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Religion isn’t just talking the talk, it’s walking the walk. If you get talking (conversation) too far away from walking (doing good in the world) then you will get approximately what we have now around the globe and in our own backyards—turf wars over abstract “truth” that are getting very dangerous. Abstract principles unconnected to ethics historicallly have gotten a lot of people killed.
Yes, we do have to tackle the tough questions in interfaith dialogue. I believe that is what Pope Benedict XVI intended in his speech on faith and reason at Regensburg. But I think we would all be wise, as I think the Pope was not, and turn the critical lens on our own religious tradition and not use other religions as the negative example.
Down through the ages, women have fared very poorly with the world’s major religions. For example, my own Christian religion has blamed women, through Eve, for sin and death entering the world.
For many people, religion is not just another academic subject like literature or math.
On the one hand, as the difference between the attitudes toward the presidential candidacy of John Kennedy and John Kerry show, the American people, in the case of Kerry, no longer regard Catholicism as potentially “un-American," the question that was raised about Kennedy.
As we in the United States try to move away from enemy stereotyping in religion toward pluralism and tolerance, we all need to become more visually aware of what the media is selling us on an unconscious level.
One of my yoga instructors often ends practice with the instruction to “feel the presence of your being.” I have done yoga for years and honestly could not have survived the stresses of being a seminary president without it.
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormonism) is the fastest growing world religion. From a reviled and feared sect for much of its history, the LDS have become a politically, economically and globally powerful church. The partial accommodation Mormons have made to American culture, especially in the official repudiation of “plural marriage” (polygamy), as well as their growing economic and political power makes it inevitable that their cultural and religious location would change.
In the last several years I have been working in both Muslim-Christian and now Muslim-Christian-Jewish dialogue on issues of war and peace. From this work I have learned that Jihad, both historically and for most Muslims today, does not mean "Holy War". Jihad literally means “struggle” or “struggle in the way of God.” It is sometimes called the 6th pillar of Islam and equates to the responsibility of believers to struggle to improve themselves and/or society.
The Dalai Lama is right. All religious traditions do have messages of love, compassion, and forgiveness. Unfortunately, all religions also have messages of hate, cruelty and condemnation. The conundrum of religion, as we saw illustrated in the On Faith discussions with author and professional atheist Christopher Hitchens, is that for every claim that religion does good in the world, there are also the well-documented examples of religious messages of intolerance, moral callousness and judgmentalism, and the harm that they have caused.
Halloween is no fun for me anymore. I just can’t bring myself to make fun of ghosts and goblins and devils when there is so much real horror around us. To quote the kid from movie The Sixth Sense, “I see dead people” and I can’t seem to stop.
I started thinking in very literal terms especially about ghosts when all those nooses started appearing post the Jena 6 protests. First, of course, there were the three nooses (in the school colors!) found hanging from the “white student’s tree” in Jena, La., and then a noose on the campus of the University of Maryland, a police locker room in Long Island, NY, a Pittsburgh bus maintenance garage, and other high schools. These twisted ropes are the ghosts of an unburied past in America that is coming back to haunt us.
Christians have lost Christmas as a religious holiday and it is not because of political correctness. Christmas sales now drive the American economy. We need to recognize that we Christians no longer have a nativity theology, we have a “black Friday theology”—that crucial day when Christmas shopping cleans up the retail bottom lines and the red ink turns to black. Unless Christ turns a profit for us, the American economy shows a net loss.
Well, really, what’s the loss? When Christmas day (December 25) inconveniently turned out to fall on a Sunday, Willow Creek, the mega-church on the north side of Chicago, canceled worship. Instead, they gave out a video and let people stay home and celebrate with their families. I hesitate to speculate what, then, they would be celebrating except the triumph of cultural Christianity. What kind of Christians cancel worship because it falls on Christmas day?
For a Christian, I had a partly Jewish upbringing. My father, a civil engineer, worked for a construction company that was employed for five years in completely renovating the Jewish resort, Grossingers. This was a long daily commute for my father from our suburb outside New York City to the Catskills. In the summers, therefore, we lived at Grossingers. From that experience, I lived and learned that Judaism is family and food totally blended with religion. Furthermore, most New Yorkers, no matter what their faith, are sort of Jewish anyway.
In my adult life, I have taught with Rabbis, had Jewish students in my classes and spoken in many synagogues. In all this I have come to appreciate even more that Judaism is an ancient practice of living faith that has endured through enormous, even unprecedented persecution and mass murder. While some forms of the Jewish faith, such as the Reformed tradition, engage modernity and others, such as the Orthodox tradition, resist modern culture, Judaism as a whole remains not so much a belief system as a vibrant way of interpreting life lived with God.
This is a very important question and I wish to be very specific in my answer. In preparation for writing this post, I have re-read Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf’s very helpful book What’s Right With Islam: A New Vision for Muslims and the West. This is a thoughtful and useful book in many ways and I highly recommend it to our readers. Everyone will benefit if we listen carefully to one another.
It is clear from this Pew study that the old denominational affiliations no longer apply. The religious landscape in the U.S. is best described these days as “post-denominational.” Post-denominational means that it is far less important whether you are Methodist or Baptist, or even Catholic, than where you fall along the continuum of fundamentalist to evangelical to progressive (liberal) to secular or unaligned. While some faiths or denominations generally are more evangelical or more liberal, each tradition has a wide spectrum within it. If you are a liberal Christian in a conservative Protestant denomination, you may have more in common with a Reformed Jew than with the Christians in your own denomination.
The Question: Pope Benedict's recent baptism of a well-known Italian Muslim has prompted criticism in much of the Islamic world. Has Benedict done enough to build bridges to Islam?
More than 70,000 bridges across America are rated structurally deficient like the span that collapsed in Minneapolis and it is estimated that repairing them will cost $188 billion dollars and take at least a generation to complete.
But that task is beginning to look less daunting than the bridge work that is needed between Pope Benedict and Islam.
What Islam Really Says About Violence, Rights and Other Religions
Gomaa, Fadlallah, Mubarak, Khan, Siddiqi, Ellison, others | On Faith
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