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Religious leaders should make concern for the environment one of the two or three top issues. If we do not survive, we do not do anything else, either. And "we," our descendants, will not survive on our present course.
From drums and smoke signals to the internet, "media" represent too many expressions to be contained in generalizations.
I celebrated with most of the two billion people called by the name of Jesus Christ. In a way, that answers the question.
Yes, Islam is a violent religion. So are Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and all the rest.
Islam is also a non-violent religon. So are Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and all the rest.
(The exception would be those which had not had much "earthly" power, such as Baha'i.)
How can they all be violent and non-violent?
From 1890, when scholars first started computing, until the 1930s, not once was an article in a mainstream secular or religious publication favorable to the Mormons.
In the 1930s their reputation began to change when, in the midst of the Depression, word went around that "they take care of their own." Mormon versions of communalism did mean that the poor among them were better off than many others. If it meant that they were not dependent upon the federal government, this was a mis-impression: Utah, their stronghold, received as much help as other such states.
"Social revolutionary" is not a concept that would fit in the time of the 8th century B.C.E. prophets or of Jesus; "social" is a modern understanding and "revolution" is a word invented in recent centuries. So, no, it'd be unfitting to put Jesus in that category.
HOWEVER, in the gospel portraits of Jesus we find plenty of attitudes, expressions, sayings, and teachings which are more readily appropriable by people we call "social revolutionaries" than they would be to those who oppose them.
With most orthodox mainstream Christians I am with Reinhold Niebuhr who said we should not be concerned with "the furniture or the temperature of hell." Heaven as a "place" has been out for a long time. Heaven as a way of picturing and imaging and providing a means of expressing hope remains "in;" whatever else that hope means, it envisions that "nothing shall separate us from the love of God," including death. I believe that about death and God, and know that to say more takes us into the realms of the unimaginable and indescribable. . .
As for hell: some years ago U.S. Catholic magazine asked its readers who they pictured for sure would be in hell, and they only found two--Hitler and Stalin. No doubt most of us could picture more. Or maybe not. I gave the Ingersoll Lecture at Harvard some years ago: "Hell Disappeared--No one Noticed. A civic argument." 19th-Century public school readers from the "good olds days," as they are known, told children that if they would lie and not repent they would go to hell; and their parents would look at them from heaven and see them in flames, and know they had it coming. I'd like to think that such pedagogy and envisioning is not around.
While I believe that God is a judge, I don't think God ratifies all our decisions. . . Frankly, I almost never believe a believer in literal hell. I'll be at dinner with one, and ask him or her to hold a finger over the candle for ten seconds. No way. Now picture it all over you, forever. No way. If you believe that, why are you spending two hours with me when you could be rescuing them?
One does not hear much hellfire preaching even from hellfire preachers these days; they attract more with the "prosperity gospel" than with fright.
Hell is separation from God, from Love; it's a self-chosen situation.
To the second question: would I vote for a pagan?
[I doubt if one will rise to candidacy for president, but as for other offices:'
Would I vote for a pagan? I probably already have.
They come in many informal forms.
To the first question, about chaplaincy:
Some years ago I spoke to the chaplains' committee on endorsement, or whatever it is called: they check the credentials of the religious groups that want to be represented in chaplaincy. I've studied American religion for decades, but those two days I heard testimony from any number of groups that want to be in on the act.
Curiously, while Catholics, Jews, mainline Protestants are not producing enough chaplains--in part because their religious bodies have more dissesnters against recent wars, the less familiar, small, and, to others, "exotic" groups were ready to go. In some senses, it seemed that they welcomed this credentialing.
So it may be with Pagans.
since Chaplains are supposed to serve people of many faiths, and most do, it may be hard to picture many non-pagans welcoming services by pagan priests.
Still, on church-state grounds it's hard to know on what principle to rule them out: one does not want the government being the determiner of what is a legitimate religion and what isn't.
Some folks on both sides of this issue will get emotional about it, and most of the rest of the military and civilian citizenry will go about its business the same way, whether or not . . . .
First, does anyone care? Yes, millions do, with differing degrees of intensity.
Catholics, first. One faction cheers, because they are anti-ecumenical, consider Orthodox and Protestant members to be buzzing insects that distract Catholics who must swat them. Or, more charitably, because they fear that ecumenism portends relativism, and Catholic truth too easily gets given away. Another faction has begun to speak up in criticism, seeing it as an abrasive, arrogant, mistimed, and itself distracting word at a time when people of faith ought to pull together against common enemies. No doubt between them are most Catholics who more or less have always taken for granted what the Pope said of the Church and Everybody Else, but will not be stirred or alienated: they know Christian neighbors who seem to be doing far more than "playing at church" in ecclesial communities. I'd add a fourth element: those who are enraged by such expressions and think that "it's the same old Ratzinger," the old Inquisitor speaking up, but who hold their fire, in charity and so as not to alienate Rome.
It is important to separate three questions:
First: should there be prayers to open U. S. Senate sessions?
Second: should Hindus and others of "other religions" be assigned the task of offering prayer there?
Third: is the extraordinary occasion of a Hindu prayer a good opportunity to debate the first question?
On this question I suppose I should declare "I have an interest," because I am a member of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, and, to pile it on, an ordained minister in it. Further, I am a friend and fan--dare one call one's self that?--of the Presiding bishop, Mark Hanson, and the local bishop, Paul Landahl, was my pastor for twenty-two years and remains a cherished friend. With only one exception (heading the committee that drafted a "concordat" between ELCA and the Episcopal Church), I've not been directly involved in ELCA affairs, and feel free to pick and choose my issues.
The gay ordinations theme has not been central in my thinking and work, but circumstances push it ever closer to the center. I often observe in editorials and lectures that every Christian church body in the world is torn apart over issues that one can grasp in two terms, "sex" and "authority."
Sex means the whole biological range, with controversies over in vitro fertilization, contraception, abortion, stem cell research, sexual interactions. Authority means who decides issues in the modern world where we all have so much freedom. The ELCA is far along in what appears to me to be a comprehensive and searching study of "sex-and-your-faith," and is due to report in 2009.
Do I think more or less of Mother Teresa after the publication of her diaries? Answer: I think the same (which is quite highly), though in a different category. I think less of those who use her experience of the absence of God as proof for the non-existence of God.The two have nothing to do with each other. I welcome her honesty, her eloquence, the passion of her soul-searching, and regard the disclosures as signs of pathos: how sad the she, who sought so hard, did not find, or receive.
If and as she proceeds to sainthood--on a track that does not concern us non-Roman Catholics--she can still be a model with whom many will identify. The absence of the experience of God or the experience of God is a classic theme with which many can identify. I once wrote a whole book, "A Cry of Absence," taking off from writing by perhaps the most noted theologian in 20th century Catholicism. He wanted us to concentrate on a "wintry sort of spirituality," and not just market summery, sunny, everything-solved spirituality. Such wintry sorts are all over the Bible and the pages of Christian history.
This one is easy.
Why does a merciful God allow human-caused and natural disasters to happen.
Answer: I don't know.
I doubt whether there's ever been a natural disaster in which it's not been natural for thoughtful believers to ponder the question, and there are libraries full of answers, none of them informed, because humans do not know the mind of God.
Their answers cancel each other out, or are based on contrived reasoning of intellectual sleight-of-hand.
This does not mean that there's no value in discussing the theme: it helps us sort out other aspects of our experience of and witness to God.
Whatever else believers in the Bible find in the book, it all stops back with the observation that "he makes his rain to fall and his son to shine on the just and on the unjust."
Where biblical authors do address the issue, it can get pretty scary, as it does in Isaiah 45:7, Yahweh speaking: "I form light and create darkness, I make weal and create woe." And in the Book of Job we get three chapters of "who do you think you are?" questions when we want final solutions to our existential problems.
When good things happen, the believer is licensed to give thanks, but claiming to know why a hurricane cloud blew where it did or our team or army won--that's tricky, because then "when bad things happen" one cannot skip out and say that someone can know the "why."
Not having the answers in the ultimate sense has not deterred (us) believers from expressing belief. They, we, have instead to be more humble about what we claim--and do what we can to prevent man-made disasters.
What Islam Really Says About Violence, Rights and Other Religions
Gomaa, Fadlallah, Mubarak, Khan, Siddiqi, Ellison, others | On Faith
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