Quite simply: all the great prophets were critical of their contemporaries and were not for that reason anti-Jewish.

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I don't see how teaching religion can be mandatory in universities. By then people specialize and many would be unlikely to sign on for a course which included a compulsory element in religion.

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I can't speak for the United States. But discrimination against Roman Catholics is sometimes alleged in the UK -- for instance, in the present Blair government's decision to go ahead and insist that all adoption agencies, including not least the Roman Catholic ones, will be forced to place children with gay couples.

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The British media is significantly different from that in the U.S., from what I've seen; but in both cases it's hard to generalize. There are some excellent programs, some appalling ones, and many in between.

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The question, I'm afraid, is too vague to answer. It's like asking 'is New York a hot city?' -- to which the answer will depend on whether you visit in February or July.

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Well, sorry, as a Brit I simply can't answer this one.

But perhaps American readers would like to know that Mormonism certainly hasn't entered the mainstream of British religion and most Brits pretty certainly would only have the sketchiest idea of what it is, where it is, what it believes or does.

People in the UK are far, far less interested in religion as such all round than they are in the U.S.A. Why that should be so is itself a very interesting question but it's not the one you asked!

The Pope's reaffirmation is simply another statement of what has always been the RC position -- at least for the last century or more.

(In what follows, I speak, naturally, from the Anglican position.)

On the one hand, there have been striking ecumenical advances -- Pope John's giving of his ring to Archbishop Michael Ramsey being a highlight of deep symbolic import. But these haven't been matched, on the other hand, by any real advance in terms of official recognition of Anglican orders and hence of Anglican Eucharists. There is an inconsistency here in that RCs do recognize Anglican (and indeed Methodist, Baptist etc.) baptisms as valid providing they are trinitarian; so if our baptisms are valid, why not our Eucharists? Is that an Achilles heel in Rome's 'fixed' position?

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I have looked at the sites and find myself unable to do more than observe. I have taken part in some Christian-Mulsim dialogues, with great enjoyment and profit, but find myself still very much in the learning stage. It is quite clear that a large number of Muslims in the western world, and indeed a large number elsewhere, are able with clarity and coherence to expound a view of Islam in which it is indeed tolerant, non-compulsory, open to people converting to other faiths, etc. It is equally clear that a large number of Muslims all round the world are able with apparent equal clarity and coherence to expound and propagate other interpretations.

I am not a specialist in the Koran, but I have been present when Muslims have debated with one another the texts which seem to go this way and the texts which seem to go that way. I am not in a position to adjudicate as to which is more central to 'genuine' Islam or indeed whether the Koran genuinely admits of different interpretations. I merely note that such differences do seem to exist, and that large swathes of Muslim-dominated territories seem to live by the more hard-line versions, just as other parts (e.g. Qatar, where I took part in a dialogue for a week in 2003) seem to live by the more open versions.

In other words, No Easy Answers. Sound familiar?

The really interesting thing is, what might the Hindu have meant by 'god'? To whom did this person think (s)he was praying? As long as Americans concentrate on the 'church and state' questions on the one hand or on the 'one nation' issues they will ignore these real questions.

That, I guess, comes from the Deistic background in which it is assumed that 'god' is univocal, whereas precisely in Hinduism that is far from being the case. I have a sense -- which I see in spades on this side of the Atlantic as well! -- of people taking great care not to ask the 'god' question, perhaps in case the cat gets let out of the bag, i.e. that people might start realizing that the Christian claim is that we only really discover who the true God is when we look long and hard at Jesus himself.

The whole 'Jesus Seminar' movement was an exercise in making it harder to do that, making it less likely that people would glimpse the shocking and deeply challenging true Jesus and true God (while, of course, claiming all the while that theirs was the truly radical Jesus and God...).

A genuine conversation about what 'god' means, between a well thought out Christian and a well thought out Hindu, would be a great start. And we might discover that the word 'prayer' actually changed its meaning, too, according to what sort of god you think you're praying to.

It would be nice to have a clear sound-bite for this one, but I'm afraid the question needs a bit of redefining.

The phrase 'religious extremists' has come to mean (a) Muslim terrorists and (b) (in some quarters at least) Christian fundamentalists. But of course many Christians (like myself) who aren't fundamentalists believe that fundamentalism is a bizarre, distorted form of Christianity and 'our' form is (at least) a more authentic one.

In other words, lots (most?) of us believe ourselves to be the 'right' type of Christian -- so perhaps, in that sense, we too are 'religious extremists', even if the 'extreme' to which we go is that of a more reasoned, thought-out, and (hopefully) biblically faithful and socially responsible kind of thing.

I suppose all this is saying that the phrase 'religious extremists' is a way of liberal society doing with people it disapproves of more or less the equivalent of what they are doing to us, that is, labeling us in such a way that will then justify writing us off, whether with rhetoric or with bombs.

Of course, this doesn't justify what they do; to understand the complexities of a question isn't the same as excusing dehumanizing behavior of whatever sort. It is a way of saying, what I wish we could say to terrorists and others: Look, we take our religion seriously too, and it leads us to different conclusions from you. We might be wrong; so might you; but in the name of whichever god you invoke, would it not be a better thing for us all to talk together about the issues at the heart of our respective faiths than to try to achieve dominance by violence?

Unfortunately, they could quite well come back at us and say, 'You mean, like you westerners have been doing in Iraq and Afghanistan for the last five years?'

This was a huge relief to those of us in the UK who have watched the sheer silliness of political correctness go higher and higher. One local council -- Warrington, I believe -- has replaced its usual 'Happy Christmas' message this year with 'Recycle for Warrington', which is hardly a cheering message even though recycling is of course a good idea.

It would be nice to think that the worm was starting to turn. The reality is that it isn't the Muslims or the Hindus who are 'offended' at Christians doing Christian celebrations. It is the old-fashioned secularists who, discovering that their myth (that Christianity would die out by the end of the 20th Century) had failed to come true, have gone in for that tried and tested formula, 'cognitive dissonance'.

This is really an internal matter for the Jewish community and almost anything I might say could be misinterpreted. However, I do believe that the Jewish community, insofar as it retains its historic integrity in whatever form that may have taken through cultural variation, bears a vital witness to the one creator God, who made this world and will one day call it to account and remake it in justice and peace. The Jewish people have a great, though challenging, advantage over many western Christians, in that they know in their bones that they are called to be different, to be a sign of contradiction to the way the world tends to drift, even while (in their exuberant celebrations of the goodness of the created order) they are a sign of affirmation that the world of space, time and matter is the good creation of a good God.

What would be marvelous would be if Jews and Christians could work together increasingly on such things that we can agree on. This doesn't mean 'pretending we're all the same really'; we know we're not. But there are common affirmations, common stands against all forms of paganism, common respect for God's good world, which bind us together even while they remind us of our strange and sad differences. Above all, it is time on all sides to stop defining ourselves in terms of the horrible and barbarous events of the first half of the twentieth century, and start thinking of ourselves in terms of the good things that our God might have in store for the twenty-first.

The astonishing misrepresentation of Archbishop Rowan in virtually all newspapers over the last few days, and the scorn and anger which this has fueled, have caused many people within the church to ask what on earth is going on. The issues are complex, but let me try to highlight the key points.

Obviously it would be good for people to read the whole lecture, which is available on line at his website together with further clarification. There is an excellent summary and discussion of the whole issue by Andrew Goddard available on the Fulcrum website.

First, the lecture which Rowan gave was the start of a series organized by and for the legal profession, about the nature of law. He was not making a public statement about his belief in Jesus (people have asked me ‘why doesn’t he speak about Jesus?’ and the answer is ‘he does, a great deal of the time, but this wasn’t that sort of occasion’). He was addressing some of the most serious and far-reaching questions which face us both in Britain and throughout western culture, and was doing so with the sensitivity and intellectual rigor which the occasion, and his audience, rightly demanded. We should be grateful that we have an Archbishop capable of such work, not demand that his every word be instantly comprehensible by the casual uninformed onlooker. If I ask someone to fix my car, or my computer, I don’t expect to understand everything they say about the technicalities; rather, I’m glad someone out there knows what’s going on and can do what’s necessary.

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