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The Perfect Game
By Eboo Patel and Samantha Kirby
Thursday, Chicago White Sox pitcher Mark Buehrle pitched a perfect game against Tampa Bay. Needless to say, folks around Chicago were pretty excited - President Obama (now dubbed First Fan) called to give his congratulations, and even Cubs fans were cheering him on. The triumph is the headline of all the local papers.
But the most interesting part of these stories are the sidebars, like Dewayne Wise's home-run catch at the top of the 9th. It reminds us that a game can only be pitched perfectly if everyone on the team does their part. (This is something Buehrle already knows - two years ago when he threw his first no-hitter he bought watches for his team.)
In Cairo, Obama called for us to build bridges of understanding between faiths through service. At the end of June, he called for Americans to make community service a national priority this summer through the United We Serve campaign.
And now, it's up to us to see it through. At the Chicago offices of Interfaith Youth Core, we have a group of interns who are doing just this. Every Tuesday, they come together and serve at a soup kitchen over lunch. This team of young people - Jews, Christians, Muslims and agnostics - are making service a part of their daily lives, and writing about it to share their experience. One young man, Chris, wrote in his blog about service, "This work was about more than just heaping reheated food on a plate (though that was certainly a significant portion). It was about human interaction, about accountability and community assessment, and it was about sharing and acting upon values of generosity, compassion, and interconnectedness."
Another, Timur, connected it to his experience serving in New Orleans last year, "I believe that when you serve with another, a bond is formed. I often had volunteer groups made up people from different backgrounds. We had Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hare Krishnas, you name it!...But when the hammering and sawing started, everyone joined together for the common good. What was once an untrained but willing group of volunteers had become a family linked by service."
United We Serve projects are happening all over the country. In Atlanta last week, about eighty young people - Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu and Christian - joined to sort books donated to literacy programs in Africa. They ended the day with a discussion of how their different faiths inspired them to come that day to serve together. The event went so long over the proposed time that some of the young Muslims ended up praying the sundown prayers in the chapel of the host organization, the Youth Theological Initiative.
These are just a few examples of how Americans are living out the goals of interfaith bridge-building through service that Obama has laid out.
Now, more than ever, we need everyone in the game.
By
Eboo Patel
|
July 24, 2009; 10:59 AM ET
| Category:
Religion & Leadership
,
Religion & Politics
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Posted by: ccnl1 | July 27, 2009 12:58 PM
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Unfortunately, Islam is far from perfect as noted below in a partial body count:
1a) 179 killed in Mumbai/Bombay, 290 injured
1b) Assassination of Benazir Bhutto and Theo Van Gogh
2) 9/11, 3000 mostly US citizens, 1000’s injured
3) The 24/7 Sunni-Shiite centuries-old blood feud currently being carried out in Iraq, US Troops, 3,440 KIA, 846 non-hostile) and 91,843 – 100,263 Iraqi civilians killed, http://www.iraqbodycount.org/ and
http://www.defenselink.mil/news/casualty.pdf
4) Kenya- In Nairobi, about 212 people were killed and an estimated 4000 injured; in Dar es Salaam, the attack killed at least 11 and wounded 85.[2]
5) Bali-in 2002-killing 202 people, 164 of whom were foreign nationals, and 38 Indonesian citizens. A further 209 people were injured.
6) Bali in 2005- Twenty people were killed, and 129 people were injured by three bombers who killed themselves in the attacks.
7) Spain in 2004- killing 191 people and wounding 2,050.
8) UK in 2005- The bombings killed 52 commuters and the four radical Islamic suicide bombers, injured 700.
9) The execution of an eloping couple in Afghanistan on 04/15/2009 by the Taliban.
Posted by: ccnl1 | July 25, 2009 3:10 PM
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More about the imperfections of Islam (for those eyes that have not seen)-
Mohammed was an illiterate, womanizing, lust and greed-driven, warmongering, hallucinating Arab, who also had embellishing/hallucinating/plagiarizing scribal biographers who not only added "angels" and flying chariots to the koran but also a militaristic agenda to support the plundering and looting of the lands of non-believers.
This agenda continues as shown by the massacre in Mumbai, the assassinations of Bhutto and Theo Van Gogh, the conduct of the seven Muslim doctors in the UK, the 9/11 terrorists, the 24/7 Sunni suicide/roadside/market/mosque bombers, the 24/7 Shiite suicide/roadside/market/mosque bombers, the Islamic bombers of the trains in the UK and Spain, the Bali crazies, the Kenya crazies, the Pakistani “koranics”, the Palestine suicide bombers/rocketeers, the Lebanese nutcases, the Taliban nut jobs, and the Filipino “koranics”.
And who funds this muck and stench of terror? The warmongering, Islamic, Shiite terror and torture theocracy of Iran aka the Third Axis of Evil and also the Sunni "Wannabees" of Saudi Arabia.
Current crises:
The Sunni-Shiite blood feud and the warmongering, womanizing (11 wives), hallucinating founder.