and Muslims alike for its religious significance, for its stunning structure and as a symbol of conquest.
The presidential decree came minutes after a Turkish court announced that it had revoked Hagia Sophia’s status as a museum, which for the last 80 years had made it a monument of relative harmony and a symbol of the secularism that was part of the foundation of the modern Turkish state.
Built in the sixth century as a cathedral, Hagia Sophia stands as the greatest example of Byzantine Christian architecture in the world. But it has been a source of Christian-Muslim rivalry, having stood at the center of Christendom for nearly a millennium and then, after being conquered, of the Muslim Ottoman Empire, when it was last used as a mosque.
Mr. Erdogan’s decree transferred control of the site to the Religious Affairs Directorate, sealing the removal of its museum status and allowing Hagia Sophia to become a working mosque once again.
Video and more...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/10/worl ... 778d3e6de3
The decree came after a Turkish court revoked the site’s 80-year-old status as a museum and is likely to provoke an international furor.
ISTANBUL — President Recep Tayyip Erdogan issued a decree Friday ordering Hagia Sophia to be opened for Muslim prayers, an action likely to provoke international furor around a World Heritage Site cherished by Christians and Muslims alike for its religious significance, for its stunning structure and as a symbol of conquest.
The presidential decree came minutes after a Turkish court announced that it had revoked Hagia Sophia’s status as a museum, which for the last 80 years had made it a monument of relative harmony and a symbol of the secularism that was part of the foundation of the modern Turkish state.
Built in the sixth century as a cathedral, Hagia Sophia stands as the greatest example of Byzantine Christian architecture in the world. But it has been a source of Christian-Muslim rivalry, having stood at the center of Christendom for nearly a millennium and then, after being conquered, of the Muslim Ottoman Empire, when it was last used as a mosque.
Mr. Erdogan’s decree transferred control of the site to the Religious Affairs Directorate, sealing the removal of its museum status and allowing Hagia Sophia to become a working mosque once again.
Video and more...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/10/worl ... 778d3e6de3
Pope 'very pained' by decision to turn Istanbul's Hagia Sophia museum into mosque
VATICAN CITY (Reuters) - Pope Francis said on Sunday he was hurt by Turkey's decision to make Istanbul's Hagia Sophia museum a mosque, the latest religious leader to condemn the move.
"My thoughts go to Istanbul. I think of Santa Sophia and I am very pained," he said during his weekly blessing in St. Peter's Square.
Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan has said the first prayers would be held in Hagia Sophia on July 24, after declaring the ancient monument was once again a mosque following a court ruling revoking its status as a museum.
The World Council of Churches has called on Erdogan to reverse his decision and Patriarch Bartholomew, the Istanbul-based spiritual leader of the world's Orthodox Christians, called it disappointing.
More..
https://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/world/po ... ailsignout
VATICAN CITY (Reuters) - Pope Francis said on Sunday he was hurt by Turkey's decision to make Istanbul's Hagia Sophia museum a mosque, the latest religious leader to condemn the move.
"My thoughts go to Istanbul. I think of Santa Sophia and I am very pained," he said during his weekly blessing in St. Peter's Square.
Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan has said the first prayers would be held in Hagia Sophia on July 24, after declaring the ancient monument was once again a mosque following a court ruling revoking its status as a museum.
The World Council of Churches has called on Erdogan to reverse his decision and Patriarch Bartholomew, the Istanbul-based spiritual leader of the world's Orthodox Christians, called it disappointing.
More..
https://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/world/po ... ailsignout
WITH TRUMP’S FAILURE TO PROTECT RELIGIOUS MINORITIES, AFGHAN HINDUS AND SIKHS FACE AN UNCERTAIN FUTURE IN INDIA
On July 19, 2020, The New York Times reported that India had offered to take in Afghan Hindus and Sikhs in an attempt to address the recent violence against those communities whose numbers have been steadily shrinking in Afghanistan. Despite what may seem like a generous offer by the Indian government, Afghan religious minorities are concerned that, as they’ve spent their entire lives in Afghanistan, they “will die from poverty” in India. Meanwhile, for Sikhs in the diaspora, the concern lies in India’s long history of persecution and violence towards minority groups.
The push to remove the Sikh and Hindu community from Afghanistan comes following a recent attack on a gurdwara in Kabul. On March 25, 2020, an ISIS gunman stormed Gurdwara Har Rai Sahib and killed 25 Sikhs. The following day, during the funeral services, there was yet another attempt to take more lives as an explosive device went off near the gate of a crematorium. These attacks elicited a number of responses from Sikhs in the diaspora, including the Sikh community in the United States which urged members of Congress to take action and provide refuge to members of the deteriorating Afghan Sikh community.
On April 1, over two dozen civil rights, human rights and interfaith organizations sent a letter to members of Congress to intervene on behalf of Sikhs and Hindus “who face extinction in Afghanistan.” The plea by these organizations and Sikh Americans was heard as 26 representatives sent a letter to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, on May 4, and 20 senators sent him a letter on June 25, advocating on behalf of Sikhs and Hindus in Afghanistan. In the letter, the senators note that:
“The Sikh and Hindu communities once numbered around 250,000 people but now have fewer than 1,000 individuals due to decades of persecution. The communities continue to face discrimination in access to housing and employment, and the Taliban has previously mandated that Sikhs and Hindus wear yellow armbands or patches as a marker of their religious status.”
Pompeo condemned the March attack at the time but there has yet to be any action taken since members of Congress sent their May and June letters to him. The lack of action from the United States to protect members of religious minorities is highly hypocritical Pompeo established the International Religious Freedom Alliance to “[advocate] for people who are imprisoned or otherwise persecuted due to their religion or beliefs” earlier this year.
With other countries failing Afghan Sikhs and Hindus, the Indian government’s offer is crucial to help the at-risk communities. However, there were concerns raised by a senior Afghan official, who wished to remain anonymous, that this may very well be a political move by the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP):
“[T]he move appeared aimed at a domestic audience in India, where Prime Minister Narendra Modi has tried to move the country away from its secular, multicultural foundations and give it a more overtly Hindu identity, while projecting itself as a champion of persecuted Hindu minorities elsewhere.”
These concerns are legitimate as the Hindu nationalist BJP and the Indian government generally has a long history of persecution and genocide of minority groups. Within the last four decades, India has either committed or failed to take legitimate action in several cases, including but not limited to: a genocide against Sikhs that they refuse to acknowledge beginning in 1984, anti-Muslim riots following the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992, the murder of a Christian missionary and his sons in 1999, riots in Gujarat under the leadership of then Chief Minister Narendra Modi in 2002, anti-Christian riots in Orissa in 2008, and the riots following the discriminatory Citizenship Amendment Bill in 2019.
More...
https://religiondispatches.org/with-tru ... e-in-india
On July 19, 2020, The New York Times reported that India had offered to take in Afghan Hindus and Sikhs in an attempt to address the recent violence against those communities whose numbers have been steadily shrinking in Afghanistan. Despite what may seem like a generous offer by the Indian government, Afghan religious minorities are concerned that, as they’ve spent their entire lives in Afghanistan, they “will die from poverty” in India. Meanwhile, for Sikhs in the diaspora, the concern lies in India’s long history of persecution and violence towards minority groups.
The push to remove the Sikh and Hindu community from Afghanistan comes following a recent attack on a gurdwara in Kabul. On March 25, 2020, an ISIS gunman stormed Gurdwara Har Rai Sahib and killed 25 Sikhs. The following day, during the funeral services, there was yet another attempt to take more lives as an explosive device went off near the gate of a crematorium. These attacks elicited a number of responses from Sikhs in the diaspora, including the Sikh community in the United States which urged members of Congress to take action and provide refuge to members of the deteriorating Afghan Sikh community.
On April 1, over two dozen civil rights, human rights and interfaith organizations sent a letter to members of Congress to intervene on behalf of Sikhs and Hindus “who face extinction in Afghanistan.” The plea by these organizations and Sikh Americans was heard as 26 representatives sent a letter to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, on May 4, and 20 senators sent him a letter on June 25, advocating on behalf of Sikhs and Hindus in Afghanistan. In the letter, the senators note that:
“The Sikh and Hindu communities once numbered around 250,000 people but now have fewer than 1,000 individuals due to decades of persecution. The communities continue to face discrimination in access to housing and employment, and the Taliban has previously mandated that Sikhs and Hindus wear yellow armbands or patches as a marker of their religious status.”
Pompeo condemned the March attack at the time but there has yet to be any action taken since members of Congress sent their May and June letters to him. The lack of action from the United States to protect members of religious minorities is highly hypocritical Pompeo established the International Religious Freedom Alliance to “[advocate] for people who are imprisoned or otherwise persecuted due to their religion or beliefs” earlier this year.
With other countries failing Afghan Sikhs and Hindus, the Indian government’s offer is crucial to help the at-risk communities. However, there were concerns raised by a senior Afghan official, who wished to remain anonymous, that this may very well be a political move by the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP):
“[T]he move appeared aimed at a domestic audience in India, where Prime Minister Narendra Modi has tried to move the country away from its secular, multicultural foundations and give it a more overtly Hindu identity, while projecting itself as a champion of persecuted Hindu minorities elsewhere.”
These concerns are legitimate as the Hindu nationalist BJP and the Indian government generally has a long history of persecution and genocide of minority groups. Within the last four decades, India has either committed or failed to take legitimate action in several cases, including but not limited to: a genocide against Sikhs that they refuse to acknowledge beginning in 1984, anti-Muslim riots following the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992, the murder of a Christian missionary and his sons in 1999, riots in Gujarat under the leadership of then Chief Minister Narendra Modi in 2002, anti-Christian riots in Orissa in 2008, and the riots following the discriminatory Citizenship Amendment Bill in 2019.
More...
https://religiondispatches.org/with-tru ... e-in-india
The Supreme Court’s Religious Crusaders Take On the Pandemic Response
The fight over limits on church attendance divides the justices.
I know I should be jaded by now by the persistence of the Supreme Court’s conservative justices in seeking to elevate religious interests over those of secular society. After all, in the closing days of the court’s term, religious employers won the right to withhold from female employees the contraception coverage to which federal law entitled them. Religious schools gained a broad exemption from the anti-discrimination laws that would otherwise protect classroom teachers and soon, no doubt, other employees as well.
But I was still startled last week to see Justices Samuel Alito, Brett Kavanaugh, Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas vote to turn a public health issue into a religious crusade. Fortunately for the people of rural Lyon County, Nev., where a church went to federal court for the right to have 90 people at a worship service instead of the permitted 50, the four justices failed to find a fifth vote and the 50-person cap remains.
What surprised me was not that a church would run to federal court with such a case, rather than add a second service or meet outside under a tent. Representing the church, Calvary Chapel Dayton Valley, was the Alliance Defending Freedom, which used to focus primarily on representing people seeking a religious exemption from having to do business with couples in same-sex marriages. Lately, the alliance has been bringing cases around the country to challenge Covid-19-related limits on in-person church services.
I was mildly surprised that this case got to the Supreme Court; another church case reached the court in May, with a similar outcome. In that case, as in the Nevada case, Chief Justice John Roberts refused to go along with the four dissenters.
What did astonish me was the ferocity of the main dissenting opinion, written by Justice Alito and joined by Justices Thomas and Kavanaugh. They appear oblivious to the facts on the ground, particularly the well-documented role of religious services in spreading the virus. (Reflecting the nationwide pattern, a small church in New Haven, Conn., where I live, was identified this month as the likely source of an unexpected uptick in Covid-19 cases.) People who are sitting — and breathing — together for a prolonged period in an enclosed space might as well put out a welcome mat for the coronavirus. We knew that back in May. It is even more evident now. Thus the growing prevalence of official orders limiting people who can come together in that fashion to a certain number or a certain percentage of the venue’s capacity.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/30/opin ... ogin-email
The fight over limits on church attendance divides the justices.
I know I should be jaded by now by the persistence of the Supreme Court’s conservative justices in seeking to elevate religious interests over those of secular society. After all, in the closing days of the court’s term, religious employers won the right to withhold from female employees the contraception coverage to which federal law entitled them. Religious schools gained a broad exemption from the anti-discrimination laws that would otherwise protect classroom teachers and soon, no doubt, other employees as well.
But I was still startled last week to see Justices Samuel Alito, Brett Kavanaugh, Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas vote to turn a public health issue into a religious crusade. Fortunately for the people of rural Lyon County, Nev., where a church went to federal court for the right to have 90 people at a worship service instead of the permitted 50, the four justices failed to find a fifth vote and the 50-person cap remains.
What surprised me was not that a church would run to federal court with such a case, rather than add a second service or meet outside under a tent. Representing the church, Calvary Chapel Dayton Valley, was the Alliance Defending Freedom, which used to focus primarily on representing people seeking a religious exemption from having to do business with couples in same-sex marriages. Lately, the alliance has been bringing cases around the country to challenge Covid-19-related limits on in-person church services.
I was mildly surprised that this case got to the Supreme Court; another church case reached the court in May, with a similar outcome. In that case, as in the Nevada case, Chief Justice John Roberts refused to go along with the four dissenters.
What did astonish me was the ferocity of the main dissenting opinion, written by Justice Alito and joined by Justices Thomas and Kavanaugh. They appear oblivious to the facts on the ground, particularly the well-documented role of religious services in spreading the virus. (Reflecting the nationwide pattern, a small church in New Haven, Conn., where I live, was identified this month as the likely source of an unexpected uptick in Covid-19 cases.) People who are sitting — and breathing — together for a prolonged period in an enclosed space might as well put out a welcome mat for the coronavirus. We knew that back in May. It is even more evident now. Thus the growing prevalence of official orders limiting people who can come together in that fashion to a certain number or a certain percentage of the venue’s capacity.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/30/opin ... ogin-email
Mawlana Hazar Imam: “We come from the same common heritage, descendants of Abraham…”
Posted by Nimira Dewji
“… today we must explore every opportunity to have different faiths come together in addressing the problems of our respective societies. We come from the same common religious heritage, descendants of Abraham, and it is enjoined on us to address the problems of society on the same ethical premises.”
Mawlana Hazar Imam
Lisbon, Portugal, December 19, 2005
Speech
Abrahamic Aga Khan
Mawlana Hazar Imam speaks after being awarded the Gra-Cruz de Cristo, or Military Order of Christ, Lisbon, Portugal. Source: AKDN
“The shared destiny of the ethos of the Abrahamic tradition that unites Christians, Jews, and Muslims is governed by the duty of loving care to help nurture each life that is born to its God-given potential.”
Mawlana Hazar Imam
Houston, USA, June 23, 2002
Speech
https://nimirasblog.wordpress.com/2020/ ... f-abraham/
Posted by Nimira Dewji
“… today we must explore every opportunity to have different faiths come together in addressing the problems of our respective societies. We come from the same common religious heritage, descendants of Abraham, and it is enjoined on us to address the problems of society on the same ethical premises.”
Mawlana Hazar Imam
Lisbon, Portugal, December 19, 2005
Speech
Abrahamic Aga Khan
Mawlana Hazar Imam speaks after being awarded the Gra-Cruz de Cristo, or Military Order of Christ, Lisbon, Portugal. Source: AKDN
“The shared destiny of the ethos of the Abrahamic tradition that unites Christians, Jews, and Muslims is governed by the duty of loving care to help nurture each life that is born to its God-given potential.”
Mawlana Hazar Imam
Houston, USA, June 23, 2002
Speech
https://nimirasblog.wordpress.com/2020/ ... f-abraham/
Violent riots erupt in Malmo, Sweden after Koran-torching stunt, police say they have ‘no control’ over situation (PHOTOS, VIDEOS)
28 Aug, 2020 23:43
Demonstrators burn tires during a riot in the Rosengard neighborhood of Malmo, Sweden following a public Koran burning, August 28, 2020. © Reuters / TT News Agency
6241
Follow RT onRT
A wave of chaotic unrest broke out in Malmo, Sweden after anti-Islam activists filmed a public Koran burning, sparking protests that soon descended into riots, with unruly demonstrators setting fires and clashing with police.
Some 300 people gathered along a main thoroughfare in Malmo on Friday around 7:30pm local time to protest after members of a far-right political party staged a Koran burning earlier in the day, according to local press reports. As the crowd grew, fires were ignited in the street and several cars torched, prompting a heavy police response that struggled to bring the situation under control.
“We have ongoing and violent riots right now that we have no control over,” police spokesman Rickard Lundqvist told a local news outlet amid the disorder.
Clashes erupted between protesters and law enforcement in Malmo’s Rosengard district, seeing stones, paving bricks and fireworks hurled at officers and emergency response vehicles.
Chants of “Allahu akbar” (“God is great” in Arabic) could be heard in footage that circulated online, which also showed tires and other debris burned in the street and a billowing column of black smoke rising into the night sky. A major fire was also reported in an underground parking garage in Rosengard, about 1km away from the main area of unrest.
The Koran burning which set off the riots was carried out by members of Stram Kurs (“Hard Line”), a far-right Danish political party founded by lawyer and anti-Islam activist Rasmus Paludan in 2017. The activists filmed the burning of the holy book, which was done in a public park.
Elsewhere in Malmo, three Stram Kurs members were reportedly arrested for incitement against an ethnic group after torching another Koran in public.
Paludan was barred entry into Sweden earlier on Friday, turned away at a border checkpoint near Malmo and slapped with a two-year ban from the country over concerns that he could “disturb public order,” a police spokesperson told Danish broadcaster DR. The right-wing activist had previously requested a permit to hold a demonstration in Malmo, where he was set to attend a Koran burning with street artist Dan Park, which was promptly rejected by Swedish authorities. A court argued that while “the freedom of assembly and demonstration are constitutionally protected rights,” the government may prohibit a gathering “for reasons of order and safety.”
https://www.rt.com/news/499381-malmo-ri ... n-burning/
28 Aug, 2020 23:43
Demonstrators burn tires during a riot in the Rosengard neighborhood of Malmo, Sweden following a public Koran burning, August 28, 2020. © Reuters / TT News Agency
6241
Follow RT onRT
A wave of chaotic unrest broke out in Malmo, Sweden after anti-Islam activists filmed a public Koran burning, sparking protests that soon descended into riots, with unruly demonstrators setting fires and clashing with police.
Some 300 people gathered along a main thoroughfare in Malmo on Friday around 7:30pm local time to protest after members of a far-right political party staged a Koran burning earlier in the day, according to local press reports. As the crowd grew, fires were ignited in the street and several cars torched, prompting a heavy police response that struggled to bring the situation under control.
“We have ongoing and violent riots right now that we have no control over,” police spokesman Rickard Lundqvist told a local news outlet amid the disorder.
Clashes erupted between protesters and law enforcement in Malmo’s Rosengard district, seeing stones, paving bricks and fireworks hurled at officers and emergency response vehicles.
Chants of “Allahu akbar” (“God is great” in Arabic) could be heard in footage that circulated online, which also showed tires and other debris burned in the street and a billowing column of black smoke rising into the night sky. A major fire was also reported in an underground parking garage in Rosengard, about 1km away from the main area of unrest.
The Koran burning which set off the riots was carried out by members of Stram Kurs (“Hard Line”), a far-right Danish political party founded by lawyer and anti-Islam activist Rasmus Paludan in 2017. The activists filmed the burning of the holy book, which was done in a public park.
Elsewhere in Malmo, three Stram Kurs members were reportedly arrested for incitement against an ethnic group after torching another Koran in public.
Paludan was barred entry into Sweden earlier on Friday, turned away at a border checkpoint near Malmo and slapped with a two-year ban from the country over concerns that he could “disturb public order,” a police spokesperson told Danish broadcaster DR. The right-wing activist had previously requested a permit to hold a demonstration in Malmo, where he was set to attend a Koran burning with street artist Dan Park, which was promptly rejected by Swedish authorities. A court argued that while “the freedom of assembly and demonstration are constitutionally protected rights,” the government may prohibit a gathering “for reasons of order and safety.”
https://www.rt.com/news/499381-malmo-ri ... n-burning/
Iran's secular shift: new survey reveals huge changes in religious beliefs
Pooyan Tamimi Arab, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies, Utrecht University and Ammar Maleki, Assistant Professor, Public Law and Governance, Tilburg University
The Conversation September 10, 2020, 6:14 AM CDT
Iran’s 1979 Islamic revolution was a defining event that changed how we think about the relationship between religion and modernity. Ayatollah Khomeini’s mass mobilization of Islam showed that modernization by no means implies a linear process of religious decline.
Reliable large-scale data on Iranians’ post-revolutionary religious beliefs, however, has always been lacking. Over the years, research and waves of protests and crackdowns indicated massive disappointment among Iranians with their political system. This steadily turned into a deeply felt disillusionment with institutional religion.
In June 2020, our research institute, the Group for Analyzing and Measuring Attitudes in IRAN (GAMAAN), conducted an online survey with the collaboration of Ladan Boroumand, co-founder of the Abdorrahman Boroumand Center for Human Rights in Iran.
The results verify Iranian society’s unprecedented secularisation.
Reaching Iranians online
Iran’s census claims that 99.5% of the population are Muslim, a figure that hides the state’s active hostility toward irreligiosity, conversion and unrecognised religious minorities.
Iranians live with an ever-present fear of retribution for speaking against the state. In Iran, one cannot simply call people or knock on doors seeking answers to politically sensitive questions. That’s why the anonymity of digital surveys offers an opportunity to capture what Iranians really think about religion.
Since the revolution, literacy rates have risen sharply and the urban population has grown substantially. Levels of internet penetration in Iran are comparable to those in Italy, with around 60 million users and the number grows relentlessly: 70% of adults are members of at least one social media platform.
For our survey on religious belief in Iran, we targeted diverse digital channels after analysing which groups showed lower participation rates in our previous large-scale surveys. The link to the survey was shared by Kurdish, Arab, Sufi and other networks. And our research assistant successfully convinced Shia pro-regime channels to spread it among their followers, too. We reached mass audiences by sharing the survey on Instagram pages and Telegram channels, some of which had a few million followers.
After cleaning our data, we were left with a sample of almost 40,000 Iranians living in Iran. The sample was weighted and balanced to the target population of literate Iranians aged above 19, using five demographic variables and voting behaviour in the 2017 presidential elections.
A secular and diverse Iran
Our results reveal dramatic changes in Iranian religiosity, with an increase in secularisation and a diversity of faiths and beliefs. Compared with Iran’s 99.5% census figure, we found that only 40% identified as Muslim.
In contrast with state propaganda that portrays Iran as a Shia nation, only 32% explicitly identified as such, while 5% said they were Sunni Muslim and 3% Sufi Muslim. Another 9% said they were atheists, along with 7% who prefer the label of spirituality. Among the other selected religions, 8% said they were Zoroastrians – which we interpret as a reflection of Persian nationalism and a desire for an alternative to Islam, rather than strict adherence to the Zoroastrian faith – while 1.5% said they were Christian.
Most Iranians, 78%, believe in God, but only 37% believe in life after death and only 30% believe in heaven and hell. In line with other anthropological research, a quarter of our respondents said they believed in jinns or genies. Around 20% said they did not believe in any of the options, including God.
These numbers demonstrate that a general process of secularisation, known to encourage religious diversity, is taking place in Iran. An overwhelming majority, 90%, described themselves as hailing from believing or practising religious families. Yet 47% reported losing their religion in their lifetime, and 6% said they changed from one religious orientation to another. Younger people reported higher levels of irreligiosity and conversion to Christianity than older respondents.
A third said they occasionally drank alcohol in a country that legally enforces temperance. Over 60% said they did not perform the obligatory Muslim daily prayers, synchronous with a 2020 state-backed poll in which 60% reported not observing the fast during Ramadan (the majority due to being “sick”). In comparison, in a comprehensive survey conducted in 1975 before the Islamic Revolution, over 80% said they always prayed and observed the fast.
Religion and legislation
We found that societal secularisation was also linked to a critical view of the religious governance system: 68% agreed that religious prescriptions should be excluded from legislation, even if believers hold a parliamentary majority, and 72% opposed the law mandating all women wear the hijab, the Islamic veil.
Iranians also harbour illiberal secularist opinions regarding religious diversity: 43% said that no religions should have the right to proselytise in public. However, 41% believed that every religion should be able to manifest in public.
Four decades ago, the Islamic Revolution taught sociologists that European-style secularisation is not followed universally around the world. The subsequent secularisation of Iran confirmed by our survey demonstrates that Europe is not exceptional either, but rather part of complex, global interactions between religious and secular forces.
Other research on population growth, whose decline has been linked to higher levels of secularisation, also suggests a decline in religiosity in Iran. In 2020, Iran recorded its lowest population growth, below 1%.
Greater access to the world via the internet, but also through interactions with the global Iranian diaspora in the past 50 years, has generated new communities and forms of religious experience inside the country. A future disentangling of state power and religious authority would likely exacerbate these societal transformations. Iran as we think we know it is changing, in fundamental ways.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Pooyan Tamimi Arab is the secretary of the non-profit research institute GAMAAN.
Ammar Maleki is the director of the non-profit research institute GAMAAN. GAMAAN (gamaan.org) collaborated with and received funding for this research from Ladan Boroumand.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/ir ... 17092.html
Pooyan Tamimi Arab, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies, Utrecht University and Ammar Maleki, Assistant Professor, Public Law and Governance, Tilburg University
The Conversation September 10, 2020, 6:14 AM CDT
Iran’s 1979 Islamic revolution was a defining event that changed how we think about the relationship between religion and modernity. Ayatollah Khomeini’s mass mobilization of Islam showed that modernization by no means implies a linear process of religious decline.
Reliable large-scale data on Iranians’ post-revolutionary religious beliefs, however, has always been lacking. Over the years, research and waves of protests and crackdowns indicated massive disappointment among Iranians with their political system. This steadily turned into a deeply felt disillusionment with institutional religion.
In June 2020, our research institute, the Group for Analyzing and Measuring Attitudes in IRAN (GAMAAN), conducted an online survey with the collaboration of Ladan Boroumand, co-founder of the Abdorrahman Boroumand Center for Human Rights in Iran.
The results verify Iranian society’s unprecedented secularisation.
Reaching Iranians online
Iran’s census claims that 99.5% of the population are Muslim, a figure that hides the state’s active hostility toward irreligiosity, conversion and unrecognised religious minorities.
Iranians live with an ever-present fear of retribution for speaking against the state. In Iran, one cannot simply call people or knock on doors seeking answers to politically sensitive questions. That’s why the anonymity of digital surveys offers an opportunity to capture what Iranians really think about religion.
Since the revolution, literacy rates have risen sharply and the urban population has grown substantially. Levels of internet penetration in Iran are comparable to those in Italy, with around 60 million users and the number grows relentlessly: 70% of adults are members of at least one social media platform.
For our survey on religious belief in Iran, we targeted diverse digital channels after analysing which groups showed lower participation rates in our previous large-scale surveys. The link to the survey was shared by Kurdish, Arab, Sufi and other networks. And our research assistant successfully convinced Shia pro-regime channels to spread it among their followers, too. We reached mass audiences by sharing the survey on Instagram pages and Telegram channels, some of which had a few million followers.
After cleaning our data, we were left with a sample of almost 40,000 Iranians living in Iran. The sample was weighted and balanced to the target population of literate Iranians aged above 19, using five demographic variables and voting behaviour in the 2017 presidential elections.
A secular and diverse Iran
Our results reveal dramatic changes in Iranian religiosity, with an increase in secularisation and a diversity of faiths and beliefs. Compared with Iran’s 99.5% census figure, we found that only 40% identified as Muslim.
In contrast with state propaganda that portrays Iran as a Shia nation, only 32% explicitly identified as such, while 5% said they were Sunni Muslim and 3% Sufi Muslim. Another 9% said they were atheists, along with 7% who prefer the label of spirituality. Among the other selected religions, 8% said they were Zoroastrians – which we interpret as a reflection of Persian nationalism and a desire for an alternative to Islam, rather than strict adherence to the Zoroastrian faith – while 1.5% said they were Christian.
Most Iranians, 78%, believe in God, but only 37% believe in life after death and only 30% believe in heaven and hell. In line with other anthropological research, a quarter of our respondents said they believed in jinns or genies. Around 20% said they did not believe in any of the options, including God.
These numbers demonstrate that a general process of secularisation, known to encourage religious diversity, is taking place in Iran. An overwhelming majority, 90%, described themselves as hailing from believing or practising religious families. Yet 47% reported losing their religion in their lifetime, and 6% said they changed from one religious orientation to another. Younger people reported higher levels of irreligiosity and conversion to Christianity than older respondents.
A third said they occasionally drank alcohol in a country that legally enforces temperance. Over 60% said they did not perform the obligatory Muslim daily prayers, synchronous with a 2020 state-backed poll in which 60% reported not observing the fast during Ramadan (the majority due to being “sick”). In comparison, in a comprehensive survey conducted in 1975 before the Islamic Revolution, over 80% said they always prayed and observed the fast.
Religion and legislation
We found that societal secularisation was also linked to a critical view of the religious governance system: 68% agreed that religious prescriptions should be excluded from legislation, even if believers hold a parliamentary majority, and 72% opposed the law mandating all women wear the hijab, the Islamic veil.
Iranians also harbour illiberal secularist opinions regarding religious diversity: 43% said that no religions should have the right to proselytise in public. However, 41% believed that every religion should be able to manifest in public.
Four decades ago, the Islamic Revolution taught sociologists that European-style secularisation is not followed universally around the world. The subsequent secularisation of Iran confirmed by our survey demonstrates that Europe is not exceptional either, but rather part of complex, global interactions between religious and secular forces.
Other research on population growth, whose decline has been linked to higher levels of secularisation, also suggests a decline in religiosity in Iran. In 2020, Iran recorded its lowest population growth, below 1%.
Greater access to the world via the internet, but also through interactions with the global Iranian diaspora in the past 50 years, has generated new communities and forms of religious experience inside the country. A future disentangling of state power and religious authority would likely exacerbate these societal transformations. Iran as we think we know it is changing, in fundamental ways.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Pooyan Tamimi Arab is the secretary of the non-profit research institute GAMAAN.
Ammar Maleki is the director of the non-profit research institute GAMAAN. GAMAAN (gamaan.org) collaborated with and received funding for this research from Ladan Boroumand.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/ir ... 17092.html
Do Cuomo’s New Covid Rules Discriminate Against Religion?
I almost always side with protecting houses of worship. But there are limits.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo has imposed new restrictions on businesses, mass gatherings and places of worship in towns and New York City neighborhoods with high rates of coronavirus infections — some of which also have large populations of Orthodox and Hasidic Jews. An Orthodox advocacy group, Agudath Israel of America, has filed a federal lawsuit against the new regulations on the grounds that they violate the right to free exercise of religion.
I have devoted much of my career to protecting the free exercise of religion. It is a rare thing for me to side with a government that seeks to restrict anyone’s religious practices. But this time, the government is on stronger ground.
Few constitutional rights are absolute. Free speech can be censored in extreme cases, as when it incites imminent violence. The right to freely exercise religion includes the right to take religiously motivated actions — engaging in worship and rituals and following moral rules. Very occasionally, such actions do serious harm. They cannot be absolutely protected.
No one reasonably believes that free exercise of religion protects a right to conduct human sacrifice. Faith-healing parents are prosecuted when they withhold medical care from a child, and the child dies. There is no constitutional right to refuse vaccinations for religious reasons.
With respect to both vaccinations and withholding medical care, legislatures have enacted protections for religious objectors. But no court has ever protected such conduct under the Constitution.
Pandemic restrictions are like these examples. Covid-19 kills some and permanently injures others; the threat to human life is real and immediate. Those who flout the rules endanger everyone around them, and this is sufficient reason for regulating even a worship service.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/09/opin ... 778d3e6de3
I almost always side with protecting houses of worship. But there are limits.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo has imposed new restrictions on businesses, mass gatherings and places of worship in towns and New York City neighborhoods with high rates of coronavirus infections — some of which also have large populations of Orthodox and Hasidic Jews. An Orthodox advocacy group, Agudath Israel of America, has filed a federal lawsuit against the new regulations on the grounds that they violate the right to free exercise of religion.
I have devoted much of my career to protecting the free exercise of religion. It is a rare thing for me to side with a government that seeks to restrict anyone’s religious practices. But this time, the government is on stronger ground.
Few constitutional rights are absolute. Free speech can be censored in extreme cases, as when it incites imminent violence. The right to freely exercise religion includes the right to take religiously motivated actions — engaging in worship and rituals and following moral rules. Very occasionally, such actions do serious harm. They cannot be absolutely protected.
No one reasonably believes that free exercise of religion protects a right to conduct human sacrifice. Faith-healing parents are prosecuted when they withhold medical care from a child, and the child dies. There is no constitutional right to refuse vaccinations for religious reasons.
With respect to both vaccinations and withholding medical care, legislatures have enacted protections for religious objectors. But no court has ever protected such conduct under the Constitution.
Pandemic restrictions are like these examples. Covid-19 kills some and permanently injures others; the threat to human life is real and immediate. Those who flout the rules endanger everyone around them, and this is sufficient reason for regulating even a worship service.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/09/opin ... 778d3e6de3
SouthWest Ismaili Muslim Choir Participates in Annual Fort Bend Interfaith #Thanksgiving Service
On November 23, 2020, The Fort Bend Interfaith Community invited people from all-faiths to a virtual Interfaith Thanksgiving Service with the theme of “Signs of Hope.” The event featured readings, songs, poems, dances and prayers from 13 different faith communities including Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Sikh, Baha’i, and Hindu.
Video: A Thanksgiving Message of Hope Southwest Ismaili Muslim Choir
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Bp0MPg ... e=emb_logo
SouthWest (Houston) Ismaili choir presented a beautiful rendition of the hamd “Wohi Khuda Hai” from beautiful, serene setting of Ismaili JamatKhana and Centre, Houston, U.S.A.
Welcome remarks were given by Irfan Ali (Honorary Secretary, Ismaili Council for the SouthWestern U.S, and board member of Fort Bend Interfaith council).
Fort Bend Interfaith Thanksgiving Service
Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=waIaJ1C ... b_err_woyt
On November 23, 2020, The Fort Bend Interfaith Community invited people from all-faiths to a virtual Interfaith Thanksgiving Service with the theme of “Signs of Hope.” The event featured readings, songs, poems, dances and prayers from 13 different faith communities including Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Sikh, Baha’i, and Hindu.
Video: A Thanksgiving Message of Hope Southwest Ismaili Muslim Choir
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Bp0MPg ... e=emb_logo
SouthWest (Houston) Ismaili choir presented a beautiful rendition of the hamd “Wohi Khuda Hai” from beautiful, serene setting of Ismaili JamatKhana and Centre, Houston, U.S.A.
Welcome remarks were given by Irfan Ali (Honorary Secretary, Ismaili Council for the SouthWestern U.S, and board member of Fort Bend Interfaith council).
Fort Bend Interfaith Thanksgiving Service
Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=waIaJ1C ... b_err_woyt
The Significance of Jesus (Nabi Isa) in Islamic Traditions
"[Nabi Isa] said, ‘Indeed, I am the servant of Allah. He has given me the kitab and made me a prophet. He has made me blessed wherever I am, and has enjoined upon me prayer and alms as long as I live.’"
Holy Qur'an 19:30-31
On December 25 each year, Christmas is observed to mark the birth of Jesus, or Nabi Isa (alayhi-salam) as he is referred to in the Holy Qur’an. Christmas offers us an opportunity to reflect on the significance of Nabi Isa in Islamic traditions.
Nabi Isa in the Holy Qur’an
Nabi Isa is mentioned in the Qur’an-e-Sharif as one of the prophets who brought scripture and guidance to humankind, in the times before Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him and his family). The Qur’an gives him the unique title of “Messiah” (al-masih in Arabic), meaning “anointed one.” Nabi Isa’s name occurs in the Qur’an twenty-five times, often in the form “Isa ibn Maryam,” meaning “Jesus son of Mary.” In addition, Sura Maryam in the Qur’an is named after Nabi Isa’s mother, Bibi Maryam.
The Qur’an includes many aspects of the narrative found in the Gospels about Nabi Isa’s life. This includes his virgin birth, the signs given to him by God, and that he was raised by God into His presence. It also suggests his future return. However, the Qur’an denies that Nabi Isa was himself divine.
Surat Aal-e-Imran mentions that angels announced the coming birth of Nabi Isa, saying: “The angels said, ‘O Maryam, Allah gives you good news of a Word [kalima] from Him. His name is al-Masih [the Messiah], Isa ibn Maryam, honoured in this world and in the next, and of those brought near [to God]’” (3:45).
The Prophets of the Abrahamic Tradition
The Holy Qur’an frequently mentions that divine guidance was sent to humankind through various prophets. One ayah says:
“So [you believers], say, ‘We believe in God and in what was sent down to us and what was sent down to Ibrahim (Abraham), Isma’il (Ishmael), Ishaq (Isaac), Ya’qub (Jacob), and the Tribes, and what was given to Musa (Moses), Isa (Jesus), and all the prophets by their Lord. We make no distinction between any of them, and we devote ourselves to Him’” (2:136).
This view that all prophets are considered to be equal is also supported by a widely-reported hadith, in which Prophet Muhammad is believed to have said:
“Both in this world and in the Hereafter, I am the nearest of all the people to Jesus, the son of Mary. The prophets are paternal brothers; their mothers are different, but their religion is one.”
Many Qur’anic verses also describe the prophets as belonging to the same family. For example, there is a line of prophets descended from Nabi Ibrahim (alayhi-salam). Both of his sons, Nabi Ishaq and Nabi Isma’il were prophets, as was Nabi Ishaq’s son, Nabi Ya’qub, and his grandson, Nabi Yusuf, or Joseph (alayhum-as-salam).
Thus, Allah chose certain families over others based on their devotion, submission and faith towards the Divine, as reflected in the following Qur’anic verses:
“Allah chose Adam and Nuh (Noah), the family of Ibrahim, and the family of Imran above all mankind: a progeny one from the other” (3:33-34).
“We have already given the family of Ibrahim the Book and Wisdom and conferred upon them a great kingdom” (4:54).
According to Islamic tradition, Prophet Muhammad was a descendant of Nabi Ibrahim through Nabi Isma’il, while Nabi Musa and Nabi Isa were descendants of Nabi Ibrahim through Nabi Ishaq. For the Shia, this elevated status of Nabi Ibrahim’s family extends also to Hazrat Ali, Bibi Fatima and the Imams descended from them.
Mawlana Hazar Imam has often highlighted this shared Abrahamic heritage. Speaking in Houston, USA in 2002, he said:
“The shared destiny of the ethos of the Abrahamic tradition that unites Christians, Jews and Muslims is governed by the duty of loving care to help nurture each life that is born to its God-given potential.”
The Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem is one of the oldest Muslim architectural monuments. It is believed to stand on the site of Nabi Ibrahim’s attempted sacrifice of his son, which is a story that is shared by all three Abrahamic faiths: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. For Muslims, it is commemorated on Eid al-Adha. Source: Wikimedia Commons
Nabi Isa as a Spiritual Exemplar
In Qur’anic commentaries, Nabi Isa is depicted as someone who embodied the qualities of piety and concern for the needy, whose example inspired Prophet Muhammad. In Sufi literature, Nabi Isa is often portrayed as an example of detachment from the world and closeness to God.
In his article, “Jesus, Christians and Christianity in the Thought of the Ikhwan al-Safa’,” Dr. Omar Ali-de-Unzaga explains that, for the Ikhwan al-Safa’, Nabi Isa is a spiritual exemplar par excellence.
The Ikhwan al-Safa’, or Brethren of Purity, were a group of anonymous scholars who wrote a series of epistles (rasa’il in Arabic). Their identity and spiritual affiliation is the subject of debate, although several scholars have suggested they may have been Ismailis of the pre-Fatimid era.
Dr. Ali-de-Unzaga writes:
“Jesus figures prominently in the Rasa’il, as one of the exemplars who embodied the views of the Ikhwan al-Safa’: belief in the eternity of the soul and the pursuit of the purification of the soul from matter by detachment from the bodily realm.”
Miniature painting depicting the Ikhwan al-Safa’. Source: Wikimedia Commons
In the Memoirs of Aga Khan, Imam Sultan Mahomed Shah (alayhi-salam) mentions Nabi Isa as someone who attained spiritual enlightenment and power:
“…some men are born with such natural spiritual capacities and possibilities of development, that they have direct experience of that great love, that all-embracing, all-consuming love, which direct contact with reality gives to the human soul. Hafiz, indeed, has said that men like Jesus Christ, and Muslim mystics like Mansour and Bayezid and others, have possessed that spiritual power of the greater love; that any of us, if the Holy Spirit ever-present grants us that enlightenment, can, being thus blessed, have the power which Christ had…”
Common Ground: Pluralism and Nabi Isa
Mawlana Hazar Imam has also spoken about Nabi Isa in connection with pluralism. In his speech upon receiving the “Tolerance” award from the Tutzing Evangelical Academy in Germany in 2006, our beloved Imam said:
“Despite the long history of religious conflict, there is a long counter-history of religious focus on tolerance as a central virtue – on welcoming the stranger and loving one's neighbour.
‘Who is my Neighbor?’ – one of the central Christian narratives asks. Jesus responds by telling the story of the Good Samaritan – a foreigner, a representative of the Other, who reaches out sympathetically, across ethnic and cultural divides, to show mercy to the fallen stranger at the side of the road.”
Conclusion
In Islamic traditions, Nabi Isa is held in high regard as a messenger of God and an exemplar of the ideals of piety and austerity. He is also part of the shared heritage that binds the monotheistic faiths of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Together, they are known in the Qur’an as the Ahl al-Kitab, or People of the Book, that is, people to whom Allah sent revelation.
Christmas provides us with an opportunity to reflect upon the life and significance of an important prophet in our own tradition. It is also a reminder of our duty to build bridges with our brothers and sisters of all faiths, remembering that we are all born from a single soul. It offers a chance for us to show our respect for the diversity of festivals that are celebrated in our larger society, and indeed, amongst members of our own families who may be of other faiths.
To conclude, we end with a quote from Mawlana Hazar Imam’s speech at the opening ceremony of the Ismaili Centre, Vancouver in 1985:
“Islam is the last of the world's great monotheistic faiths to be revealed and is essentially tolerant. It entertains no opposition to earlier beliefs. On the contrary it recognises them as being part of God's message to mankind. To all Muslims – Shia and Sunni alike – the ‘people of the book’ are the people of all monotheistic faiths, and a wide, all-embracing, vision of the brotherhood of man and the unity of God is among the most fundamental of the faith's teaching.”
https://iicanada.org/community/signific ... traditions
"[Nabi Isa] said, ‘Indeed, I am the servant of Allah. He has given me the kitab and made me a prophet. He has made me blessed wherever I am, and has enjoined upon me prayer and alms as long as I live.’"
Holy Qur'an 19:30-31
On December 25 each year, Christmas is observed to mark the birth of Jesus, or Nabi Isa (alayhi-salam) as he is referred to in the Holy Qur’an. Christmas offers us an opportunity to reflect on the significance of Nabi Isa in Islamic traditions.
Nabi Isa in the Holy Qur’an
Nabi Isa is mentioned in the Qur’an-e-Sharif as one of the prophets who brought scripture and guidance to humankind, in the times before Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him and his family). The Qur’an gives him the unique title of “Messiah” (al-masih in Arabic), meaning “anointed one.” Nabi Isa’s name occurs in the Qur’an twenty-five times, often in the form “Isa ibn Maryam,” meaning “Jesus son of Mary.” In addition, Sura Maryam in the Qur’an is named after Nabi Isa’s mother, Bibi Maryam.
The Qur’an includes many aspects of the narrative found in the Gospels about Nabi Isa’s life. This includes his virgin birth, the signs given to him by God, and that he was raised by God into His presence. It also suggests his future return. However, the Qur’an denies that Nabi Isa was himself divine.
Surat Aal-e-Imran mentions that angels announced the coming birth of Nabi Isa, saying: “The angels said, ‘O Maryam, Allah gives you good news of a Word [kalima] from Him. His name is al-Masih [the Messiah], Isa ibn Maryam, honoured in this world and in the next, and of those brought near [to God]’” (3:45).
The Prophets of the Abrahamic Tradition
The Holy Qur’an frequently mentions that divine guidance was sent to humankind through various prophets. One ayah says:
“So [you believers], say, ‘We believe in God and in what was sent down to us and what was sent down to Ibrahim (Abraham), Isma’il (Ishmael), Ishaq (Isaac), Ya’qub (Jacob), and the Tribes, and what was given to Musa (Moses), Isa (Jesus), and all the prophets by their Lord. We make no distinction between any of them, and we devote ourselves to Him’” (2:136).
This view that all prophets are considered to be equal is also supported by a widely-reported hadith, in which Prophet Muhammad is believed to have said:
“Both in this world and in the Hereafter, I am the nearest of all the people to Jesus, the son of Mary. The prophets are paternal brothers; their mothers are different, but their religion is one.”
Many Qur’anic verses also describe the prophets as belonging to the same family. For example, there is a line of prophets descended from Nabi Ibrahim (alayhi-salam). Both of his sons, Nabi Ishaq and Nabi Isma’il were prophets, as was Nabi Ishaq’s son, Nabi Ya’qub, and his grandson, Nabi Yusuf, or Joseph (alayhum-as-salam).
Thus, Allah chose certain families over others based on their devotion, submission and faith towards the Divine, as reflected in the following Qur’anic verses:
“Allah chose Adam and Nuh (Noah), the family of Ibrahim, and the family of Imran above all mankind: a progeny one from the other” (3:33-34).
“We have already given the family of Ibrahim the Book and Wisdom and conferred upon them a great kingdom” (4:54).
According to Islamic tradition, Prophet Muhammad was a descendant of Nabi Ibrahim through Nabi Isma’il, while Nabi Musa and Nabi Isa were descendants of Nabi Ibrahim through Nabi Ishaq. For the Shia, this elevated status of Nabi Ibrahim’s family extends also to Hazrat Ali, Bibi Fatima and the Imams descended from them.
Mawlana Hazar Imam has often highlighted this shared Abrahamic heritage. Speaking in Houston, USA in 2002, he said:
“The shared destiny of the ethos of the Abrahamic tradition that unites Christians, Jews and Muslims is governed by the duty of loving care to help nurture each life that is born to its God-given potential.”
The Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem is one of the oldest Muslim architectural monuments. It is believed to stand on the site of Nabi Ibrahim’s attempted sacrifice of his son, which is a story that is shared by all three Abrahamic faiths: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. For Muslims, it is commemorated on Eid al-Adha. Source: Wikimedia Commons
Nabi Isa as a Spiritual Exemplar
In Qur’anic commentaries, Nabi Isa is depicted as someone who embodied the qualities of piety and concern for the needy, whose example inspired Prophet Muhammad. In Sufi literature, Nabi Isa is often portrayed as an example of detachment from the world and closeness to God.
In his article, “Jesus, Christians and Christianity in the Thought of the Ikhwan al-Safa’,” Dr. Omar Ali-de-Unzaga explains that, for the Ikhwan al-Safa’, Nabi Isa is a spiritual exemplar par excellence.
The Ikhwan al-Safa’, or Brethren of Purity, were a group of anonymous scholars who wrote a series of epistles (rasa’il in Arabic). Their identity and spiritual affiliation is the subject of debate, although several scholars have suggested they may have been Ismailis of the pre-Fatimid era.
Dr. Ali-de-Unzaga writes:
“Jesus figures prominently in the Rasa’il, as one of the exemplars who embodied the views of the Ikhwan al-Safa’: belief in the eternity of the soul and the pursuit of the purification of the soul from matter by detachment from the bodily realm.”
Miniature painting depicting the Ikhwan al-Safa’. Source: Wikimedia Commons
In the Memoirs of Aga Khan, Imam Sultan Mahomed Shah (alayhi-salam) mentions Nabi Isa as someone who attained spiritual enlightenment and power:
“…some men are born with such natural spiritual capacities and possibilities of development, that they have direct experience of that great love, that all-embracing, all-consuming love, which direct contact with reality gives to the human soul. Hafiz, indeed, has said that men like Jesus Christ, and Muslim mystics like Mansour and Bayezid and others, have possessed that spiritual power of the greater love; that any of us, if the Holy Spirit ever-present grants us that enlightenment, can, being thus blessed, have the power which Christ had…”
Common Ground: Pluralism and Nabi Isa
Mawlana Hazar Imam has also spoken about Nabi Isa in connection with pluralism. In his speech upon receiving the “Tolerance” award from the Tutzing Evangelical Academy in Germany in 2006, our beloved Imam said:
“Despite the long history of religious conflict, there is a long counter-history of religious focus on tolerance as a central virtue – on welcoming the stranger and loving one's neighbour.
‘Who is my Neighbor?’ – one of the central Christian narratives asks. Jesus responds by telling the story of the Good Samaritan – a foreigner, a representative of the Other, who reaches out sympathetically, across ethnic and cultural divides, to show mercy to the fallen stranger at the side of the road.”
Conclusion
In Islamic traditions, Nabi Isa is held in high regard as a messenger of God and an exemplar of the ideals of piety and austerity. He is also part of the shared heritage that binds the monotheistic faiths of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Together, they are known in the Qur’an as the Ahl al-Kitab, or People of the Book, that is, people to whom Allah sent revelation.
Christmas provides us with an opportunity to reflect upon the life and significance of an important prophet in our own tradition. It is also a reminder of our duty to build bridges with our brothers and sisters of all faiths, remembering that we are all born from a single soul. It offers a chance for us to show our respect for the diversity of festivals that are celebrated in our larger society, and indeed, amongst members of our own families who may be of other faiths.
To conclude, we end with a quote from Mawlana Hazar Imam’s speech at the opening ceremony of the Ismaili Centre, Vancouver in 1985:
“Islam is the last of the world's great monotheistic faiths to be revealed and is essentially tolerant. It entertains no opposition to earlier beliefs. On the contrary it recognises them as being part of God's message to mankind. To all Muslims – Shia and Sunni alike – the ‘people of the book’ are the people of all monotheistic faiths, and a wide, all-embracing, vision of the brotherhood of man and the unity of God is among the most fundamental of the faith's teaching.”
https://iicanada.org/community/signific ... traditions
Building Bridges Through Faith
In recognition of World Interfaith Harmony Week, the Ismaili Jamatkhana and Center in collaboration with Faith Alliance of Metro Atlanta and Interfaith Youth Core is pleased to present, “Building Bridges Through Faith.” Join us for a conversation with Dr. Eboo Patel and interfaith leaders on the importance of interfaith cooperation in bringing peace, harmony, and tolerance to our communities.
Wednesday, February 3, 2021
7:00 p.m. ET | 6:00 p.m. CT | 4:00 p.m. PT
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gt_LGgGwnqk
In recognition of World Interfaith Harmony Week, the Ismaili Jamatkhana and Center in collaboration with Faith Alliance of Metro Atlanta and Interfaith Youth Core is pleased to present, “Building Bridges Through Faith.” Join us for a conversation with Dr. Eboo Patel and interfaith leaders on the importance of interfaith cooperation in bringing peace, harmony, and tolerance to our communities.
Wednesday, February 3, 2021
7:00 p.m. ET | 6:00 p.m. CT | 4:00 p.m. PT
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gt_LGgGwnqk
DISPATCHES FROM THE RHODIAN SHORE: A (TOUGH) LOVE LETTER TO RELIGIOUS STUDIES
When writing as critical scholars of religion about the impacts and role of religion in society we need to broaden our remit, and must do so quickly. Let me explain why.
It’s probably best to start with environmental history, thus the name for this dispatch. It’s a riff on the geographer Clarence Glacken’s magisterial 1967 opus with the completely accessible title, Traces on the Rhodian Shore: Nature and Culture in Western Thought from Ancient Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century. The book is similarly dry, but oh so full of important facts and syntheses of Western (and of course, sadly, male) intellectual thought about interactions between humans and nature. Glacken condenses 2000 years of Western thought about nature to three themes, the third of which I’m interested in here: “the idea of man [sic] as a geographic agent.”
First, let’s jump ahead to data points about human impact on the natural world that Glacken didn’t have in 1967. These updated data points will overly determine everything in society moving forward, including how humans produce religion and thus how we academically study, research, and teach about it. They’re also data points published in just the last two months, bridging 2020 into 2021. Trends suggest future data points will only be more alarming and more severe, but we’ll get to that.
1. 2020 is tied with 2016 as the warmest year in recorded history. Sadly, if warming trends triggered by human addiction to fossil fuels and other practices that release heat trapping greenhouse gasses continue (spoiler: they will), then 2020 will be downright cool compared to how hot it’s going to be in 2040 and 2050 and, well, basically for the rest of the foreseeable future. The possibility of more rapid warming in the coming decades is very real, too. This is because the oceans are becoming saturated with excess heat which will remain in the atmosphere once they’re fully saturated. It’s also because at some point in the future permafrost will start thawing and releasing methane. Sound alarming? Not when we get to data point number 2.
2. Basically, we are not alarmed enough. Not by a long shot. Rather, in concluding their analysis of climate data, an international group of scientists write, “We have summarized predictions of a ghastly future of mass extinction, declining health, and climate-disruption upheavals (including looming massive migrations) and resource conflicts this century…we contend that only a realistic appreciation of the colossal challenges facing the international community might allow it to chart a less-ravaged future.” I’ll return to this point later. For those wanting another piece about the need to avert collapse with rapid interventions, here you go; and here’s another from a scholar who has opined we’re past that point and need to talk about deep adaptation. But I digress.
3. Human-induced global warming (with vast past and present intersectional differences in complicity and power within this) has led to the Earth losing 28 trillion tons of ice from the Arctic sea and ice shelves; mountain glaciers; Greenland (the statistical odds are increasing that this melt will radically slow or even stop the Gulf Stream); and Antarctic sea and ice shelves. That’s a lot of water. And the rate of melt is only going to increase. The rate also tracks closely to worst-case sea-level- rise predictions from the most recent IPCC report for ice sheets, suggesting a minimum 16 inches of sea level rise by 2100 from just this one source, with more to come after that. (For those of you employed at campuses or institutions near the coast, like I am, this should be adding to feelings of alarm.)
4. Another group of scientists are very worried that the Earth will soon lose its ability to capture (or “sink”) carbon out of the atmosphere due to oversaturation that will then lead to structurally impoverished ecosystems. Their fear is that by 2040 (the freshmen we’ll be teaching then are being born right now) the ability of land to be a carbon sink will be halved, severely amplifying global warming feedback loops.
5. The cultural stories and values we have about the worth and role of nature, matter. How we discuss the natural world across social science and humanistic disciplines, matter, as seen here in the undervaluing of nature in economics.
Most of the rest of my argument builds on data point number 5, focusing on how religious studies (as if that’s a monolithic thing) to date has talked about the natural world. I share the below as someone who is at the core of my training a religionist who’s vested in using education to build a better, more sustainable society. I recognize that understanding the role of religion in society is of import as we work toward this goal and that we should indeed be talking about racial justice, religious liberty, and sex/gender/justice as articulated by Religion Dispatches and its various contributors.
But notice, here, that nature/ecology is not a central concern—either of religious studies or RD. This is a microcosm of larger trajectories in the historical development of religious studies where expertise in the study of religion and nature/ecology is frustratingly underrepresented by tenured positions in most all academic departments of religion, as well. Yet we are precisely at a time when we need religious studies to help shape both the environmental humanities and sustainability in higher education. This is a concern I have with the field, especially given the first 4 data points above.
We know that disciplines are as much a social construction as is the academy itself. This suggests that education on a much warmer planet is going to shift in the years and decades to come towards addressing and responding to data points like those above. Will the humanities have a place at the new academic table on a planet going through biome shifts? And will religious studies and its methods and theories about religious and non-religious/secular actors and communities the world over—all of whom will be adapting to climate change—have a seat?
I think here of the adaptive cycle of resilience and how the academy, similar to fossil-fuel driven civilization as a whole, is going to be moving from conservation to a far more radical reorganization. If those in religious studies want to be present in a reorganized academy, then those teaching and researching religious studies will likely have to be of worth to societies grappling with averting collapse and, at least according to the data points above, adapting to what appears to be the very real possibility of runaway climate change. This means centering across our discipline and in our departments the natural world. And we must do so in a way that emphasizes justice, racial and otherwise.
There are movements within religious studies that point towards helping with such a reorganization. I think here of the religion and nature program at the University of Florida, the only Ph.D. program of its kind and from where I earned my Ph.D. (go Gators!). I think, too, of the Yale Forum on Religion and Ecology, as well as the International Society for the Study of Religion, Nature, and Culture. In theology I think of, for example, Drew Theological School; but I also think of the very real pushback from some of the more conservative (read: white evangelical) schools of theology and the approaches of their traditions to understanding the natural world that may be anathema to navigating adaptation and promoting any type of non-anthropocentric cultural values ascribed to the planet. And despite these programs being early adopters of a religion and nature/ecology approach to religious studies, they’re still outliers, massively outnumbered by the majority of programs that do not teach such courses (or possibly offer a token elective course on religion and nature/ecology) or train scholars to teach and research such content.
The above data points, all published in the last two months, strongly suggest that Glacken’s analysis was spot on: we are geographic, and thus geologic, agents to the point of now triggering shifts in ecosystems to new biological and chemical structures that will unfold in our lifetime and in those of our future students. These regimes will be hard to adapt to and will most likely inform very different human ways of being religious in the decades to come. How we understand these shifts and situate ourselves as scholars of religion studying them is a matter of increasing import, if for no other reason than that it may impact the relevancy of our field as higher education reorganizes itself.
I mention all this because part of the human reorganization within climate shifts will include the funding of higher education. We already see religious studies being targeted during economic crunches triggered by demographic contraction. The post-Covid economic landscape is also still to emerge, but I do think the humanities, and within it religious studies, will take most of the 2020s to recover, if they do at all. It is very possible that those departments and programs in the academy not teaching to the above data points may be of even less value to administrators and the paying public by the 2030s and 2040s.
This is especially salient as students at that time will be looking for programs and classes that speak to acquiring skills and understanding how to adapt to and make sense of climate change. The ethical, normative, historical, and analytical skills that religious studies offer should indeed (and, I argue, must) be part of this future. However if many of those in religious studies are not systematically foregrounding and speaking to religion and nature/ecology interactions, let alone within the context of climate change, then we shouldn’t be surprised to have our programs of study lose funding and import and the interest of students in the decades to come.
This brings me back to data point 2. If we think of future dispatches about religion written from inundated shores, hopefully they will reflect that religious studies joined with the rest of the academy in rising to the colossal challenges of our time. Hopefully they will reflect new hiring patterns, new patterns of engagement with colleagues across the academy and, in our teaching and research, a foregrounding of the natural world upon which our survival, let alone our intersectional flourishing, entirely depends.
https://religiondispatches.org/dispatch ... us-studies
When writing as critical scholars of religion about the impacts and role of religion in society we need to broaden our remit, and must do so quickly. Let me explain why.
It’s probably best to start with environmental history, thus the name for this dispatch. It’s a riff on the geographer Clarence Glacken’s magisterial 1967 opus with the completely accessible title, Traces on the Rhodian Shore: Nature and Culture in Western Thought from Ancient Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century. The book is similarly dry, but oh so full of important facts and syntheses of Western (and of course, sadly, male) intellectual thought about interactions between humans and nature. Glacken condenses 2000 years of Western thought about nature to three themes, the third of which I’m interested in here: “the idea of man [sic] as a geographic agent.”
First, let’s jump ahead to data points about human impact on the natural world that Glacken didn’t have in 1967. These updated data points will overly determine everything in society moving forward, including how humans produce religion and thus how we academically study, research, and teach about it. They’re also data points published in just the last two months, bridging 2020 into 2021. Trends suggest future data points will only be more alarming and more severe, but we’ll get to that.
1. 2020 is tied with 2016 as the warmest year in recorded history. Sadly, if warming trends triggered by human addiction to fossil fuels and other practices that release heat trapping greenhouse gasses continue (spoiler: they will), then 2020 will be downright cool compared to how hot it’s going to be in 2040 and 2050 and, well, basically for the rest of the foreseeable future. The possibility of more rapid warming in the coming decades is very real, too. This is because the oceans are becoming saturated with excess heat which will remain in the atmosphere once they’re fully saturated. It’s also because at some point in the future permafrost will start thawing and releasing methane. Sound alarming? Not when we get to data point number 2.
2. Basically, we are not alarmed enough. Not by a long shot. Rather, in concluding their analysis of climate data, an international group of scientists write, “We have summarized predictions of a ghastly future of mass extinction, declining health, and climate-disruption upheavals (including looming massive migrations) and resource conflicts this century…we contend that only a realistic appreciation of the colossal challenges facing the international community might allow it to chart a less-ravaged future.” I’ll return to this point later. For those wanting another piece about the need to avert collapse with rapid interventions, here you go; and here’s another from a scholar who has opined we’re past that point and need to talk about deep adaptation. But I digress.
3. Human-induced global warming (with vast past and present intersectional differences in complicity and power within this) has led to the Earth losing 28 trillion tons of ice from the Arctic sea and ice shelves; mountain glaciers; Greenland (the statistical odds are increasing that this melt will radically slow or even stop the Gulf Stream); and Antarctic sea and ice shelves. That’s a lot of water. And the rate of melt is only going to increase. The rate also tracks closely to worst-case sea-level- rise predictions from the most recent IPCC report for ice sheets, suggesting a minimum 16 inches of sea level rise by 2100 from just this one source, with more to come after that. (For those of you employed at campuses or institutions near the coast, like I am, this should be adding to feelings of alarm.)
4. Another group of scientists are very worried that the Earth will soon lose its ability to capture (or “sink”) carbon out of the atmosphere due to oversaturation that will then lead to structurally impoverished ecosystems. Their fear is that by 2040 (the freshmen we’ll be teaching then are being born right now) the ability of land to be a carbon sink will be halved, severely amplifying global warming feedback loops.
5. The cultural stories and values we have about the worth and role of nature, matter. How we discuss the natural world across social science and humanistic disciplines, matter, as seen here in the undervaluing of nature in economics.
Most of the rest of my argument builds on data point number 5, focusing on how religious studies (as if that’s a monolithic thing) to date has talked about the natural world. I share the below as someone who is at the core of my training a religionist who’s vested in using education to build a better, more sustainable society. I recognize that understanding the role of religion in society is of import as we work toward this goal and that we should indeed be talking about racial justice, religious liberty, and sex/gender/justice as articulated by Religion Dispatches and its various contributors.
But notice, here, that nature/ecology is not a central concern—either of religious studies or RD. This is a microcosm of larger trajectories in the historical development of religious studies where expertise in the study of religion and nature/ecology is frustratingly underrepresented by tenured positions in most all academic departments of religion, as well. Yet we are precisely at a time when we need religious studies to help shape both the environmental humanities and sustainability in higher education. This is a concern I have with the field, especially given the first 4 data points above.
We know that disciplines are as much a social construction as is the academy itself. This suggests that education on a much warmer planet is going to shift in the years and decades to come towards addressing and responding to data points like those above. Will the humanities have a place at the new academic table on a planet going through biome shifts? And will religious studies and its methods and theories about religious and non-religious/secular actors and communities the world over—all of whom will be adapting to climate change—have a seat?
I think here of the adaptive cycle of resilience and how the academy, similar to fossil-fuel driven civilization as a whole, is going to be moving from conservation to a far more radical reorganization. If those in religious studies want to be present in a reorganized academy, then those teaching and researching religious studies will likely have to be of worth to societies grappling with averting collapse and, at least according to the data points above, adapting to what appears to be the very real possibility of runaway climate change. This means centering across our discipline and in our departments the natural world. And we must do so in a way that emphasizes justice, racial and otherwise.
There are movements within religious studies that point towards helping with such a reorganization. I think here of the religion and nature program at the University of Florida, the only Ph.D. program of its kind and from where I earned my Ph.D. (go Gators!). I think, too, of the Yale Forum on Religion and Ecology, as well as the International Society for the Study of Religion, Nature, and Culture. In theology I think of, for example, Drew Theological School; but I also think of the very real pushback from some of the more conservative (read: white evangelical) schools of theology and the approaches of their traditions to understanding the natural world that may be anathema to navigating adaptation and promoting any type of non-anthropocentric cultural values ascribed to the planet. And despite these programs being early adopters of a religion and nature/ecology approach to religious studies, they’re still outliers, massively outnumbered by the majority of programs that do not teach such courses (or possibly offer a token elective course on religion and nature/ecology) or train scholars to teach and research such content.
The above data points, all published in the last two months, strongly suggest that Glacken’s analysis was spot on: we are geographic, and thus geologic, agents to the point of now triggering shifts in ecosystems to new biological and chemical structures that will unfold in our lifetime and in those of our future students. These regimes will be hard to adapt to and will most likely inform very different human ways of being religious in the decades to come. How we understand these shifts and situate ourselves as scholars of religion studying them is a matter of increasing import, if for no other reason than that it may impact the relevancy of our field as higher education reorganizes itself.
I mention all this because part of the human reorganization within climate shifts will include the funding of higher education. We already see religious studies being targeted during economic crunches triggered by demographic contraction. The post-Covid economic landscape is also still to emerge, but I do think the humanities, and within it religious studies, will take most of the 2020s to recover, if they do at all. It is very possible that those departments and programs in the academy not teaching to the above data points may be of even less value to administrators and the paying public by the 2030s and 2040s.
This is especially salient as students at that time will be looking for programs and classes that speak to acquiring skills and understanding how to adapt to and make sense of climate change. The ethical, normative, historical, and analytical skills that religious studies offer should indeed (and, I argue, must) be part of this future. However if many of those in religious studies are not systematically foregrounding and speaking to religion and nature/ecology interactions, let alone within the context of climate change, then we shouldn’t be surprised to have our programs of study lose funding and import and the interest of students in the decades to come.
This brings me back to data point 2. If we think of future dispatches about religion written from inundated shores, hopefully they will reflect that religious studies joined with the rest of the academy in rising to the colossal challenges of our time. Hopefully they will reflect new hiring patterns, new patterns of engagement with colleagues across the academy and, in our teaching and research, a foregrounding of the natural world upon which our survival, let alone our intersectional flourishing, entirely depends.
https://religiondispatches.org/dispatch ... us-studies
Influencers Are the New Televangelists
How did they become our moral authorities?
On Instagram, I follow 700 people, mostly women. One hundred of those women follow Glennon Doyle, whose memoir “Untamed” has been on the Times best-seller list for 51 weeks.
Fans of Ms. Doyle’s gospel, an accessible combination of self-care, activism and tongue-in-cheek Christianity (“Jesus loves me, this I know, for he gave me Lexapro”), can worship at any time of day or night at the electric church of her Instagram feed. By replacing the rigid dogma of religion with the confessional lingua franca of social media, Ms. Doyle has become a charismatic preacher for women — like me — who aren’t even religious.
Twenty-two percent of millennials are not affiliated with a specific religion. We are known as religious “nones.” The Pew Research Center found that the number of nones in the population as a whole increased nine percentage points from 2009 to 2019. The main reasons that nones are unaffiliated are that they question religious teachings, or they don’t like the church’s stance on social issues.
But are we truly nonreligious, or are our belief systems too bespoke to appear on a list of major religions in a Pew phone survey?
Many millennials who have turned their backs on religious tradition because it isn’t diverse, or inclusive enough, have found alternative scripture online. Our new belief system is a blend of left-wing political orthodoxy, intersectional feminism, self-optimization, therapy, wellness, astrology and Dolly Parton.
And we’ve found a different kind of clergy: personal growth influencers. Women like Ms. Doyle, who offer nones like us permission, validation and community on-demand at a time when it’s nearly impossible to share communion in person. We don’t even have to put down our phones.
In February Ms. Doyle posted a virtual sermon to her followers on Instagram, encouraging them to “embrace quitting as a spiritual practice.” More than 100,000 members of her congregation liked it. Followers responded with prayer hands emojis, “God bless yous,” and one “Hallelujah, sister.”
I spoke to Kimberly Ciano, a 31-year-old health practitioner on Long Island who found Glennon Doyle via her “discovery” feed. Ms. Ciano has followed a spiritual path that may sound familiar to other nones: She grew up Roman Catholic, but became alienated from her faith by what she saw as the church’s hypocrisy. In her 20s, she studied yoga and Eastern philosophy. During a year when she lost a job, a 10-year relationship, and her grandmother, the message she absorbed from Ms. Doyle helped sustain her: “It’s OK to not be OK.”
Ms. Doyle and other quasi-spiritual influencers are the latest iteration of an American institution that has been around since the second half of the 20th century: the televangelist.
These women are Instavangelists. Our screens may have shrunk, but we’re still drawn to spiritual counsel, especially when it doubles as entertainment.
The original televangelist, Oral Roberts, began television broadcasts of his services in 1954. Millions of Americans were captivated by his dramatic onscreen healings and his message that positive thinking (and donations to his ministry) would lead to prosperity. Instavangelists like Gabrielle Bernstein (916,000 followers on Instagram) have rebranded the prosperity gospel as manifesting abundance, and she, Ms. Doyle (1.5 million followers), Brené Brown (3.3 million followers), and Gwyneth Paltrow (7.5 million followers) have become the neo-religious leaders of our era.
These women look and sound radically different from conservative evangelical male televangelists like Pat Robertson and Joel Osteen. And while they don’t brand themselves as faith leaders, this is the role they play in many of their secular fans’ lives. The size of their devoted, ecstatic, largely female following shows how many American women are desperate for good vibes, coping skills for modern life, and proactive steps to combat injustice and inequality.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/05/opin ... 778d3e6de3
How did they become our moral authorities?
On Instagram, I follow 700 people, mostly women. One hundred of those women follow Glennon Doyle, whose memoir “Untamed” has been on the Times best-seller list for 51 weeks.
Fans of Ms. Doyle’s gospel, an accessible combination of self-care, activism and tongue-in-cheek Christianity (“Jesus loves me, this I know, for he gave me Lexapro”), can worship at any time of day or night at the electric church of her Instagram feed. By replacing the rigid dogma of religion with the confessional lingua franca of social media, Ms. Doyle has become a charismatic preacher for women — like me — who aren’t even religious.
Twenty-two percent of millennials are not affiliated with a specific religion. We are known as religious “nones.” The Pew Research Center found that the number of nones in the population as a whole increased nine percentage points from 2009 to 2019. The main reasons that nones are unaffiliated are that they question religious teachings, or they don’t like the church’s stance on social issues.
But are we truly nonreligious, or are our belief systems too bespoke to appear on a list of major religions in a Pew phone survey?
Many millennials who have turned their backs on religious tradition because it isn’t diverse, or inclusive enough, have found alternative scripture online. Our new belief system is a blend of left-wing political orthodoxy, intersectional feminism, self-optimization, therapy, wellness, astrology and Dolly Parton.
And we’ve found a different kind of clergy: personal growth influencers. Women like Ms. Doyle, who offer nones like us permission, validation and community on-demand at a time when it’s nearly impossible to share communion in person. We don’t even have to put down our phones.
In February Ms. Doyle posted a virtual sermon to her followers on Instagram, encouraging them to “embrace quitting as a spiritual practice.” More than 100,000 members of her congregation liked it. Followers responded with prayer hands emojis, “God bless yous,” and one “Hallelujah, sister.”
I spoke to Kimberly Ciano, a 31-year-old health practitioner on Long Island who found Glennon Doyle via her “discovery” feed. Ms. Ciano has followed a spiritual path that may sound familiar to other nones: She grew up Roman Catholic, but became alienated from her faith by what she saw as the church’s hypocrisy. In her 20s, she studied yoga and Eastern philosophy. During a year when she lost a job, a 10-year relationship, and her grandmother, the message she absorbed from Ms. Doyle helped sustain her: “It’s OK to not be OK.”
Ms. Doyle and other quasi-spiritual influencers are the latest iteration of an American institution that has been around since the second half of the 20th century: the televangelist.
These women are Instavangelists. Our screens may have shrunk, but we’re still drawn to spiritual counsel, especially when it doubles as entertainment.
The original televangelist, Oral Roberts, began television broadcasts of his services in 1954. Millions of Americans were captivated by his dramatic onscreen healings and his message that positive thinking (and donations to his ministry) would lead to prosperity. Instavangelists like Gabrielle Bernstein (916,000 followers on Instagram) have rebranded the prosperity gospel as manifesting abundance, and she, Ms. Doyle (1.5 million followers), Brené Brown (3.3 million followers), and Gwyneth Paltrow (7.5 million followers) have become the neo-religious leaders of our era.
These women look and sound radically different from conservative evangelical male televangelists like Pat Robertson and Joel Osteen. And while they don’t brand themselves as faith leaders, this is the role they play in many of their secular fans’ lives. The size of their devoted, ecstatic, largely female following shows how many American women are desperate for good vibes, coping skills for modern life, and proactive steps to combat injustice and inequality.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/05/opin ... 778d3e6de3
Pope Francis Meets Iraq’s Top Ayatollah as Both Urge Peace
The meeting with Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani came as Francis sought to protect his persecuted flock in Iraq by forging closer bonds between the Roman Catholic Church and the Muslim world.
Watch video at:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/06/worl ... iversified
UR, Iraq — First Pope Francis showed up at the modest residence of Iraq’s most reclusive, and powerful, Shiite religious cleric for a delicate and painstakingly negotiated summit. Hours later, he presided over a stage crowded with religious leaders on the windswept Plain of Ur, a vast and, now arid, expanse where the faithful believe God revealed himself to the Prophet Abraham, the patriarch of the Jewish, Christian and Muslim faiths.
In settings both intimate and theatrical, in gestures both concrete and symbolic, Pope Francis on Saturday sought to protect his persecuted flock by forging closer bonds between the Roman Catholic Church and the Muslim world, a mission that is a central theme of his papacy and of his historic trip to Iraq.
By meeting with Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani in the holy city of Najaf, Francis threaded a political needle, seeking an alliance with an extraordinarily influential Shiite cleric who, unlike his Iranian counterparts, believes that religion should not govern the state.
In Ur, his speech, within view of a 4,000-year-old mud brick ziggurat with a temple dedicated to a moon god, added biblical and emotional resonance to the day.
The meetings, the church’s top officials said, were two parts of the same piece.
“Of course they go together,” Pietro Parolin, the Vatican’s secretary of state, and second highest-ranking official after the pope, said in a brief interview.
“There is a direct link with what is happening here,” he said, gesturing at the stage in Ur, “and the meeting with al-Sistani.”
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/06/worl ... iversified
The meeting with Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani came as Francis sought to protect his persecuted flock in Iraq by forging closer bonds between the Roman Catholic Church and the Muslim world.
Watch video at:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/06/worl ... iversified
UR, Iraq — First Pope Francis showed up at the modest residence of Iraq’s most reclusive, and powerful, Shiite religious cleric for a delicate and painstakingly negotiated summit. Hours later, he presided over a stage crowded with religious leaders on the windswept Plain of Ur, a vast and, now arid, expanse where the faithful believe God revealed himself to the Prophet Abraham, the patriarch of the Jewish, Christian and Muslim faiths.
In settings both intimate and theatrical, in gestures both concrete and symbolic, Pope Francis on Saturday sought to protect his persecuted flock by forging closer bonds between the Roman Catholic Church and the Muslim world, a mission that is a central theme of his papacy and of his historic trip to Iraq.
By meeting with Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani in the holy city of Najaf, Francis threaded a political needle, seeking an alliance with an extraordinarily influential Shiite cleric who, unlike his Iranian counterparts, believes that religion should not govern the state.
In Ur, his speech, within view of a 4,000-year-old mud brick ziggurat with a temple dedicated to a moon god, added biblical and emotional resonance to the day.
The meetings, the church’s top officials said, were two parts of the same piece.
“Of course they go together,” Pietro Parolin, the Vatican’s secretary of state, and second highest-ranking official after the pope, said in a brief interview.
“There is a direct link with what is happening here,” he said, gesturing at the stage in Ur, “and the meeting with al-Sistani.”
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/06/worl ... iversified
Can the Meritocracy Find God?
The secularization of America probably won’t reverse unless the intelligentsia gets religion.
As is now traditional on the Easter holiday, I spent last Sunday hunting for eggs with my children, attending Mass, hiding more eggs at an aunt’s house so the children could hunt yet again, and reading elegiac essays about American Christianity’s decline.
This year the inspiration for the elegies was new data from Gallup showing that for the first time in its decades of polling, fewer than half of Americans claim membership in a church, synagogue or mosque. The fall has been swift: From 70 percent in 1999 to 47 percent in 2020. And lately the trend has inspired fewer Voltairean hosannas and more anxiety about a future where the impulses of religion are poured into politics instead.
When the last round of grim data on church affiliation came out in 2019, I played the contrarian and argued that the decline may be somewhat overstated, that it’s sharpest among lukewarm believers and very-occasional churchgoers, and that the core of religious practice in the United States looks somewhat more resilient than the dire headline numbers might suggest.
For this column, though, I’ll emphasize the negative: Even if there is a resilience in American religion — especially in evangelical Christianity, still the most numerically robust form of faith — it doesn’t alter institutional faith’s general weakness, its limited influence, its subordinate position to other personal affiliations, from partisanship to ethnic identity to sports or superhero fandom.
A key piece of this weakness is religion’s extreme marginalization with the American intelligentsia — meaning not just would-be intellectuals but the wider elite-university-educated population, the meritocrats or “knowledge workers,” the “professional-managerial class.”
Most of these people — my people, by tribe and education — would be unlikely models of holiness in any dispensation, given their ambitions and their worldliness. But Jesus endorsed the wisdom of serpents as well as the innocence of doves, and religious communities no less than secular ones rely on talent and ambition. So the deep secularization of the meritocracy means that people who would once have become priests and ministers and rabbis become psychologists or social workers or professors, people who might once have run missions go to work for NGOs instead, and guilt-ridden moguls who might once have funded religious charities salve their consciences by starting secular foundations.
As a Christian inhabitant of this world, I often try to imagine what it would take for the meritocracy to get religion. There are certain ways in which its conversion doesn’t seem unimaginable. A lot of progressive ideas about social justice still make more sense as part of a biblical framework, which among other things might temper the movement’s prosecutorial style with forgiveness and with hope. Meanwhile on the meritocracy’s rightward wing — meaning not-so-woke liberals and Silicon Valley libertarians — you can see people who might have been new atheists 15 years ago taking a somewhat more sympathetic look at the older religions, out of fear of the vacuum their decline has left.
Frankly I would welcome conversions of both types: In future clashes between East Coast progressives and West Coast techno-libertarians, let them clash as brothers and sisters in Christ.
But the obstacles are considerable. One problem is that whatever its internal divisions, the American educated class is deeply committed to a moral vision that regards emancipated, self-directed choice as essential to human freedom and the good life. The tension between this worldview and the thou-shalt-not, death-of-self commandments of biblical religion can be bridged only with difficulty — especially because the American emphasis on authenticity makes it hard for people to simply live with certain hypocrisies and self-contradictions, or embrace a church that judges their self-affirming choices on any level, however distant or abstract.
Then, too, the manifest failure of many churches to live up to their own commandments, the pulse of scandal in religious life, makes their claim to offer a higher, harder wisdom seem self-discrediting.
A second obstacle is the meritocracy’s anti-supernaturalism: The average Ivy League professor, management consultant or Google engineer is not necessarily a strict materialist, but they have all been trained in a kind of scientism, which regards strong religious belief as fundamentally anti-rational, miracles as superstition, the idea of a personal God as so much wishful thinking.
Thus when spiritual ideas creep back into elite culture, it’s often in the form of “wellness” or self-help disciplines, or in enthusiasms like astrology, where there’s always a certain deniability about whether you’re really invoking a spiritual reality, really committing to metaphysical belief.
My sense is that these two obstacles effectively work together to block people from religious faith. If someone has an experience that calls their unbelief into question, their association of traditional religion with sexual prohibitions or bigotry or scandal is often enough to keep them from being drawn by that experience to a church or synagogue.
Alternatively, if they feel drawn by a desire for community or moral formation to experiment with churchgoing — maybe in a community that’s liberal or “seeker-sensitive," rather than reactionary or Republican — then their materialist bias makes it hard for them to persevere, to get up early to perform rituals or recite creeds whose claims they can’t actually believe.
I don’t know exactly how this blocking pattern might be broken. But I will say that the second obstacle seems by far the weaker one. That is, I think I understand pretty well why my secular neighbors doubt the godliness of churches that seem to treat gay people or women unfairly or that appear to be led by fools and hypocrites. But I am more puzzled by secular-minded people who think the rationality of religion has, under modern conditions, somehow been disproved.
Yes, science has undercut some religious ideas once held with certainty. But our supposedly “disenchanted” world remains the kind of world that inspired religious belief in the first place: a miraculously ordered and lawbound system that generates conscious beings who can mysteriously unlock its secrets, who display godlike powers in miniature and also a strong demonic streak, and whose lives are constantly buffeted by hard-to-explain encounters and intimations of transcendence. To be dropped into such a world and not be persistently open to religious possibilities seems much more like prejudice than rationality.
And my anthropological understanding of my secular neighbors particularly fails when it comes to the indifference with which some of them respond to religious possibilities, or for that matter to mystical experiences they themselves have had.
Like Pascal contemplating his wager, it always seems to me that if you concede that religious questions are plausible you should concede that they are urgent, or that if you feel the supernatural brush you, your spiritual curiosity should be radically enhanced.
But clearly many highly intelligent people disagree. Which perhaps makes it a mistake to focus too much on overt obstacles to upper-class belief. They could be partially removed, rolled back a little way, and for a revival you would still need the impulse, the push, that makes people seek and knock and ask.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/10/opin ... 778d3e6de3
The secularization of America probably won’t reverse unless the intelligentsia gets religion.
As is now traditional on the Easter holiday, I spent last Sunday hunting for eggs with my children, attending Mass, hiding more eggs at an aunt’s house so the children could hunt yet again, and reading elegiac essays about American Christianity’s decline.
This year the inspiration for the elegies was new data from Gallup showing that for the first time in its decades of polling, fewer than half of Americans claim membership in a church, synagogue or mosque. The fall has been swift: From 70 percent in 1999 to 47 percent in 2020. And lately the trend has inspired fewer Voltairean hosannas and more anxiety about a future where the impulses of religion are poured into politics instead.
When the last round of grim data on church affiliation came out in 2019, I played the contrarian and argued that the decline may be somewhat overstated, that it’s sharpest among lukewarm believers and very-occasional churchgoers, and that the core of religious practice in the United States looks somewhat more resilient than the dire headline numbers might suggest.
For this column, though, I’ll emphasize the negative: Even if there is a resilience in American religion — especially in evangelical Christianity, still the most numerically robust form of faith — it doesn’t alter institutional faith’s general weakness, its limited influence, its subordinate position to other personal affiliations, from partisanship to ethnic identity to sports or superhero fandom.
A key piece of this weakness is religion’s extreme marginalization with the American intelligentsia — meaning not just would-be intellectuals but the wider elite-university-educated population, the meritocrats or “knowledge workers,” the “professional-managerial class.”
Most of these people — my people, by tribe and education — would be unlikely models of holiness in any dispensation, given their ambitions and their worldliness. But Jesus endorsed the wisdom of serpents as well as the innocence of doves, and religious communities no less than secular ones rely on talent and ambition. So the deep secularization of the meritocracy means that people who would once have become priests and ministers and rabbis become psychologists or social workers or professors, people who might once have run missions go to work for NGOs instead, and guilt-ridden moguls who might once have funded religious charities salve their consciences by starting secular foundations.
As a Christian inhabitant of this world, I often try to imagine what it would take for the meritocracy to get religion. There are certain ways in which its conversion doesn’t seem unimaginable. A lot of progressive ideas about social justice still make more sense as part of a biblical framework, which among other things might temper the movement’s prosecutorial style with forgiveness and with hope. Meanwhile on the meritocracy’s rightward wing — meaning not-so-woke liberals and Silicon Valley libertarians — you can see people who might have been new atheists 15 years ago taking a somewhat more sympathetic look at the older religions, out of fear of the vacuum their decline has left.
Frankly I would welcome conversions of both types: In future clashes between East Coast progressives and West Coast techno-libertarians, let them clash as brothers and sisters in Christ.
But the obstacles are considerable. One problem is that whatever its internal divisions, the American educated class is deeply committed to a moral vision that regards emancipated, self-directed choice as essential to human freedom and the good life. The tension between this worldview and the thou-shalt-not, death-of-self commandments of biblical religion can be bridged only with difficulty — especially because the American emphasis on authenticity makes it hard for people to simply live with certain hypocrisies and self-contradictions, or embrace a church that judges their self-affirming choices on any level, however distant or abstract.
Then, too, the manifest failure of many churches to live up to their own commandments, the pulse of scandal in religious life, makes their claim to offer a higher, harder wisdom seem self-discrediting.
A second obstacle is the meritocracy’s anti-supernaturalism: The average Ivy League professor, management consultant or Google engineer is not necessarily a strict materialist, but they have all been trained in a kind of scientism, which regards strong religious belief as fundamentally anti-rational, miracles as superstition, the idea of a personal God as so much wishful thinking.
Thus when spiritual ideas creep back into elite culture, it’s often in the form of “wellness” or self-help disciplines, or in enthusiasms like astrology, where there’s always a certain deniability about whether you’re really invoking a spiritual reality, really committing to metaphysical belief.
My sense is that these two obstacles effectively work together to block people from religious faith. If someone has an experience that calls their unbelief into question, their association of traditional religion with sexual prohibitions or bigotry or scandal is often enough to keep them from being drawn by that experience to a church or synagogue.
Alternatively, if they feel drawn by a desire for community or moral formation to experiment with churchgoing — maybe in a community that’s liberal or “seeker-sensitive," rather than reactionary or Republican — then their materialist bias makes it hard for them to persevere, to get up early to perform rituals or recite creeds whose claims they can’t actually believe.
I don’t know exactly how this blocking pattern might be broken. But I will say that the second obstacle seems by far the weaker one. That is, I think I understand pretty well why my secular neighbors doubt the godliness of churches that seem to treat gay people or women unfairly or that appear to be led by fools and hypocrites. But I am more puzzled by secular-minded people who think the rationality of religion has, under modern conditions, somehow been disproved.
Yes, science has undercut some religious ideas once held with certainty. But our supposedly “disenchanted” world remains the kind of world that inspired religious belief in the first place: a miraculously ordered and lawbound system that generates conscious beings who can mysteriously unlock its secrets, who display godlike powers in miniature and also a strong demonic streak, and whose lives are constantly buffeted by hard-to-explain encounters and intimations of transcendence. To be dropped into such a world and not be persistently open to religious possibilities seems much more like prejudice than rationality.
And my anthropological understanding of my secular neighbors particularly fails when it comes to the indifference with which some of them respond to religious possibilities, or for that matter to mystical experiences they themselves have had.
Like Pascal contemplating his wager, it always seems to me that if you concede that religious questions are plausible you should concede that they are urgent, or that if you feel the supernatural brush you, your spiritual curiosity should be radically enhanced.
But clearly many highly intelligent people disagree. Which perhaps makes it a mistake to focus too much on overt obstacles to upper-class belief. They could be partially removed, rolled back a little way, and for a revival you would still need the impulse, the push, that makes people seek and knock and ask.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/10/opin ... 778d3e6de3
Muslims and Christians should learn from their shared history
For the last couple of years, billions of Muslims and Christians have been enjoying religious holidays that fall at roughly the same time of year. The end of Easter has coincided with the beginning of Ramadan, and this should not surprise us at all since both great religions emerged from the same historic region and share a common Abrahamic history and culture. However, a cursory glance at social media reveals that few Muslims and Christians realize they are celebrating their holy days concurrently. It is a shame that, instead of seeking commonalities, the relationship between Christians and Muslims has often been characterized by mistrust and misunderstanding.
As the month-long Ramadan festivities near their midpoint, we ask whether it is time for a new era of peaceful coexistence and understanding between all the Abrahamic faith communities. If the answer is “yes,” the path forward should begin by gaining a better appreciation of our shared Abrahamic history and culture. Our stories are intertwined and at crucial moments we are indebted to one another for existing as faith groups to this day.
Many stories exist in Muslim history that recall the contributions of Christians during several consequential periods. When still a boy accompanying his merchant uncle in southern Syria, Prophet Muhammad met a charismatic Christian monk who is known to Muslims today as Bahira. This encounter may have instilled in him a lasting respect for the Christian faith; something that was deepened a few decades later, when the Prophet’s early followers faced vicious persecution on the Arabian Peninsula. It was a Christian king in Ethiopia who offered shelter to Muslims whose faith he didn’t share but whose shared humanity he recognized and cherished.
These are among the reasons why the Qur’an often references Christians with deep respect and refers to the Bible as holy. Catholics, for instance, will find the entire 19th chapter of the Qur’an devoted to Mary, mother of Jesus. She is referred to as “above all women of all nations of the worlds.” For centuries, Muslim artists and poets have been awestruck by Mary’s piety and devotion, and have expressed their admiration in visuals arts, paintings, odes and miniature drawings. Whole sections of the Qur’an sing the praises of the Hebrew prophets Isaac, Jacob, Moses, Aaron, Enoch, Adam and Noah.
Our stories are intertwined and at crucial moments we are indebted to one another for existing as faith groups to this day.
Saud Al-Sarhan and Johnnie Moore
The model for Muslims is the Prophet Muhammad and he invited his own followers to lead humble and simple lives in emulation of Jesus, celebrating him as a miracle-working prophet imbued with a holy spirit. The Qur’an explicitly prohibits attacking Christian places of worship.
As the community of early Muslims expanded, the spirit of coexistence was maintained by successive leaders. The famous Umar’s Assurance letter, written by the Second Caliph Umar ibn Al-Khattab to the Christians of Jerusalem when Muslims entered the city in 638 states: “He (Umar) has given them (the people of Jerusalem) an assurance of safety for themselves, for their property, their churches, their crosses, the sick and healthy of the city and for all the rituals which belong to their religion. Their churches will not be inhabited by Muslims and will not be destroyed. Neither they, nor the land on which they stand, nor their cross, nor their property will be damaged. They will not be forcibly converted.”
Beyond respecting each other’s right to exist, one of the most glorious moments of Near Eastern history was the time when Christians, Muslims and Jews lived side-by-side and came together for the common good. This came about in 10th-century Baghdad, when the city was the capital of a state ruled by the enlightened Abbasid dynasty. It became the intellectual and scientific center of the world because members of the three Abrahamic faiths cast bigotries aside and came together in a joint quest for knowledge and scientific progress. Clerics, scholars, doctors and translators from all faiths innovated in mathematics, science and medicine and developed philosophical traditions that still live with us today.
What made this possible was not Muslims, Christians and Jews believing in the same teachings. Even at the time when the Abrahamic faiths peacefully coexisted, imams, priests and rabbis tended to be defensive about their theology. It was, after all, the Middle Ages. Yet, what those societies exhibited that other societies at the time did not was a liberal attitude toward intellectual curiosity, public conversation and open and public theological and philosophical dialogue and even debate. This commingling of religious communities often led to innovations that strengthened each faith community without prejudicing the safety and security of the others. This was possible because the adherents of the Abrahamic faiths were respectful and understanding of each other; something that has been sadly missed in subsequent eras. History may repeat itself once again, but it will require a rediscovery of that enlightened spirit.
The history of our religious communities has sometimes been marked by dark periods of enmity, hostility, violence and even war. It must be stressed though: This is not the only story. Our message to the children of Abraham at this crucial time is that there are much better and far more interesting stories to tell, which are drawn from the far longer and more illustrious periods of our shared history. These stories are blessings that we can enjoy and learn from together.
Yes, this Ramadan — as a Muslim and as a Christian — we choose to believe in the best of humanity and to uphold the peaceful teachings of our separate but intricately linked faiths. We vehemently reject those who would use religion to divide us. In the words of Jesus: “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.”
https://www.arabnews.com/node/1846736
For the last couple of years, billions of Muslims and Christians have been enjoying religious holidays that fall at roughly the same time of year. The end of Easter has coincided with the beginning of Ramadan, and this should not surprise us at all since both great religions emerged from the same historic region and share a common Abrahamic history and culture. However, a cursory glance at social media reveals that few Muslims and Christians realize they are celebrating their holy days concurrently. It is a shame that, instead of seeking commonalities, the relationship between Christians and Muslims has often been characterized by mistrust and misunderstanding.
As the month-long Ramadan festivities near their midpoint, we ask whether it is time for a new era of peaceful coexistence and understanding between all the Abrahamic faith communities. If the answer is “yes,” the path forward should begin by gaining a better appreciation of our shared Abrahamic history and culture. Our stories are intertwined and at crucial moments we are indebted to one another for existing as faith groups to this day.
Many stories exist in Muslim history that recall the contributions of Christians during several consequential periods. When still a boy accompanying his merchant uncle in southern Syria, Prophet Muhammad met a charismatic Christian monk who is known to Muslims today as Bahira. This encounter may have instilled in him a lasting respect for the Christian faith; something that was deepened a few decades later, when the Prophet’s early followers faced vicious persecution on the Arabian Peninsula. It was a Christian king in Ethiopia who offered shelter to Muslims whose faith he didn’t share but whose shared humanity he recognized and cherished.
These are among the reasons why the Qur’an often references Christians with deep respect and refers to the Bible as holy. Catholics, for instance, will find the entire 19th chapter of the Qur’an devoted to Mary, mother of Jesus. She is referred to as “above all women of all nations of the worlds.” For centuries, Muslim artists and poets have been awestruck by Mary’s piety and devotion, and have expressed their admiration in visuals arts, paintings, odes and miniature drawings. Whole sections of the Qur’an sing the praises of the Hebrew prophets Isaac, Jacob, Moses, Aaron, Enoch, Adam and Noah.
Our stories are intertwined and at crucial moments we are indebted to one another for existing as faith groups to this day.
Saud Al-Sarhan and Johnnie Moore
The model for Muslims is the Prophet Muhammad and he invited his own followers to lead humble and simple lives in emulation of Jesus, celebrating him as a miracle-working prophet imbued with a holy spirit. The Qur’an explicitly prohibits attacking Christian places of worship.
As the community of early Muslims expanded, the spirit of coexistence was maintained by successive leaders. The famous Umar’s Assurance letter, written by the Second Caliph Umar ibn Al-Khattab to the Christians of Jerusalem when Muslims entered the city in 638 states: “He (Umar) has given them (the people of Jerusalem) an assurance of safety for themselves, for their property, their churches, their crosses, the sick and healthy of the city and for all the rituals which belong to their religion. Their churches will not be inhabited by Muslims and will not be destroyed. Neither they, nor the land on which they stand, nor their cross, nor their property will be damaged. They will not be forcibly converted.”
Beyond respecting each other’s right to exist, one of the most glorious moments of Near Eastern history was the time when Christians, Muslims and Jews lived side-by-side and came together for the common good. This came about in 10th-century Baghdad, when the city was the capital of a state ruled by the enlightened Abbasid dynasty. It became the intellectual and scientific center of the world because members of the three Abrahamic faiths cast bigotries aside and came together in a joint quest for knowledge and scientific progress. Clerics, scholars, doctors and translators from all faiths innovated in mathematics, science and medicine and developed philosophical traditions that still live with us today.
What made this possible was not Muslims, Christians and Jews believing in the same teachings. Even at the time when the Abrahamic faiths peacefully coexisted, imams, priests and rabbis tended to be defensive about their theology. It was, after all, the Middle Ages. Yet, what those societies exhibited that other societies at the time did not was a liberal attitude toward intellectual curiosity, public conversation and open and public theological and philosophical dialogue and even debate. This commingling of religious communities often led to innovations that strengthened each faith community without prejudicing the safety and security of the others. This was possible because the adherents of the Abrahamic faiths were respectful and understanding of each other; something that has been sadly missed in subsequent eras. History may repeat itself once again, but it will require a rediscovery of that enlightened spirit.
The history of our religious communities has sometimes been marked by dark periods of enmity, hostility, violence and even war. It must be stressed though: This is not the only story. Our message to the children of Abraham at this crucial time is that there are much better and far more interesting stories to tell, which are drawn from the far longer and more illustrious periods of our shared history. These stories are blessings that we can enjoy and learn from together.
Yes, this Ramadan — as a Muslim and as a Christian — we choose to believe in the best of humanity and to uphold the peaceful teachings of our separate but intricately linked faiths. We vehemently reject those who would use religion to divide us. In the words of Jesus: “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.”
https://www.arabnews.com/node/1846736
Unconditional Love - A Jewish, Christian & Muslim Perspective (The Interfaith Amigos)
Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZk-FFtbnBw
Unconditional Love - A Jewish, Christian And Muslim Perspective
The Interfaith Amigos
In this 5-minute video, Rabbi Ted Falcon, Pastor Don Mackenzie and Imam Jamal Rahman - The Interfaith Amigos - talk about how their respective traditions address the concept of unconditional love.
The Interfaith Amigos started working together after 9/11. Since then, they have brought their unique blend of spiritual wisdom and humor to audiences all over the world. Their work is dedicated to supporting more effective interfaith dialogue that can bring greater collaboration on the major social and economic issues of our time.
With their willingness to openly address the usual taboos of interfaith dialogue — the “awkward” parts of each tradition — The Interfaith Amigos create a more authentic conversation between themselves and with their audiences, giving people an opportunity to step more fully into the rich promise of the interfaith experience.
Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZk-FFtbnBw
Unconditional Love - A Jewish, Christian And Muslim Perspective
The Interfaith Amigos
In this 5-minute video, Rabbi Ted Falcon, Pastor Don Mackenzie and Imam Jamal Rahman - The Interfaith Amigos - talk about how their respective traditions address the concept of unconditional love.
The Interfaith Amigos started working together after 9/11. Since then, they have brought their unique blend of spiritual wisdom and humor to audiences all over the world. Their work is dedicated to supporting more effective interfaith dialogue that can bring greater collaboration on the major social and economic issues of our time.
With their willingness to openly address the usual taboos of interfaith dialogue — the “awkward” parts of each tradition — The Interfaith Amigos create a more authentic conversation between themselves and with their audiences, giving people an opportunity to step more fully into the rich promise of the interfaith experience.
'We are all the same' - Barcelona church opens doors to Ramadan dinners
Luis Felipe Castilleja and Jordi Rubio
Reuters Mon, May 3, 2021, 4:29 AM
BARCELONA (Reuters) - With COVID-19 restrictions preventing Barcelona's Islamic population from celebrating Ramadan at the usual indoor venues, a Catholic church has offered up its open-air cloisters for Muslims to eat and pray together.
Every evening between 50 and 60 Muslims, many of them homeless, stream into the centuries-old stone passages of the Santa Anna church, where volunteers offer a hearty meal of home-cooked food.
"We are all the same... If you are Catholic or of another religion and I am Muslim, that's fine," said Hafid Oubrahim, a 27-year old Moroccan of Berber descent who attends the dinners.
"We are all like brothers and we must help each other too."
During the month of Ramadan, observant Muslims do not eat between sunrise and sundown, breaking their fast only after nightfall with a meal known as Iftar.
Faouzia Chati, president of the Catalan Association of Moroccan Women, used to organise Iftar gatherings in the city, but limits on indoor dining forced her to seek an alternative space with good ventilation and room for distancing.
She found a receptive ear in Father Peio Sanchez, Santa Anna's rector, who sees the meeting of different faiths as emblematic of civic coexistence.
"People are very happy that Muslims can do Iftar in a Catholic church, because religions serve to unite us, not to separate us," said Chati.
Sanchez looked on as a man intoned the Muslim evening call to prayer beneath the orange trees of the church's central courtyard, illuminated by the flames of gas heaters.
"Even with different cultures, different languages, different religions, we are more capable of sitting down and talking than some politicians," said the rector.
(Writing by Nathan Allen in Madrid; Editing by Andrei Khalip and Gareth Jones)
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/sa ... 951832.htm
Luis Felipe Castilleja and Jordi Rubio
Reuters Mon, May 3, 2021, 4:29 AM
BARCELONA (Reuters) - With COVID-19 restrictions preventing Barcelona's Islamic population from celebrating Ramadan at the usual indoor venues, a Catholic church has offered up its open-air cloisters for Muslims to eat and pray together.
Every evening between 50 and 60 Muslims, many of them homeless, stream into the centuries-old stone passages of the Santa Anna church, where volunteers offer a hearty meal of home-cooked food.
"We are all the same... If you are Catholic or of another religion and I am Muslim, that's fine," said Hafid Oubrahim, a 27-year old Moroccan of Berber descent who attends the dinners.
"We are all like brothers and we must help each other too."
During the month of Ramadan, observant Muslims do not eat between sunrise and sundown, breaking their fast only after nightfall with a meal known as Iftar.
Faouzia Chati, president of the Catalan Association of Moroccan Women, used to organise Iftar gatherings in the city, but limits on indoor dining forced her to seek an alternative space with good ventilation and room for distancing.
She found a receptive ear in Father Peio Sanchez, Santa Anna's rector, who sees the meeting of different faiths as emblematic of civic coexistence.
"People are very happy that Muslims can do Iftar in a Catholic church, because religions serve to unite us, not to separate us," said Chati.
Sanchez looked on as a man intoned the Muslim evening call to prayer beneath the orange trees of the church's central courtyard, illuminated by the flames of gas heaters.
"Even with different cultures, different languages, different religions, we are more capable of sitting down and talking than some politicians," said the rector.
(Writing by Nathan Allen in Madrid; Editing by Andrei Khalip and Gareth Jones)
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/sa ... 951832.htm
Does prayer actually work?
https://www.discover.hayhouse.com/vanza ... kxOTkyMAS2
Beloved Friend,
“Prayer doesn’t work.” “I don’t know how to pray.” “I’m afraid to pray the wrong way.” I’ve heard these prayer disclaimers time and time again over the years.
In a sense, it’s true that prayer doesn’t work.
What does work is your relationship with whomever you are praying to and whatever you are praying about. What works is your intention. What works is your passion. What works is your understanding of and trust in the principles of prayer.
Here’s what I’ve come to understand: prayer absolutely works—all the time. Every thought you think is a prayer. Every word you speak is a prayer. And, because you are connected to the Source and Creator of life at all times, everything you do is a prayer.
Unfortunately, so many of us pray while holding the belief that we don’t know how to pray. In the worst-case scenarios, we pray without belief, trust, or faith. And then we worry about the things we’ve prayed about.
If these experiences sound familiar, this may explain why prayer hasn’t worked for you…or why you doubt the power of prayer.
But prayer is wonderfully powerful.
In my darkest moments, prayer was the tool I used to get back into the light. In my deepest heartache, prayer was the ladder I used to climb out of the pain. I have mastered the art, science, and joy of prayer. And now I want to share with you what I know about how to develop an effective prayer practice so that you will begin to see your prayer requests manifest with grace and ease.
So I invite you to join me for a powerful LIVE 7-Day Prayer Challenge that I’m doing in collaboration with Hay House, which runs from June 13-19.
We are going to pray together, learn how to do it more effectively, and then practice what we have learned. My prayer is that you can join me LIVE online each day. If you cannot join live, you’ll get the recordings that you can keep forever—all for only $27.
Get My Ticket ►
https://www.hayhouseu.com/checkout/cart ... ntent=9233
Learn More ►
https://www.discover.hayhouse.com/vanza ... kxOTkyMAS2
In this virtual LIVE prayer challenge, it is my intention that you will learn how to:
Appreciate the science and true nature of prayer
Develop a profound relationship with the Source (or God, the Divine, the Creator, etc.) that is the focus of your prayers
Understand the principles of Affirmative Prayer so that you can create an intimate prayer life
Activate the power of Affirmative Prayers that are grounded in faith and trust
Recognize—and overcome—the barriers to effective prayer that lead people to believe prayer doesn’t work
I want you to learn as you go, so we will start each day of the challenge at 5:00 AM PT / 8:00 AM ET with a powerful 10-minute guided affirmative prayer practice. Then, we will get down to the business of exploring, examining, and practicing the scientific principles of Affirmative Prayer. And at the end of each session, I’ll give you a practice assignment that you can do overnight to help you go even deeper.
If you don’t pray, want to learn how to pray, or want to deepen your prayer practice, I look forward to being with you for this wonderful week of prayer and connecting with the Divine.
Join Now ►
In Joy and with Love,
Iyanla
https://www.discover.hayhouse.com/vanza ... kxOTkyMAS2
Beloved Friend,
“Prayer doesn’t work.” “I don’t know how to pray.” “I’m afraid to pray the wrong way.” I’ve heard these prayer disclaimers time and time again over the years.
In a sense, it’s true that prayer doesn’t work.
What does work is your relationship with whomever you are praying to and whatever you are praying about. What works is your intention. What works is your passion. What works is your understanding of and trust in the principles of prayer.
Here’s what I’ve come to understand: prayer absolutely works—all the time. Every thought you think is a prayer. Every word you speak is a prayer. And, because you are connected to the Source and Creator of life at all times, everything you do is a prayer.
Unfortunately, so many of us pray while holding the belief that we don’t know how to pray. In the worst-case scenarios, we pray without belief, trust, or faith. And then we worry about the things we’ve prayed about.
If these experiences sound familiar, this may explain why prayer hasn’t worked for you…or why you doubt the power of prayer.
But prayer is wonderfully powerful.
In my darkest moments, prayer was the tool I used to get back into the light. In my deepest heartache, prayer was the ladder I used to climb out of the pain. I have mastered the art, science, and joy of prayer. And now I want to share with you what I know about how to develop an effective prayer practice so that you will begin to see your prayer requests manifest with grace and ease.
So I invite you to join me for a powerful LIVE 7-Day Prayer Challenge that I’m doing in collaboration with Hay House, which runs from June 13-19.
We are going to pray together, learn how to do it more effectively, and then practice what we have learned. My prayer is that you can join me LIVE online each day. If you cannot join live, you’ll get the recordings that you can keep forever—all for only $27.
Get My Ticket ►
https://www.hayhouseu.com/checkout/cart ... ntent=9233
Learn More ►
https://www.discover.hayhouse.com/vanza ... kxOTkyMAS2
In this virtual LIVE prayer challenge, it is my intention that you will learn how to:
Appreciate the science and true nature of prayer
Develop a profound relationship with the Source (or God, the Divine, the Creator, etc.) that is the focus of your prayers
Understand the principles of Affirmative Prayer so that you can create an intimate prayer life
Activate the power of Affirmative Prayers that are grounded in faith and trust
Recognize—and overcome—the barriers to effective prayer that lead people to believe prayer doesn’t work
I want you to learn as you go, so we will start each day of the challenge at 5:00 AM PT / 8:00 AM ET with a powerful 10-minute guided affirmative prayer practice. Then, we will get down to the business of exploring, examining, and practicing the scientific principles of Affirmative Prayer. And at the end of each session, I’ll give you a practice assignment that you can do overnight to help you go even deeper.
If you don’t pray, want to learn how to pray, or want to deepen your prayer practice, I look forward to being with you for this wonderful week of prayer and connecting with the Divine.
Join Now ►
In Joy and with Love,
Iyanla
Celebration of the 20 years of the Law on religious freedom in Portugal
On 22nd June 2021, Portugal celebrated the twentieth anniversary of the law on religious freedom in Portugal. The Religious Freedom and Inter-religious dialogue National day is celebrated on the date when the law on religious freedom was published.
Portuguese
The celebration of such an important date was marked by a conference at the Gulbenkian, that brought together experts who spoke about the importance and the contributions of this law to the Portuguese society. This event also gathered the various members of the religious freedom commission and the representatives of the various religious denominations, namely those that constitute the Interreligious Dialogue Working Group of the High Commission for Migration (GTDIR ACM) – a public institution that works for the integration of immigrants in the national territory.
It may be stated that in Portugal, there is a clear sign of interest in the religious phenomenon, recognizing the important role that it can play in terms of social cohesion. A prime example of this reality is the law on religious freedom of 2001, considered to be a progressive law by many national and international specialists, which gives a scope of legality, freedom and dignity to the religious phenomenon in its multiple forms. It is under this law that religious communities are granted fundamental rights for the believers, that impact their lives. This law ensures that people can be free to choose or change their faith, that they can provide religious education to the younger generations of their communities, receive of disseminate religious information, meet to partake in ceremonies and to practice their faith. The law on religious freedom protects not only individuals, but also the religious organizations around which communities of believers are organised.
This law has also established the Religious Freedom Commission, which has a fundamental role in all matters related to the application of this Law, and to which the Shia Ismaili Muslim community is a part of. Other relevant examples of the state's interest in the religious phenomenon are namely the creation of the National Day of Religious Freedom and Interreligious Dialogue (on 22nd June) and the Interreligious Dialogue Working Group, in which the Ismaili community also participates. The Interreligious Dialogue Working Group, constituted in 2015 aims at promoting greater awareness of the various religious communities that reside in Portugal and to promote the acknowledgement and appreciation of the cultural and religious diversity in the Portuguese society.
Mawlana Hazar Imam has said the following about the law for religious freedom in Portugal, at the inauguration of the Ismaili Centre in Lisbon, on the 11th July 1998:
“In this connection, I would like to compliment the Government of Portugal on the Law of Religious Freedom currently being discussed in the country. It is a pioneering and forward-looking undertaking that will encourage a new era of religious freedom, respect, and equality for over 60 different religious communities in the country, while maintaining the historic role of the Catholic Church. The draft Law on Religious Freedom can serve as a model for the rest of the European Community, where populations have grown more ethnically and religiously diverse in the past three to four decades.
In a more immediate sense, I believe that the proposed law will provide a basis for a greater cooperation between faith communities in Portugal along the lines envisaged in The World Bank's Interfaith Dialogue. If experience elsewhere is a guide, we can expect the release of much energy and creativity, and the Government and people of Portugal should be assured that the Ismaili Centre of Lisbon, and all those it represents – the Ismaili community world-wide, and the agencies of the Aga Khan Development Network – will devote their energies to making Portugal's leadership in this creative and uniquely exciting initiative the success it must be. Social harmony coupled with the freedom and respect of religious expression is a prerequisite for all human progress”.
Still in celebration of this historic date the High Commission for Migration published a document with the testimonies of the various religious denominations that constitute the Inter-religious Dialogue Working Group, regarding the inter-religious dialogue in Portugal for the last 20 years that can be read here https://www.acm.gov.pt/documents/10181/ ... a6a37eb839.
Photos and more...
https://the.ismaili/portugal/celebratio ... m-portugal
On 22nd June 2021, Portugal celebrated the twentieth anniversary of the law on religious freedom in Portugal. The Religious Freedom and Inter-religious dialogue National day is celebrated on the date when the law on religious freedom was published.
Portuguese
The celebration of such an important date was marked by a conference at the Gulbenkian, that brought together experts who spoke about the importance and the contributions of this law to the Portuguese society. This event also gathered the various members of the religious freedom commission and the representatives of the various religious denominations, namely those that constitute the Interreligious Dialogue Working Group of the High Commission for Migration (GTDIR ACM) – a public institution that works for the integration of immigrants in the national territory.
It may be stated that in Portugal, there is a clear sign of interest in the religious phenomenon, recognizing the important role that it can play in terms of social cohesion. A prime example of this reality is the law on religious freedom of 2001, considered to be a progressive law by many national and international specialists, which gives a scope of legality, freedom and dignity to the religious phenomenon in its multiple forms. It is under this law that religious communities are granted fundamental rights for the believers, that impact their lives. This law ensures that people can be free to choose or change their faith, that they can provide religious education to the younger generations of their communities, receive of disseminate religious information, meet to partake in ceremonies and to practice their faith. The law on religious freedom protects not only individuals, but also the religious organizations around which communities of believers are organised.
This law has also established the Religious Freedom Commission, which has a fundamental role in all matters related to the application of this Law, and to which the Shia Ismaili Muslim community is a part of. Other relevant examples of the state's interest in the religious phenomenon are namely the creation of the National Day of Religious Freedom and Interreligious Dialogue (on 22nd June) and the Interreligious Dialogue Working Group, in which the Ismaili community also participates. The Interreligious Dialogue Working Group, constituted in 2015 aims at promoting greater awareness of the various religious communities that reside in Portugal and to promote the acknowledgement and appreciation of the cultural and religious diversity in the Portuguese society.
Mawlana Hazar Imam has said the following about the law for religious freedom in Portugal, at the inauguration of the Ismaili Centre in Lisbon, on the 11th July 1998:
“In this connection, I would like to compliment the Government of Portugal on the Law of Religious Freedom currently being discussed in the country. It is a pioneering and forward-looking undertaking that will encourage a new era of religious freedom, respect, and equality for over 60 different religious communities in the country, while maintaining the historic role of the Catholic Church. The draft Law on Religious Freedom can serve as a model for the rest of the European Community, where populations have grown more ethnically and religiously diverse in the past three to four decades.
In a more immediate sense, I believe that the proposed law will provide a basis for a greater cooperation between faith communities in Portugal along the lines envisaged in The World Bank's Interfaith Dialogue. If experience elsewhere is a guide, we can expect the release of much energy and creativity, and the Government and people of Portugal should be assured that the Ismaili Centre of Lisbon, and all those it represents – the Ismaili community world-wide, and the agencies of the Aga Khan Development Network – will devote their energies to making Portugal's leadership in this creative and uniquely exciting initiative the success it must be. Social harmony coupled with the freedom and respect of religious expression is a prerequisite for all human progress”.
Still in celebration of this historic date the High Commission for Migration published a document with the testimonies of the various religious denominations that constitute the Inter-religious Dialogue Working Group, regarding the inter-religious dialogue in Portugal for the last 20 years that can be read here https://www.acm.gov.pt/documents/10181/ ... a6a37eb839.
Photos and more...
https://the.ismaili/portugal/celebratio ... m-portugal
Why We Need to Start Talking About God
This is a preview of the Tish Harrison Warren newsletter, which is reserved for Times subscribers. Sign up to get it in your inbox weekly.
Each Sunday in my Anglican church in Austin, Texas, the priest leading the service takes his or her place in front of the congregation and begins by saying the opening acclamation, usually, “Blessed be God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.”
What has surprised me since I first attended an Anglican service just over a decade ago is that we begin not with welcoming anyone in the pews but with a direct announcement about God.
It’s a little jarring, even now that I am a priest. We all made an effort to get to church. We woke up early on a weekend, brushed our teeth, wrestled kids into car seats, masked up and found a place to sit. But the service doesn’t start by acknowledging any of that. No thanking everyone for showing up. Not even a bland mention of the weather or how nice everyone looks this week. Instead, I stand up in front of everyone and proclaim the presence of an invisible God.
Part of why I find this moment strange is that I’m habituated by my daily life and our broader culture to focus on the “horizontal” or immanent, aspects of life — those things we can observe and measure without reference to God, mystery or transcendence. This can affect my spiritual life, flattening faith into solely the stuff of relationships, life hacks, sociology or politics.
But each week, as a church, the first words we say publicly directly address the “vertical,” transcendent dimension of life. We do not have just an urbane, abstracted conversation about religion, but we speak as if God’s presence is relevant — the orienting fact of our gathering.
Karl Barth, a 20th-century Swiss theologian, is credited with saying that Christians must live our lives with a Bible in one hand and a newspaper in the other. Barth, who was a leader of a group of Christians in Germany resisting Hitler, understood that faith is not a pious, protective bubble shielding us from the urgent needs of the world. It is the very impetus that leads us into active engagement with society. People of faith must immerse ourselves in messy questions of how to live faithfully in a particular moment with particular headlines calling for particular attention and particular responses.
While Christians and other religious people may wonder how broader culture affects our faith (or why we must hold a newspaper in one hand), others may wonder why faith is relevant to the contemporary world at all (or why we hold a Bible in the other). Membership in a house of worship has declined steadily in the United States over the past eight decades and, according to a Gallup poll, dropped below 50 percent this year.
So we must ask: Is faith worth discussing anymore? In the vast world of subjects that one could read about, from architecture to Zumba, why make space for a newsletter about faith and spiritual practice?
As a pastor, I see again and again that in defining moments of people’s lives — the birth of children, struggles in marriage, deep loss and disappointment, moral crossroads, facing death — they talk about God and the spiritual life. In these most tender moments, even those who aren’t sure what exactly they believe cannot avoid big questions of meaning: who we are, what we are here for, why we believe what we believe, why beauty and horror exist.
These questions bubble up in all of us, often unbidden. Even when we hum through a mundane week — not consciously thinking about God or life’s meaning or death — we are still motivated in our depths by ultimate questions and assumptions about what’s right and wrong, what’s true or false and what makes for a good life.
The opening acclamation in my church service each week acknowledges the elephant in the room. We begin by saying: We are here to talk to God and talk about things of God. To do so can be controversial, complex, painful, delicate and at times even a little embarrassing — all the reasons we avoid talking about religion at cocktail parties. But we still do it because the subject of God and, more broadly, of transcendent truth, lurks in every headline and in each moment of our ordinary lives.
This newsletter, like our opening acclamation, acknowledges the presence of God in the world, believing that God, faith and spirituality remain a relevant part of our public and private lives. In it, I will talk about the habits and practices that shape our lives, the beliefs that drive our imaginations, the commitments that guide our souls.
It won’t look the same every week: Though the Bible may remain the same, the newspaper changes each day. And different events and seasons in our lives and in society throw us back on old questions about truth, beauty and goodness in new ways. In a cultural moment when faith is often used as a bludgeon for our political and ideological enemies, we need space to talk about belief and practice with nuance, curiosity and reflection.
So here’s my opening acclamation. Let’s discuss our deepest questions, longings and loves and the rituals and habits that form who we are and the way we walk through the world, week in and week out.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/22/opin ... 778d3e6de3
This is a preview of the Tish Harrison Warren newsletter, which is reserved for Times subscribers. Sign up to get it in your inbox weekly.
Each Sunday in my Anglican church in Austin, Texas, the priest leading the service takes his or her place in front of the congregation and begins by saying the opening acclamation, usually, “Blessed be God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.”
What has surprised me since I first attended an Anglican service just over a decade ago is that we begin not with welcoming anyone in the pews but with a direct announcement about God.
It’s a little jarring, even now that I am a priest. We all made an effort to get to church. We woke up early on a weekend, brushed our teeth, wrestled kids into car seats, masked up and found a place to sit. But the service doesn’t start by acknowledging any of that. No thanking everyone for showing up. Not even a bland mention of the weather or how nice everyone looks this week. Instead, I stand up in front of everyone and proclaim the presence of an invisible God.
Part of why I find this moment strange is that I’m habituated by my daily life and our broader culture to focus on the “horizontal” or immanent, aspects of life — those things we can observe and measure without reference to God, mystery or transcendence. This can affect my spiritual life, flattening faith into solely the stuff of relationships, life hacks, sociology or politics.
But each week, as a church, the first words we say publicly directly address the “vertical,” transcendent dimension of life. We do not have just an urbane, abstracted conversation about religion, but we speak as if God’s presence is relevant — the orienting fact of our gathering.
Karl Barth, a 20th-century Swiss theologian, is credited with saying that Christians must live our lives with a Bible in one hand and a newspaper in the other. Barth, who was a leader of a group of Christians in Germany resisting Hitler, understood that faith is not a pious, protective bubble shielding us from the urgent needs of the world. It is the very impetus that leads us into active engagement with society. People of faith must immerse ourselves in messy questions of how to live faithfully in a particular moment with particular headlines calling for particular attention and particular responses.
While Christians and other religious people may wonder how broader culture affects our faith (or why we must hold a newspaper in one hand), others may wonder why faith is relevant to the contemporary world at all (or why we hold a Bible in the other). Membership in a house of worship has declined steadily in the United States over the past eight decades and, according to a Gallup poll, dropped below 50 percent this year.
So we must ask: Is faith worth discussing anymore? In the vast world of subjects that one could read about, from architecture to Zumba, why make space for a newsletter about faith and spiritual practice?
As a pastor, I see again and again that in defining moments of people’s lives — the birth of children, struggles in marriage, deep loss and disappointment, moral crossroads, facing death — they talk about God and the spiritual life. In these most tender moments, even those who aren’t sure what exactly they believe cannot avoid big questions of meaning: who we are, what we are here for, why we believe what we believe, why beauty and horror exist.
These questions bubble up in all of us, often unbidden. Even when we hum through a mundane week — not consciously thinking about God or life’s meaning or death — we are still motivated in our depths by ultimate questions and assumptions about what’s right and wrong, what’s true or false and what makes for a good life.
The opening acclamation in my church service each week acknowledges the elephant in the room. We begin by saying: We are here to talk to God and talk about things of God. To do so can be controversial, complex, painful, delicate and at times even a little embarrassing — all the reasons we avoid talking about religion at cocktail parties. But we still do it because the subject of God and, more broadly, of transcendent truth, lurks in every headline and in each moment of our ordinary lives.
This newsletter, like our opening acclamation, acknowledges the presence of God in the world, believing that God, faith and spirituality remain a relevant part of our public and private lives. In it, I will talk about the habits and practices that shape our lives, the beliefs that drive our imaginations, the commitments that guide our souls.
It won’t look the same every week: Though the Bible may remain the same, the newspaper changes each day. And different events and seasons in our lives and in society throw us back on old questions about truth, beauty and goodness in new ways. In a cultural moment when faith is often used as a bludgeon for our political and ideological enemies, we need space to talk about belief and practice with nuance, curiosity and reflection.
So here’s my opening acclamation. Let’s discuss our deepest questions, longings and loves and the rituals and habits that form who we are and the way we walk through the world, week in and week out.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/22/opin ... 778d3e6de3
The New Chief Chaplain at Harvard? An Atheist.
The elevation of Greg Epstein, author of “Good Without God,” reflects a broader trend of young people who increasingly identify as spiritual but religiously nonaffiliated.
The Puritan colonists who settled in New England in the 1630s had a nagging concern about the churches they were building: How would they ensure that the clergymen would be literate? Their answer was Harvard University, a school that was established to educate the ministry and adopted the motto “Truth for Christ and the Church.” It was named after a pastor, John Harvard, and it would be more than 70 years before the school had a president who was not a clergyman.
Nearly four centuries later, Harvard’s organization of chaplains has elected as its next president an atheist named Greg Epstein, who takes on the job this week.
Mr. Epstein, 44, author of the book “Good Without God,” is a seemingly unusual choice for the role. He will coordinate the activities of more than 40 university chaplains, who lead the Christian, Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist and other religious communities on campus. Yet many Harvard students — some raised in families of faith, others never quite certain how to label their religious identities — attest to the influence that Mr. Epstein has had on their spiritual lives.
“There is a rising group of people who no longer identify with any religious tradition but still experience a real need for conversation and support around what it means to be a good human and live an ethical life,” said Mr. Epstein, who was raised in a Jewish household and has been Harvard’s humanist chaplain since 2005, teaching students about the progressive movement that centers people’s relationships with one another instead of with God.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/26/us/h ... 778d3e6de3
The elevation of Greg Epstein, author of “Good Without God,” reflects a broader trend of young people who increasingly identify as spiritual but religiously nonaffiliated.
The Puritan colonists who settled in New England in the 1630s had a nagging concern about the churches they were building: How would they ensure that the clergymen would be literate? Their answer was Harvard University, a school that was established to educate the ministry and adopted the motto “Truth for Christ and the Church.” It was named after a pastor, John Harvard, and it would be more than 70 years before the school had a president who was not a clergyman.
Nearly four centuries later, Harvard’s organization of chaplains has elected as its next president an atheist named Greg Epstein, who takes on the job this week.
Mr. Epstein, 44, author of the book “Good Without God,” is a seemingly unusual choice for the role. He will coordinate the activities of more than 40 university chaplains, who lead the Christian, Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist and other religious communities on campus. Yet many Harvard students — some raised in families of faith, others never quite certain how to label their religious identities — attest to the influence that Mr. Epstein has had on their spiritual lives.
“There is a rising group of people who no longer identify with any religious tradition but still experience a real need for conversation and support around what it means to be a good human and live an ethical life,” said Mr. Epstein, who was raised in a Jewish household and has been Harvard’s humanist chaplain since 2005, teaching students about the progressive movement that centers people’s relationships with one another instead of with God.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/26/us/h ... 778d3e6de3
A Christian’s Case Against Exemptions to Vaccine Mandates
Religious exemptions to employer mandates are a precious right in our democracy. This is why it is especially important not to offer such exemptions to coronavirus vaccine mandates. They make a mockery of Christianity and religious liberty.
Now that the Food and Drug Administration has fully approved the Pfizer-BioNTech coronavirus vaccine, government agencies, universities and businesses are instituting vaccination requirements. This has prompted a wave of requests from individuals to opt out of such requirements by claiming a religious exemption.
The legal basis of this request is Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which requires American employers to accommodate employees’ religious beliefs. One evangelical church near Sacramento has reportedly issued more than 3,000 letters requesting exemptions, and a pastor in Brooklyn told The New York Daily News that 60 percent of his congregation has asked for them. Given that evangelicals account for a substantial portion of people refusing vaccination, especially in the Delta-ravaged Bible Belt, the road to ending the pandemic may very well now run through the religious exemption issue.
According to the Civil Rights Act, these exemptions are meant to apply to people with “sincerely held religious beliefs,” and on both counts — religious belief and sincerity — the exemption demand fails when it comes to coronavirus vaccine mandates for Christians.
First, there is no actual religious basis for exemptions from vaccine mandates in any established stream of Christianity. Within both Catholicism and all the major Protestant denominations, no creed or Scripture in any way prohibits Christians from getting the vaccine. Even the sect of Christian Scientists, which historically has abstained from medical treatment, has expressed openness to vaccines for the sake of the wider community. The consensus of mainstream Christian leaders — from Pope Francis to Franklin Graham — is that vaccination is consistent with biblical Christian faith.
Biblically based arguments against vaccination have been rebutted. The project Christians and the Vaccine, which I helped to found, has created numerous explainer videos in an effort to refute attempts by anti-vax Christians to hijack pro-life values, to distort biblical references like the “mark of the beast” and to inflame fears about government control. Christians who request religious exemptions rarely even try to offer substantive biblical and theological reasoning. Rather, the drivers for evangelical resistance are nonreligious and are rooted in deep-seated suspicion of government and vulnerability to misinformation.
My plea to my fellow Christians: If you insist on refusing the vaccine, that is your right. But please do not bring God into it. Doing so is the very definition of violating the Third Commandment, “Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain.”
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/06/opin ... 778d3e6de3
Religious exemptions to employer mandates are a precious right in our democracy. This is why it is especially important not to offer such exemptions to coronavirus vaccine mandates. They make a mockery of Christianity and religious liberty.
Now that the Food and Drug Administration has fully approved the Pfizer-BioNTech coronavirus vaccine, government agencies, universities and businesses are instituting vaccination requirements. This has prompted a wave of requests from individuals to opt out of such requirements by claiming a religious exemption.
The legal basis of this request is Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which requires American employers to accommodate employees’ religious beliefs. One evangelical church near Sacramento has reportedly issued more than 3,000 letters requesting exemptions, and a pastor in Brooklyn told The New York Daily News that 60 percent of his congregation has asked for them. Given that evangelicals account for a substantial portion of people refusing vaccination, especially in the Delta-ravaged Bible Belt, the road to ending the pandemic may very well now run through the religious exemption issue.
According to the Civil Rights Act, these exemptions are meant to apply to people with “sincerely held religious beliefs,” and on both counts — religious belief and sincerity — the exemption demand fails when it comes to coronavirus vaccine mandates for Christians.
First, there is no actual religious basis for exemptions from vaccine mandates in any established stream of Christianity. Within both Catholicism and all the major Protestant denominations, no creed or Scripture in any way prohibits Christians from getting the vaccine. Even the sect of Christian Scientists, which historically has abstained from medical treatment, has expressed openness to vaccines for the sake of the wider community. The consensus of mainstream Christian leaders — from Pope Francis to Franklin Graham — is that vaccination is consistent with biblical Christian faith.
Biblically based arguments against vaccination have been rebutted. The project Christians and the Vaccine, which I helped to found, has created numerous explainer videos in an effort to refute attempts by anti-vax Christians to hijack pro-life values, to distort biblical references like the “mark of the beast” and to inflame fears about government control. Christians who request religious exemptions rarely even try to offer substantive biblical and theological reasoning. Rather, the drivers for evangelical resistance are nonreligious and are rooted in deep-seated suspicion of government and vulnerability to misinformation.
My plea to my fellow Christians: If you insist on refusing the vaccine, that is your right. But please do not bring God into it. Doing so is the very definition of violating the Third Commandment, “Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain.”
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/06/opin ... 778d3e6de3
Vaccine Resisters Seek Religious Exemptions. But What Counts as Religious?
Major denominations are essentially unanimous in their support of the vaccines against Covid-19, but individuals who object are citing their personal faith for support.
When Crisann Holmes’s employer announced last month that it would require all employees to be vaccinated against Covid-19 by Nov. 1, she knew she had to find a way out.
She signed a petition to ask the company to relax its mandate. She joined an informal protest, skipping work with other dissenting employees at the mental health care system where she has worked for two years. And she attempted a solution that many across the country are now exploring: a religious exemption.
“My freedom and my children’s freedom and children’s children’s freedom are at stake,” said Ms. Holmes, who lives in Indiana. In August, she submitted an exemption request she wrote herself, bolstered by her own Bible study and language from sources online. Some vaccines were developed using fetal cell lines from aborted fetuses, she wrote, citing a remote connection to a practice she finds abhorrent. She quoted a passage from the New Testament: “Let us purify ourselves from everything that contaminates body and spirit.”
Major religious traditions, denominations and institutions are essentially unanimous in their support of the vaccines against Covid-19. But as more employers across the country begin requiring Covid vaccinations for workers, they are butting up against the nation’s sizable population of vaccine holdouts who nonetheless see their resistance in religious terms — or at least see an opportunity. Vaccine-resistant workers are sharing tips online for requesting exemptions to the requirements on religious grounds; others are submitting letters from far-flung religious authorities who have advertised their willingness to help.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/11/us/c ... 778d3e6de3
Major denominations are essentially unanimous in their support of the vaccines against Covid-19, but individuals who object are citing their personal faith for support.
When Crisann Holmes’s employer announced last month that it would require all employees to be vaccinated against Covid-19 by Nov. 1, she knew she had to find a way out.
She signed a petition to ask the company to relax its mandate. She joined an informal protest, skipping work with other dissenting employees at the mental health care system where she has worked for two years. And she attempted a solution that many across the country are now exploring: a religious exemption.
“My freedom and my children’s freedom and children’s children’s freedom are at stake,” said Ms. Holmes, who lives in Indiana. In August, she submitted an exemption request she wrote herself, bolstered by her own Bible study and language from sources online. Some vaccines were developed using fetal cell lines from aborted fetuses, she wrote, citing a remote connection to a practice she finds abhorrent. She quoted a passage from the New Testament: “Let us purify ourselves from everything that contaminates body and spirit.”
Major religious traditions, denominations and institutions are essentially unanimous in their support of the vaccines against Covid-19. But as more employers across the country begin requiring Covid vaccinations for workers, they are butting up against the nation’s sizable population of vaccine holdouts who nonetheless see their resistance in religious terms — or at least see an opportunity. Vaccine-resistant workers are sharing tips online for requesting exemptions to the requirements on religious grounds; others are submitting letters from far-flung religious authorities who have advertised their willingness to help.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/11/us/c ... 778d3e6de3