VACCINE MANDATES ARE CONSTITUTIONAL; RELIGIOUS EXEMPTIONS ARE UNNECESSARY AND HARMFUL
The Spirit of 1776 was as much about science as it was about freedom. George Washington required the entire Continental Army to get inoculated against smallpox—the first army-wide vaccination in history. Mortality dropped from 30% to 1%. Mandatory vaccinations just might have won America its freedom. From that auspicious beginning, Americans have let vaccine science protect our soldiers in the military, our students in school, our healthcare workers on the front lines—everyone.
Vaccine mandates are undoubtedly constitutional. The Supreme Court explained back in 1905 that freedom can be limited, especially when wielded to harm others’ rights: “The liberty secured by the Constitution of the United States does not import an absolute right in each person to be at all times, and in all circumstances, wholly freed from restraint…”
During WWII, the court specifically said that religious freedom is no excuse to shun vaccines: “The right to practice religion freely does not include liberty to expose the community or the child to communicable disease or the latter to ill health or death.” Even the late, uber-conservative Justice Antonin Scalia singled out religious exemption from “compulsory vaccination laws” as not required by the First Amendment. Most state courts have independently reached the same conclusion.
In hundreds of cases across more than a century, the law is clear: vaccine mandates are constitutional and religious exemptions are not constitutionally required.
People are fond of saying that freedom isn’t free, but nor is it absolute. And thinking in constitutional absolutes is killing Americans. Literally. The claim that the Second Amendment protects a sacred and unlimited right is a legal narrative recently invented, deliberately advanced, and grossly manipulated by the NRA—and it’s killing Americans. The Supreme Court’s political manipulation of the constitutional right has allowed guns to become as much of a public health crisis as Covid and has thwarted sensible gun regulation. This Supreme Court is considering another Second Amendment case this term (oral argument is on Nov. 3) that will likely entrench the absolutist misunderstanding of the right further.
There is currently a crusade, much like the NRA’s, to weaponize the religious freedom right guaranteed by the First Amendment. To make the right to act on a religious belief as absolute as the right to believe. This has never been true under our Constitution.
More...
https://religiondispatches.org/vaccine- ... nd-harmful
INTERFAITH ISSUES
We Remember Saints Because They’re a Lot Like Us
Most major Christian holidays focus on an event in the life of Jesus, but All Saints’ Day, which falls on Nov. 1, is fixed on stories of his people.
Though the day is understood and celebrated differently in different traditions, most people in my denomination, Anglicanism, understand the term “saint” to include both canonized heroes and average Christians.
For a religious holiday, All Saints' Day is surprisingly earthy. It reminds me that for all of us — so-called religious or non-religious people alike — faith and spirituality are shaped in profoundly relational ways. No one is a “freethinker.” None of us come to what we believe on our own.
For good or for ill, we believe what we believe because of our particular encounters with people and human communities. All systems of belief and practice are handed down in ordinary ways by people with particular names, faces, languages, traditions, limitations and longings.
In popular imagination, a saint is someone who is perfect and selfless, who dwells in holy ecstasy and impeccable goodness. “Don’t call me a saint,” Dorothy Day said. “I don’t want to be dismissed that easily.”
But saints are imperfect people. And this is what draws me to this day. Christians don’t remember these men and women because they were perfect. We remember them because, like us, they were broken, selfish and fearful, yet God wrought beauty and light through their lives.
At the first Anglican church I attended, over a decade ago, we didn’t have a sermon on All Saints’ Sunday. Instead, congregants were invited to tell stories about people who had changed their life and faith. Some told stories of well-known saints — Teresa of Ávila or Francis of Assisi. But they also told of friends bringing casseroles after the death of a spouse, of people showing up when life was falling apart, of professors, parents and neighbors. It was like a less polished version of “The Moth Radio Hour,” but in church. I loved it.
The story of how I came to know God is one about chance encounters and long friendships, honest conversations and books I’ve read, people who have left the Christian faith and those who haven’t, communities who’ve loved me and dismayed me.
Though I grew up going to church, for most of my childhood, church history was a hazy and irrelevant idea. My imagination started with Jesus and his followers, then skipped across two millenniums and landed at my own congregation in a small town in central Texas. As an adult, I began learning about church history and it felt like an almost miraculous discovery. This broader global and ancient family expanded my vision of what Christianity is beyond the small confines of my culture, race and moment in time.
I learned about how Christians created orphanages and hospitals. I encountered Ephrem the Syrian, a poet and musician, who began women’s choirs and composed some of the earliest hymns for female voices, spreading literacy among women in the fourth century. He died tending the sick in a plague.
I read about Felicity, an enslaved woman who was martyred in the third century while offering forgiveness to her executioners. I learned about Maximilian Kolbe, a Polish Catholic priest who hid thousands of refugees during the Nazi regime. Kolbe died in Auschwitz after volunteering to take the place of another prisoner who was to be executed.
But learning church history was also deeply disillusioning as I discovered how parts of the church have been complicit in white supremacy, colonialism, abuse, misogyny and astonishing evil. All faith stories are shaped by human communities, and these human communities often disappoint us.
In a cultural moment where want to divide all people and institutions neatly into “good guys” and “bad guys,” those on the right side of history and those who aren’t, the righteous and the damned, this day reminds us of the checkered and complicated truth of each human heart. Martin Luther gave us the helpful phrase “simul justus et peccator” — simultaneously saint and sinner. It names how we are holy and wayward at once. It proclaims a paradox that we are redeemed yet in need of redemption.
All Saints’ Day reminds me that God meets us, saints and sinners, despite our contradictions, and makes good out of haphazard lives. It tells me that all of us, even the best of us, are in need of unimaginable mercy and forgiveness. The church is “first and foremost, a community of forgiven sinners,” writes the theologian Gilbert Meilaender. It is not “a community that embodies the practices of perfection” but instead “a body of believers who still live ‘in the flesh,’ who are still part of the world, suffering the transformations effected by God’s grace on its pilgrim way.” Recalling the stories of saints is, in the end, a celebration not of perfection but of grace.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/31/opin ... 778d3e6de3
Most major Christian holidays focus on an event in the life of Jesus, but All Saints’ Day, which falls on Nov. 1, is fixed on stories of his people.
Though the day is understood and celebrated differently in different traditions, most people in my denomination, Anglicanism, understand the term “saint” to include both canonized heroes and average Christians.
For a religious holiday, All Saints' Day is surprisingly earthy. It reminds me that for all of us — so-called religious or non-religious people alike — faith and spirituality are shaped in profoundly relational ways. No one is a “freethinker.” None of us come to what we believe on our own.
For good or for ill, we believe what we believe because of our particular encounters with people and human communities. All systems of belief and practice are handed down in ordinary ways by people with particular names, faces, languages, traditions, limitations and longings.
In popular imagination, a saint is someone who is perfect and selfless, who dwells in holy ecstasy and impeccable goodness. “Don’t call me a saint,” Dorothy Day said. “I don’t want to be dismissed that easily.”
But saints are imperfect people. And this is what draws me to this day. Christians don’t remember these men and women because they were perfect. We remember them because, like us, they were broken, selfish and fearful, yet God wrought beauty and light through their lives.
At the first Anglican church I attended, over a decade ago, we didn’t have a sermon on All Saints’ Sunday. Instead, congregants were invited to tell stories about people who had changed their life and faith. Some told stories of well-known saints — Teresa of Ávila or Francis of Assisi. But they also told of friends bringing casseroles after the death of a spouse, of people showing up when life was falling apart, of professors, parents and neighbors. It was like a less polished version of “The Moth Radio Hour,” but in church. I loved it.
The story of how I came to know God is one about chance encounters and long friendships, honest conversations and books I’ve read, people who have left the Christian faith and those who haven’t, communities who’ve loved me and dismayed me.
Though I grew up going to church, for most of my childhood, church history was a hazy and irrelevant idea. My imagination started with Jesus and his followers, then skipped across two millenniums and landed at my own congregation in a small town in central Texas. As an adult, I began learning about church history and it felt like an almost miraculous discovery. This broader global and ancient family expanded my vision of what Christianity is beyond the small confines of my culture, race and moment in time.
I learned about how Christians created orphanages and hospitals. I encountered Ephrem the Syrian, a poet and musician, who began women’s choirs and composed some of the earliest hymns for female voices, spreading literacy among women in the fourth century. He died tending the sick in a plague.
I read about Felicity, an enslaved woman who was martyred in the third century while offering forgiveness to her executioners. I learned about Maximilian Kolbe, a Polish Catholic priest who hid thousands of refugees during the Nazi regime. Kolbe died in Auschwitz after volunteering to take the place of another prisoner who was to be executed.
But learning church history was also deeply disillusioning as I discovered how parts of the church have been complicit in white supremacy, colonialism, abuse, misogyny and astonishing evil. All faith stories are shaped by human communities, and these human communities often disappoint us.
In a cultural moment where want to divide all people and institutions neatly into “good guys” and “bad guys,” those on the right side of history and those who aren’t, the righteous and the damned, this day reminds us of the checkered and complicated truth of each human heart. Martin Luther gave us the helpful phrase “simul justus et peccator” — simultaneously saint and sinner. It names how we are holy and wayward at once. It proclaims a paradox that we are redeemed yet in need of redemption.
All Saints’ Day reminds me that God meets us, saints and sinners, despite our contradictions, and makes good out of haphazard lives. It tells me that all of us, even the best of us, are in need of unimaginable mercy and forgiveness. The church is “first and foremost, a community of forgiven sinners,” writes the theologian Gilbert Meilaender. It is not “a community that embodies the practices of perfection” but instead “a body of believers who still live ‘in the flesh,’ who are still part of the world, suffering the transformations effected by God’s grace on its pilgrim way.” Recalling the stories of saints is, in the end, a celebration not of perfection but of grace.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/31/opin ... 778d3e6de3
Views from a rabbi, a priest & an imam on the Abrahamic house being built in Abu Dhabi
Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hviaj_eqP3g
Religious history was made in Abu Dhabi last year, when the Document on Human Fraternity was signed in February by Pope Francis and Dr. Ahmed Al Tayeb, the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar.
Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hviaj_eqP3g
Religious history was made in Abu Dhabi last year, when the Document on Human Fraternity was signed in February by Pope Francis and Dr. Ahmed Al Tayeb, the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar.
Raef - The Muslim Christmas Song (Deck the Halls Cover)
Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=deskt ... IbqcoBuUvI
Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=deskt ... IbqcoBuUvI
Daily Diamond
"A deepening sense of spiritual commitment—and the ethical framework that goes with it--will be a central requirement if we are to find our way through the minefields and the quick sands of modern life. A strengthening of religious institutions should be a vital part of this process. To be sure, freedom of religion is a critical value in a pluralistic society. But if freedom of religion deteriorates into freedom from religion—then societies will find themselves lost in a bleak and unpromising landscape—with no compass, no roadmap and no sense of ultimate direction."
Mawlana Hazar Imam, Evora, Portugal, February 2006
"A deepening sense of spiritual commitment—and the ethical framework that goes with it--will be a central requirement if we are to find our way through the minefields and the quick sands of modern life. A strengthening of religious institutions should be a vital part of this process. To be sure, freedom of religion is a critical value in a pluralistic society. But if freedom of religion deteriorates into freedom from religion—then societies will find themselves lost in a bleak and unpromising landscape—with no compass, no roadmap and no sense of ultimate direction."
Mawlana Hazar Imam, Evora, Portugal, February 2006
Is That a Burning Bush? Is This Mt. Sinai? Solstice Bolsters a Claim
On the year’s shortest day, hundreds of Israelis ventured deep into the desert to witness a strange natural phenomenon atop an ancient pilgrimage site that some argue is where God spoke to Moses.
MOUNT KARKOM, Israel — The mountain kept its secrets for centuries, its air of sacred mystery enhanced by a remote location in the Negev Desert in southern Israel.
But one day last week, hundreds of Israeli adventurers headed deep into the wilderness to reach Mount Karkom, determined to get closer to answering a question as intriguing as it is controversial: Is this the Mount Sinai of the Bible, where God is believed to have communicated with Moses?
Mount Sinai’s location has long been disputed by scholars both religious and academic, and there are a dozen more traditional contenders, most of them in the mountainous expanses of the Sinai Peninsula across the border in Egypt.
But Mount Karkom’s claim has gained some popular support because of an annual natural phenomenon that an intrepid group of archaeology and nature enthusiasts had come to witness for themselves.
In 2003, a local Israeli guide and ecologist happened to be atop Karkom’s vast plateau one day in late December around the time of the winter solstice, when he came upon a marvel.
At midday, with the sun low in the sky on one of the shortest days of the year, he peered across a deep ravine and spotted a strange aura of light, flickering like flames, emanating from a spot on a sheer rock face.
It was sunlight reflected at a particular angle off the sides of a cave, but the discovery soon made its way to Israeli television and was fancifully named “the burning bush.” Perhaps this, some said, was the supernatural fire that, according to the Book of Exodus, Moses saw on the holy mountain when God first spoke to him, and where he would later receive the Ten Commandments as he led the Israelites out of Egypt.
The burning bush, never consumed by the fire, is symbolic in Judaism, Christianity, Islam and other faiths including Baha’i.
But decades before this accidental astronomical discovery, Mount Karkom was already captivating some archaeologists with hints that the site had played an important spiritual role thousands of years ago.
More photos at:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/31/worl ... 778d3e6de3
On the year’s shortest day, hundreds of Israelis ventured deep into the desert to witness a strange natural phenomenon atop an ancient pilgrimage site that some argue is where God spoke to Moses.
MOUNT KARKOM, Israel — The mountain kept its secrets for centuries, its air of sacred mystery enhanced by a remote location in the Negev Desert in southern Israel.
But one day last week, hundreds of Israeli adventurers headed deep into the wilderness to reach Mount Karkom, determined to get closer to answering a question as intriguing as it is controversial: Is this the Mount Sinai of the Bible, where God is believed to have communicated with Moses?
Mount Sinai’s location has long been disputed by scholars both religious and academic, and there are a dozen more traditional contenders, most of them in the mountainous expanses of the Sinai Peninsula across the border in Egypt.
But Mount Karkom’s claim has gained some popular support because of an annual natural phenomenon that an intrepid group of archaeology and nature enthusiasts had come to witness for themselves.
In 2003, a local Israeli guide and ecologist happened to be atop Karkom’s vast plateau one day in late December around the time of the winter solstice, when he came upon a marvel.
At midday, with the sun low in the sky on one of the shortest days of the year, he peered across a deep ravine and spotted a strange aura of light, flickering like flames, emanating from a spot on a sheer rock face.
It was sunlight reflected at a particular angle off the sides of a cave, but the discovery soon made its way to Israeli television and was fancifully named “the burning bush.” Perhaps this, some said, was the supernatural fire that, according to the Book of Exodus, Moses saw on the holy mountain when God first spoke to him, and where he would later receive the Ten Commandments as he led the Israelites out of Egypt.
The burning bush, never consumed by the fire, is symbolic in Judaism, Christianity, Islam and other faiths including Baha’i.
But decades before this accidental astronomical discovery, Mount Karkom was already captivating some archaeologists with hints that the site had played an important spiritual role thousands of years ago.
More photos at:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/31/worl ... 778d3e6de3
The World Interfaith Harmony Week
Annual UN Observance Week: Feb. 1-7
The World Interfaith Harmony Week was first proposed at the UN General Assembly on September 23, 2010 by H.M. King Abdullah II of Jordan. Just under a month later, on October 20, 2010, it was unanimously adopted by the UN and henceforth the first week of February will be observed as a World Interfaith Harmony Week.
The World Interfaith Harmony Week is based on the pioneering work of The Common Word initiative. This initiative, which started in 2007, called for Muslim and Christian leaders to engage in a dialogue based on two common fundamental religious Commandments; Love of God, and Love of the Neighbour, without nevertheless compromising any of their own religious tenets. The Two commandments are at the heart of the three Monotheistic religions and therefore provide the most solid theological ground possible.
The World Interfaith Harmony Week extends the Two Commandments by adding ‘Love of the Good, and Love of the Neighbour’. This formula includes all people of goodwill. It includes those of other faiths, and those with no faith.
The World Interfaith Harmony Week provides a platform—one week in a year—when all interfaith groups and other groups of goodwill can show the world what a powerful movement they are. The thousands of events organized by these groups often go unnoticed not only by the general public, but also by other groups themselves. This week will allow for these groups to become aware of each other and strengthen the movement by building ties and avoiding duplicating each others’ efforts.
It is hoped that this initiative will provide a focal point from which all people of goodwill can recognize that the common values they hold far outweigh the differences they have, and thus provide a strong dosage of peace and harmony to their communities.
World Interfaith Harmony Week Resolution UNGA A/65/PV.34
The General Assembly, Recalling its resolutions 53/243 of 13 September 1999 on the declaration and programme of action relating to a culture of peace, 57/6 of 4 November 2002 concerning the promotion of a culture of peace and non-violence, 58/128 of 19 December 2003 on the promotion of religious and cultural understanding, harmony and cooperation, 60/4 of 20 October 2005 on a global agenda for dialogue among civilizations, 64/14 of 10 November 2009 on the Alliance of Civilizations, 64/81 of 7 December 2009 on the promotion of interreligious and intercultural dialogue, understanding and cooperation for peace and 64/164 of 18 December 2009 on the elimination of all forms of intolerance and discrimination based on religion or belief,
Recognizing the imperative need for dialogue among different faiths and religions in enhancing mutual understanding, harmony and cooperation among people,
Recalling with appreciation various global, regional and subregional initiatives on mutual understanding and interfaith harmony including the Tripartite Forum on Interfaith Cooperation for Peace, and the initiative “A Common Word”,
Recognizing that the moral imperatives of all religions, convictions and beliefs call for peace, tolerance and mutual understanding,
Reaffirms that mutual understanding and interreligious dialogue constitute important dimensions of a culture of peace;
Proclaims the first week of February of every year the World Interfaith Harmony Week between all religions, faiths and beliefs;
Encourages all States to support, on a voluntary basis, the spread of the message of interfaith harmony and goodwill in the world’s churches, mosques, synagogues, temples and other places of worship during that week, based on love of God and love of one’s neighbour or on love of the good and love of one’s neighbour, each according to their own religious traditions or convictions;
Requests the Secretary-General to keep the General Assembly informed of the implementation of the present resolution.
Un Resolution
More...
https://worldinterfaithharmonyweek.com/
Annual UN Observance Week: Feb. 1-7
The World Interfaith Harmony Week was first proposed at the UN General Assembly on September 23, 2010 by H.M. King Abdullah II of Jordan. Just under a month later, on October 20, 2010, it was unanimously adopted by the UN and henceforth the first week of February will be observed as a World Interfaith Harmony Week.
The World Interfaith Harmony Week is based on the pioneering work of The Common Word initiative. This initiative, which started in 2007, called for Muslim and Christian leaders to engage in a dialogue based on two common fundamental religious Commandments; Love of God, and Love of the Neighbour, without nevertheless compromising any of their own religious tenets. The Two commandments are at the heart of the three Monotheistic religions and therefore provide the most solid theological ground possible.
The World Interfaith Harmony Week extends the Two Commandments by adding ‘Love of the Good, and Love of the Neighbour’. This formula includes all people of goodwill. It includes those of other faiths, and those with no faith.
The World Interfaith Harmony Week provides a platform—one week in a year—when all interfaith groups and other groups of goodwill can show the world what a powerful movement they are. The thousands of events organized by these groups often go unnoticed not only by the general public, but also by other groups themselves. This week will allow for these groups to become aware of each other and strengthen the movement by building ties and avoiding duplicating each others’ efforts.
It is hoped that this initiative will provide a focal point from which all people of goodwill can recognize that the common values they hold far outweigh the differences they have, and thus provide a strong dosage of peace and harmony to their communities.
World Interfaith Harmony Week Resolution UNGA A/65/PV.34
The General Assembly, Recalling its resolutions 53/243 of 13 September 1999 on the declaration and programme of action relating to a culture of peace, 57/6 of 4 November 2002 concerning the promotion of a culture of peace and non-violence, 58/128 of 19 December 2003 on the promotion of religious and cultural understanding, harmony and cooperation, 60/4 of 20 October 2005 on a global agenda for dialogue among civilizations, 64/14 of 10 November 2009 on the Alliance of Civilizations, 64/81 of 7 December 2009 on the promotion of interreligious and intercultural dialogue, understanding and cooperation for peace and 64/164 of 18 December 2009 on the elimination of all forms of intolerance and discrimination based on religion or belief,
Recognizing the imperative need for dialogue among different faiths and religions in enhancing mutual understanding, harmony and cooperation among people,
Recalling with appreciation various global, regional and subregional initiatives on mutual understanding and interfaith harmony including the Tripartite Forum on Interfaith Cooperation for Peace, and the initiative “A Common Word”,
Recognizing that the moral imperatives of all religions, convictions and beliefs call for peace, tolerance and mutual understanding,
Reaffirms that mutual understanding and interreligious dialogue constitute important dimensions of a culture of peace;
Proclaims the first week of February of every year the World Interfaith Harmony Week between all religions, faiths and beliefs;
Encourages all States to support, on a voluntary basis, the spread of the message of interfaith harmony and goodwill in the world’s churches, mosques, synagogues, temples and other places of worship during that week, based on love of God and love of one’s neighbour or on love of the good and love of one’s neighbour, each according to their own religious traditions or convictions;
Requests the Secretary-General to keep the General Assembly informed of the implementation of the present resolution.
Un Resolution
More...
https://worldinterfaithharmonyweek.com/
Building bridges - religions' role in our societies | Eboo Patel | TEDxChicago
Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GYLesUKHPGc&t=8s
Whatever your religious affiliation, you perhaps recognize that the role of religion in our society is essential and provides a positive influence. However, as citizens of the most diverse country in history, we should be mindful to provide a bridge of cooperation between faiths to avoid identity-based disagreements. Eboo Patel is the founder of the Interfaith Youth Core, the nation's largest interfaith organization, and has consulted with multiple White House administrations on interfaith and bridge building initiatives. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx
Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GYLesUKHPGc&t=8s
Whatever your religious affiliation, you perhaps recognize that the role of religion in our society is essential and provides a positive influence. However, as citizens of the most diverse country in history, we should be mindful to provide a bridge of cooperation between faiths to avoid identity-based disagreements. Eboo Patel is the founder of the Interfaith Youth Core, the nation's largest interfaith organization, and has consulted with multiple White House administrations on interfaith and bridge building initiatives. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx
Three faith traditions come together for a weekend of remembrance
The news can be hard to get through each day.
Wars, crimes, and the suffering of innocents. The warming of the planet and rising of the seas. Wildfires, lockdowns, detainment camps, and millions displaced by war, drought, hunger, and dictatorships.
Sometimes, there is too much to take in.
This is a weekend that includes Passover, Easter Sunday, and the continuation of Ramadan. Holidays about rescue, renewal, and reflection. Stories about the parting of seas, for a people to escape slavery; a great soul rising; and fasting and long nights of prayer to remind ourselves of the preciousness of life.
Sarah Sager, a Cantor in Beachwood, Ohio, told us this confluence of holy days, "represents the right of every human being to be free. For three-thousand years we have been observing this holiday with the same vision. We will continue to do so until the dream is realized. Somehow, it shouldn't be so hard and rare."
Imam Makram Nu'man El-Amin in Minneapolis told us, "I choose not to see this as a coincidence, but a sign that all these faiths overlap. We bring multitudes around the globe together in acts of prayers this weekend for the common good of all peoples. This is especially important in a time of conflicts and social justice concerns."
Sponsor Message
And Sister Margaret Guider of the Boston College School of Theology and Ministry, sent us a poem that reads in part:
"The convergence of these sacred days
should serve as a collective reminder,
that the prophetic heritage
of our respective faith traditions, whether adhered to or not
in the ways of our ancestors, continues to permeate the air
which the human family breathes,
of freedom, love and peace,
the life-giving breath of the Holy One.
Yet, many of us, throughout the year,
breathe through our mouths,
while holding our noses.
In doing so, we defend ourselves from the suffocating air of
bondage, hatred and violence
that surrounds us.
However, in doing so,
we also close ourselves off
from any opportunity of
smelling the scents of
justice, hope and compassion
that also arouse conscience,
giving rise to courage, and resiliency.
Perhaps these holy days
will provide us with an opportunity to open ourselves to be moved
Christians, East and West,
Muslims, Shia and Sunni,
and Jews, Orthodox and Reformed,
to breathe in
the scents of the sacred - of freedom, love and peace,
that we are called to breathe out -
Not only on special days,
But every day."
https://www.npr.org/2022/04/16/10931440 ... emembrance
Wars, crimes, and the suffering of innocents. The warming of the planet and rising of the seas. Wildfires, lockdowns, detainment camps, and millions displaced by war, drought, hunger, and dictatorships.
Sometimes, there is too much to take in.
This is a weekend that includes Passover, Easter Sunday, and the continuation of Ramadan. Holidays about rescue, renewal, and reflection. Stories about the parting of seas, for a people to escape slavery; a great soul rising; and fasting and long nights of prayer to remind ourselves of the preciousness of life.
Sarah Sager, a Cantor in Beachwood, Ohio, told us this confluence of holy days, "represents the right of every human being to be free. For three-thousand years we have been observing this holiday with the same vision. We will continue to do so until the dream is realized. Somehow, it shouldn't be so hard and rare."
Imam Makram Nu'man El-Amin in Minneapolis told us, "I choose not to see this as a coincidence, but a sign that all these faiths overlap. We bring multitudes around the globe together in acts of prayers this weekend for the common good of all peoples. This is especially important in a time of conflicts and social justice concerns."
Sponsor Message
And Sister Margaret Guider of the Boston College School of Theology and Ministry, sent us a poem that reads in part:
"The convergence of these sacred days
should serve as a collective reminder,
that the prophetic heritage
of our respective faith traditions, whether adhered to or not
in the ways of our ancestors, continues to permeate the air
which the human family breathes,
of freedom, love and peace,
the life-giving breath of the Holy One.
Yet, many of us, throughout the year,
breathe through our mouths,
while holding our noses.
In doing so, we defend ourselves from the suffocating air of
bondage, hatred and violence
that surrounds us.
However, in doing so,
we also close ourselves off
from any opportunity of
smelling the scents of
justice, hope and compassion
that also arouse conscience,
giving rise to courage, and resiliency.
Perhaps these holy days
will provide us with an opportunity to open ourselves to be moved
Christians, East and West,
Muslims, Shia and Sunni,
and Jews, Orthodox and Reformed,
to breathe in
the scents of the sacred - of freedom, love and peace,
that we are called to breathe out -
Not only on special days,
But every day."
https://www.npr.org/2022/04/16/10931440 ... emembrance
Ahl al-Kitab “People of the Book”
Chand Raat of Dhu al-Hajj 1443 – 29th June 2022: Ahl al-Kitab “People of the Book”
BY ISMAILIMAIL POSTED ON JUNE 28, 2022
By: Sadruddin Noorani, Chicago, USA
Who are the “Ahl al-Kitab”? Ahl al-Kitab, meaning “possessors of the Scripture,” or “people of the Book”, is a specific term accorded to Jews and Christians in the Holy Qur’an.
The Qur’an states that Jews, Christians, and Sabians can, like Muslims, achieve salvation through the performance of the rites of their respective religions.
“Indeed, those who believe (in the Qur’an, And those who follow the Jewish scriptures, And the Christians and the Sabians (Sabi’in) [before Prophet Muhammad], And who believe in God And the Last Day, And work righteousness, Shall have their reward with their Lord: On them Shall be no fear, nor shall they grieve.” 2:62
This term, in the Qur’an and the resultant Muslim terminology, denotes the Jews and the Christians, repositories of the earlier revealed books, al-Tawraat – the Torah, al-Zabur – the Psalms, and al-Injeel – the Gospel. This term was later extended to include the Sabians, Zoroastrians, Samaritans, Hindus, and Buddhists.
This could also be called the ‘Abrahamic tradition’ as the Jews, Christians, and Muslims share common roots with Hazrat Ibrahim (a.s.) as the patriarch. All three of them are Semitic and they are monotheistic, with slight variations in the degree of monotheism.
Concept of Prophethood and Divine Guidance:
In Islam, God is not a silent God. He communicates with mankind through His Prophets. (And after the end of Prophecy, according to Shi’a doctrine, tradition, and interpretation of history, through the Imam of the Time). Muslims, therefore, believe that all communities have been guided through divinely inspired messengers.
“And there was never a people without a Prophet having lived amongst them.” Qur’an 35:24.
According to a tradition, there have been 124,000 Prophets who were inspired to guide their respective communities. The Qur’an mentions 25 by name.
But the Qur’an also states that there have been Prophets besides those that are mentioned:
“And we sent messengers we have mentioned to thee before, and messengers we have not mentioned to thee.” 4:164
All Prophets brought the same message:
One may then question: What need was there to send Prophet Muhammad (p.b.u.h.) if all the messages were the same and from the same source? The answer is simple and clear. Even though the message is one in origin, the way mankind understands and interprets the message varies. Aga Khan (lll) has very gently articulated this in his Memoirs (Pg 174):
“The answer of Islam is precise and clear. In spite of its great spiritual strength, Jewish monotheism has retained two characteristics which render it essentially different from Islamic monotheism: God has remained, in spite of all, a national and racial God for the children of Israel, and his personality is entirely separate from its supreme manifestation, the universe. In far distant countries such as India and China, the purity of the faith in one God had been so vitiated by polytheism, idolatry and even by pantheism, which was hardly distinguishable from atheism, that these popular and folk-lore religions bore but little resemblance to that which emanated from the true and pure Godhead. Christianity lost its strength and meaning for Muslims in that it saw its great and glorious founder not as a man but as God incarnate in man, as God made flesh…”
It is obvious from the above that the same message from the same source could be differently interpreted. Therefore, even though there is one Message – we have diversity of interpretations; diversity in the manner in which humans understand and interpret it. Different faiths are different interpretations of the same message: Submission to the Will of God. The interpretations and practices of faith have evolved according to time, environment, and circumstances. For instance, with regards to their views of qualities of God, the Jews stress the sternness of God, the Christians tend to stress the love of God, Islam stresses love on the one hand and justice on the other.
“Verily we have revealed the Torah. In it is guidance and light.”5:47
Islam recognizes all Prophets and all divine scriptures including the Psalms (revealed to Prophet David), the Old Testament (revealed to Prophet Moses), and the New Testament (revealed to Prophet Jesus).
“Say: ‘We believe in God, and in what has been revealed to us and what was revealed to Abraham, Ismail, Issac, Jacob, and the tribes, and in (the books) given to Moses, Jesus, and the Prophets, from their Lord: We make no distinction between one and another among them, and to God do we bow our will (in Islam).’ 3:84
Muslims believe that each of the revelations built on and enhanced the preceding revelation. This series of revelations was concluded with the revelation of the Qur’an on Prophet Muhammad (p.b.u.h.). The Qur’an confirms and completes the message of all preceding Prophets and books of revelation. Thus, the revelation to Prophet Muhammad is a continuation and culmination of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic message.
Therefore, there is no fundamental conflict of faith between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Any conflict which one perceives may be of a social, political, or economic nature; but there is no conflict of faith.
Ahl al-Kitab and commonalities in particular to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam:
All three faiths are part of the Abrahamic tradition. They claim descent from a common ancestor, Prophet Abraham. The Jews through his son Ishaaq (Isaac) and the Muslims through his son Ismail. Christianity is the offspring of Judaism; Jesus himself was seen as a Jewish Rabbi. There is no fundamental conflict of faith between the people of the Book. The commonalities are:
Common monotheistic vision – a belief in one God: The Shahadah, or affirmation that: “There is no God but Allah” is the Islamic counterpart of the Jewish Shema Yisrael: “Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One.” Similarly, in Christianity there is the following affirmation: There is one God and father of all, who is above all, and through all, and in you all.
Common religious attitudes towards life – the transience of earthly life: Like Jews and Christians, Muslims also believe that the present life is only a trial preparation for the next realm of existence and accountability of actions.
Common ethics and values: Respect for knowledge, justice, compassion towards the poor and underprivileged, importance of family life, and respect for parents, etc.
This is not to minimize the differences or to renounce the points that separate us, but that the basic unity of faith is of such importance that it allows us to consider our differences with serenity and with a sense of perspective. It means that we can live together, co-exist, work together in an atmosphere of peace, understanding, tolerance and friendship, because we are all believers of the same God.
Common practices amongst the people of the Book:
Judaism, Christianity and Islam also share the concepts of prayer, fasting and pilgrimage, although in different forms and with different emphases on meaning and interpretation.
Prayers:
Prayers are an essential part of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Like Islam, the teachings of Judaism and Christianity regard congregational prayers as more beneficial than prayers said individually.
Charity:
Judaism: The Mosaic Law prescribes as obligatory to offer as charity to the needy one tenth of the value of the produce from the harvest on those who can afford it. The Bible and the Talmus teach that assisting the poor is a duty and not just an act of grace on the part of the donor.
Christianity: The message is ‘have mercy and help the poor and needy‘. (Luke, X, 30-37).
Islam: The Qur’an is studded with passages extolling the importance and necessity of ‘giving’ to the poor, the widowed, and the orphaned. According to the teachings of Islam, the practical fulfillment of belief in God’s Oneness, in divine revelation, and in the existence of the hereafter, is best achieved through prayer and in the service of humanity through charity and philanthropy.
Fasting:
In Islam (Ramadan) has been regarded as the counterpart of the Christian Lent, a forty-day period of fasting and penitence before Easter. It corresponds to the 40 days Jesus spent fasting in the wilderness before beginning his public ministry. But it also resembles the Jewish observance of the month of “Elul” as a period of Teshuvah or penitence.
Pilgrimage:
Every Muslim is expected to make a pilgrimage to Mecca (Ka’bah) at least once in their lifetime, if it is physically and financially affordable. The Israelites were instructed in the Bible to make pilgrimage to Jerusalem three times a year. The concept of visiting (going on pilgrimage to) shrines or ‘their saints’ are common in all the three religions.
Conclusion:
“O mankind! We created you from a single soul, male and female, and made you into nations and tribes, so that you may come to know one another. Truly, the most honored of you in God’s sight is the greatest of you in piety. God is all knowing, all-aware.”49:13
We must not indulge in over-simplified euphoria. That is, we must refrain from taking an over-simplifying approach or attitude. It is needless to say that we have different interpretations along very important lines, for example: Islam does not accept the idea of filial relationship and the concept of trinity (“Christ the son of Mary was no more than an Apostle; many were the apostles that passed away before him. His mother was a woman of truth, …” Qur’an,5:75) as usually understood by Christians, both of which are alien to the Islamic perspective.
Remember that all ’People of the Book’ are from one Abrahamic tradition:
“…And dispute you not with the People of the Book, except with means better (than mere disputation), unless it be with those of them who inflict wrong (and injury):
But say, “We believe in the revelation which has come down to us and in that which came down to you; Our God and your God is One; and it is to Him we bow (in Islam) …” 29:46
“Lo! Those who believe in Allah and his Messengers and seek to make distinction between Allah and His Messengers, and (those who) say, we believe in some and disbelieve in others, and seek to choose a way in between such are truly disbelievers…;” 4:150-151
“Therefore, …go straight as you have been commanded,
and do not follow their likes and dislikes, but say:
“I believe in whatever Book God has sent down;
and I have been commanded to act justly towards you.
God is our Lord and your Lord.
To us shall be accounted our deeds; and to you yours;
let there be no dispute between us and you;
God will bring us all together, for with Him all journeys end.” 42:15
Sir Sultan Mahomed Shah, Aga Khan (lll) states in “Islam, the religion of my Ancestors”, 1954, page 10):
“All Islamic schools of thought accept it as a fundamental principle that for centuries, for thousands of years before the advent of Prophet Muhammad, there arose from time to time messengers, illuminated by divine grace, for and amongst those races of the earth which had sufficiently advanced intellectually to comprehend such a message. Thus Abraham, Moses, Jesus and all the prophets of Israel are universally accepted by Islam. Muslims indeed know no limitation merely to the prophets of Israel, they are ready to admit that there were similar divinely inspired messengers in other countries–Gautama Buddha, Shri Krishna and Shri Ram in India, Socrates in Greece, the wise men of China and many other sages and saints among people and civilizations of which we have now lost trace. Thus man’s soul has never been left without a specially inspired messenger from the Soul that sustains, embraces and is the Universe.”
Prince Karim al-Husayni, Aga Khan lV said at the opening ceremony of the Burnaby Jamatkhana, Vancouver, Canada, 23rd August 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 recognizes them as being part of God’s message to mankind. To all Muslims, Shi’a and Sunni alike, the “People of the Book” are the people of 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 teachings…”
https://ismailimail.blog/2022/06/28/cha ... -the-book/
BY ISMAILIMAIL POSTED ON JUNE 28, 2022
By: Sadruddin Noorani, Chicago, USA
Who are the “Ahl al-Kitab”? Ahl al-Kitab, meaning “possessors of the Scripture,” or “people of the Book”, is a specific term accorded to Jews and Christians in the Holy Qur’an.
The Qur’an states that Jews, Christians, and Sabians can, like Muslims, achieve salvation through the performance of the rites of their respective religions.
“Indeed, those who believe (in the Qur’an, And those who follow the Jewish scriptures, And the Christians and the Sabians (Sabi’in) [before Prophet Muhammad], And who believe in God And the Last Day, And work righteousness, Shall have their reward with their Lord: On them Shall be no fear, nor shall they grieve.” 2:62
This term, in the Qur’an and the resultant Muslim terminology, denotes the Jews and the Christians, repositories of the earlier revealed books, al-Tawraat – the Torah, al-Zabur – the Psalms, and al-Injeel – the Gospel. This term was later extended to include the Sabians, Zoroastrians, Samaritans, Hindus, and Buddhists.
This could also be called the ‘Abrahamic tradition’ as the Jews, Christians, and Muslims share common roots with Hazrat Ibrahim (a.s.) as the patriarch. All three of them are Semitic and they are monotheistic, with slight variations in the degree of monotheism.
Concept of Prophethood and Divine Guidance:
In Islam, God is not a silent God. He communicates with mankind through His Prophets. (And after the end of Prophecy, according to Shi’a doctrine, tradition, and interpretation of history, through the Imam of the Time). Muslims, therefore, believe that all communities have been guided through divinely inspired messengers.
“And there was never a people without a Prophet having lived amongst them.” Qur’an 35:24.
According to a tradition, there have been 124,000 Prophets who were inspired to guide their respective communities. The Qur’an mentions 25 by name.
But the Qur’an also states that there have been Prophets besides those that are mentioned:
“And we sent messengers we have mentioned to thee before, and messengers we have not mentioned to thee.” 4:164
All Prophets brought the same message:
One may then question: What need was there to send Prophet Muhammad (p.b.u.h.) if all the messages were the same and from the same source? The answer is simple and clear. Even though the message is one in origin, the way mankind understands and interprets the message varies. Aga Khan (lll) has very gently articulated this in his Memoirs (Pg 174):
“The answer of Islam is precise and clear. In spite of its great spiritual strength, Jewish monotheism has retained two characteristics which render it essentially different from Islamic monotheism: God has remained, in spite of all, a national and racial God for the children of Israel, and his personality is entirely separate from its supreme manifestation, the universe. In far distant countries such as India and China, the purity of the faith in one God had been so vitiated by polytheism, idolatry and even by pantheism, which was hardly distinguishable from atheism, that these popular and folk-lore religions bore but little resemblance to that which emanated from the true and pure Godhead. Christianity lost its strength and meaning for Muslims in that it saw its great and glorious founder not as a man but as God incarnate in man, as God made flesh…”
It is obvious from the above that the same message from the same source could be differently interpreted. Therefore, even though there is one Message – we have diversity of interpretations; diversity in the manner in which humans understand and interpret it. Different faiths are different interpretations of the same message: Submission to the Will of God. The interpretations and practices of faith have evolved according to time, environment, and circumstances. For instance, with regards to their views of qualities of God, the Jews stress the sternness of God, the Christians tend to stress the love of God, Islam stresses love on the one hand and justice on the other.
“Verily we have revealed the Torah. In it is guidance and light.”5:47
Islam recognizes all Prophets and all divine scriptures including the Psalms (revealed to Prophet David), the Old Testament (revealed to Prophet Moses), and the New Testament (revealed to Prophet Jesus).
“Say: ‘We believe in God, and in what has been revealed to us and what was revealed to Abraham, Ismail, Issac, Jacob, and the tribes, and in (the books) given to Moses, Jesus, and the Prophets, from their Lord: We make no distinction between one and another among them, and to God do we bow our will (in Islam).’ 3:84
Muslims believe that each of the revelations built on and enhanced the preceding revelation. This series of revelations was concluded with the revelation of the Qur’an on Prophet Muhammad (p.b.u.h.). The Qur’an confirms and completes the message of all preceding Prophets and books of revelation. Thus, the revelation to Prophet Muhammad is a continuation and culmination of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic message.
Therefore, there is no fundamental conflict of faith between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Any conflict which one perceives may be of a social, political, or economic nature; but there is no conflict of faith.
Ahl al-Kitab and commonalities in particular to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam:
All three faiths are part of the Abrahamic tradition. They claim descent from a common ancestor, Prophet Abraham. The Jews through his son Ishaaq (Isaac) and the Muslims through his son Ismail. Christianity is the offspring of Judaism; Jesus himself was seen as a Jewish Rabbi. There is no fundamental conflict of faith between the people of the Book. The commonalities are:
Common monotheistic vision – a belief in one God: The Shahadah, or affirmation that: “There is no God but Allah” is the Islamic counterpart of the Jewish Shema Yisrael: “Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One.” Similarly, in Christianity there is the following affirmation: There is one God and father of all, who is above all, and through all, and in you all.
Common religious attitudes towards life – the transience of earthly life: Like Jews and Christians, Muslims also believe that the present life is only a trial preparation for the next realm of existence and accountability of actions.
Common ethics and values: Respect for knowledge, justice, compassion towards the poor and underprivileged, importance of family life, and respect for parents, etc.
This is not to minimize the differences or to renounce the points that separate us, but that the basic unity of faith is of such importance that it allows us to consider our differences with serenity and with a sense of perspective. It means that we can live together, co-exist, work together in an atmosphere of peace, understanding, tolerance and friendship, because we are all believers of the same God.
Common practices amongst the people of the Book:
Judaism, Christianity and Islam also share the concepts of prayer, fasting and pilgrimage, although in different forms and with different emphases on meaning and interpretation.
Prayers:
Prayers are an essential part of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Like Islam, the teachings of Judaism and Christianity regard congregational prayers as more beneficial than prayers said individually.
Charity:
Judaism: The Mosaic Law prescribes as obligatory to offer as charity to the needy one tenth of the value of the produce from the harvest on those who can afford it. The Bible and the Talmus teach that assisting the poor is a duty and not just an act of grace on the part of the donor.
Christianity: The message is ‘have mercy and help the poor and needy‘. (Luke, X, 30-37).
Islam: The Qur’an is studded with passages extolling the importance and necessity of ‘giving’ to the poor, the widowed, and the orphaned. According to the teachings of Islam, the practical fulfillment of belief in God’s Oneness, in divine revelation, and in the existence of the hereafter, is best achieved through prayer and in the service of humanity through charity and philanthropy.
Fasting:
In Islam (Ramadan) has been regarded as the counterpart of the Christian Lent, a forty-day period of fasting and penitence before Easter. It corresponds to the 40 days Jesus spent fasting in the wilderness before beginning his public ministry. But it also resembles the Jewish observance of the month of “Elul” as a period of Teshuvah or penitence.
Pilgrimage:
Every Muslim is expected to make a pilgrimage to Mecca (Ka’bah) at least once in their lifetime, if it is physically and financially affordable. The Israelites were instructed in the Bible to make pilgrimage to Jerusalem three times a year. The concept of visiting (going on pilgrimage to) shrines or ‘their saints’ are common in all the three religions.
Conclusion:
“O mankind! We created you from a single soul, male and female, and made you into nations and tribes, so that you may come to know one another. Truly, the most honored of you in God’s sight is the greatest of you in piety. God is all knowing, all-aware.”49:13
We must not indulge in over-simplified euphoria. That is, we must refrain from taking an over-simplifying approach or attitude. It is needless to say that we have different interpretations along very important lines, for example: Islam does not accept the idea of filial relationship and the concept of trinity (“Christ the son of Mary was no more than an Apostle; many were the apostles that passed away before him. His mother was a woman of truth, …” Qur’an,5:75) as usually understood by Christians, both of which are alien to the Islamic perspective.
Remember that all ’People of the Book’ are from one Abrahamic tradition:
“…And dispute you not with the People of the Book, except with means better (than mere disputation), unless it be with those of them who inflict wrong (and injury):
But say, “We believe in the revelation which has come down to us and in that which came down to you; Our God and your God is One; and it is to Him we bow (in Islam) …” 29:46
“Lo! Those who believe in Allah and his Messengers and seek to make distinction between Allah and His Messengers, and (those who) say, we believe in some and disbelieve in others, and seek to choose a way in between such are truly disbelievers…;” 4:150-151
“Therefore, …go straight as you have been commanded,
and do not follow their likes and dislikes, but say:
“I believe in whatever Book God has sent down;
and I have been commanded to act justly towards you.
God is our Lord and your Lord.
To us shall be accounted our deeds; and to you yours;
let there be no dispute between us and you;
God will bring us all together, for with Him all journeys end.” 42:15
Sir Sultan Mahomed Shah, Aga Khan (lll) states in “Islam, the religion of my Ancestors”, 1954, page 10):
“All Islamic schools of thought accept it as a fundamental principle that for centuries, for thousands of years before the advent of Prophet Muhammad, there arose from time to time messengers, illuminated by divine grace, for and amongst those races of the earth which had sufficiently advanced intellectually to comprehend such a message. Thus Abraham, Moses, Jesus and all the prophets of Israel are universally accepted by Islam. Muslims indeed know no limitation merely to the prophets of Israel, they are ready to admit that there were similar divinely inspired messengers in other countries–Gautama Buddha, Shri Krishna and Shri Ram in India, Socrates in Greece, the wise men of China and many other sages and saints among people and civilizations of which we have now lost trace. Thus man’s soul has never been left without a specially inspired messenger from the Soul that sustains, embraces and is the Universe.”
Prince Karim al-Husayni, Aga Khan lV said at the opening ceremony of the Burnaby Jamatkhana, Vancouver, Canada, 23rd August 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 recognizes them as being part of God’s message to mankind. To all Muslims, Shi’a and Sunni alike, the “People of the Book” are the people of 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 teachings…”
https://ismailimail.blog/2022/06/28/cha ... -the-book/
First 90-acre Hindu park coming up in Canada’s Brampton city to be named after holy Gita
A multi-million dollar park to be carved out in Brampton city of Canada will be named after the Hindu holy scripture, Gita. The Hindus constitute the second largest immigrant community after the Sikhs in Canada with a large Gujarati community having settled there.
The Brampton city Municipal Corporation has allotted 90 acres of conservative forest land for the purpose which will be beautifully landscaped and have sculptures of Lord Krishna and Arjuna, the two main characters of the Gita besides some other Hindu deities.
Patrick Brown, mayor of Brampton says that keeping the basic principle of secularism on the top, the city council after naming Guru Nanak Road and a Masjid Drive will now set up Gita Park. “We respect all religions followed by the citizens of the metropolitan area,” he maintains.
The mayor disclosed that the park would have facilities for ‘Garba’ celebrations, a basketball court, a cricket field, and a place for doing yoga. “It will be a real meeting place for the people of all walks of life,” says the mayor.
The 90-acre Gita Park will be the largest in the world outside India where Hindu culture will be showcased.
The Hindu community residing in Brampton has welcomed the decision of the city council saying that it will help create better relations among all religions and races including the whites who will be free to use the park.
Don Patel, a leading Hindu activist while talking to local Omni TV, says the Gita spreads the message of peace and love. The park will kindle curiosity in the minds of youngsters to read and know what the Gita preaches.
Pope presses Muslim dialogue in first papal visit to Bahrain
Pope Francis is bringing his message of dialogue with the Muslim world to the kingdom of Bahrain
A worker hang a bar in front of portraits that show Pope Francis, right and Bahrain's King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa, left, outside the Cathedral of Our Lady of Arabia where the Pope will attend a Mass, in Manama, Bahrain, Wednesday, Nov. 2, 2022. Pope Francis is making the November 3-6 visit to participate in a government-sponsored conference on East-West dialogue and to minister to Bahrain's tiny Catholic community, part of his effort to pursue dialogue with the Muslim world. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla)
AWALI, Bahrain -- Pope Francis on Thursday brought his message of dialogue with the Muslim world to the kingdom of Bahrain, where the Sunni-led government is hosting an interfaith conference on East-West coexistence even as it stands accused of discriminating against the country’s Shiite majority.
Human rights groups and relatives of Shiite activists on death row have urged Francis to use his visit to call for an end to the death penalty and political repression in Bahrain. But it wasn't clear if Francis will publicly and explictly embarrass his hosts during his four-day visit, the first of any pontiff to the island nation in the Persian Gulf.
The 85-year-old pope, who has been using a wheelchair for several months because of strained knee ligaments, said he was in “a lot of pain” as he headed to Bahrain, and for the first time greeted journalists travelling with him while seated in the plane rather than walking through the aisle.
He arrived at the desert Awali air base to little fanfare and went immediately into a private meeting with Bahrain’s King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa at the airport before the official welcome ceremony.
Francis has long touted dialogue as an instrument of peace and believes a show of interfaith harmony is needed, especially now given Russia’s war in Ukraine and regional conflicts, such as in Yemen. On the eve of the trip, Francis asked for prayers so that the trip will promote “the cause of brotherhood and of peace, of which our times are in extreme and urgent need.”
The visit is Francis' second to a Gulf Arab country, following his 2019 landmark trip to Abu Dhabi, where he signed a document promoting Catholic-Muslim fraternity with a leading Sunni cleric, Sheikh Ahmed al-Tayeb. Al-Tayeb is the grand imam of Al-Azhar, the seat of Sunni learning in Cairo. Francis followed that with a 2021 visit to Iraq, where he was received by Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, one of the world’s pre-eminent Shiite clerics.
Francis will meet again this week in Bahrain with al-Tayeb, as well as other prominent figures in the interfaith field who are expected to attend the conference, which is similar to one hosted last month by Kazakhstan that Francis and el-Tayeb also attended. Members of the regional Muslim Council of Elders, the spiritual leader of the world's Orthodox Christians, Patriarch Bartholomew, a representative from the Russian Orthodox Church and rabbis from the United States are all expected, according to the Bahrain program.
The trip will also allow Francis to minister to Bahrain’s Catholic community, which numbers around 80,000 in a country of around 1.5 million. Most are workers hailing from the Philippines and India, though trip organizers expect pilgrims from Saudi Arabia and other neighboring countries will attend Francis’ big Mass at the national stadium on Saturday.
Bahrain is home to the Gulf’s first Catholic Church, the Sacred Heart parish, which opened in 1939, as well as its biggest one, Our Lady of Arabia Cathedral. The church, with a capacity of 2,300, opened last year in the desert town of Awali on land gifted to the church by King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa. In fact, the king presented Francis with a model of the church when he visited the Vatican in 2014 and extended the first invitation to visit.
Francis will visit both churches during his visit and is likely to thank the king for the tolerance the government has long shown Christians living in the country, particularly when compared to neighboring Saudi Arabia, where Christians cannot openly practice their faith.
“Religious liberty inside Bahrain is perhaps the best in the Arab world,” said Bishop Paul Hinder, the apostolic administrator for Bahrain and other Gulf Arab countries. “Even if everything isn’t ideal, there can be conversions (to Christianity), which aren’t at least officially punished like in other countries.”
But in the runup to his visit to Bahrain, Shiite opposition groups and human rights organizations have urged Francis to raise human rights violations against the majority Shiites by the Sunni monarchy. They urged him to call for an end to the death penalty and request to visit the country’s Jau prison, where hundreds of Shiite activists have been jailed.
Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have repeatedly denounced the use of torture in prisons, as well as forced confessions and “sham trials” against dissidents.
“We are writing to appeal to you as the families of twelve death row inmates who are facing imminent execution in Bahrain,” read a letter from the families to Francis released this week by the Bahrain Institute for Rights and Democracy. "Our family members remain behind bars and at risk of execution despite the clear injustice of their convictions."
Francis has changed church teaching to declare the death penalty inadmissible in all cases. He has regularly visited prisoners during his foreign trips, though no such prison visit is planned in Bahrain.
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The Vatican spokesman declined to say whether Francis would raise Bahrain’s human rights record publicly or privately during his visit.
———
Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.
https://abcnews.go.com/International/wi ... n-92584730
A worker hang a bar in front of portraits that show Pope Francis, right and Bahrain's King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa, left, outside the Cathedral of Our Lady of Arabia where the Pope will attend a Mass, in Manama, Bahrain, Wednesday, Nov. 2, 2022. Pope Francis is making the November 3-6 visit to participate in a government-sponsored conference on East-West dialogue and to minister to Bahrain's tiny Catholic community, part of his effort to pursue dialogue with the Muslim world. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla)
AWALI, Bahrain -- Pope Francis on Thursday brought his message of dialogue with the Muslim world to the kingdom of Bahrain, where the Sunni-led government is hosting an interfaith conference on East-West coexistence even as it stands accused of discriminating against the country’s Shiite majority.
Human rights groups and relatives of Shiite activists on death row have urged Francis to use his visit to call for an end to the death penalty and political repression in Bahrain. But it wasn't clear if Francis will publicly and explictly embarrass his hosts during his four-day visit, the first of any pontiff to the island nation in the Persian Gulf.
The 85-year-old pope, who has been using a wheelchair for several months because of strained knee ligaments, said he was in “a lot of pain” as he headed to Bahrain, and for the first time greeted journalists travelling with him while seated in the plane rather than walking through the aisle.
He arrived at the desert Awali air base to little fanfare and went immediately into a private meeting with Bahrain’s King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa at the airport before the official welcome ceremony.
Francis has long touted dialogue as an instrument of peace and believes a show of interfaith harmony is needed, especially now given Russia’s war in Ukraine and regional conflicts, such as in Yemen. On the eve of the trip, Francis asked for prayers so that the trip will promote “the cause of brotherhood and of peace, of which our times are in extreme and urgent need.”
The visit is Francis' second to a Gulf Arab country, following his 2019 landmark trip to Abu Dhabi, where he signed a document promoting Catholic-Muslim fraternity with a leading Sunni cleric, Sheikh Ahmed al-Tayeb. Al-Tayeb is the grand imam of Al-Azhar, the seat of Sunni learning in Cairo. Francis followed that with a 2021 visit to Iraq, where he was received by Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, one of the world’s pre-eminent Shiite clerics.
Francis will meet again this week in Bahrain with al-Tayeb, as well as other prominent figures in the interfaith field who are expected to attend the conference, which is similar to one hosted last month by Kazakhstan that Francis and el-Tayeb also attended. Members of the regional Muslim Council of Elders, the spiritual leader of the world's Orthodox Christians, Patriarch Bartholomew, a representative from the Russian Orthodox Church and rabbis from the United States are all expected, according to the Bahrain program.
The trip will also allow Francis to minister to Bahrain’s Catholic community, which numbers around 80,000 in a country of around 1.5 million. Most are workers hailing from the Philippines and India, though trip organizers expect pilgrims from Saudi Arabia and other neighboring countries will attend Francis’ big Mass at the national stadium on Saturday.
Bahrain is home to the Gulf’s first Catholic Church, the Sacred Heart parish, which opened in 1939, as well as its biggest one, Our Lady of Arabia Cathedral. The church, with a capacity of 2,300, opened last year in the desert town of Awali on land gifted to the church by King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa. In fact, the king presented Francis with a model of the church when he visited the Vatican in 2014 and extended the first invitation to visit.
Francis will visit both churches during his visit and is likely to thank the king for the tolerance the government has long shown Christians living in the country, particularly when compared to neighboring Saudi Arabia, where Christians cannot openly practice their faith.
“Religious liberty inside Bahrain is perhaps the best in the Arab world,” said Bishop Paul Hinder, the apostolic administrator for Bahrain and other Gulf Arab countries. “Even if everything isn’t ideal, there can be conversions (to Christianity), which aren’t at least officially punished like in other countries.”
But in the runup to his visit to Bahrain, Shiite opposition groups and human rights organizations have urged Francis to raise human rights violations against the majority Shiites by the Sunni monarchy. They urged him to call for an end to the death penalty and request to visit the country’s Jau prison, where hundreds of Shiite activists have been jailed.
Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have repeatedly denounced the use of torture in prisons, as well as forced confessions and “sham trials” against dissidents.
“We are writing to appeal to you as the families of twelve death row inmates who are facing imminent execution in Bahrain,” read a letter from the families to Francis released this week by the Bahrain Institute for Rights and Democracy. "Our family members remain behind bars and at risk of execution despite the clear injustice of their convictions."
Francis has changed church teaching to declare the death penalty inadmissible in all cases. He has regularly visited prisoners during his foreign trips, though no such prison visit is planned in Bahrain.
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The Vatican spokesman declined to say whether Francis would raise Bahrain’s human rights record publicly or privately during his visit.
———
Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.
https://abcnews.go.com/International/wi ... n-92584730
Why We Shouldn’t Lose Faith in Organized Religion
Eboo Patel wants to tell a better story about religion in America.
Patel, an American Muslim and founder and president of Interfaith America, a Chicago-based nonprofit that aims to promote cooperation across religious differences, served on President Barack Obama’s Advisory Council on Faith-Based Neighborhood Partnerships and has written five books, including his latest, “We Need to Build: Field Notes for Diverse Democracy.” I met Patel at an Interfaith America gathering last year and was struck by his buoyant enthusiasm for religious groups in America and his comfort with diversity and disagreement. I asked him to speak with me about religious identity, diversity and institutions in America. This interview has been edited and condensed.
Tish Harrison Warren: What worries you about the state of religious discourse in America now and what encourages you?
Eboo Patel: Here’s what worries me: Half the time when I’m giving a public presentation, the first question about religion is a negative question. What do you think about Islam and violence? What do you think about the Catholic Church and the pedophilia crisis? Why do so many people of faith hate gay people? Particularly in the areas of America where people have higher levels of education, those are their first questions. It is considered sophisticated and educated to know only the bad stuff about religion. Of course, that’s ironic because to only know the bad stuff is to not actually be educated. So that is discouraging.
I’ll tell you what I find encouraging. Catholic sisters just keep on doing what Catholic sisters do, which is taking care of poor people. There are 10,000 migrants in Chicago that leadership recently welcomed into the city. But they had not adequately prepared for where those people would sleep. Well, guess who’s taking care of them? Largely, Catholic Charities and other faith-based organizations.
Our society relies on religious communities to take care of people, to do addiction counseling, to do job training, to do hunger and homelessness work, to do refugee resettlement. We just don’t often tell the story of them doing that work. And I think that that’s a big problem.
At many interfaith gatherings I’ve been to, I see mainly religious progressives talking about progressive causes. Your organization reaches out to moderate and conservative religious people as well, including white evangelicals. How do you bridge those progressive/conservative divides that seem so deep now?
It’s actually so much simpler in practice than it is in theory. I’ll give an example: In any hospital in America at any hour, there are people from very different religious identities — a Muslim surgeon with a Jewish anesthesiologist, with a Mormon nurse, with a Jehovah’s Witness social worker, with a Baptist who is sanitizing the room at a hospital started by a Catholic social order like the Dominicans or the Jesuits, that is run by an agnostic who grew up Buddhist. And every single one of them before they walk into a surgery is having their own kind of moment of prayer or reflection or connection with what they call God. That’s what we see as interfaith work.
People from diverse religious backgrounds — who may disagree on some fundamental things about abortion or where to draw the line in Jerusalem or doctrinal matters like the nature of Jesus — who are working together on other fundamental things. That is the genius of American society. We call that civic cooperation. It takes place everywhere all the time.
Think about refugee resettlement. Six of the nine refugee resettlement agencies in America were founded by faith communities. And virtually all of them spend most of their time resettling refugees from a different religion. So you have Jews who founded the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, HIAS, in the late 19th century to resettle Jews from Russia. Then, by around the 1970s, most of the Jews who want to be resettled somewhere, whether it’s the United States or Europe or Israel, have been resettled. So does HIAS close? No! They start resettling Cambodian Buddhists. And now they’re resettling Somali Muslims. I think that’s the most inspiring thing in the world. In America, people build institutions — hospitals, social service agencies, colleges, whatever — out of the inspiration of their own faith identity, but the institution serves people of all identities. That is not a common ethos in human history.
But that’s the story of America. That is American pluralism at its best. That is civic cooperation. And I think that we should marvel at that every day.
One thing that you bring up in your writing is that religious identities are often not taken as seriously as other identity sources like race, sexual orientation or gender. You argue that diversity and inclusion conversations should include really diverse religious beliefs and identities. What do you think about the role of religious identity in America?
Stephen Prothero wrote the book “Religious Literacy,” about the absence of religious literacy in American civic life. We know less about our country, less history, less about the world civilizations, less about our neighbors, if we don’t engage in positive, productive conversations about religion. Few people truly recognize the role that religious communities play in America’s civic infrastructure — hospitals, social service agencies, our colleges, our K-through-12 schools. Did you read Jessica Grose’s series on people leaving a religion? I wonder how many people who are reading that have alarm bells going off about the state of American civil society. If people stop going to church, who’s going to support the little Catholic school where half the students are under the poverty line? Fewer people in religious communities is a bad thing for American civil society. American religion has long been entrepreneurial, and American religion will likely adapt in ways that increase religious participation in the medium to long run. I don’t think we’re going to live in this cultural moment forever. But I fear that American society and social services will suffer in the short run.
You write a lot about the role of institutions in society, especially in “We Need to Build.” You recently wrote in an article, “A healthy sector cannot have 100 arsonists for every architect.” Can you explain what you mean by that?
You can’t have a critical mass of people going around basically telling other people what they’re doing wrong and constantly undermining existing institutions if better ones aren’t replacing them. In popular discourse, there’s a model of social change that seems to say that if I tell you how much I hate you and totally delegitimize you, then something better will rise up from the ground. That’s craziness.
So, for instance, I would much rather have a conversation about what is a just ecosystem of public safety that involves multiple actors — from youth organizations, religious communities, schools, social services and law enforcement. That’s a positive framing of the conversation, as opposed to trying to rip down one institution, the police, instead of having a robust conversation, plan and strategy to build a positive, healthy ecosystem of public safety.
What is needed to help people become more constructive in their approach to social change?
I’m a big believer in the stories that we tell. This is my understanding of religion, of pluralism, of social change: If you tell an inspiring story, people will want to move in that direction. If you only tell a terrible story about America, then people will think that terribleness is inevitable. You tell a terrible story about Islam or Christianity and people will think that terribleness is inevitable. Which is why I think that call-out culture and cancellation culture is wrong in both theory and practice. It is the wrong approach to social change. We want to encourage people — whether schools or churches or entire religions or nations — to be doing more of what we think is beautiful and healthy.
Can you define healthy pluralism? What’s harming that and what’s helping that now?
Our framework for healthy pluralism is: respect, relate, cooperate. Respect for people, for diverse identities, even if you disagree with them. Relate positively across communities. Cooperate on common projects that serve the common good. And the truth is, in America, we do this all the time. We do this in our refugee resettlement. We do this in disaster relief. We do this with social services. We do this in athletics. It is actually the central dynamic of our civic culture. But we do not talk about it as building pluralism.
Do you think that is becoming more or less possible in the United States?
I think we are in a moment of transition. The last few years seemed so challenging. I think there’s a day when people wake up and they’re like, “You know what? I don’t care that my dad voted for Trump. I’m going to call him anyway.” In other words, some of this is just a paradigm shift and you’re like, “I’m just not going to let X stop me from engaging in Y anymore.” It’s that simple. I think we could be at the end of oppositionalism and anger, despair and fear. And then all of a sudden, collectively, something new happens.
When it comes to religious diversity, specifically, American pluralism is mostly inspiring and generally the envy of the world. And we ought to be proud of that. For all of the mistakes and sins of the European founders, their understanding of religious identity and diversity was totally inspiring, both in 1776 and in 2023. And it’s our job to try to live into that vision.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/09/opin ... pe=Article
Patel, an American Muslim and founder and president of Interfaith America, a Chicago-based nonprofit that aims to promote cooperation across religious differences, served on President Barack Obama’s Advisory Council on Faith-Based Neighborhood Partnerships and has written five books, including his latest, “We Need to Build: Field Notes for Diverse Democracy.” I met Patel at an Interfaith America gathering last year and was struck by his buoyant enthusiasm for religious groups in America and his comfort with diversity and disagreement. I asked him to speak with me about religious identity, diversity and institutions in America. This interview has been edited and condensed.
Tish Harrison Warren: What worries you about the state of religious discourse in America now and what encourages you?
Eboo Patel: Here’s what worries me: Half the time when I’m giving a public presentation, the first question about religion is a negative question. What do you think about Islam and violence? What do you think about the Catholic Church and the pedophilia crisis? Why do so many people of faith hate gay people? Particularly in the areas of America where people have higher levels of education, those are their first questions. It is considered sophisticated and educated to know only the bad stuff about religion. Of course, that’s ironic because to only know the bad stuff is to not actually be educated. So that is discouraging.
I’ll tell you what I find encouraging. Catholic sisters just keep on doing what Catholic sisters do, which is taking care of poor people. There are 10,000 migrants in Chicago that leadership recently welcomed into the city. But they had not adequately prepared for where those people would sleep. Well, guess who’s taking care of them? Largely, Catholic Charities and other faith-based organizations.
Our society relies on religious communities to take care of people, to do addiction counseling, to do job training, to do hunger and homelessness work, to do refugee resettlement. We just don’t often tell the story of them doing that work. And I think that that’s a big problem.
At many interfaith gatherings I’ve been to, I see mainly religious progressives talking about progressive causes. Your organization reaches out to moderate and conservative religious people as well, including white evangelicals. How do you bridge those progressive/conservative divides that seem so deep now?
It’s actually so much simpler in practice than it is in theory. I’ll give an example: In any hospital in America at any hour, there are people from very different religious identities — a Muslim surgeon with a Jewish anesthesiologist, with a Mormon nurse, with a Jehovah’s Witness social worker, with a Baptist who is sanitizing the room at a hospital started by a Catholic social order like the Dominicans or the Jesuits, that is run by an agnostic who grew up Buddhist. And every single one of them before they walk into a surgery is having their own kind of moment of prayer or reflection or connection with what they call God. That’s what we see as interfaith work.
People from diverse religious backgrounds — who may disagree on some fundamental things about abortion or where to draw the line in Jerusalem or doctrinal matters like the nature of Jesus — who are working together on other fundamental things. That is the genius of American society. We call that civic cooperation. It takes place everywhere all the time.
Think about refugee resettlement. Six of the nine refugee resettlement agencies in America were founded by faith communities. And virtually all of them spend most of their time resettling refugees from a different religion. So you have Jews who founded the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, HIAS, in the late 19th century to resettle Jews from Russia. Then, by around the 1970s, most of the Jews who want to be resettled somewhere, whether it’s the United States or Europe or Israel, have been resettled. So does HIAS close? No! They start resettling Cambodian Buddhists. And now they’re resettling Somali Muslims. I think that’s the most inspiring thing in the world. In America, people build institutions — hospitals, social service agencies, colleges, whatever — out of the inspiration of their own faith identity, but the institution serves people of all identities. That is not a common ethos in human history.
But that’s the story of America. That is American pluralism at its best. That is civic cooperation. And I think that we should marvel at that every day.
One thing that you bring up in your writing is that religious identities are often not taken as seriously as other identity sources like race, sexual orientation or gender. You argue that diversity and inclusion conversations should include really diverse religious beliefs and identities. What do you think about the role of religious identity in America?
Stephen Prothero wrote the book “Religious Literacy,” about the absence of religious literacy in American civic life. We know less about our country, less history, less about the world civilizations, less about our neighbors, if we don’t engage in positive, productive conversations about religion. Few people truly recognize the role that religious communities play in America’s civic infrastructure — hospitals, social service agencies, our colleges, our K-through-12 schools. Did you read Jessica Grose’s series on people leaving a religion? I wonder how many people who are reading that have alarm bells going off about the state of American civil society. If people stop going to church, who’s going to support the little Catholic school where half the students are under the poverty line? Fewer people in religious communities is a bad thing for American civil society. American religion has long been entrepreneurial, and American religion will likely adapt in ways that increase religious participation in the medium to long run. I don’t think we’re going to live in this cultural moment forever. But I fear that American society and social services will suffer in the short run.
You write a lot about the role of institutions in society, especially in “We Need to Build.” You recently wrote in an article, “A healthy sector cannot have 100 arsonists for every architect.” Can you explain what you mean by that?
You can’t have a critical mass of people going around basically telling other people what they’re doing wrong and constantly undermining existing institutions if better ones aren’t replacing them. In popular discourse, there’s a model of social change that seems to say that if I tell you how much I hate you and totally delegitimize you, then something better will rise up from the ground. That’s craziness.
So, for instance, I would much rather have a conversation about what is a just ecosystem of public safety that involves multiple actors — from youth organizations, religious communities, schools, social services and law enforcement. That’s a positive framing of the conversation, as opposed to trying to rip down one institution, the police, instead of having a robust conversation, plan and strategy to build a positive, healthy ecosystem of public safety.
What is needed to help people become more constructive in their approach to social change?
I’m a big believer in the stories that we tell. This is my understanding of religion, of pluralism, of social change: If you tell an inspiring story, people will want to move in that direction. If you only tell a terrible story about America, then people will think that terribleness is inevitable. You tell a terrible story about Islam or Christianity and people will think that terribleness is inevitable. Which is why I think that call-out culture and cancellation culture is wrong in both theory and practice. It is the wrong approach to social change. We want to encourage people — whether schools or churches or entire religions or nations — to be doing more of what we think is beautiful and healthy.
Can you define healthy pluralism? What’s harming that and what’s helping that now?
Our framework for healthy pluralism is: respect, relate, cooperate. Respect for people, for diverse identities, even if you disagree with them. Relate positively across communities. Cooperate on common projects that serve the common good. And the truth is, in America, we do this all the time. We do this in our refugee resettlement. We do this in disaster relief. We do this with social services. We do this in athletics. It is actually the central dynamic of our civic culture. But we do not talk about it as building pluralism.
Do you think that is becoming more or less possible in the United States?
I think we are in a moment of transition. The last few years seemed so challenging. I think there’s a day when people wake up and they’re like, “You know what? I don’t care that my dad voted for Trump. I’m going to call him anyway.” In other words, some of this is just a paradigm shift and you’re like, “I’m just not going to let X stop me from engaging in Y anymore.” It’s that simple. I think we could be at the end of oppositionalism and anger, despair and fear. And then all of a sudden, collectively, something new happens.
When it comes to religious diversity, specifically, American pluralism is mostly inspiring and generally the envy of the world. And we ought to be proud of that. For all of the mistakes and sins of the European founders, their understanding of religious identity and diversity was totally inspiring, both in 1776 and in 2023. And it’s our job to try to live into that vision.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/09/opin ... pe=Article
Jewish and Muslim Interfaith Communities Are Tested by the Israel-Hamas War
‘I Love You. I Am Sorry’: One Jew, One Muslim and a Friendship Tested by War
A Los Angeles program that connects Muslims and Jews has been strained by the war in Israel. But the group’s leaders found that it has strengthened their bond.
Aziza Hasan, right, whose family roots run through Palestine, runs NewGround. Andrea Hodos, once a resident of Israel, has been her associate director since 2020.Credit...Mark Abramson for The New York Times
The two women sat knee to knee.
Aziza Hasan, a devout Muslim, looked out at the group gathered around her, spoke of the loved ones who had died in Israel and Gaza and began reciting the first chapter of the Quran.
“In the name of God, the most compassionate, most merciful …”
“Show us the straight way,” she continued, “the way of those whose portion is not wrath and who go not astray.”
Then, the woman beside her, Andrea Hodos, a devout Jew, followed with a Hebrew song acknowledging the angels.
“On my right side is Gabriel, God’s strength,” she told the crowd, translating the song. “Behind me, God’s healer, Raphael. Above my head is God’s divine presence.”
On this late afternoon of Oct. 15, the war between Israel and Hamas was well underway as Ms. Hasan and Ms. Hodos sat on parched grass at a bustling park six miles west of downtown Los Angeles. A circle of Jews and Muslims surrounded them.
Everyone on hand was part of NewGround, a nonprofit fellowship program that has helped more than 500 Los Angeles Muslims and Jews learn to listen, disagree, empathize with one another — and become friends.
Ms. Hasan, whose family roots run through Palestine, runs NewGround. Ms. Hodos, once a resident of Israel, has been her associate director since 2020.
The two women can recall details of the long, brutal history of clashes and wars pitting Israel against its neighbors to the north, east and south — and how those clashes sent fearful shock waves through Los Angeles, a city with one of the nation’s largest populations of Muslims and Jews.
//Reactions to the Conflict in the U.S.
//Jewish Americans: For many American Jews, there have been too many emotions to process. Young people spoke of fear, shock, solidarity and helplessness, while some progressives said they were feeling abandoned by their left-wing allies.
//Palestinian Americans: Palestinians in the United States are dismayed by the violence, but some said that politicians and news outlets were overlooking historical context.
//Harvard University: A coalition of more than 30 student groups posted an open letter blaming Israel for the Hamas attacks. Within days, students affiliated with those groups found themselves at the center of a free speech controversy.
“But it’s never been this bad,” they said, practically in unison, during a recent interview at a Los Angeles cafe.
Never have they worried like this about death and destruction in the Middle East sparking antisemitic or Islamophobic violence in the United States.
Never have they fretted like this about their work and their words being misinterpreted and misunderstood.
Never had they held this much dread, or found this kind of hopeful, grounding solace in the interfaith bonds their labor has created.
Image
Aziza Hasan and Andrea Hodos partake in an impromptu interfaith prayer in Ms. Hodos’s living room. Ms. Hasan is kneeling with her hands faced up, while Ms. Hodos is bowing next to her.
“We’re so connected,” said Ms. Hasan, right, 43, “that sometimes Andrea can complete my thought or start a sentence and finish it for me.”Credit...Mark Abramson for The New York Times
Ms. Hasan and Ms. Hodos are more than co-workers. Their close friendship signals that the ties that bind adherents of Judaism and Islam can remain strong, even as the war pitting people of their faiths against each other rages.
“Aziza is like a sister to me,” said Ms. Hodos, 57. “She is family.”
“We’re so connected,” said Ms. Hasan, 43, “that sometimes Andrea can complete my thought or start a sentence and finish it for me.”
Both women have deep roots in Israel and Palestine. Ms. Hodos spent her post-college years living in Jerusalem, reconnecting with her faith and learning about the growing peace movement. Her husband, now a rabbi and professor of rabbinical literature, lived in Israel for a dozen years. Their children are Israeli citizens. She has a relative who is a reservist in the Israeli Army, a fact that Ms. Hasan admits is difficult to reconcile.
Ms. Hasan’s paternal grandparents were Palestinian farmers who were forced off their land at gunpoint during the creation of Israel in the late 1940s.
As the firstborn daughter of a Muslim father and a white American mother, Ms. Hasan spent much of her childhood in Jordan. She recalls the taunts of schoolmates in Jordan telling her that her mother was going to hell for being Christian. After her father died, her family moved to a small town in Kansas, where she remembers hearing she was going to hell for being Muslim.
“Navigating through a world of opposite views is how it has always been for me,” she said. “The work is gut-wrenching and difficult, but I keep coming back because it is so important to my core.”
Her voice trailed. A beat passed. She sighed. “Still,” she said, “I sometimes wonder why I am so devoted to something that seems so bleak, especially now.”
She leans on Ms. Hodos for strength. Their lives are intertwined, and their families are close. They provide one another with shoulders to cry on.
Ms. Hodos’s eyes widen when she recalls a favored memory — the two women baking together in the Hodos family’s kosher kitchen, making pinwheel cookies from an old Palestinian recipe.
Image
Aziza Hasan and Andrea Hodos hug inside a backyard sukkah.
“Aziza is like a sister to me,” said Ms. Hodos.Credit...Mark Abramson for The New York Times
After reports of the massacre and kidnapping of Israeli Jews by Hamas militants, the two exchanged texts.
“How are you holding up?” Ms. Hasan wrote, before expressing anger that such atrocity could be done in the name of God, and fear of a violent retaliation that would take innocent lives.
“I love you,” she continued. “I am sorry. I am here.”
Ms. Hodos was reeling. Her son had a friend who was taken captive. Her husband was once an Israeli soldier. Decades ago, he had fought during a war with Lebanon. The shock and pain she felt was so profound that at first, she struggled to find the right words, so she replied by sending poems about the grief of loss during war.
“So much gratitude to have your partnership,” she wrote. Her heart ached for Israel, but she needed to make it known that her care was not limited by borders. “I’m so worried about everyone in Gaza for what is ahead.”
As the war and atrocity spread over the coming days, both women struggled against depression, nausea and sleeplessness. They were unable to eat.
They pressed on, appearing at mosques and synagogues and gathering with friends of their faith in their respective homes.
“More people are reaching out to each other than I’ve ever seen,” said Ms. Hasan. “I think that’s the result of the relationships we’ve built all these years. Without that connection, one person becomes defensive in a discussion, and whoever they are speaking with from the other side entrenches and gets defensive back quickly. When there’s a relationship, there are moments of softening that allow a little more slack in the discussion and a little more care.”
The NewGround gathering at the park west of downtown Los Angeles was such a moment.
A solemn, grieving apprehension took hold as the two friends welcomed the group. Israel had spent days bombing targets in Gaza, an act of retribution for Hamas’s attack that was causing a humanitarian disaster.
For a long while, members of NewGround gathered in five or six small clusters, people of both faiths mixing as slivers of anguished conversation filled the air.
“I know Israelis who are going from funeral to funeral for children of their friends.”
“I know people in Gaza who have lost loved ones.”
“My children are scared, and I don’t know what to say.”
“My generation has to make something different for the next. We don’t have to repeat the hurt on both sides.”
An hour passed. Then two. Everyone ended up sitting together in a circle. Side by side, knee to knee, Ms. Hasan said her prayer and Ms. Hodos sang.
The sun went down. The sky turned black. For a while, there was a peaceful silence.
A correction was made on Oct. 21, 2023: In an earlier version of this article, a reference to an angel misspelled the name. It is Gabriel, not Gabrielle.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/21/us/j ... s-war.html
A Los Angeles program that connects Muslims and Jews has been strained by the war in Israel. But the group’s leaders found that it has strengthened their bond.
Aziza Hasan, right, whose family roots run through Palestine, runs NewGround. Andrea Hodos, once a resident of Israel, has been her associate director since 2020.Credit...Mark Abramson for The New York Times
The two women sat knee to knee.
Aziza Hasan, a devout Muslim, looked out at the group gathered around her, spoke of the loved ones who had died in Israel and Gaza and began reciting the first chapter of the Quran.
“In the name of God, the most compassionate, most merciful …”
“Show us the straight way,” she continued, “the way of those whose portion is not wrath and who go not astray.”
Then, the woman beside her, Andrea Hodos, a devout Jew, followed with a Hebrew song acknowledging the angels.
“On my right side is Gabriel, God’s strength,” she told the crowd, translating the song. “Behind me, God’s healer, Raphael. Above my head is God’s divine presence.”
On this late afternoon of Oct. 15, the war between Israel and Hamas was well underway as Ms. Hasan and Ms. Hodos sat on parched grass at a bustling park six miles west of downtown Los Angeles. A circle of Jews and Muslims surrounded them.
Everyone on hand was part of NewGround, a nonprofit fellowship program that has helped more than 500 Los Angeles Muslims and Jews learn to listen, disagree, empathize with one another — and become friends.
Ms. Hasan, whose family roots run through Palestine, runs NewGround. Ms. Hodos, once a resident of Israel, has been her associate director since 2020.
The two women can recall details of the long, brutal history of clashes and wars pitting Israel against its neighbors to the north, east and south — and how those clashes sent fearful shock waves through Los Angeles, a city with one of the nation’s largest populations of Muslims and Jews.
//Reactions to the Conflict in the U.S.
//Jewish Americans: For many American Jews, there have been too many emotions to process. Young people spoke of fear, shock, solidarity and helplessness, while some progressives said they were feeling abandoned by their left-wing allies.
//Palestinian Americans: Palestinians in the United States are dismayed by the violence, but some said that politicians and news outlets were overlooking historical context.
//Harvard University: A coalition of more than 30 student groups posted an open letter blaming Israel for the Hamas attacks. Within days, students affiliated with those groups found themselves at the center of a free speech controversy.
“But it’s never been this bad,” they said, practically in unison, during a recent interview at a Los Angeles cafe.
Never have they worried like this about death and destruction in the Middle East sparking antisemitic or Islamophobic violence in the United States.
Never have they fretted like this about their work and their words being misinterpreted and misunderstood.
Never had they held this much dread, or found this kind of hopeful, grounding solace in the interfaith bonds their labor has created.
Image
Aziza Hasan and Andrea Hodos partake in an impromptu interfaith prayer in Ms. Hodos’s living room. Ms. Hasan is kneeling with her hands faced up, while Ms. Hodos is bowing next to her.
“We’re so connected,” said Ms. Hasan, right, 43, “that sometimes Andrea can complete my thought or start a sentence and finish it for me.”Credit...Mark Abramson for The New York Times
Ms. Hasan and Ms. Hodos are more than co-workers. Their close friendship signals that the ties that bind adherents of Judaism and Islam can remain strong, even as the war pitting people of their faiths against each other rages.
“Aziza is like a sister to me,” said Ms. Hodos, 57. “She is family.”
“We’re so connected,” said Ms. Hasan, 43, “that sometimes Andrea can complete my thought or start a sentence and finish it for me.”
Both women have deep roots in Israel and Palestine. Ms. Hodos spent her post-college years living in Jerusalem, reconnecting with her faith and learning about the growing peace movement. Her husband, now a rabbi and professor of rabbinical literature, lived in Israel for a dozen years. Their children are Israeli citizens. She has a relative who is a reservist in the Israeli Army, a fact that Ms. Hasan admits is difficult to reconcile.
Ms. Hasan’s paternal grandparents were Palestinian farmers who were forced off their land at gunpoint during the creation of Israel in the late 1940s.
As the firstborn daughter of a Muslim father and a white American mother, Ms. Hasan spent much of her childhood in Jordan. She recalls the taunts of schoolmates in Jordan telling her that her mother was going to hell for being Christian. After her father died, her family moved to a small town in Kansas, where she remembers hearing she was going to hell for being Muslim.
“Navigating through a world of opposite views is how it has always been for me,” she said. “The work is gut-wrenching and difficult, but I keep coming back because it is so important to my core.”
Her voice trailed. A beat passed. She sighed. “Still,” she said, “I sometimes wonder why I am so devoted to something that seems so bleak, especially now.”
She leans on Ms. Hodos for strength. Their lives are intertwined, and their families are close. They provide one another with shoulders to cry on.
Ms. Hodos’s eyes widen when she recalls a favored memory — the two women baking together in the Hodos family’s kosher kitchen, making pinwheel cookies from an old Palestinian recipe.
Image
Aziza Hasan and Andrea Hodos hug inside a backyard sukkah.
“Aziza is like a sister to me,” said Ms. Hodos.Credit...Mark Abramson for The New York Times
After reports of the massacre and kidnapping of Israeli Jews by Hamas militants, the two exchanged texts.
“How are you holding up?” Ms. Hasan wrote, before expressing anger that such atrocity could be done in the name of God, and fear of a violent retaliation that would take innocent lives.
“I love you,” she continued. “I am sorry. I am here.”
Ms. Hodos was reeling. Her son had a friend who was taken captive. Her husband was once an Israeli soldier. Decades ago, he had fought during a war with Lebanon. The shock and pain she felt was so profound that at first, she struggled to find the right words, so she replied by sending poems about the grief of loss during war.
“So much gratitude to have your partnership,” she wrote. Her heart ached for Israel, but she needed to make it known that her care was not limited by borders. “I’m so worried about everyone in Gaza for what is ahead.”
As the war and atrocity spread over the coming days, both women struggled against depression, nausea and sleeplessness. They were unable to eat.
They pressed on, appearing at mosques and synagogues and gathering with friends of their faith in their respective homes.
“More people are reaching out to each other than I’ve ever seen,” said Ms. Hasan. “I think that’s the result of the relationships we’ve built all these years. Without that connection, one person becomes defensive in a discussion, and whoever they are speaking with from the other side entrenches and gets defensive back quickly. When there’s a relationship, there are moments of softening that allow a little more slack in the discussion and a little more care.”
The NewGround gathering at the park west of downtown Los Angeles was such a moment.
A solemn, grieving apprehension took hold as the two friends welcomed the group. Israel had spent days bombing targets in Gaza, an act of retribution for Hamas’s attack that was causing a humanitarian disaster.
For a long while, members of NewGround gathered in five or six small clusters, people of both faiths mixing as slivers of anguished conversation filled the air.
“I know Israelis who are going from funeral to funeral for children of their friends.”
“I know people in Gaza who have lost loved ones.”
“My children are scared, and I don’t know what to say.”
“My generation has to make something different for the next. We don’t have to repeat the hurt on both sides.”
An hour passed. Then two. Everyone ended up sitting together in a circle. Side by side, knee to knee, Ms. Hasan said her prayer and Ms. Hodos sang.
The sun went down. The sky turned black. For a while, there was a peaceful silence.
A correction was made on Oct. 21, 2023: In an earlier version of this article, a reference to an angel misspelled the name. It is Gabriel, not Gabrielle.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/21/us/j ... s-war.html
Where Does Religion Come From?
Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the ex-Muslim critic of Islamic fundamentalism and longtime champion of Enlightenment liberalism, has announced that she now calls herself a Christian — a conversion that she attributes to a twofold realization.
First, that atheist materialism is too weak a base upon which to ground Western liberalism in a world where it’s increasingly beset, and the biblical tradition from which the liberal West emerged offers a surer foundation for her values. Second, that despite the sense of liberation from punitive religion that atheism once offered her, in the longer run she found “life without any spiritual solace unendurable.”
Her essay, not surprisingly, attracted a lot of criticism. Some of it came from Christians disappointed in the ideological and instrumental way that Hirsi Ali framed her conversion, the absence of a clear statement that Christian claims are not merely useful or necessary but true. The rest came from atheists baffled that Hirsi Ali had failed to internalize all the supposedly brilliant atheistic rebuttals to her stated reasons for belief.
I have no criticisms to offer myself. Some sort of religious attitude is essentially demanded, in my view, by what we know about the universe and the human place within it, but every sincere searcher is likely to follow their own idiosyncratic path. And to set out to practice Christianity because you love the civilization that sprang from it and feel some kind of spiritual response to its teachings seems much more reasonable than hovering forever in agnosticism while you wait to achieve perfect theological certainty about the divinity of Christ.
But as I read some of the critiques it struck me that the Hirsi Ali path as she describes it is actually unusually legible to atheists, in the sense that it matches well with how a lot of smart secular analysts assume that religions take shape and sustain themselves.
In these assumptions, the personal need for religion reflects the fear of death or the desire for cosmic meaning (illustrated by Hirsi Ali’s yearning for “solace”), while the rise of organized religion mostly reflects the societal need for a unifying moral-metaphysical structure, a shared narrative, a glue to bind a complex society together (illustrated by her desire for a religious system to undergird her political worldview).
For instance, in Ara Norenzayan’s 2015 book “Big Gods: How Religion Transformed Cooperation and Conflict,” the great world religions are portrayed as technologies of social trust, encouraging pro-social behavior (“Watched people are nice people” is one of Norenzayan’s formulations, with moralistic gods as the ultimate guarantor of good behavior) as societies scale up from hunter-gatherer bands to urbanized states. At a certain point, the social and governmental order becomes sufficiently trustworthy itself that people begin to kick away the ladder of supernatural belief; hence secularization in the developed world. But it would make sense, on Norenzayan’s premises, that when a developed society seems to be destabilizing, threatened by enemies outside and increasingly divided within, the need for a “Big God” would return — and so people would reach back, like Hirsi Ali, to the traditions that gave rise to the social order in the first place.
What’s missing from this account, though, is an explanation of how you get from the desire for meaning or the fear of death to the specific content of religious belief — the content that’s obviously quite important to a lot of people, insofar as its absence in Hirsi Ali’s account frustrated many of her readers.
Even if belief in invisible watchers has its social uses, if such beings don’t exist it’s a pretty odd thing that societies the world over have converged on the belief that we share the cosmos with them. To say nothing of the specific doctrines and miraculous claims associated with that belief: For instance, if Christianity disappeared from everyone’s memory tomorrow, it would be odd indeed for a modern Western thinker seeking meaning amid disillusionment to declare, “what we need here is the doctrine of the Trinity and a resurrected messiah with some angels at the tomb.”
One of the strongest attempts to explain the substance and content of supernatural belief comes from psychological theorists like Pascal Boyer and Paul Bloom, who argue that humans naturally believe in invisible minds and impossible beings because of the same cognitive features that let us understand other human minds and their intentions. Such understanding is essential to human socialization, but as Bloom puts it, our theory of mind also “overshoots”: Because “we perceive the world of objects as essentially separate from the world of minds,” it’s easy for us “to envision soulless bodies and bodiless souls. This helps explain why we believe in gods and an afterlife.” And because we look for intentionality in human beings and human systems, we slide easily into “inferring goals and desires where none exist. This makes us animists and creationists.”
Boyer, for his part, argues that our theories about these imagined invisible beings tend to fall into their own cognitively convenient categories. We love supernatural beings and scenarios that combine something familiar and something alien, from ghosts (what if there were a mind — but without a body!) to angels (what if there were a person — but with wings and powers of flight!) to the Virgin Birth (what if there were a pregnancy — without sex!).
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With these arguments you can close the circle. People want meaning, societies need order, our minds naturally invent invisible beings, and that’s why the intelligent, rational, liberal Ayaan Hirsi Ali is suddenly and strangely joining a religion that asks her to accept the miraculous conception of a first-century Jewish holy man.
But here’s what this closed circle leaves out: The nature of actual religious experience, which is just much weirder, unexpected and destabilizing than psychological and evolutionary arguments for its utility would suggest, while also clearly being a generative force behind the religious traditions that these theories are trying to explain.
One way to get at this weirdness is to look at situations where there’s a supernatural experience without a pre-existing tradition that makes sense of people’s experiences and shapes their interpretations. By this I mean that if you have a mystical experience in the context of, say, a Pentecostalist faith-healing service or a Roman Catholic Mass, you are likely to interpret it in light of existing Christian theology. But if you have a religious experience “in the wild,” as it were, the sheer strangeness is more likely to come through.
I’ve written about how you can get at this strangeness by reading the Christian Gospels without the structuring expectations of Christian doctrine. Just as first-person reports of the Jesus phenomenon, their mysteries can’t be adequately explained by an overactive theory of mind among Jesus’ disciples and the advantages of Christianity for social control thereafter.
But another path, which I’ve been following lately, is to read about U.F.O. encounters — because clearly the Pentagon wants us to! — and consider them as a form of religious experience, even as the basis for a new half-formed 21st-century religion. This is the line taken by Diana Walsh Pasulka, a religious studies professor at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington, in her two books on the subject, “American Cosmic: UFOs, Religion, Technology,” and its recently published sequel, “Encounters: Experiences With Nonhuman Intelligences.” It’s also a sub-theme in Matthew Bowman’s “The Abduction of Betty and Barney Hill: Alien Encounters, Civil Rights, and the New Age in America," which focuses on one of the more notable early U.F.O. encounters, involving an interracial couple in 1960s New Hampshire.
In both the Hill story and the larger array of narratives discussed by Pasulka, you see people having largely unlooked-for encounters with entities that defy easy categorization and explanation. Some aspects of these encounters fit a Spielbergian science-fiction template, and since this is a secular and scientific age, the wider society embraces that template and argues about whether we could really be visited by extraterrestrials from Alpha Centauri or Vulcan or wherever. But when you go deeper into the narratives, many of their details and consequences resemble not some “Star Trek”-style first contact, but the supernatural experiences of early modern and pre-modern societies, from fairy abductions to saintly and demonic encounters to brushes with the gods.
And what you see in the communities that have grown up around these experiences is not a ratification of existing religious structures (even if some people interpret them in line with Christianity or some other faith), nor a set of pat stories that supply meaning and purpose and ratify a moral order. Rather it’s a landscape of destabilized agnosticism, filled with competing theories about what’s actually going on, half-formed theologies and metaphysical pictures blurring together with scientific and pseudoscientific narratives, with would-be gurus rushing to embrace specific visions and skeptics cautioning about the potentially malign intentions of the visitors, whatever or whoever they may be.
Far from being a landscape created by the human desire for sense-making, by our tendency to impose purpose and intentionality where none exists, the realm of U.F.O. experience is a landscape waiting for someone to make sense of it, filled with people who wish they had a simple, cognitively convenient explanation for what’s going on.
In that sense the U.F.O. phenomenon may be revealing some of the raw material of religion, the real place where all the ladders start — which is with revelation crying out for interpretation, personal encounter awaiting a coherent intellectual response.
And if that is where religion really comes from, all the evolutionary and sociological explanations are likely to remain interesting but insufficient, covering aspects of why particular religions take the shape they do, but missing the heart of the matter.
Given the existence and influence of Christianity, it makes sense that some intellectuals in a decadent post-Christian society would be drawn back toward its consolations. But why were we given Christianity in the first place? Why are we being given whatever we’re being given in the U.F.O. phenomenon?
The only definite answer is that the world is much stranger than the secular imagination thinks.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/15/opin ... elief.html
Why You Can’t Predict the Future of Religion
Asbury University students sing worship songs together outside of Hughes Chapel in February.Credit...Jesse Barber for The New York Times
In an 1822 letter to the physician Benjamin Waterhouse, Thomas Jefferson expressed his confidence that traditional Christianity in the young United States was giving way to a more enlightened faith, much like Jefferson’s own in its rejection of the divinity of Jesus Christ. “I trust,” he wrote, “that there is not a young man now living in the U.S. who will not die an Unitarian.”
Less than a year earlier, on “a Sabbath evening in the autumn of 1821” in upstate New York, a young man named Charles Grandison Finney began a multiday interplay of prayer and mystical experience that led to a moment when, he wrote later, “it seemed as if I met the Lord Jesus Christ face to face … He stood before me, and I fell down at his feet and poured out my soul to Him. I wept aloud like a child, and made such confessions as I could with my choked utterance.”
This experience set Finney on a path that would help bury Jefferson’s confident hypothesis — toward leadership in an age of revivalism, the Second Great Awakening, that forged the form of evangelical Christianity that would bestride 19th-century America and also encouraged a proliferation of novel sects with supernatural beliefs entirely distant from Jefferson’s Enlightenment religion.
That history is worth mentioning for a specific reason and a general one. The specific reason is that a Christian college in rural Kentucky, Asbury University, has just experienced an old-school revival — a multiweek outpouring that has kept students praying and singing in the school chapel from morning to night, drawn tens of thousands of pilgrims from around the country, captured the imagination of the internet and even drawn the attention of The New York Times.
The general reason is that whatever the Asbury Revival’s long-term impact, the history of Finney and Jefferson is a reminder that religious history is shaped as much by sudden irruptions as long trajectories, as much by the mystical and personal as by the institutional and sociological.
Secular experts writing about religion tend to emphasize the deep structural forces shaping practice and belief — the effects of industrialization or the scientific revolution, suburbanization or the birth control pill. Religious intellectuals tend to emphasize theological debates and evangelization strategies. (Should Christians be winsome or combative? Should churches adapt to liberal modernity or resist its blandishments?)
These analytical tools are always important; the sociological doesn’t disappear just because the mystical has suddenly arrived. In last weekend’s column, for instance, I suggested a link between the apparent crisis in teenage mental health and the decline of organized Christianity, and this week my colleague Ruth Graham, reporting from Asbury, notes that accounts of healing at the revival are “overwhelmingly about mental health, trauma and disillusionment.” Nor, in the shadow of the numinous, does strategy cease to matter: The encounter on the road to Damascus created Paul the Apostle, but his career thereafter was all organizing, preaching, letter-writing and shoe (or sandal) leather.
But the experiences themselves remain irreducibly unpredictable. Why Asbury? Why Saul of Tarsus? Why Charles Grandison Finney?
A unique religious culture exists across the Mountain West because one of Finney’s upstate New York contemporaries believed he received a revelation from the angel Moroni. Arguably the most important movement within global Christianity today exists because of a revival that began with an African-American preacher and his followers praying together in a shabby part of Los Angeles in 1906. And I can quote you chapter and verse on the reasonability of theism, but in the causal chain of history I’m a Christian because two thousand years ago a motley group of provincials in Roman Palestine believed they’d seen their teacher heal the sick and raise the dead and then rise transfigured from the grave — and then because, two millenniums later, as a child in suburban Connecticut, I watched my own parents fall to the floor and speak in tongues.
Whether these experiences correspond to ultimate reality will not be argued here. My points are about observation and expectation.
When it comes to the religious future, you should follow the social trends, but also always expect the unexpected — recognizing that every organized faith could disappear tomorrow and some spiritual encounter would resurrect religion soon enough.
If you’re trying to discern what a post-Christian spirituality might become, then what post-Christian seekers are experiencing and what (or whom) they claim to be encountering matters as much as any specific religious label they might claim.
And if you’re imagining a renewal for American Christianity, all the best laid plans — the pastoral strategies, theological debates and long-term trendlines — may matter less than something happening in some obscure place or to some obscure individual, in whose visions an entirely unexpected future might be taking shape.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/25/opin ... pe=Article
Re: INTERFAITH ISSUES
Be Open to Spiritual Experience. Also, Be Really Careful.
Shahzia Sikander’s sculpture “NOW” at the New York State Supreme Court’s appellate division building on Madison Avenue.Credit...Vincent Tullo for The New York Time
Pundits depend on categorizations, especially in periods of turbulence. We reach for labels like “populist” and “nationalist,” for instance, in order to generalize about the stirrings of millions of voters, even when many of them might better be described simply as experimenters — pulling different levers or swinging left to right without any certain goal except to conjure a new political experience.
As in politics, so with religion. As a writer, I’m always reaching for terminology that can capture various divisions within the general pattern of American Christianity’s decline: “liberal” versus “conservative” Catholics when I write about my own church, “heresy” or “orthodoxy” to describe tendencies within and around Christian belief, “secularism” and “paganism” to discuss modes of post-Christianity.
But the dissolution of the old order of American religion — the decline of churches and denominations and the rise of deinstitutionalized spirituality — means that more and more religious lives are lived in between worldviews, in experimental territory where it’s a mistake to expect coherence, theological consistency, a definite set of prior assumptions or beliefs.
In this column I want to defend the rationality of this kind of spiritual experimentation and then to warn about its dangers. (The argument will get weirder as it goes.) But first let me give you three examples of the experimental style I have in mind, from the general to the specific.
Start with the broad youthful impulse toward what you might call magical thinking, ranging from the vogue for astrology to the TikTok craze for manifesting desired outcomes in your life. In certain ways this is an extension of the self-help spiritualities that have been attached to American religion since forever, but right now the magical dimension is more explicit, the connection to old-time religion weak to nonexistent.
At the same time, it’s unclear to what extent any of this can be called belief. Instead there is a playacting dimension throughout, a range of attitudes from “This isn’t real, but it’s fun” to “Maybe this isn’t real, but it’s cool to play around with” to “This is actually real, but who knows what it means?” Even some people who explicitly identify with witchcraft seem to have this ambiguity in their identification; they are participants in a culture of ritual and exploration, not believers in a specific set of claims.
A second example is the increasing fascination with psychedelics and hallucinogenic drugs, which takes secular and scientific forms but also has a strong spiritual dimension, with many participants who believe the drugs don’t just cause an experience within the mind but also open the “doors of perception,” as Aldous Huxley titled his account of taking mescaline, to realities that exist above and around us all the while.
This is clearly true of the emergent spiritual culture around DMT, an ingredient in the psychedelic brew known as ayahuasca that’s become a trip of choice for so-called psychonauts — explorers of the spiritual territory that its ingestion seems to open up. For many users, DMT seems to offer an eerily shared experience: They report encountering similar landscapes and similar beings, as if they’re all either connecting to the shared archetypes of some Jungian subconscious (which would be strange enough) or actually entering the same supernatural plane. And the latter belief yields spiritual experimentation in its purest form: People taking DMT this way aren’t practicing a religion so much as trying to discover religion’s supernatural grounding and fashion a personal theology out of what they find and see.
Now a third example, very specific: Recently a statue appeared on a New York courthouse, occupying a plinth near famous lawgivers like Moses and Confucius. It’s a golden woman, or at least a female figure, with braided hair shaped like horns, roots or tendrils for arms and feet, rising from a lotus flower.
The figure’s sculptor, the Pakistani American artist Shahzia Sikander, has emphasized her work’s political significance. The golden woman wears a version of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s lace collar, and she’s meant to symbolize female power in a historically male-dominated legal world and to protest Roe v. Wade’s reversal.
But the work is clearly an attempt at a religious icon as well, one forged in a blurring of spiritual traditions. It matches a similar statue by the same artist that bears the word “Havah,” evoking the Arabic and Hebrew name for Eve, and thereby making a feminist claim on the monotheistic tradition. But the imagery of the courthouse statue is also pantheistic, the roots and flower evoking nature-spirituality, “a magical hybrid plant-animal,” as one art critic put it. And then finally it’s very hard not to see the braids-as-horns, the tendrils that look a bit tentacle-like, as an appropriation of Christian images of the demonic in a statue that stands against the politics of conservative Christianity.
But none of these interpretations are stable; much like people playing with magic or experimenting on the frontiers of consciousness, Sikander has devised a religious icon that lacks a settled religious meaning, that’s deliberately open to infusions from the viewer, that summons spiritual energy in a nonspecific way.
For the stringent materialist, everything I’ve just described is reasonable as long as it's understood to be playacting, experience hunting, artistic experimentation. Only when it becomes serious does it offend against rationality.
However, stringent materialism is itself a weird late-modern superstition, and the kind of experimentation I’m describing is actually far more rational than a life lived as though the universe is random and indifferent and human beings are gene-transmission machines with an illusion of self-consciousness.
Yes, plenty of New Age and woo-woo practices don’t make any sense or lead only unto pyramid schemes; there are traps for the credulous all over. But the basic pattern of human existence and experience, an ordered and mathematically beautiful cosmos that yields extraordinary secrets to human inquiry and supplies all kinds of wild spiritual experiences even in our allegedly disenchanted age (and even sometimes to professional skeptics), makes a general openness to metaphysical possibilities a fundamentally reasonable default. And this is especially true if you have no theological tradition, no religious upbringing to structure your encounter with the universe’s mysteries — if you’re starting fresh, as many people nowadays are.
But precisely because an attitude of spiritual experimentation is reasonable, it’s also important to emphasize something taught by almost every horror movie but nonetheless skated over in a lot of American spirituality: the importance of being really careful in your openness and not just taking the beneficence of the metaphysical realm for granted.
If the material universe as we find it is beautiful but also naturally perilous and shot through with sin and evil wherever human agency is at work, there is no reason to expect that any spiritual dimension would be different — no reason to think that being a psychonaut is any less perilous than being an astronaut, even if the danger takes a different form.
There is plenty of raw data to indicate the perils: Not every near-death experience is heavenly; some share of DMT users come back traumatized; the American Catholic Church reportedly fields an increasing number of exorcism inquiries even as its cultural influence otherwise declines. And there should also be a fundamental uncertainty around even initially positive experiences: Not all that glitters is gold, and the idea that certain forces are out to trick you or use you recurs across religious cultures (and in the semireligious culture around U.F.O. experience today).
I’m writing as a Christian; my religion explicitly warns against magic, divination, summoning spirits and the like. (Atheist polemicists like to say that religious people are atheists about every god except their own, but this is not really the case; Christianity certainly takes for granted that there are powers in the world besides its triune God.) And it makes sense that in a culture where people are reacting against the Christian past there might be an instinct to ignore such prohibitions, to regard them as just another form of patriarchal chauvinism, white-male control.
But the presumption of danger in the supernatural realm is hardly confined to Christian tradition, and the presumption that pantheism or polytheism or any other alternative to Western monotheism automatically generates humane and kindly societies finds no confirmation in history whatsoever.
So from any religious perspective, there’s reason to worry about a society in which structures have broken down and masses of people are going searching without maps or playing around in half-belief or deploying, against what remains of Christianity, symbols that invoke multiple spiritualities at once.
Some element of danger is unavoidable. The future of humanity depends on people opening doors to the transcendent, rather than sealing themselves into materialism and despair.
But when the door is open, be very, very careful about what you invite in.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/01/opin ... pe=Article
Shahzia Sikander’s sculpture “NOW” at the New York State Supreme Court’s appellate division building on Madison Avenue.Credit...Vincent Tullo for The New York Time
Pundits depend on categorizations, especially in periods of turbulence. We reach for labels like “populist” and “nationalist,” for instance, in order to generalize about the stirrings of millions of voters, even when many of them might better be described simply as experimenters — pulling different levers or swinging left to right without any certain goal except to conjure a new political experience.
As in politics, so with religion. As a writer, I’m always reaching for terminology that can capture various divisions within the general pattern of American Christianity’s decline: “liberal” versus “conservative” Catholics when I write about my own church, “heresy” or “orthodoxy” to describe tendencies within and around Christian belief, “secularism” and “paganism” to discuss modes of post-Christianity.
But the dissolution of the old order of American religion — the decline of churches and denominations and the rise of deinstitutionalized spirituality — means that more and more religious lives are lived in between worldviews, in experimental territory where it’s a mistake to expect coherence, theological consistency, a definite set of prior assumptions or beliefs.
In this column I want to defend the rationality of this kind of spiritual experimentation and then to warn about its dangers. (The argument will get weirder as it goes.) But first let me give you three examples of the experimental style I have in mind, from the general to the specific.
Start with the broad youthful impulse toward what you might call magical thinking, ranging from the vogue for astrology to the TikTok craze for manifesting desired outcomes in your life. In certain ways this is an extension of the self-help spiritualities that have been attached to American religion since forever, but right now the magical dimension is more explicit, the connection to old-time religion weak to nonexistent.
At the same time, it’s unclear to what extent any of this can be called belief. Instead there is a playacting dimension throughout, a range of attitudes from “This isn’t real, but it’s fun” to “Maybe this isn’t real, but it’s cool to play around with” to “This is actually real, but who knows what it means?” Even some people who explicitly identify with witchcraft seem to have this ambiguity in their identification; they are participants in a culture of ritual and exploration, not believers in a specific set of claims.
A second example is the increasing fascination with psychedelics and hallucinogenic drugs, which takes secular and scientific forms but also has a strong spiritual dimension, with many participants who believe the drugs don’t just cause an experience within the mind but also open the “doors of perception,” as Aldous Huxley titled his account of taking mescaline, to realities that exist above and around us all the while.
This is clearly true of the emergent spiritual culture around DMT, an ingredient in the psychedelic brew known as ayahuasca that’s become a trip of choice for so-called psychonauts — explorers of the spiritual territory that its ingestion seems to open up. For many users, DMT seems to offer an eerily shared experience: They report encountering similar landscapes and similar beings, as if they’re all either connecting to the shared archetypes of some Jungian subconscious (which would be strange enough) or actually entering the same supernatural plane. And the latter belief yields spiritual experimentation in its purest form: People taking DMT this way aren’t practicing a religion so much as trying to discover religion’s supernatural grounding and fashion a personal theology out of what they find and see.
Now a third example, very specific: Recently a statue appeared on a New York courthouse, occupying a plinth near famous lawgivers like Moses and Confucius. It’s a golden woman, or at least a female figure, with braided hair shaped like horns, roots or tendrils for arms and feet, rising from a lotus flower.
The figure’s sculptor, the Pakistani American artist Shahzia Sikander, has emphasized her work’s political significance. The golden woman wears a version of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s lace collar, and she’s meant to symbolize female power in a historically male-dominated legal world and to protest Roe v. Wade’s reversal.
But the work is clearly an attempt at a religious icon as well, one forged in a blurring of spiritual traditions. It matches a similar statue by the same artist that bears the word “Havah,” evoking the Arabic and Hebrew name for Eve, and thereby making a feminist claim on the monotheistic tradition. But the imagery of the courthouse statue is also pantheistic, the roots and flower evoking nature-spirituality, “a magical hybrid plant-animal,” as one art critic put it. And then finally it’s very hard not to see the braids-as-horns, the tendrils that look a bit tentacle-like, as an appropriation of Christian images of the demonic in a statue that stands against the politics of conservative Christianity.
But none of these interpretations are stable; much like people playing with magic or experimenting on the frontiers of consciousness, Sikander has devised a religious icon that lacks a settled religious meaning, that’s deliberately open to infusions from the viewer, that summons spiritual energy in a nonspecific way.
For the stringent materialist, everything I’ve just described is reasonable as long as it's understood to be playacting, experience hunting, artistic experimentation. Only when it becomes serious does it offend against rationality.
However, stringent materialism is itself a weird late-modern superstition, and the kind of experimentation I’m describing is actually far more rational than a life lived as though the universe is random and indifferent and human beings are gene-transmission machines with an illusion of self-consciousness.
Yes, plenty of New Age and woo-woo practices don’t make any sense or lead only unto pyramid schemes; there are traps for the credulous all over. But the basic pattern of human existence and experience, an ordered and mathematically beautiful cosmos that yields extraordinary secrets to human inquiry and supplies all kinds of wild spiritual experiences even in our allegedly disenchanted age (and even sometimes to professional skeptics), makes a general openness to metaphysical possibilities a fundamentally reasonable default. And this is especially true if you have no theological tradition, no religious upbringing to structure your encounter with the universe’s mysteries — if you’re starting fresh, as many people nowadays are.
But precisely because an attitude of spiritual experimentation is reasonable, it’s also important to emphasize something taught by almost every horror movie but nonetheless skated over in a lot of American spirituality: the importance of being really careful in your openness and not just taking the beneficence of the metaphysical realm for granted.
If the material universe as we find it is beautiful but also naturally perilous and shot through with sin and evil wherever human agency is at work, there is no reason to expect that any spiritual dimension would be different — no reason to think that being a psychonaut is any less perilous than being an astronaut, even if the danger takes a different form.
There is plenty of raw data to indicate the perils: Not every near-death experience is heavenly; some share of DMT users come back traumatized; the American Catholic Church reportedly fields an increasing number of exorcism inquiries even as its cultural influence otherwise declines. And there should also be a fundamental uncertainty around even initially positive experiences: Not all that glitters is gold, and the idea that certain forces are out to trick you or use you recurs across religious cultures (and in the semireligious culture around U.F.O. experience today).
I’m writing as a Christian; my religion explicitly warns against magic, divination, summoning spirits and the like. (Atheist polemicists like to say that religious people are atheists about every god except their own, but this is not really the case; Christianity certainly takes for granted that there are powers in the world besides its triune God.) And it makes sense that in a culture where people are reacting against the Christian past there might be an instinct to ignore such prohibitions, to regard them as just another form of patriarchal chauvinism, white-male control.
But the presumption of danger in the supernatural realm is hardly confined to Christian tradition, and the presumption that pantheism or polytheism or any other alternative to Western monotheism automatically generates humane and kindly societies finds no confirmation in history whatsoever.
So from any religious perspective, there’s reason to worry about a society in which structures have broken down and masses of people are going searching without maps or playing around in half-belief or deploying, against what remains of Christianity, symbols that invoke multiple spiritualities at once.
Some element of danger is unavoidable. The future of humanity depends on people opening doors to the transcendent, rather than sealing themselves into materialism and despair.
But when the door is open, be very, very careful about what you invite in.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/01/opin ... pe=Article
Re: INTERFAITH ISSUES
Philosophy of Islam
Munir Ahmed Sheikh Published December 8, 2023 Updated 31 minutes ago
I LIVE in Canada but often visit Pakistan. I notice two types of differences in how Islam is practised in the two countries. The first is a much wider range of practices in Canada than in Pakistan. The second is much less tolerance in Pakistan for those who do things differently.
There is another stark difference that should be obvious to all: the contrast between the glory days of Islam starting with the Prophet (PBUH) becoming the head of state in Arabia, when Muslims were a force to be reckoned with, and today when the Muslim world is in a state of utter chaos.
This raises the question of how Islam relates to the sorry state we are in today. I am puzzled nobody asks that question since we have always been taught to believe that Islam is a complete way of life. It raises the question of which of the following explains our current malaise.
First, is it that Islam can’t be a way of life in the modern world? Second, is it that we don’t seem to understand Islam anymore, compared to the generations of a few centuries ago, during and after the Prophet’s time? Or is it that Islam, the way we understand it, is just fine and we don’t follow enough of it? We need to spend time understanding the philosophy of Islam.
Whichever of these explanations is correct is fundamentally critical to the Muslims’ place in the modern world.
In the absence of any critical thinking on the big issues, I find the Muslim world taking the easy way out: living in the modern world but tagging Islam to it by practising a set of rituals without any understanding of what they are meant for.
The tragedy of this approach is that a Muslim may do every bad thing conceivable, but be happy in their belief that they are practising Islam and, despite their sins, will go straight to heaven. I call this balance-sheet Islam: the danger is that the more you practise rituals without the slightest thought of what they are for, the more you may feel you have huge positive assets that give you a licence to do every conceivable bad thing. In this scenario, religion cannot be the positive force it was meant to be.
Let me put my preliminary thoughts on the table to answer the question I posed here to kick-start a conversation.
My understanding of Islam, based on many years of serious research, is based on two fundamental principles: first, there is an underlying purpose behind everything Islam wants us to do or not to do. This purpose is related to two key outcomes, ie, good human beings and a well-functioning society; second, Islam came for the benefit of us humans, not as a means of benefiting Allah. He, given the entity we believe Him to be, doesn’t need any favours from us. So, if religion doesn’t help me, is there any point in me spending time on it?
These two principles take me to an understanding and practice of Islam that bears no resemblance to what I see happening in the Muslim world.
Where does this approach take us?
We need to keep in mind there are two parts to Islam: its philosophy, or the big picture which describes the fundamental objectives and desired outcomes; and the operational tools, that are used to achieve these objectives and outcomes.
It may be easy to provide simplistic answers to both these requirements but that wouldn’t be sufficient because there are many serious challenges to overcome in getting practical guidelines. We need serious thinking and research over many years done by many knowledgeable and thoughtful people.
The same thing that Muslims used to do in the past: people such as, to name just a few, Hazrat Umar, Hazrat Ali, Imam Jaffer Sadiq, Imam Abu Hanifa, Imam Ghazali and Abu Ali Sina.
As an example, what is the fundamental objective behind the way we understand zakat? Is it a 2.5 per cent wealth tax? Or is it to achieve a desirable level of income equality? Given the way economic systems have changed from then to now, there is a huge conflict between the two answers. So, we need to spend time understanding the philosophy of Islam.
Similarly, we need to differentiate between the philosophical and the operational. Which is which? Take namaz as an example. Experiencing the way Islam is practised in Pakistan, it would seem namaz is the philosophy. Is it?
Or is it an operational tool to achieve a philosophy, such as making humans better? I saw an example of a huge conflict between the philosophical and the operational when one of our guests arrived an hour late with the explanation that they waited to offer their Maghribprayers.
I hope I have put some questions and ideas on the table for others to participate in a serious conversation.
The writer is a freelance contributor.
Published in Dawn, December 8th, 2023
https://www.dawn.com/news/1796053/philosophy-of-islam
Munir Ahmed Sheikh Published December 8, 2023 Updated 31 minutes ago
I LIVE in Canada but often visit Pakistan. I notice two types of differences in how Islam is practised in the two countries. The first is a much wider range of practices in Canada than in Pakistan. The second is much less tolerance in Pakistan for those who do things differently.
There is another stark difference that should be obvious to all: the contrast between the glory days of Islam starting with the Prophet (PBUH) becoming the head of state in Arabia, when Muslims were a force to be reckoned with, and today when the Muslim world is in a state of utter chaos.
This raises the question of how Islam relates to the sorry state we are in today. I am puzzled nobody asks that question since we have always been taught to believe that Islam is a complete way of life. It raises the question of which of the following explains our current malaise.
First, is it that Islam can’t be a way of life in the modern world? Second, is it that we don’t seem to understand Islam anymore, compared to the generations of a few centuries ago, during and after the Prophet’s time? Or is it that Islam, the way we understand it, is just fine and we don’t follow enough of it? We need to spend time understanding the philosophy of Islam.
Whichever of these explanations is correct is fundamentally critical to the Muslims’ place in the modern world.
In the absence of any critical thinking on the big issues, I find the Muslim world taking the easy way out: living in the modern world but tagging Islam to it by practising a set of rituals without any understanding of what they are meant for.
The tragedy of this approach is that a Muslim may do every bad thing conceivable, but be happy in their belief that they are practising Islam and, despite their sins, will go straight to heaven. I call this balance-sheet Islam: the danger is that the more you practise rituals without the slightest thought of what they are for, the more you may feel you have huge positive assets that give you a licence to do every conceivable bad thing. In this scenario, religion cannot be the positive force it was meant to be.
Let me put my preliminary thoughts on the table to answer the question I posed here to kick-start a conversation.
My understanding of Islam, based on many years of serious research, is based on two fundamental principles: first, there is an underlying purpose behind everything Islam wants us to do or not to do. This purpose is related to two key outcomes, ie, good human beings and a well-functioning society; second, Islam came for the benefit of us humans, not as a means of benefiting Allah. He, given the entity we believe Him to be, doesn’t need any favours from us. So, if religion doesn’t help me, is there any point in me spending time on it?
These two principles take me to an understanding and practice of Islam that bears no resemblance to what I see happening in the Muslim world.
Where does this approach take us?
We need to keep in mind there are two parts to Islam: its philosophy, or the big picture which describes the fundamental objectives and desired outcomes; and the operational tools, that are used to achieve these objectives and outcomes.
It may be easy to provide simplistic answers to both these requirements but that wouldn’t be sufficient because there are many serious challenges to overcome in getting practical guidelines. We need serious thinking and research over many years done by many knowledgeable and thoughtful people.
The same thing that Muslims used to do in the past: people such as, to name just a few, Hazrat Umar, Hazrat Ali, Imam Jaffer Sadiq, Imam Abu Hanifa, Imam Ghazali and Abu Ali Sina.
As an example, what is the fundamental objective behind the way we understand zakat? Is it a 2.5 per cent wealth tax? Or is it to achieve a desirable level of income equality? Given the way economic systems have changed from then to now, there is a huge conflict between the two answers. So, we need to spend time understanding the philosophy of Islam.
Similarly, we need to differentiate between the philosophical and the operational. Which is which? Take namaz as an example. Experiencing the way Islam is practised in Pakistan, it would seem namaz is the philosophy. Is it?
Or is it an operational tool to achieve a philosophy, such as making humans better? I saw an example of a huge conflict between the philosophical and the operational when one of our guests arrived an hour late with the explanation that they waited to offer their Maghribprayers.
I hope I have put some questions and ideas on the table for others to participate in a serious conversation.
The writer is a freelance contributor.
Published in Dawn, December 8th, 2023
https://www.dawn.com/news/1796053/philosophy-of-islam
Re: INTERFAITH ISSUES
It’s Easter 2050. Here’s What American Religion Looks Like.
Another Easter, another survey showing religion’s recent ebb: This one is from Gallup, confirming a deepening of the 21st-century decline in church attendance.
But diminishment coexists with transformation. The kind of Christian practice that’s likely to endure and thrive as loosely affiliated church members fall away isn’t the kind we associate with the flood tide of American Christianity 60 years ago. Meanwhile, the main alternative to traditional religion, a faith in secular progress, has entered into its own crisis of commitment and belief, with mysticism creeping back in around secularism’s edges.
So let’s try to imagine how these trends might shape American religion a generation hence. Clearly the old order of Protestant denominationalism, Methodists and Presbyterians and Episcopalians clustering around the city green, no longer defines our religious life. In its place, what alignments are taking shape? How might an American in 2050 describe the country’s key religious groups?
Let’s imagine such a description. Start with a group we’ll call the neotraditionalists. These are liturgical and doctrinally conservative Christians, with a Roman Catholic core orbited by some Reformation factions, Calvinists especially, as well as some Eastern Orthodox churches, small but flush with converts.
Next, we have a larger group, the mere Christians. These are Americans we would call ex-evangelical or nondenominational Protestant today, but terms like “denomination” and “Protestant” seem quaint in our imagined 2050 and even “evangelical” is falling into abeyance. Instead most people in this category just identify as Christians, while attending churches with names like Elevate and Rise and Resurrection — institutions that are theologically conservative, but not doctrinally intense and not liturgical at all.
The mere Christians are middle class and suburban, with fewer advanced degrees and extra kids than the neotrads and more multiracial congregations. At one edge their category blurs into Pentecostalism; at another into churches that are technically still part of a denominational structure but don’t advertise as such: “The Galilee Initiative” in big letters, “a Southern Baptist community” in tiny ones.
Next up, the liberal Christians. For generations the more liberal-leaning Protestant denominations have been declining. But liberal Christianity is a renewable resource, as long as there are conservative Christianities to inspire rebellion and disillusionment.
The question is what liberal faith’s institutional form looks like in 2050. Maybe a liberal Catholicism that’s short on priests but enduring under lay leadership. Maybe a liberal form of nondenominational Christianity built by the heirs of today’s disillusioned “ex-vangelicals.” Maybe a Mainline Protestantism that’s survived through consolidation, with former Episcopalians and Methodists and Congregationalists clustered together in a United Progressive Church.
The “neo” as well as the “traditionalist” matters. These believers have created, rather than inherited, their conservative culture. Generally they are highly educated and upwardly mobile, though their tendency to have large families limits that mobility. The stereotypical neo-trad lives around a city or college town in a conservative state and sends her kids to one of the ever-expanding network of classical high schools. But there are important neo-trad subcultures in big liberal cities, supplying the behind-the-scenes leadership — judges, administrators, wonks — for whatever kind of political conservatism exists in 2050.
Then, the all-American pagans. This is a catchall for the emergent post-Christian forms of religious faith — via New Age spirituality, astrology, U.F.O. fascinations, meditation and mind-altering drugs, magic and witchcraft, intellectual pantheism and old-school polytheism and even Satanism.
These experiments won’t have a singular institutional expression in 2050. But together they will be seen as a major American religion, not just a minor tendency or impulse — potent in today’s most secular regions (the Pacific Northwest, New England), supplying spiritual scripts for a lot of political progressives, infusing weird metaphysics into Silicon Valley’s A.I. and technofuturist visions.
Then, the fast-growing outsiders. These are smaller groups that because of geographic concentration and high fertility seem increasingly important. The Mormons would be the obvious example, though their fertility advantage has diminished a bit. The Amish are another: By the 2050s their population may be shooting past a million. Orthodox Jews will probably outnumber their Reform and Conservative brethren. And whichever form of Islam manages the ordeal of assimilation in America could have a similar trajectory.
Finally, a wild card: the intelligentsia. For a century or more the American intellectual classes have been much more unbelieving than the country as a whole. Does that default posture survive another generation’s worth of change? Do progressive-minded intellectuals throw themselves into some mixture of paganism and transhumanism? Do humanists make common cause with liberal Christians or even neo-traditionalists against some threatening techno-future? Can an arid and implausible atheism really endure in a much weirder American future?
We’ll find out. Happy Easter.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/30/opin ... erica.html
Another Easter, another survey showing religion’s recent ebb: This one is from Gallup, confirming a deepening of the 21st-century decline in church attendance.
But diminishment coexists with transformation. The kind of Christian practice that’s likely to endure and thrive as loosely affiliated church members fall away isn’t the kind we associate with the flood tide of American Christianity 60 years ago. Meanwhile, the main alternative to traditional religion, a faith in secular progress, has entered into its own crisis of commitment and belief, with mysticism creeping back in around secularism’s edges.
So let’s try to imagine how these trends might shape American religion a generation hence. Clearly the old order of Protestant denominationalism, Methodists and Presbyterians and Episcopalians clustering around the city green, no longer defines our religious life. In its place, what alignments are taking shape? How might an American in 2050 describe the country’s key religious groups?
Let’s imagine such a description. Start with a group we’ll call the neotraditionalists. These are liturgical and doctrinally conservative Christians, with a Roman Catholic core orbited by some Reformation factions, Calvinists especially, as well as some Eastern Orthodox churches, small but flush with converts.
Next, we have a larger group, the mere Christians. These are Americans we would call ex-evangelical or nondenominational Protestant today, but terms like “denomination” and “Protestant” seem quaint in our imagined 2050 and even “evangelical” is falling into abeyance. Instead most people in this category just identify as Christians, while attending churches with names like Elevate and Rise and Resurrection — institutions that are theologically conservative, but not doctrinally intense and not liturgical at all.
The mere Christians are middle class and suburban, with fewer advanced degrees and extra kids than the neotrads and more multiracial congregations. At one edge their category blurs into Pentecostalism; at another into churches that are technically still part of a denominational structure but don’t advertise as such: “The Galilee Initiative” in big letters, “a Southern Baptist community” in tiny ones.
Next up, the liberal Christians. For generations the more liberal-leaning Protestant denominations have been declining. But liberal Christianity is a renewable resource, as long as there are conservative Christianities to inspire rebellion and disillusionment.
The question is what liberal faith’s institutional form looks like in 2050. Maybe a liberal Catholicism that’s short on priests but enduring under lay leadership. Maybe a liberal form of nondenominational Christianity built by the heirs of today’s disillusioned “ex-vangelicals.” Maybe a Mainline Protestantism that’s survived through consolidation, with former Episcopalians and Methodists and Congregationalists clustered together in a United Progressive Church.
The “neo” as well as the “traditionalist” matters. These believers have created, rather than inherited, their conservative culture. Generally they are highly educated and upwardly mobile, though their tendency to have large families limits that mobility. The stereotypical neo-trad lives around a city or college town in a conservative state and sends her kids to one of the ever-expanding network of classical high schools. But there are important neo-trad subcultures in big liberal cities, supplying the behind-the-scenes leadership — judges, administrators, wonks — for whatever kind of political conservatism exists in 2050.
Then, the all-American pagans. This is a catchall for the emergent post-Christian forms of religious faith — via New Age spirituality, astrology, U.F.O. fascinations, meditation and mind-altering drugs, magic and witchcraft, intellectual pantheism and old-school polytheism and even Satanism.
These experiments won’t have a singular institutional expression in 2050. But together they will be seen as a major American religion, not just a minor tendency or impulse — potent in today’s most secular regions (the Pacific Northwest, New England), supplying spiritual scripts for a lot of political progressives, infusing weird metaphysics into Silicon Valley’s A.I. and technofuturist visions.
Then, the fast-growing outsiders. These are smaller groups that because of geographic concentration and high fertility seem increasingly important. The Mormons would be the obvious example, though their fertility advantage has diminished a bit. The Amish are another: By the 2050s their population may be shooting past a million. Orthodox Jews will probably outnumber their Reform and Conservative brethren. And whichever form of Islam manages the ordeal of assimilation in America could have a similar trajectory.
Finally, a wild card: the intelligentsia. For a century or more the American intellectual classes have been much more unbelieving than the country as a whole. Does that default posture survive another generation’s worth of change? Do progressive-minded intellectuals throw themselves into some mixture of paganism and transhumanism? Do humanists make common cause with liberal Christians or even neo-traditionalists against some threatening techno-future? Can an arid and implausible atheism really endure in a much weirder American future?
We’ll find out. Happy Easter.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/30/opin ... erica.html
Re: INTERFAITH ISSUES
No Religion? At These Faith-Based Retirement Communities, No Problem.
Some communities with religious origins now offer spiritual programming as just one of many enticements, like the bingo nights of yesteryear.
An older woman in a sundress and sandals poses in a rolling office chair. A desk and bookshelf are behind her.
Helen Leddy moved to Shell Point Retirement Community in Fort Myers, Fla., last year. Her best friend, Judy Burget, told her that there would be no proselytizing and the senior living community founded by the evangelical Christian and Missionary Alliance.Credit...Zack Wittman for The New York Times
Tammy LaGorce
By Tammy LaGorce
April 28, 2024
Before Helen Leddy moved to Shell Point Retirement Community in Fort Myers, Fla., last year, she got the lowdown on the place from her best friend, Judy Burget.
Ms. Leddy, 86, wasn’t interested in leaving her condo if it meant adopting one part of the culture Shell Point emphasized on its website: “If you go online, you see they’re built around religion,” she said. As a Unitarian Universalist who grew up Jewish, Ms. Leddy was concerned that the denomination that founded Shell Point, the evangelical Christian and Missionary Alliance, might promote values that did not match hers, and that her new neighbors might proselytize. Ms. Burget, who has lived at Shell Point for six years, told her that wasn’t going to happen.
Faith-based communities like Shell Point, which was established in 1968, generally don’t insist that residents subscribe to the religion that shaped the communities, according to Katie Smith Sloan, the president and chief executive of LeadingAge, an association of nonprofit providers of aging services. Instead, residents have come to expect different kinds of benefits, and the religious aspect, which was once a meaningful calling card, is now often seen as just another effective marketing tool, like on-site beauty salons or golf pro shops.
Image
A woman with gray hair and a light-blue jacket smiles as she holds a potted plan in a garden.
Judy Burget moved to Shell Point six years ago and found a welcoming community that offers recreational opportunities, including a chance to get her hands dirty in the on-site butterfly garden. Credit...Zack Wittman for The New York Times
Like other continuing-care retirement communities — developments where people over age 55 can live independently and then move to higher levels of caregiving when needed — Shell Point encourages residents to find their mid- or late-life groove in any number of ways. Here, a meandering pedestrian may be honked off the road by a golf cart driver hurrying to the woodworking shop, a photography or pottery class, a personal training session or a show at the 44,000-square-foot arts center.
Ms. Leddy, who recently attended a pizza party in her building, said that gatherings at Shell Point “generally start with a blessing, and maybe there’s a blessing at the end.” Otherwise, acquaintances toss off the occasional “God bless.”
About 56 of the 200 largest continuing-care communities in the United States are faith-based, according to Ziegler, a financial company that specializes in senior living. A majority are sponsored by Christian or Jewish organizations, and most faith-based communities are nonprofits. They are competing for a customer base that is not only graying, but attending church services in declining numbers.
That has led to what amounts to fancy footwork among some of the market’s major players, said Eloise Tweeten, the founder of Tweeten Eldercare Advisors, a company that matches families with retirement communities in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Image
A mid-rise building with palm trees in front.
Shell Point Retirement Community was established in 1968 by the evangelical Christian and Missionary Alliance. Credit...Zack Wittman for The New York Times
Faith-based communities “are doing a bit of a dance,” said Ms. Tweeten, who has been advising older people for 17 years. Her father chose to move into a Lutheran-based community in Madison, Wis., in the early 2000s; today, a similar community might call itself Lutheran-inspired. “They don’t want to limit the population that moves in, so they have to walk this line,” she said, adding that “to sustain growth, they’re focusing not so much on religion as philosophy” — like pacifism or progressivism.
That is evident at Enso Village, a new community in Healdsburg, Calif., that several of Ms. Tweeten’s clients toured recently. The community, which will hold a ribbon-cutting in June, is a collaboration between Kendal, an East Coast retirement community operator founded by Quakers, and San Francisco Zen Center, an organization of Zen practice and retreat centers that has public programs and provides housing to some practitioners.
Susan O’Connell, 76, started dreaming up Enso in 2006, when she was a resident at the Zen Center. She lives at Enso now. “I didn’t want to age in the ways that I saw were available, so I tried to create something,” Ms. O’Connell said. “And I found out that a lot of people had my same ideas.”
The Zen Center formed a partnership with Kendal after the two organizations assessed where Quaker and Zen values merge. “Quakers sit in silence and, as they say, wait for the still voice within to arise,” Ms. O’Connell explained. “Of course, in Zen, we meditate.”
Openness and ethical conduct are shared values, too, she added. But like other faith-based communities, Enso is open to everyone. Quaker, Jewish and agnostic residents have welcomed Sufis and Christians to the community, which has an on-site garden and teaching kitchen, a meditation hall and organized volunteer outings. Regardless of religion, “we’re all seekers,” Ms. O’Connell said.
Image
A woman poses in a blue dress stands on a paved trail in a wooded area.
Sharell Shippen is director of spirituality at HumanGood, a nonprofit that runs faith-based retirement communities across the country. Atheists and agnostics are a presence on all its campuses. Credit...Michelle Gustafson for The New York Times
They are not all baby boomers, born between 1946 and 1964, but the values associated with that generation seep into retirement communities, Ms. Tweeten says. She recalled that a client who recently toured Spring Lake Village, a Santa Rosa, Calif., community with Episcopalian roots, was sniffing around for cars with bumper stickers that might signal conservative values. “He wasn’t going to move there if he saw signs of people not being politically liberal,” she said. At Enso, Ms. O’Connell noted, marketing materials have included images of peace signs and a vintage Volkswagen bus.
HumanGood, a nonprofit that runs 19 faith-based continuing-care retirement communities across the country, was founded by Baptists and Presbyterians in the 1950s and still identifies as faith-based. But its director of spirituality, Sharell Shippen, said it would be a mistake to think of HumanGood as a Christian community. “The way we see spiritual service has evolved,” she said.
At Rydal Park, the company’s campus in Jenkintown, Pa., a majority of residents are Jewish. A rabbi is on site on Friday evenings for Shabbat, but there is also a priest for Catholic Mass on Sundays. A HumanGood campus in California held a Wiccan service at a resident’s request. And the spiritual needs of agnostic and atheist residents — a presence in all HumanGood continuing-care communities — are not overlooked, either. “If spirituality for you is a nature walk, we’ll walk alongside you,” Ms. Shippen said.
Choosing not to participate in HumanGood’s spirituality programs is also an option. “You can engage or disengage,” Ms. Shippen said. As at Shell Point and Enso, there is still plenty to do.
Image
Modest two-story homes with beige roofs on a tree-lined street.
Rydal Park, a HumanGood community in Jenkintown, Pa., offers residents Shabbat services as well as Catholic Mass. Credit...Michelle Gustafson for The New York Times
The variety of leisure opportunities and amenities often translates into hefty entrance fees and contracts that can seriously dent a grandchild’s inheritance. According to the nonprofit National Investment Center for Seniors Housing and Care, the average upfront entrance fee is about $450,000. And that’s followed by a monthly maintenance or service fee of several thousand dollars. Faith-based communities are not necessarily cheaper. Though some acquired their land from a religious foundation, not many get funding from the church that shaped them, said Ms. Smith Sloan, of LeadingAge.
Residents have to qualify financially before they can move into a continuing-care community, and then pay high entrance and monthly fees, but if the community is a nonprofit, they may not have to worry about being kicked out if eventually they can’t pay their bills. Dee Pekruhn, LeadingAge’s director of life plan communities services and policy, said that if residents “outlive their resources,” the communities “often have an affiliated foundation established to pick up those costs.”
Image
A man in a white shirt and woman in a red shirt smile in the office area of a home. A large window behind them has a view of a town, a bridge and body of water.
Bob and Gretchen Dawson moved to Plymouth Harbor, on Sarasota Bay, in 2018. The community was founded by a Congregational minister. Mr. Dawson said he is not particularly religious. Credit...Zack Wittman for The New York Times
Bob Dawson, 74, and his wife, Gretchen, toured several communities in Florida before choosing Plymouth Harbor, an interfaith community on Sarasota Bay, in 2018. Its website once trumpeted “the dream of the Reverend Dr. John Whitney MacNeil,” the Congregational minister who founded the community in 1966, but those references were recently removed. ”I felt that we didn’t need that passage,” said Plymouth Harbor’s president and chief executive, Jeff Weatherhead, adding that “while it was his dream, it took much more than that one man’s dream.”
The Dawsons paid more attention to the financial viability of Plymouth Harbor and the community’s friendliness and amenities when they were planning to move. “We plan to live here the rest of our lives, so we needed to make sure that in return for our money, it will be able to take care of us,” Mr. Dawson said. He is not particularly religious, but it’s OK with him if his neighbors are. Mostly, they don’t talk about it.
“Do we feel constricted or constrained or directed by a religious agenda here?” he said. “No, not at all.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/28/real ... 778d3e6de3
Some communities with religious origins now offer spiritual programming as just one of many enticements, like the bingo nights of yesteryear.
An older woman in a sundress and sandals poses in a rolling office chair. A desk and bookshelf are behind her.
Helen Leddy moved to Shell Point Retirement Community in Fort Myers, Fla., last year. Her best friend, Judy Burget, told her that there would be no proselytizing and the senior living community founded by the evangelical Christian and Missionary Alliance.Credit...Zack Wittman for The New York Times
Tammy LaGorce
By Tammy LaGorce
April 28, 2024
Before Helen Leddy moved to Shell Point Retirement Community in Fort Myers, Fla., last year, she got the lowdown on the place from her best friend, Judy Burget.
Ms. Leddy, 86, wasn’t interested in leaving her condo if it meant adopting one part of the culture Shell Point emphasized on its website: “If you go online, you see they’re built around religion,” she said. As a Unitarian Universalist who grew up Jewish, Ms. Leddy was concerned that the denomination that founded Shell Point, the evangelical Christian and Missionary Alliance, might promote values that did not match hers, and that her new neighbors might proselytize. Ms. Burget, who has lived at Shell Point for six years, told her that wasn’t going to happen.
Faith-based communities like Shell Point, which was established in 1968, generally don’t insist that residents subscribe to the religion that shaped the communities, according to Katie Smith Sloan, the president and chief executive of LeadingAge, an association of nonprofit providers of aging services. Instead, residents have come to expect different kinds of benefits, and the religious aspect, which was once a meaningful calling card, is now often seen as just another effective marketing tool, like on-site beauty salons or golf pro shops.
Image
A woman with gray hair and a light-blue jacket smiles as she holds a potted plan in a garden.
Judy Burget moved to Shell Point six years ago and found a welcoming community that offers recreational opportunities, including a chance to get her hands dirty in the on-site butterfly garden. Credit...Zack Wittman for The New York Times
Like other continuing-care retirement communities — developments where people over age 55 can live independently and then move to higher levels of caregiving when needed — Shell Point encourages residents to find their mid- or late-life groove in any number of ways. Here, a meandering pedestrian may be honked off the road by a golf cart driver hurrying to the woodworking shop, a photography or pottery class, a personal training session or a show at the 44,000-square-foot arts center.
Ms. Leddy, who recently attended a pizza party in her building, said that gatherings at Shell Point “generally start with a blessing, and maybe there’s a blessing at the end.” Otherwise, acquaintances toss off the occasional “God bless.”
About 56 of the 200 largest continuing-care communities in the United States are faith-based, according to Ziegler, a financial company that specializes in senior living. A majority are sponsored by Christian or Jewish organizations, and most faith-based communities are nonprofits. They are competing for a customer base that is not only graying, but attending church services in declining numbers.
That has led to what amounts to fancy footwork among some of the market’s major players, said Eloise Tweeten, the founder of Tweeten Eldercare Advisors, a company that matches families with retirement communities in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Image
A mid-rise building with palm trees in front.
Shell Point Retirement Community was established in 1968 by the evangelical Christian and Missionary Alliance. Credit...Zack Wittman for The New York Times
Faith-based communities “are doing a bit of a dance,” said Ms. Tweeten, who has been advising older people for 17 years. Her father chose to move into a Lutheran-based community in Madison, Wis., in the early 2000s; today, a similar community might call itself Lutheran-inspired. “They don’t want to limit the population that moves in, so they have to walk this line,” she said, adding that “to sustain growth, they’re focusing not so much on religion as philosophy” — like pacifism or progressivism.
That is evident at Enso Village, a new community in Healdsburg, Calif., that several of Ms. Tweeten’s clients toured recently. The community, which will hold a ribbon-cutting in June, is a collaboration between Kendal, an East Coast retirement community operator founded by Quakers, and San Francisco Zen Center, an organization of Zen practice and retreat centers that has public programs and provides housing to some practitioners.
Susan O’Connell, 76, started dreaming up Enso in 2006, when she was a resident at the Zen Center. She lives at Enso now. “I didn’t want to age in the ways that I saw were available, so I tried to create something,” Ms. O’Connell said. “And I found out that a lot of people had my same ideas.”
The Zen Center formed a partnership with Kendal after the two organizations assessed where Quaker and Zen values merge. “Quakers sit in silence and, as they say, wait for the still voice within to arise,” Ms. O’Connell explained. “Of course, in Zen, we meditate.”
Openness and ethical conduct are shared values, too, she added. But like other faith-based communities, Enso is open to everyone. Quaker, Jewish and agnostic residents have welcomed Sufis and Christians to the community, which has an on-site garden and teaching kitchen, a meditation hall and organized volunteer outings. Regardless of religion, “we’re all seekers,” Ms. O’Connell said.
Image
A woman poses in a blue dress stands on a paved trail in a wooded area.
Sharell Shippen is director of spirituality at HumanGood, a nonprofit that runs faith-based retirement communities across the country. Atheists and agnostics are a presence on all its campuses. Credit...Michelle Gustafson for The New York Times
They are not all baby boomers, born between 1946 and 1964, but the values associated with that generation seep into retirement communities, Ms. Tweeten says. She recalled that a client who recently toured Spring Lake Village, a Santa Rosa, Calif., community with Episcopalian roots, was sniffing around for cars with bumper stickers that might signal conservative values. “He wasn’t going to move there if he saw signs of people not being politically liberal,” she said. At Enso, Ms. O’Connell noted, marketing materials have included images of peace signs and a vintage Volkswagen bus.
HumanGood, a nonprofit that runs 19 faith-based continuing-care retirement communities across the country, was founded by Baptists and Presbyterians in the 1950s and still identifies as faith-based. But its director of spirituality, Sharell Shippen, said it would be a mistake to think of HumanGood as a Christian community. “The way we see spiritual service has evolved,” she said.
At Rydal Park, the company’s campus in Jenkintown, Pa., a majority of residents are Jewish. A rabbi is on site on Friday evenings for Shabbat, but there is also a priest for Catholic Mass on Sundays. A HumanGood campus in California held a Wiccan service at a resident’s request. And the spiritual needs of agnostic and atheist residents — a presence in all HumanGood continuing-care communities — are not overlooked, either. “If spirituality for you is a nature walk, we’ll walk alongside you,” Ms. Shippen said.
Choosing not to participate in HumanGood’s spirituality programs is also an option. “You can engage or disengage,” Ms. Shippen said. As at Shell Point and Enso, there is still plenty to do.
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Modest two-story homes with beige roofs on a tree-lined street.
Rydal Park, a HumanGood community in Jenkintown, Pa., offers residents Shabbat services as well as Catholic Mass. Credit...Michelle Gustafson for The New York Times
The variety of leisure opportunities and amenities often translates into hefty entrance fees and contracts that can seriously dent a grandchild’s inheritance. According to the nonprofit National Investment Center for Seniors Housing and Care, the average upfront entrance fee is about $450,000. And that’s followed by a monthly maintenance or service fee of several thousand dollars. Faith-based communities are not necessarily cheaper. Though some acquired their land from a religious foundation, not many get funding from the church that shaped them, said Ms. Smith Sloan, of LeadingAge.
Residents have to qualify financially before they can move into a continuing-care community, and then pay high entrance and monthly fees, but if the community is a nonprofit, they may not have to worry about being kicked out if eventually they can’t pay their bills. Dee Pekruhn, LeadingAge’s director of life plan communities services and policy, said that if residents “outlive their resources,” the communities “often have an affiliated foundation established to pick up those costs.”
Image
A man in a white shirt and woman in a red shirt smile in the office area of a home. A large window behind them has a view of a town, a bridge and body of water.
Bob and Gretchen Dawson moved to Plymouth Harbor, on Sarasota Bay, in 2018. The community was founded by a Congregational minister. Mr. Dawson said he is not particularly religious. Credit...Zack Wittman for The New York Times
Bob Dawson, 74, and his wife, Gretchen, toured several communities in Florida before choosing Plymouth Harbor, an interfaith community on Sarasota Bay, in 2018. Its website once trumpeted “the dream of the Reverend Dr. John Whitney MacNeil,” the Congregational minister who founded the community in 1966, but those references were recently removed. ”I felt that we didn’t need that passage,” said Plymouth Harbor’s president and chief executive, Jeff Weatherhead, adding that “while it was his dream, it took much more than that one man’s dream.”
The Dawsons paid more attention to the financial viability of Plymouth Harbor and the community’s friendliness and amenities when they were planning to move. “We plan to live here the rest of our lives, so we needed to make sure that in return for our money, it will be able to take care of us,” Mr. Dawson said. He is not particularly religious, but it’s OK with him if his neighbors are. Mostly, they don’t talk about it.
“Do we feel constricted or constrained or directed by a religious agenda here?” he said. “No, not at all.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/28/real ... 778d3e6de3
Re: INTERFAITH ISSUES
Your Religious Values Are Not American Values
Whenever a politician cites “Judeo-Christian values,” I find it’s generally followed by something unsettling.
Last month brought two flagrant instances. In both cases, Republican officials introduced state laws that formalize precepts of the Christian nationalist movement — in the words of the National Association of Christian Lawmakers (A.D. 2019), “doing everything we can to restore the Judeo-Christian foundation of our nation.”
On June 19, Gov. Jeff Landry of Louisiana signed legislation requiring public classrooms to display the Ten Commandments, a practice struck down as unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1980. A rich endorsement came via Donald Trump, who crowed, “I LOVE THE TEN COMMANDMENTS IN PUBLIC SCHOOLS, PRIVATE SCHOOLS, AND MANY OTHER PLACES, FOR THAT MATTER. READ IT — HOW CAN WE, AS A NATION, GO WRONG???”
One week later, Landry’s fellow Christian soldier Ryan Walters, Oklahoma’s superintendent of public instruction, announced plans to mandate teaching the Bible in public schools. Walters said learning the Bible is necessary to having “an understanding of the basis of our legal system.”
Forgive me for wondering: Is he referring to “an eye for an eye” or the stoning of disobedient children?
Either way, for both Trump and true believers, it hardly matters that the First Amendment was intended to protect religion from the state, not to have the state impose a religion. (So much for originalism.) Their goal is to impose one form of religion, Christianity, and the underlying message is that those who do not share it will have to submit.
Not only have such moves been declared unconstitutional (“I can’t wait to be sued,” Landry said), but they are also exclusionary and offensive to many.
Despite what the Christian nationalist movement would have you believe, America was not founded as a Christian nation. Nor is it one today. In a pluralistic country, neither the Bible nor Judeo-Christian values are universal, including in the two heavily Christian Southern states in which these laws were passed.
In Louisiana, for example, 2 percent of residents are adherents of other faiths — including Islam, Buddhism, Judaism and Hinduism. Thirteen percent are religious nones, including 4 percent who are atheist or agnostic. In Oklahoma, a similar percentage follow non-Christian religions, and an even larger portion — 18 percent — adhere to no religion.
In a suit challenging the Louisiana law, Americans United for Separation of Church and State noted that among the state’s approximately 680,000 students, many do not practice any religion at all. In response, Landry called on his followers to “stand up for Judeo-Christian values.”
While most of the Ten Commandments involve universal principles, and moral precepts can be found in the Bible, not everyone draws ethical guidelines from religion. And when the Ten Commandments say, “Thou shalt have no other gods before me,” the implication is that there is one true god. That is decidedly not true for all Americans. Some atheists and secular humanists embrace the ideal put forth by Felix Adler, the founder of the Society for Ethical Culture, of deed before creed — that how we act is far more important than what we profess to believe.
Politicians, many of whom regularly flout Adler’s ideal, rarely bother to include nonbelievers — those of us who are not what politicians refer to as people of faith — in their supposedly inclusive rhetoric. This is where leaders of both parties, with their public prayers and displays of religiosity, typically alienate people like me whose principles do not stem from belief in a god. Barack Obama was an exception in including people “with no faith at all,” though I would have preferred a more elegant phrasing. Many of us rationalists do have faith, but it’s in science or humanity, as disappointing as humanity can be.
When it comes to the Ten Commandments, four of the 10 (three if you’re Catholic) concern a specific form of worship with a specific god. I’m on board with a rule against killing, for instance, but somehow this god has given a lot of killing a pass in his name.
And there’s a lot to explain in the Bible itself if you believe it’s a holy book — like its acceptance of slavery.
For me, the Bible’s primary interest is in its historical and literary influence, a work whose stories and metaphors have permeated literature. But it’s also one that, throughout history, has inspired and abetted many of the world’s most violent and deadly wars.
In their drive to foist their religious beliefs on others or to prove their conservative Christian bona fides, Republicans are leaning harder into exclusionary territory. Prominent and mainstream Republicans increasingly support the tenets of the Christian nationalist movement, which often embeds antisemitism and anti-Muslim views into its creed. And it is probably no coincidence that this is occurring as many Christians are fleeing their religion — many, no doubt, because of the hypocrisy and intolerance they’ve witnessed.
In ordinary times, all this would be quickly swatted away by the courts. Unfortunately, the conservative majority of the Supreme Court has demonstrated that, like many Republican politicians, when it comes to freedom of religion — and yes, that must include freedom from religion — those justices are willing to put their own faith above all else.
This Fourth of July, let’s bear in mind that what many Americans value in this country is its inclusion and protection of all, regardless of their beliefs.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/04/opin ... 778d3e6de3
Whenever a politician cites “Judeo-Christian values,” I find it’s generally followed by something unsettling.
Last month brought two flagrant instances. In both cases, Republican officials introduced state laws that formalize precepts of the Christian nationalist movement — in the words of the National Association of Christian Lawmakers (A.D. 2019), “doing everything we can to restore the Judeo-Christian foundation of our nation.”
On June 19, Gov. Jeff Landry of Louisiana signed legislation requiring public classrooms to display the Ten Commandments, a practice struck down as unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1980. A rich endorsement came via Donald Trump, who crowed, “I LOVE THE TEN COMMANDMENTS IN PUBLIC SCHOOLS, PRIVATE SCHOOLS, AND MANY OTHER PLACES, FOR THAT MATTER. READ IT — HOW CAN WE, AS A NATION, GO WRONG???”
One week later, Landry’s fellow Christian soldier Ryan Walters, Oklahoma’s superintendent of public instruction, announced plans to mandate teaching the Bible in public schools. Walters said learning the Bible is necessary to having “an understanding of the basis of our legal system.”
Forgive me for wondering: Is he referring to “an eye for an eye” or the stoning of disobedient children?
Either way, for both Trump and true believers, it hardly matters that the First Amendment was intended to protect religion from the state, not to have the state impose a religion. (So much for originalism.) Their goal is to impose one form of religion, Christianity, and the underlying message is that those who do not share it will have to submit.
Not only have such moves been declared unconstitutional (“I can’t wait to be sued,” Landry said), but they are also exclusionary and offensive to many.
Despite what the Christian nationalist movement would have you believe, America was not founded as a Christian nation. Nor is it one today. In a pluralistic country, neither the Bible nor Judeo-Christian values are universal, including in the two heavily Christian Southern states in which these laws were passed.
In Louisiana, for example, 2 percent of residents are adherents of other faiths — including Islam, Buddhism, Judaism and Hinduism. Thirteen percent are religious nones, including 4 percent who are atheist or agnostic. In Oklahoma, a similar percentage follow non-Christian religions, and an even larger portion — 18 percent — adhere to no religion.
In a suit challenging the Louisiana law, Americans United for Separation of Church and State noted that among the state’s approximately 680,000 students, many do not practice any religion at all. In response, Landry called on his followers to “stand up for Judeo-Christian values.”
While most of the Ten Commandments involve universal principles, and moral precepts can be found in the Bible, not everyone draws ethical guidelines from religion. And when the Ten Commandments say, “Thou shalt have no other gods before me,” the implication is that there is one true god. That is decidedly not true for all Americans. Some atheists and secular humanists embrace the ideal put forth by Felix Adler, the founder of the Society for Ethical Culture, of deed before creed — that how we act is far more important than what we profess to believe.
Politicians, many of whom regularly flout Adler’s ideal, rarely bother to include nonbelievers — those of us who are not what politicians refer to as people of faith — in their supposedly inclusive rhetoric. This is where leaders of both parties, with their public prayers and displays of religiosity, typically alienate people like me whose principles do not stem from belief in a god. Barack Obama was an exception in including people “with no faith at all,” though I would have preferred a more elegant phrasing. Many of us rationalists do have faith, but it’s in science or humanity, as disappointing as humanity can be.
When it comes to the Ten Commandments, four of the 10 (three if you’re Catholic) concern a specific form of worship with a specific god. I’m on board with a rule against killing, for instance, but somehow this god has given a lot of killing a pass in his name.
And there’s a lot to explain in the Bible itself if you believe it’s a holy book — like its acceptance of slavery.
For me, the Bible’s primary interest is in its historical and literary influence, a work whose stories and metaphors have permeated literature. But it’s also one that, throughout history, has inspired and abetted many of the world’s most violent and deadly wars.
In their drive to foist their religious beliefs on others or to prove their conservative Christian bona fides, Republicans are leaning harder into exclusionary territory. Prominent and mainstream Republicans increasingly support the tenets of the Christian nationalist movement, which often embeds antisemitism and anti-Muslim views into its creed. And it is probably no coincidence that this is occurring as many Christians are fleeing their religion — many, no doubt, because of the hypocrisy and intolerance they’ve witnessed.
In ordinary times, all this would be quickly swatted away by the courts. Unfortunately, the conservative majority of the Supreme Court has demonstrated that, like many Republican politicians, when it comes to freedom of religion — and yes, that must include freedom from religion — those justices are willing to put their own faith above all else.
This Fourth of July, let’s bear in mind that what many Americans value in this country is its inclusion and protection of all, regardless of their beliefs.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/04/opin ... 778d3e6de3
Re: INTERFAITH ISSUES
VOWS
They United Their Muslim and Jewish Families but Didn’t Stop There
Safi Rauf, a Muslim humanitarian, was held captive by the Taliban for 105 days. Secret calls on a smuggled phone with Sammi Cannold, a Jewish Broadway director, were his lifeline.
On July 20, Sammi Cannold and Safi Rauf were married before 300 guests in Glenwood, Iowa. His father, Haji Abdul Rauf, an imam, second from right, led the Muslim marriage ceremony. The bride’s parents, Mitchell Cannold and Dori Berinstein, stand on the far left and far right. The groom’s mother, Hamila Rauf, is second from left.Credit...Rebecca Gratz for The New York Times
Under a huppah in a cornfield in Glenwood, Iowa, Sammi Rose Cannold and Safiullah Rauf took turns reading excerpts from a notebook that she had written in nearly every day for several months.
“Day 32 of captivity. I dream of the day that I get to read this sentence back to myself, while sitting next to you on a porch somewhere, or something stupid like that,” Mr. Rauf read from Ms. Cannold’s notebook. “But today’s the first time since this started that I have fully doubted if that day will come.”
In December 2021, two months after becoming a couple, Mr. Rauf, an Afghan American humanitarian who goes by Safi, was taken hostage by the Taliban. Ms. Cannold wasn’t sure she would ever see him again.
Even better than sitting on a porch, on July 20, Mr. Rauf recited that sentence as they were married in front of 300 guests. His father, an imam, had led them through the nikah, the Muslim marriage ceremony. Ms. Cannold’s 98-year-old Jewish grandmother read a variation of the seven blessings in Hebrew and English.
Mr. Rauf was dressed in a sherwani, and Ms. Cannold wore a lehenga — outfits they had purchased on a recent trip to India while working on the first film for their production company, Beyond the Barricade, which aims to produce work that builds bridges between Jewish and Muslim communities.
Truthfully, the two, both 30, feared they would not be able to end up together. “We had both been taught in life, not by anyone in particular, but by society, that the two of us aren’t really supposed to be together,” said Ms. Cannold, a Jewish Broadway director who grew up in Armonk, N.Y. Mr. Rauf, a Muslim refugee who grew up in a camp in Peshawar, Pakistan, relocated to Omaha at age 17.
But if there’s anything their wedding embodied, it was the notion that love triumphs. Ms. Cannold joked that their wedding was like the “basis of a giant sitcom”: “One-third Muslim Afghans, one-third Jews, and one-third gay men who work in theater, all in a cornfield in Iowa.”
Image
The bride, left, leans toward the groom, as he kisses her forehead while holding hands under a tree.
About 70 days into his captivity, Mr. Rauf was able to consistently communicate with Ms. Cannold. “We would have these long conversations at night on the smuggled phone,” she said. “Our bond was really cemented during Safi’s captivity.” Credit...Rebecca Gratz for The New York Times
Their story began in August 2021. After the Taliban took over Kabul, Mr. Rauf and his two brothers scrambled to do what they could to help Afghans in need. He had been planning to attend medical school that fall, but he put that dream on hold to start a nonprofit called Human First Coalition, helping at-risk Afghans evacuate the country.
At the same time, Ms. Cannold was trying to help a friend, Zarifa Adiba, evacuate her family from Afghanistan. Ms. Adiba was a co-conductor of the Zohra orchestra, Afghanistan’s all-women orchestra.
About a week into their efforts, Ms. Cannold saw a segment on CNN about Mr. Rauf’s work. She reached out to him seeking help, and he explained that since he was trying to help thousands of people evacuate, her best bet was to volunteer for the organization. He sent her the address of the operation center in Washington, unaware that Ms. Cannold lived in New York. With no sleeping bag or hotel arrangements, she took a train to Washington.
When she walked into the center on Aug. 27, 2021, at about 6 p.m., a giant operation was in full swing to transport 500 Afghans to the airport in Kabul.
At around 1 a.m., they were all bleary-eyed, and Mr. Rauf asked her if she wanted to take a walk and get some fresh air while fielding calls for the operation. They ended up at the luminescent Lincoln Memorial, the light reflecting off the nearby pool.
“Suddenly, we were like, ‘In another world, this would be like a really weird first date,’” Ms. Cannold recalled.
Ms. Cannold stayed in Washington for a week and a half, sleeping at the operation center or at a hotel that offered rooms to volunteers. She then returned regularly from New York to continue volunteering while directing three new musicals.
They got to know each other better, and Mr. Rauf learned about her work in theater. He had never heard of Broadway before. (“I’m a theater convert,” he said.) Their mutual attraction grew stronger.
One night in mid-September, she and Mr. Rauf were working late with a team member, who eventually realized that he was something of a third wheel.
“He was like, ‘You know what? I’m going to go work at home,’” Ms. Cannold recalled. During a break, the two went out to the balcony and kissed.
Image
The couple walk along an aisle on a grassy rolling field with two young girls ahead of them. Guests are standing by their seats in the background, right. In the distant background are trees and blue skies.
The bride called the wedding the “basis of a giant sitcom”: “One-third Muslim Afghans, one-third Jews, and one-third gay men who work in theater, all in a cornfield in Iowa.”Credit...Rebecca Gratz for The New York Times
Image
The bride's grandmother, with short silver hair wears a pale gray dress, a pearl necklace and a sheer gray scarf with gold dots. She is giving a blessing into the microphone. Her two sons stand on either side. A grassy lawn stretches behind them.
Ms. Cannold’s 98-year-old Jewish grandmother read a variation of the seven blessings in Hebrew and English.Credit...Rebecca Gratz for The New York Times
Image
The groom, left, is about to step on a glass covered by a white cloth under a huppa covered by loosely draped fabric. The bride, right, watches as does the rabbi standing a few steps back between them.
Mr. Rauf stomped on glass in accordance with Jewish tradition.Credit...Rebecca Gratz for The New York Times
On Oct. 3, 2021, Ms. Adiba’s family got on a flight out of Mazar-i-Sharif, Afghanistan. The following morning, Mr. Rauf called Ms. Cannold on the phone and asked her out officially.
Later that month in London, Mr. Rauf saw his first musical: “Les Misérables.”
“He came out of the theater singing the songs on the sidewalk,” said Ms. Cannold. “And I was like, ‘Oh, thank God. He likes theater.’” (Mr. Rauf found the musical aspect of it similar to Bollywood, which he grew up watching in Pakistan.)
In December, Mr. Rauf traveled to Kabul to do some on-the-ground humanitarian work with his team there. He was guaranteed amnesty and protection by the Taliban.
But on the morning of Dec. 18, members of the Taliban’s intelligence agency rounded up the seven foreigners at their hotel, including Mr. Rauf and his brother, Anees Khalil, and told them they needed to ask a few routine questions. But as soon as they were inside the headquarters, their phones were taken away, and they were escorted to a basement. For the first three days, they were all separated and didn’t hear a word from anybody. For the first two weeks, none of their loved ones had a clue where they were.
“For all we knew, he was dead,” Ms. Cannold said.
Binge more Vows columns here and read all our wedding, relationship and divorce coverage here.
Eventually, Mr. Rauf and his brother were in the same 8-foot by 8-foot cell. Together, they were able to persuade guards to give them information and smuggle phones into their cell.
Twenty-five days in, on Jan. 11, 2022, Ms. Cannold received a text from an Afghan number in all capital letters: “Hi, how are you? I love you very much.” He then called her, and they spoke on the phone for the first time, for four minutes. She told him that everyone was working very hard on his behalf. “It was extremely emotional,” she said.
Image
The bride’s hennaed and bejeweled hands, left, rest on fabric with a gold and dark red design on a white background. Two of the groom’s fingers, right, lightly touch her hennaed pinky.
The bride and groom had henna placed on the palms of their hands. According to an Afghan tale, whoever has the darker henna the next morning loves the other person more. Mr. Rauf appeared to have darker henna.Credit...Rebecca Gratz for The New York Times
Then, for six weeks, she didn’t hear from him at all. During that time, he went on two hunger strikes, he said. Eight days into his first hunger strike, he said he was tortured by a group of guards.
Starting about 70 days in, he was able to consistently communicate with Ms. Cannold. “We would have these long conversations at night on the smuggled phone,” she said. “Our bond was really cemented during Safi’s captivity.”
In March, Ms. Cannold found herself in a head scarf at the airport in Doha, Qatar, “trying to be respectful,” she recalled, finally meeting her boyfriend’s parents for the first time without his presence. They had no clue who she was, and while she spoke English, they spoke Pashto. It was his sister-in-law who explained to them that she was their son’s girlfriend.
The four stayed in a condo together in Doha, where negotiations between the U.S. and the Taliban were taking place. Though Mr. Rauf’s parents were initially disappointed to learn that his girlfriend was not an Afghan woman, they all got close as they worked together to secure his release. Small moments, like her asking to help his mother cook, helped forge their relationship.
Over 100 days into his captivity, a deal was struck, and on April 1, 2022, he landed at a U.S. military base in Doha. She stood waiting in a nearby hotel, and they reunited. “We just kept saying, ‘Can you believe it?’” she said.
Not wasting any time, he immediately moved into her apartment in Hell’s Kitchen.
Image
The groom, in a gold patterned tunic and white billowy pants, wears a black hat, and is flanked by two women also in black hats and black robes. The trio dance with their arms up in the air bent at the elbows.
Mr. Rauf and two friends performed a dance from “Fiddler on the Roof.” In the show, the dance is performed during a Jewish wedding. “The idea that you have a Muslim doing it as a tribute to a Jewish wife is very meaningful,” Ms. Cannold said. “That was when my 98-year-old grandmother burst into tears.”Credit...Rebecca Gratz for The New York Times
Just after midnight on April 1, 2023, one year after his release, the couple took a walk to Lincoln Memorial to recreate the first night they met. Mr. Rauf proposed with a custom ring that included a piece of metal that he had obtained from the lock on his prison cell door.
Ms. Cannold graduated from Stanford with a bachelor’s degree in theater and performance studies. She also received a master’s degree in arts education from Harvard. She directed “How to Dance in Ohio” on Broadway, “Endlings” and “Evita.”
Mr. Rauf graduated from Georgetown with a bachelor’s degree in human science. In 2021, he helped evacuate thousands of at-risk Afghans, including 1,400 U.S. citizens, and has since continued to provide humanitarian aid to Afghans in need. Both have made it on the Forbes “30 under 30” lists: Ms. Cannold under “Hollywood & Entertainment,” and Mr. Rauf under “Social Impact.”
The couple are also keen on using their love story as a way to call attention to Gaza. “The degrees to which we have touch points to the present moment are greater than just the fact that we are Jews and Muslims. It is that we are also a hostage family. We have empathy for all civilian families affected by captivity on both sides,” Ms. Cannold said. “And at the same time, we are appalled by the exponentially growing number of Palestinians that have been killed, injured, displaced by the Israeli government.”
Her devoutly Jewish grandmother, Beverly Cannold, and his devoutly Muslim mother, Halima Rauf, have become close friends. “We have watched our families come together and hope to pull from that as a microcosm for how we hope to affect change on a larger level,” Ms. Cannold said.
Image
The groom, left, is seated next to the bride on a white couch. Four women in traditional Afghan clothes hold a green shawl over the couple.
During the reception, the couple changed into traditional Afghan clothes from Afghani Style, a shop owned by Mr. Rauf’s niece, Maria Bangash. Mr. Rauf wore a Jewish prayer shawl over his Afghan kuchi.Credit...Rebecca Gratz for The New York Times
Image
A woman, left foreground, with long gold earrings and a choker, holds a round tray in the air. Three other women in brightly-colored dresses follow in a line.
Mariam Waheed holds a tray while performing the henna dance during the wedding reception.Credit...Rebecca Gratz for The New York Times
Image
A close-up of the bride's open hands, left, with the palm, right, being covered by a white cloth with gold embroidery by the hands of Hamila Rauf.
Hamila Rauf, the groom’s mother, wraps a handmade cloth around Ms. Cannold’s hand.Credit...Rebecca Gratz for The New York Times
On July 20, the couple were married by Haji Abdul Rauf, Mr. Rauf’s father, at the Fountains Ballroom in Glenwood, Iowa — about 25 miles from Omaha, Nebraska, where nine of Mr. Rauf’s siblings and their families reside. Abdul Rauf became an imam in Logar, Afghanistan, but he also got ordained by the American Marriage Ministries for the occasion.
Jhanay Johnston, 31, a close friend, said that as the sun set on the wedding day, she and her husband, Darren Johnston, watched the festivities in awe.
“This is what it’s all for,” she recalled thinking. “As a first-gen American myself, being in a room in the fields of Iowa, coming from New York and seeing Muslims, agnostics and Jewish people coming together and just celebrating love. Folks who spoke little English or not all, all talking to each other, it was just a really beautiful moment. This is what makes me proud to be American. This, to me, felt like the American experiment gone right.”
Image
The groom, left, and bride are smiling as they are held up in the air in separate chairs by several men. They hold each end of a white handkerchief folded in a triangle between them. Guests stand and cheer and take photos in the background.
At the start of the reception, the couple were lifted in chairs to “Hava Nagila.” Credit...Rebecca Gratz for The New York Times
On This Day
When July 20, 2024
Where The Fountains Ballroom in Glenwood, Iowa
The Seating The couple arranged the seating chart so that most tables had a few Jewish family members, a few Muslim family members and a few theater friends.
“I think I heard from four or five of my family and friends that they were invited for breakfast the next morning to an Afghan household by their seatmate,” Ms. Cannold said. “Which is the most Afghan thing ever.”
The Bottle Dance Mr. Rauf and two friends performed a dance from the musical “Fiddler on the Roof.” “For theater people, it’s a very iconic dance,” Ms. Cannold said. In the show, the dance is performed during a Jewish wedding. “The idea that you have a Muslim doing it as a tribute to his Jewish wife is very meaningful,” she added. “That was when my 98-year-old grandmother burst into tears.”
The Henna Dance During the reception, Mr. Rauf’s cousins and sisters danced to “Nakreeze Attan,” which translates to “henna dance,” as they carried trays of henna to the stage where the couple was seated. Mr. Rauf’s mother squeezed a bit of henna onto the palms of the couple. According to an Afghan tale, whoever has the darker henna the next morning loves the other person more. When asked whose henna was brighter, Mr. Rauf flashed his palm.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/02/styl ... 778d3e6de3
They United Their Muslim and Jewish Families but Didn’t Stop There
Safi Rauf, a Muslim humanitarian, was held captive by the Taliban for 105 days. Secret calls on a smuggled phone with Sammi Cannold, a Jewish Broadway director, were his lifeline.
On July 20, Sammi Cannold and Safi Rauf were married before 300 guests in Glenwood, Iowa. His father, Haji Abdul Rauf, an imam, second from right, led the Muslim marriage ceremony. The bride’s parents, Mitchell Cannold and Dori Berinstein, stand on the far left and far right. The groom’s mother, Hamila Rauf, is second from left.Credit...Rebecca Gratz for The New York Times
Under a huppah in a cornfield in Glenwood, Iowa, Sammi Rose Cannold and Safiullah Rauf took turns reading excerpts from a notebook that she had written in nearly every day for several months.
“Day 32 of captivity. I dream of the day that I get to read this sentence back to myself, while sitting next to you on a porch somewhere, or something stupid like that,” Mr. Rauf read from Ms. Cannold’s notebook. “But today’s the first time since this started that I have fully doubted if that day will come.”
In December 2021, two months after becoming a couple, Mr. Rauf, an Afghan American humanitarian who goes by Safi, was taken hostage by the Taliban. Ms. Cannold wasn’t sure she would ever see him again.
Even better than sitting on a porch, on July 20, Mr. Rauf recited that sentence as they were married in front of 300 guests. His father, an imam, had led them through the nikah, the Muslim marriage ceremony. Ms. Cannold’s 98-year-old Jewish grandmother read a variation of the seven blessings in Hebrew and English.
Mr. Rauf was dressed in a sherwani, and Ms. Cannold wore a lehenga — outfits they had purchased on a recent trip to India while working on the first film for their production company, Beyond the Barricade, which aims to produce work that builds bridges between Jewish and Muslim communities.
Truthfully, the two, both 30, feared they would not be able to end up together. “We had both been taught in life, not by anyone in particular, but by society, that the two of us aren’t really supposed to be together,” said Ms. Cannold, a Jewish Broadway director who grew up in Armonk, N.Y. Mr. Rauf, a Muslim refugee who grew up in a camp in Peshawar, Pakistan, relocated to Omaha at age 17.
But if there’s anything their wedding embodied, it was the notion that love triumphs. Ms. Cannold joked that their wedding was like the “basis of a giant sitcom”: “One-third Muslim Afghans, one-third Jews, and one-third gay men who work in theater, all in a cornfield in Iowa.”
Image
The bride, left, leans toward the groom, as he kisses her forehead while holding hands under a tree.
About 70 days into his captivity, Mr. Rauf was able to consistently communicate with Ms. Cannold. “We would have these long conversations at night on the smuggled phone,” she said. “Our bond was really cemented during Safi’s captivity.” Credit...Rebecca Gratz for The New York Times
Their story began in August 2021. After the Taliban took over Kabul, Mr. Rauf and his two brothers scrambled to do what they could to help Afghans in need. He had been planning to attend medical school that fall, but he put that dream on hold to start a nonprofit called Human First Coalition, helping at-risk Afghans evacuate the country.
At the same time, Ms. Cannold was trying to help a friend, Zarifa Adiba, evacuate her family from Afghanistan. Ms. Adiba was a co-conductor of the Zohra orchestra, Afghanistan’s all-women orchestra.
About a week into their efforts, Ms. Cannold saw a segment on CNN about Mr. Rauf’s work. She reached out to him seeking help, and he explained that since he was trying to help thousands of people evacuate, her best bet was to volunteer for the organization. He sent her the address of the operation center in Washington, unaware that Ms. Cannold lived in New York. With no sleeping bag or hotel arrangements, she took a train to Washington.
When she walked into the center on Aug. 27, 2021, at about 6 p.m., a giant operation was in full swing to transport 500 Afghans to the airport in Kabul.
At around 1 a.m., they were all bleary-eyed, and Mr. Rauf asked her if she wanted to take a walk and get some fresh air while fielding calls for the operation. They ended up at the luminescent Lincoln Memorial, the light reflecting off the nearby pool.
“Suddenly, we were like, ‘In another world, this would be like a really weird first date,’” Ms. Cannold recalled.
Ms. Cannold stayed in Washington for a week and a half, sleeping at the operation center or at a hotel that offered rooms to volunteers. She then returned regularly from New York to continue volunteering while directing three new musicals.
They got to know each other better, and Mr. Rauf learned about her work in theater. He had never heard of Broadway before. (“I’m a theater convert,” he said.) Their mutual attraction grew stronger.
One night in mid-September, she and Mr. Rauf were working late with a team member, who eventually realized that he was something of a third wheel.
“He was like, ‘You know what? I’m going to go work at home,’” Ms. Cannold recalled. During a break, the two went out to the balcony and kissed.
Image
The couple walk along an aisle on a grassy rolling field with two young girls ahead of them. Guests are standing by their seats in the background, right. In the distant background are trees and blue skies.
The bride called the wedding the “basis of a giant sitcom”: “One-third Muslim Afghans, one-third Jews, and one-third gay men who work in theater, all in a cornfield in Iowa.”Credit...Rebecca Gratz for The New York Times
Image
The bride's grandmother, with short silver hair wears a pale gray dress, a pearl necklace and a sheer gray scarf with gold dots. She is giving a blessing into the microphone. Her two sons stand on either side. A grassy lawn stretches behind them.
Ms. Cannold’s 98-year-old Jewish grandmother read a variation of the seven blessings in Hebrew and English.Credit...Rebecca Gratz for The New York Times
Image
The groom, left, is about to step on a glass covered by a white cloth under a huppa covered by loosely draped fabric. The bride, right, watches as does the rabbi standing a few steps back between them.
Mr. Rauf stomped on glass in accordance with Jewish tradition.Credit...Rebecca Gratz for The New York Times
On Oct. 3, 2021, Ms. Adiba’s family got on a flight out of Mazar-i-Sharif, Afghanistan. The following morning, Mr. Rauf called Ms. Cannold on the phone and asked her out officially.
Later that month in London, Mr. Rauf saw his first musical: “Les Misérables.”
“He came out of the theater singing the songs on the sidewalk,” said Ms. Cannold. “And I was like, ‘Oh, thank God. He likes theater.’” (Mr. Rauf found the musical aspect of it similar to Bollywood, which he grew up watching in Pakistan.)
In December, Mr. Rauf traveled to Kabul to do some on-the-ground humanitarian work with his team there. He was guaranteed amnesty and protection by the Taliban.
But on the morning of Dec. 18, members of the Taliban’s intelligence agency rounded up the seven foreigners at their hotel, including Mr. Rauf and his brother, Anees Khalil, and told them they needed to ask a few routine questions. But as soon as they were inside the headquarters, their phones were taken away, and they were escorted to a basement. For the first three days, they were all separated and didn’t hear a word from anybody. For the first two weeks, none of their loved ones had a clue where they were.
“For all we knew, he was dead,” Ms. Cannold said.
Binge more Vows columns here and read all our wedding, relationship and divorce coverage here.
Eventually, Mr. Rauf and his brother were in the same 8-foot by 8-foot cell. Together, they were able to persuade guards to give them information and smuggle phones into their cell.
Twenty-five days in, on Jan. 11, 2022, Ms. Cannold received a text from an Afghan number in all capital letters: “Hi, how are you? I love you very much.” He then called her, and they spoke on the phone for the first time, for four minutes. She told him that everyone was working very hard on his behalf. “It was extremely emotional,” she said.
Image
The bride’s hennaed and bejeweled hands, left, rest on fabric with a gold and dark red design on a white background. Two of the groom’s fingers, right, lightly touch her hennaed pinky.
The bride and groom had henna placed on the palms of their hands. According to an Afghan tale, whoever has the darker henna the next morning loves the other person more. Mr. Rauf appeared to have darker henna.Credit...Rebecca Gratz for The New York Times
Then, for six weeks, she didn’t hear from him at all. During that time, he went on two hunger strikes, he said. Eight days into his first hunger strike, he said he was tortured by a group of guards.
Starting about 70 days in, he was able to consistently communicate with Ms. Cannold. “We would have these long conversations at night on the smuggled phone,” she said. “Our bond was really cemented during Safi’s captivity.”
In March, Ms. Cannold found herself in a head scarf at the airport in Doha, Qatar, “trying to be respectful,” she recalled, finally meeting her boyfriend’s parents for the first time without his presence. They had no clue who she was, and while she spoke English, they spoke Pashto. It was his sister-in-law who explained to them that she was their son’s girlfriend.
The four stayed in a condo together in Doha, where negotiations between the U.S. and the Taliban were taking place. Though Mr. Rauf’s parents were initially disappointed to learn that his girlfriend was not an Afghan woman, they all got close as they worked together to secure his release. Small moments, like her asking to help his mother cook, helped forge their relationship.
Over 100 days into his captivity, a deal was struck, and on April 1, 2022, he landed at a U.S. military base in Doha. She stood waiting in a nearby hotel, and they reunited. “We just kept saying, ‘Can you believe it?’” she said.
Not wasting any time, he immediately moved into her apartment in Hell’s Kitchen.
Image
The groom, in a gold patterned tunic and white billowy pants, wears a black hat, and is flanked by two women also in black hats and black robes. The trio dance with their arms up in the air bent at the elbows.
Mr. Rauf and two friends performed a dance from “Fiddler on the Roof.” In the show, the dance is performed during a Jewish wedding. “The idea that you have a Muslim doing it as a tribute to a Jewish wife is very meaningful,” Ms. Cannold said. “That was when my 98-year-old grandmother burst into tears.”Credit...Rebecca Gratz for The New York Times
Just after midnight on April 1, 2023, one year after his release, the couple took a walk to Lincoln Memorial to recreate the first night they met. Mr. Rauf proposed with a custom ring that included a piece of metal that he had obtained from the lock on his prison cell door.
Ms. Cannold graduated from Stanford with a bachelor’s degree in theater and performance studies. She also received a master’s degree in arts education from Harvard. She directed “How to Dance in Ohio” on Broadway, “Endlings” and “Evita.”
Mr. Rauf graduated from Georgetown with a bachelor’s degree in human science. In 2021, he helped evacuate thousands of at-risk Afghans, including 1,400 U.S. citizens, and has since continued to provide humanitarian aid to Afghans in need. Both have made it on the Forbes “30 under 30” lists: Ms. Cannold under “Hollywood & Entertainment,” and Mr. Rauf under “Social Impact.”
The couple are also keen on using their love story as a way to call attention to Gaza. “The degrees to which we have touch points to the present moment are greater than just the fact that we are Jews and Muslims. It is that we are also a hostage family. We have empathy for all civilian families affected by captivity on both sides,” Ms. Cannold said. “And at the same time, we are appalled by the exponentially growing number of Palestinians that have been killed, injured, displaced by the Israeli government.”
Her devoutly Jewish grandmother, Beverly Cannold, and his devoutly Muslim mother, Halima Rauf, have become close friends. “We have watched our families come together and hope to pull from that as a microcosm for how we hope to affect change on a larger level,” Ms. Cannold said.
Image
The groom, left, is seated next to the bride on a white couch. Four women in traditional Afghan clothes hold a green shawl over the couple.
During the reception, the couple changed into traditional Afghan clothes from Afghani Style, a shop owned by Mr. Rauf’s niece, Maria Bangash. Mr. Rauf wore a Jewish prayer shawl over his Afghan kuchi.Credit...Rebecca Gratz for The New York Times
Image
A woman, left foreground, with long gold earrings and a choker, holds a round tray in the air. Three other women in brightly-colored dresses follow in a line.
Mariam Waheed holds a tray while performing the henna dance during the wedding reception.Credit...Rebecca Gratz for The New York Times
Image
A close-up of the bride's open hands, left, with the palm, right, being covered by a white cloth with gold embroidery by the hands of Hamila Rauf.
Hamila Rauf, the groom’s mother, wraps a handmade cloth around Ms. Cannold’s hand.Credit...Rebecca Gratz for The New York Times
On July 20, the couple were married by Haji Abdul Rauf, Mr. Rauf’s father, at the Fountains Ballroom in Glenwood, Iowa — about 25 miles from Omaha, Nebraska, where nine of Mr. Rauf’s siblings and their families reside. Abdul Rauf became an imam in Logar, Afghanistan, but he also got ordained by the American Marriage Ministries for the occasion.
Jhanay Johnston, 31, a close friend, said that as the sun set on the wedding day, she and her husband, Darren Johnston, watched the festivities in awe.
“This is what it’s all for,” she recalled thinking. “As a first-gen American myself, being in a room in the fields of Iowa, coming from New York and seeing Muslims, agnostics and Jewish people coming together and just celebrating love. Folks who spoke little English or not all, all talking to each other, it was just a really beautiful moment. This is what makes me proud to be American. This, to me, felt like the American experiment gone right.”
Image
The groom, left, and bride are smiling as they are held up in the air in separate chairs by several men. They hold each end of a white handkerchief folded in a triangle between them. Guests stand and cheer and take photos in the background.
At the start of the reception, the couple were lifted in chairs to “Hava Nagila.” Credit...Rebecca Gratz for The New York Times
On This Day
When July 20, 2024
Where The Fountains Ballroom in Glenwood, Iowa
The Seating The couple arranged the seating chart so that most tables had a few Jewish family members, a few Muslim family members and a few theater friends.
“I think I heard from four or five of my family and friends that they were invited for breakfast the next morning to an Afghan household by their seatmate,” Ms. Cannold said. “Which is the most Afghan thing ever.”
The Bottle Dance Mr. Rauf and two friends performed a dance from the musical “Fiddler on the Roof.” “For theater people, it’s a very iconic dance,” Ms. Cannold said. In the show, the dance is performed during a Jewish wedding. “The idea that you have a Muslim doing it as a tribute to his Jewish wife is very meaningful,” she added. “That was when my 98-year-old grandmother burst into tears.”
The Henna Dance During the reception, Mr. Rauf’s cousins and sisters danced to “Nakreeze Attan,” which translates to “henna dance,” as they carried trays of henna to the stage where the couple was seated. Mr. Rauf’s mother squeezed a bit of henna onto the palms of the couple. According to an Afghan tale, whoever has the darker henna the next morning loves the other person more. When asked whose henna was brighter, Mr. Rauf flashed his palm.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/02/styl ... 778d3e6de3
Re: INTERFAITH ISSUES
Pope Visits Indonesia, Where Muslim-Christian Harmony Is Under Strain
Indonesia is proud of its religious diversity and its reputation for tolerance, but minorities, including Catholics, still face discrimination.
Three percent of Indonesia’s 280 million people are Catholics. Some worshiped at Jakarta Cathedral, in the capital, last week.Credit...Ulet Ifansasti for The New York Times
The hallelujahs rang out on Sunday from a small hall on the outskirts of Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia. The sounds from the Christian service could be heard within the green and orange mosque across the way, as a group of young girls in hijabs walked by.
On the surface, the scene was a reflection of the interfaith harmony that Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim-majority country, is proud of. But the Christians were not in their own church. Earlier this year, their congregation’s building was stormed by dozens of angry Muslims, and now they were temporarily gathering in a government-owned building in a different area.
This is the complex reality awaiting Pope Francis as he begins a four-day trip to Indonesia on Tuesday, which will include an interfaith dialogue at the national mosque. There are many vibrant examples of how Christianity and Islam coexist in Indonesia — a dynamic that Francis wants to encourage — but at the same time, religious minorities face discrimination.
By and large, Indonesian Muslims practice a moderate brand of Sunni Islam that is tolerant of other faiths. But other branches of Islam, notably the Shias and Ahmadiyyas, have long felt marginalized. And conservative strains of Islam have spread here in recent years, with one province, Aceh, having enforced Shariah law for nearly a decade.
In dozens of cities, young girls are pressured, bullied, and harassed to wear hijabs at schools and public spaces, Human Rights Watch has documented.
Image
A dozen or so people, including women in hijabs, standing with their backs toward a church building. They appear to be taking photos of another building.
The Jakarta Cathedral stands across from the Istiqlal Mosque, Indonesia’s national mosque.Credit...Ulet Ifansasti for The New York Times
With the rise of conservative Islam, some believers in minority faiths say, the space for religious freedom in Indonesia has shrunk.
The Christians who met on Sunday in Tangerang, the city on the outskirts of Jakarta, had been attacked in their building in March as children prepared costumes for an Easter show. They were told that they could not have a church in a Muslim area, members of the community said.
Last year, there were 329 acts of violence against religious minorities, nearly one per day, according to the Setara Institute for Democracy and Peace, a human rights watchdog. There has been deadly violence in the past, including bombings at churches.
The Indonesian government officially recognizes six faiths: Islam, Catholicism, Protestantism, Buddhism, Hinduism and Confucianism. It has adopted some measures to protect religious freedom, like forbidding schools to make hijabs compulsory. But some minorities say those protections aren’t honored in practice and that parts of Indonesian law effectively discriminate against them.
The biggest issue has been the building of houses of worship. To do so, religious groups have to get the signatures of 60 people from other faiths in the community, as well as approval from the local interfaith council, which is made up of religious leaders but almost always dominated by Muslims. This, critics say, effectively gives Muslims veto power.
Cardinal Ignatius Suharyo Hardjoatmodjo, the archbishop of Jakarta, downplayed the issue of church construction being blocked, saying that such incidents largely came down to vote baiting by Muslim politicians. The bigger challenges facing the Catholic Church in Indonesia, he said, are ones that face the nation as a whole: corruption, threats to democracy and income inequality.
Image
A large group of people sitting on chairs in a bare white room. At the far end on the room, a person in black robes appears to be standing on a raised platform.
Christians gathered for a Sunday service in a government-owned building in Tangerang, months after their building was stormed by Muslims.Credit...Ulet Ifansasti for The New York Times
Still, the Christian community in Tangerang has not been able to get even half of the 60 signatures for their church, members said.
“We have been independent for 79 years, but for me it is a half-independence,” said Oktaviyanto M.I. Pardede, 59, a leader of the congregation. “Why am I still being colonized by my own people, why can’t I practice my religion freely?”
The Vatican was one of the first states to recognize Indonesia’s independence after it became free of Dutch rule in 1947, and the two have maintained close ties ever since.
Yet when Pope John Paul II visited in 1989, he was met with protests because of his faith. Two decades later, when President Barack Obama visited the Istiqlal Mosque in Jakarta, the national mosque, many Muslims asked why a practicing Christian was being allowed into their house of worship.
But the reaction to Francis’s trip — part of his outreach to what he calls “the peripheries” of Catholicism — has been different.
“I think it’s a very important visit,” said Nurlaila, a Muslim woman who, like many Indonesians, goes by one name, and who had just finished praying at the Istiqlal Mosque.
Image
A man in a batik shirt standing in an aisle between pews.
Cardinal Ignatius Suharyo Hardjoatmodjo said the biggest challenges for the Catholic Church in Indonesia are ones that the nation faces as a whole.Credit...Ulet Ifansasti for The New York Times
Image
A man in a white shirt and black songkok, a kind of fez, posing in an office.
Yahya Cholil Staquf, leader of the Muslim group Nahdlatul Ulama, said it had protected churches from extremists.Credit...Ulet Ifansasti for The New York Times
Much of the credit for changing attitudes has gone to the Nahdlatul Ulama, the largest Muslim social organization in the world, with some 150 million members. Its leader, Yahya Cholil Staquf, said the group had protected churches from extremist groups and lobbied local officials to let them be built.
Three percent of Indonesia’s 280 million people are Catholics, but they have a substantial presence in some parts of the country, like the eastern island of Flores, where theirs is the dominant faith. Nationwide, Protestants account for 10 percent of the population.
Nasaruddin Umar, the grand imam of the Istiqlal Mosque, said Catholics had offered to donate animals to the mosque to be sacrificed during the Muslim festival of Eid al-Adha.
The grand imam pushed for the construction of a “tunnel of friendship” to connect the Istiqlal Mosque and the nearby Jakarta Cathedral. On Thursday, Francis will visit the Istiqlal for an interfaith dialogue, and mosque officials hope he will see the tunnel.
Such blending of religions is not unusual in Indonesia.
Image
Three men in uniform standing in an underground passageway.
A “tunnel of friendship” connects the Istiqlal Mosque and Jakarta Cathedral.Credit...Ulet Ifansasti for The New York Times
On a recent Friday night, Diah Purwanti, 47, laid out her prayer mat in the presence of a picture of Jesus. Raised a Catholic, she had converted to Islam after marrying a Muslim man. Her parents were Muslims who had converted to Catholicism, and one of her brothers is studying to be a Jesuit priest. As children, they celebrated both Eid and Christmas.
But some worshipers see a contradiction between their own experience and Indonesia’s image as a multicultural, tolerant place.
“Unity is the foundation of the country,” said Manav Hardinata, 23, whose Lutheran community has not been allowed to build a house of worship. “But here it is a competition, they treat us as if we want to take their people.”
Though they were Lutherans, not Catholics, many of the worshipers in Tangerang were hopeful and excited about the pope’s visit.
“We are hoping that it will bring changes to this issue,” said Robert Sinaga, 62. “His message is a message of community.”
On Sunday evening in Bekasi, another suburb of Jakarta, the Muslim call to prayer could be heard from the Catholic church Santa Clara, as a priest prepared for communion.
Image
A man posing next to a cut out of Pope Francis at Jakarta Cathedral last week.
Francis’s trip to Indonesia is part of his outreach to what he calls “the peripheries” of Catholicism.Credit...Ulet Ifansasti for The New York Times
After a 17-year wait, Santa Clara received a permit to begin building in 2015, said Rasnius Pasaribu, the coordinator of the church’s construction committee. But thousands of Muslims protested the project at the local city hall. So Mr. Pasaribu’s committee agreed to make changes to the church’s design.
From the highway, Santa Clara, a sprawling white complex with a congregation of 10,000, does not look like a church. It cannot display a cross or a bell there. Instead, its facade, and its statue of the Madonna, enclosed in a cave of rose petals, lie toward the back of the compound.
Still, Mr. Pasaribu said: “We are happy. It’s amazing that we can pray in a church.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/03/worl ... 778d3e6de3
Indonesia is proud of its religious diversity and its reputation for tolerance, but minorities, including Catholics, still face discrimination.
Three percent of Indonesia’s 280 million people are Catholics. Some worshiped at Jakarta Cathedral, in the capital, last week.Credit...Ulet Ifansasti for The New York Times
The hallelujahs rang out on Sunday from a small hall on the outskirts of Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia. The sounds from the Christian service could be heard within the green and orange mosque across the way, as a group of young girls in hijabs walked by.
On the surface, the scene was a reflection of the interfaith harmony that Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim-majority country, is proud of. But the Christians were not in their own church. Earlier this year, their congregation’s building was stormed by dozens of angry Muslims, and now they were temporarily gathering in a government-owned building in a different area.
This is the complex reality awaiting Pope Francis as he begins a four-day trip to Indonesia on Tuesday, which will include an interfaith dialogue at the national mosque. There are many vibrant examples of how Christianity and Islam coexist in Indonesia — a dynamic that Francis wants to encourage — but at the same time, religious minorities face discrimination.
By and large, Indonesian Muslims practice a moderate brand of Sunni Islam that is tolerant of other faiths. But other branches of Islam, notably the Shias and Ahmadiyyas, have long felt marginalized. And conservative strains of Islam have spread here in recent years, with one province, Aceh, having enforced Shariah law for nearly a decade.
In dozens of cities, young girls are pressured, bullied, and harassed to wear hijabs at schools and public spaces, Human Rights Watch has documented.
Image
A dozen or so people, including women in hijabs, standing with their backs toward a church building. They appear to be taking photos of another building.
The Jakarta Cathedral stands across from the Istiqlal Mosque, Indonesia’s national mosque.Credit...Ulet Ifansasti for The New York Times
With the rise of conservative Islam, some believers in minority faiths say, the space for religious freedom in Indonesia has shrunk.
The Christians who met on Sunday in Tangerang, the city on the outskirts of Jakarta, had been attacked in their building in March as children prepared costumes for an Easter show. They were told that they could not have a church in a Muslim area, members of the community said.
Last year, there were 329 acts of violence against religious minorities, nearly one per day, according to the Setara Institute for Democracy and Peace, a human rights watchdog. There has been deadly violence in the past, including bombings at churches.
The Indonesian government officially recognizes six faiths: Islam, Catholicism, Protestantism, Buddhism, Hinduism and Confucianism. It has adopted some measures to protect religious freedom, like forbidding schools to make hijabs compulsory. But some minorities say those protections aren’t honored in practice and that parts of Indonesian law effectively discriminate against them.
The biggest issue has been the building of houses of worship. To do so, religious groups have to get the signatures of 60 people from other faiths in the community, as well as approval from the local interfaith council, which is made up of religious leaders but almost always dominated by Muslims. This, critics say, effectively gives Muslims veto power.
Cardinal Ignatius Suharyo Hardjoatmodjo, the archbishop of Jakarta, downplayed the issue of church construction being blocked, saying that such incidents largely came down to vote baiting by Muslim politicians. The bigger challenges facing the Catholic Church in Indonesia, he said, are ones that face the nation as a whole: corruption, threats to democracy and income inequality.
Image
A large group of people sitting on chairs in a bare white room. At the far end on the room, a person in black robes appears to be standing on a raised platform.
Christians gathered for a Sunday service in a government-owned building in Tangerang, months after their building was stormed by Muslims.Credit...Ulet Ifansasti for The New York Times
Still, the Christian community in Tangerang has not been able to get even half of the 60 signatures for their church, members said.
“We have been independent for 79 years, but for me it is a half-independence,” said Oktaviyanto M.I. Pardede, 59, a leader of the congregation. “Why am I still being colonized by my own people, why can’t I practice my religion freely?”
The Vatican was one of the first states to recognize Indonesia’s independence after it became free of Dutch rule in 1947, and the two have maintained close ties ever since.
Yet when Pope John Paul II visited in 1989, he was met with protests because of his faith. Two decades later, when President Barack Obama visited the Istiqlal Mosque in Jakarta, the national mosque, many Muslims asked why a practicing Christian was being allowed into their house of worship.
But the reaction to Francis’s trip — part of his outreach to what he calls “the peripheries” of Catholicism — has been different.
“I think it’s a very important visit,” said Nurlaila, a Muslim woman who, like many Indonesians, goes by one name, and who had just finished praying at the Istiqlal Mosque.
Image
A man in a batik shirt standing in an aisle between pews.
Cardinal Ignatius Suharyo Hardjoatmodjo said the biggest challenges for the Catholic Church in Indonesia are ones that the nation faces as a whole.Credit...Ulet Ifansasti for The New York Times
Image
A man in a white shirt and black songkok, a kind of fez, posing in an office.
Yahya Cholil Staquf, leader of the Muslim group Nahdlatul Ulama, said it had protected churches from extremists.Credit...Ulet Ifansasti for The New York Times
Much of the credit for changing attitudes has gone to the Nahdlatul Ulama, the largest Muslim social organization in the world, with some 150 million members. Its leader, Yahya Cholil Staquf, said the group had protected churches from extremist groups and lobbied local officials to let them be built.
Three percent of Indonesia’s 280 million people are Catholics, but they have a substantial presence in some parts of the country, like the eastern island of Flores, where theirs is the dominant faith. Nationwide, Protestants account for 10 percent of the population.
Nasaruddin Umar, the grand imam of the Istiqlal Mosque, said Catholics had offered to donate animals to the mosque to be sacrificed during the Muslim festival of Eid al-Adha.
The grand imam pushed for the construction of a “tunnel of friendship” to connect the Istiqlal Mosque and the nearby Jakarta Cathedral. On Thursday, Francis will visit the Istiqlal for an interfaith dialogue, and mosque officials hope he will see the tunnel.
Such blending of religions is not unusual in Indonesia.
Image
Three men in uniform standing in an underground passageway.
A “tunnel of friendship” connects the Istiqlal Mosque and Jakarta Cathedral.Credit...Ulet Ifansasti for The New York Times
On a recent Friday night, Diah Purwanti, 47, laid out her prayer mat in the presence of a picture of Jesus. Raised a Catholic, she had converted to Islam after marrying a Muslim man. Her parents were Muslims who had converted to Catholicism, and one of her brothers is studying to be a Jesuit priest. As children, they celebrated both Eid and Christmas.
But some worshipers see a contradiction between their own experience and Indonesia’s image as a multicultural, tolerant place.
“Unity is the foundation of the country,” said Manav Hardinata, 23, whose Lutheran community has not been allowed to build a house of worship. “But here it is a competition, they treat us as if we want to take their people.”
Though they were Lutherans, not Catholics, many of the worshipers in Tangerang were hopeful and excited about the pope’s visit.
“We are hoping that it will bring changes to this issue,” said Robert Sinaga, 62. “His message is a message of community.”
On Sunday evening in Bekasi, another suburb of Jakarta, the Muslim call to prayer could be heard from the Catholic church Santa Clara, as a priest prepared for communion.
Image
A man posing next to a cut out of Pope Francis at Jakarta Cathedral last week.
Francis’s trip to Indonesia is part of his outreach to what he calls “the peripheries” of Catholicism.Credit...Ulet Ifansasti for The New York Times
After a 17-year wait, Santa Clara received a permit to begin building in 2015, said Rasnius Pasaribu, the coordinator of the church’s construction committee. But thousands of Muslims protested the project at the local city hall. So Mr. Pasaribu’s committee agreed to make changes to the church’s design.
From the highway, Santa Clara, a sprawling white complex with a congregation of 10,000, does not look like a church. It cannot display a cross or a bell there. Instead, its facade, and its statue of the Madonna, enclosed in a cave of rose petals, lie toward the back of the compound.
Still, Mr. Pasaribu said: “We are happy. It’s amazing that we can pray in a church.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/03/worl ... 778d3e6de3
Re: INTERFAITH ISSUES
Why Some Christians Don’t Want to Bring the Bible Into Public Schools
As the idea of incorporating the Bible into classrooms gains traction, concerns about the mission of public schools — and differences across the faith — have led even some conservative Christians to push back.
Oklahoma’s state superintendent announced in June that every teacher in the state would be expected to teach the Bible.Credit...Desiree Rios for The New York Times
In Caddo, Okla., a two-block stretch of the small town contains churches of at least four denominations, Methodist, Presbyterian, Baptist and nondenominational. More than four in five voters in the neighboring counties went Republican in the last national election.
This rural region near the border with Texas might seem an ideal testing ground for an emerging but highly contested campaign by conservative officials to expand the role of religion in children’s education and mandate that history, literature and even math classes teach the Bible to students in grades five to 12.
Yet even here, the plans are not being embraced. Rather, they are finding unexpected opposition.
“It’s one thing that has shocked me,” said Lee Northcutt, the superintendent of Caddo Public Schools. “How many truly have said, ‘That’s why we have eight, nine, 10 churches in town. They can do that.’”
Parents have told him, “That’s my job,” he added. And one teacher who serves as a preacher told him “flat out, ‘No. We shouldn’t do that,’” Mr. Northcutt recalled.
Over the last several years, some conservative Christian politicians and organizations have sought to accelerate a national movement to bring prayer and religious texts into classrooms. Many evangelicals and Catholics oppose what they view as liberal orthodoxy in school curriculums. They would like the country’s democracy to be explicitly grounded in Christian values.
ImageLee Northcutt, in a blue button down shirt and tie, sits at a desk in his office and looks toward the camera with a serious expression on his face.
Lee Northcutt, the superintendent of the Caddo Public School district, said many parents and teachers do not like the idea of incorporating the Bible into public school classrooms.Credit...Desiree Rios for The New York Times
The movement has often cast divisions over their goals as partisan. Ryan Walters, the Republican schools chief in Oklahoma who directed public schools to teach the Bible, said: “The left does not like it, but it will be taught.”
But the resistance — or at times, indifference — in places like Mr. Northcutt’s school district challenges the idea that incorporating the Bible in the classroom is an issue that breaks cleanly along party or religious lines. It also reveals a surprising obstacle to the viability of these efforts.
In other parts of rural Oklahoma, some longtime school leaders say they have never received complaints from families that religion is not taught enough in the classroom, and that they see no reason to shift course.
In Texas, members of the public were invited to express their opinions about a proposed elementary curriculum infused with stories from the Bible that education officials will vote on later this fall. Some superintendents in the northeast and western sections of the state — where many parents and educators are reverent Christians and traditionally support Republican policies — publicly criticized the religious content in the proposed lessons.
//Christianity in the Classroom
Oklahoma: The state’s schools superintendent announced in June that every teacher in Oklahoma would be expected to teach the Bible. So far, there are few signs it’s happening. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/27/us/o ... bible.html
Louisiana: A new law requires the display of the Ten Commandments in every public school classroom in Louisiana, making the state the only one with such a mandate. A group of parents is suing to block it. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/19/us/l ... rooms.html
Unexpected Opposition: As the idea of incorporating the Bible into school curriculums gains traction, some conservative Christians are pushing back. Here’s why. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/16/us/c ... texas.html
The pushback is in part a reflection of the diversity of views among everyday Christians. It also underscores the contrasting priorities of ambitious state officials with national profiles and local district leaders who tend to be more focused on the issues close to home.
In interviews, several superintendents in Republican counties said they were more concerned with ensuring that children can read, write and do math than teaching them the Bible. Others said the endeavors conflict with their mandate as public school administrators to serve all students — even when their own worldview may be shaped by a conservative and Christian lens.
Image
Chuck McCauley, of Bartlesville, stands in a gray suit and white button down shirt near a cream stuccoed wall. He smiles slightly and has his hands in his pockets.
Chuck McCauley, the superintendent of Bartlesville Public Schools, said that his personal political and religious leanings “should have zero impact on my job.”Credit...Desiree Rios for The New York Times
Chuck McCauley, the superintendent of Bartlesville Public Schools, a district of some 6,000 students in northeast Oklahoma that is home to a private religious university, said that his personal political and religious leanings “should have zero impact on my job.”
“We educate everybody that shows up,” Mr. McCauley said, adding that in-depth religious instruction should be “up to the family, up to the parents and up to the church, whatever that looks like for them. That’s none of our business.”
National polling on expanding religious instruction in public schools is limited. But one survey conducted last year by The Associated Press and a nonpartisan research institution showed a divide over the intersection of religion and public education.
Among the U.S. adults who responded, 37 percent said religion has too little influence over what children are taught, 31 percent said it has too much, and 31 percent said it has the right amount.
The push to bolster teaching on the Bible has certainly won favor among many parents and congregations. While few administrators across Oklahoma publicly announced that they will change their curriculums, for example, local superintendents said they have heard of several districts that are welcoming Mr. Walters’s mandate.
Officials in these states argue that the Bible is not only a religious text but also a historical document with centuries of influence on American society. Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas, a Republican and practicing Catholic, has said the new state-developed curriculum will help students “better understand the connection of history, art, community, literature and religion on pivotal events” like the civil rights movement and American Revolution.
Still, clashes over the role of religion in public schools have long divided Christians, even when the Bible was a centerpiece of American education.
In the 19th century, Catholics in Philadelphia fought against students reading the King James Version of the Bible, after Protestants helped bring it into schools as a common textbook. Believers across the ideological spectrum later battled over whether science classes would teach the theory of evolution or the creation story from the Book of Genesis.
Mark A. Chancey, a professor of religious studies at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, said continued disagreements across the faith help explain “why we do see pushback against these initiatives from people at different points on the theological spectrum.”
“Not just liberal Christians,” he said. “But also often more conservative Christians who recognize that once you introduce this type of teaching about the Bible, there is the opportunity for people to promote their own religious beliefs over others.”
Mr. Chancey added: “That’s a well-founded fear.”
In some school districts, anxieties over giving teachers broad license to analyze Scripture — potentially drawing the ire of parents with different beliefs — are adding to the unease.
Rob Miller, the superintendent of Bixby Public Schools, in a suburb of Tulsa, said at a public event last week on the Oklahoma mandate that he struggled with the myriad ways that educators might explain the same biblical lesson or rituals.
“I, as a Christian myself who raised my children as a Christian, would be pretty skeptical of how that might look in various classrooms,” he said.
One of Mr. Miller’s sons attended vacation Bible school at a Baptist church in the summer, the superintendent said. At 10, the child was told by an adult there that “he would not be able to enter the kingdom of God” because he was baptized only as an infant.
Lutherans like Mr. Miller believe that newborns can be baptized as a means of grace, while the Baptist tradition says the ritual should be reserved for believers making a conscious decision.
“There are different interpretations of the word of God even within the Christian faith,” Mr. Miller said. “So we have to be really careful. Who’s going to dictate what the appropriate interpretation is?”
The push to teach a Christian historical perspective in public schools also comes as some religious conservatives have joined with free-market advocates to expand opportunities for parents to use public money to attend private religious schools through voucher programs.
That movement also does not sit well with some Christian educators.
Brandon Dennard, the superintendent of the Red Lick Independent School District in northeast Texas, told The Texas Tribune that the calls for more religious instruction in the state were “just one more idea that is clouding the line between private schools and public schools.”
“I’m a conservative Christian man,” said Mr. Dennard, who did not respond to requests for comment. “But I’m in public education because I want to serve all kids.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/16/us/c ... 778d3e6de3
As the idea of incorporating the Bible into classrooms gains traction, concerns about the mission of public schools — and differences across the faith — have led even some conservative Christians to push back.
Oklahoma’s state superintendent announced in June that every teacher in the state would be expected to teach the Bible.Credit...Desiree Rios for The New York Times
In Caddo, Okla., a two-block stretch of the small town contains churches of at least four denominations, Methodist, Presbyterian, Baptist and nondenominational. More than four in five voters in the neighboring counties went Republican in the last national election.
This rural region near the border with Texas might seem an ideal testing ground for an emerging but highly contested campaign by conservative officials to expand the role of religion in children’s education and mandate that history, literature and even math classes teach the Bible to students in grades five to 12.
Yet even here, the plans are not being embraced. Rather, they are finding unexpected opposition.
“It’s one thing that has shocked me,” said Lee Northcutt, the superintendent of Caddo Public Schools. “How many truly have said, ‘That’s why we have eight, nine, 10 churches in town. They can do that.’”
Parents have told him, “That’s my job,” he added. And one teacher who serves as a preacher told him “flat out, ‘No. We shouldn’t do that,’” Mr. Northcutt recalled.
Over the last several years, some conservative Christian politicians and organizations have sought to accelerate a national movement to bring prayer and religious texts into classrooms. Many evangelicals and Catholics oppose what they view as liberal orthodoxy in school curriculums. They would like the country’s democracy to be explicitly grounded in Christian values.
ImageLee Northcutt, in a blue button down shirt and tie, sits at a desk in his office and looks toward the camera with a serious expression on his face.
Lee Northcutt, the superintendent of the Caddo Public School district, said many parents and teachers do not like the idea of incorporating the Bible into public school classrooms.Credit...Desiree Rios for The New York Times
The movement has often cast divisions over their goals as partisan. Ryan Walters, the Republican schools chief in Oklahoma who directed public schools to teach the Bible, said: “The left does not like it, but it will be taught.”
But the resistance — or at times, indifference — in places like Mr. Northcutt’s school district challenges the idea that incorporating the Bible in the classroom is an issue that breaks cleanly along party or religious lines. It also reveals a surprising obstacle to the viability of these efforts.
In other parts of rural Oklahoma, some longtime school leaders say they have never received complaints from families that religion is not taught enough in the classroom, and that they see no reason to shift course.
In Texas, members of the public were invited to express their opinions about a proposed elementary curriculum infused with stories from the Bible that education officials will vote on later this fall. Some superintendents in the northeast and western sections of the state — where many parents and educators are reverent Christians and traditionally support Republican policies — publicly criticized the religious content in the proposed lessons.
//Christianity in the Classroom
Oklahoma: The state’s schools superintendent announced in June that every teacher in Oklahoma would be expected to teach the Bible. So far, there are few signs it’s happening. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/27/us/o ... bible.html
Louisiana: A new law requires the display of the Ten Commandments in every public school classroom in Louisiana, making the state the only one with such a mandate. A group of parents is suing to block it. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/19/us/l ... rooms.html
Unexpected Opposition: As the idea of incorporating the Bible into school curriculums gains traction, some conservative Christians are pushing back. Here’s why. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/16/us/c ... texas.html
The pushback is in part a reflection of the diversity of views among everyday Christians. It also underscores the contrasting priorities of ambitious state officials with national profiles and local district leaders who tend to be more focused on the issues close to home.
In interviews, several superintendents in Republican counties said they were more concerned with ensuring that children can read, write and do math than teaching them the Bible. Others said the endeavors conflict with their mandate as public school administrators to serve all students — even when their own worldview may be shaped by a conservative and Christian lens.
Image
Chuck McCauley, of Bartlesville, stands in a gray suit and white button down shirt near a cream stuccoed wall. He smiles slightly and has his hands in his pockets.
Chuck McCauley, the superintendent of Bartlesville Public Schools, said that his personal political and religious leanings “should have zero impact on my job.”Credit...Desiree Rios for The New York Times
Chuck McCauley, the superintendent of Bartlesville Public Schools, a district of some 6,000 students in northeast Oklahoma that is home to a private religious university, said that his personal political and religious leanings “should have zero impact on my job.”
“We educate everybody that shows up,” Mr. McCauley said, adding that in-depth religious instruction should be “up to the family, up to the parents and up to the church, whatever that looks like for them. That’s none of our business.”
National polling on expanding religious instruction in public schools is limited. But one survey conducted last year by The Associated Press and a nonpartisan research institution showed a divide over the intersection of religion and public education.
Among the U.S. adults who responded, 37 percent said religion has too little influence over what children are taught, 31 percent said it has too much, and 31 percent said it has the right amount.
The push to bolster teaching on the Bible has certainly won favor among many parents and congregations. While few administrators across Oklahoma publicly announced that they will change their curriculums, for example, local superintendents said they have heard of several districts that are welcoming Mr. Walters’s mandate.
Officials in these states argue that the Bible is not only a religious text but also a historical document with centuries of influence on American society. Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas, a Republican and practicing Catholic, has said the new state-developed curriculum will help students “better understand the connection of history, art, community, literature and religion on pivotal events” like the civil rights movement and American Revolution.
Still, clashes over the role of religion in public schools have long divided Christians, even when the Bible was a centerpiece of American education.
In the 19th century, Catholics in Philadelphia fought against students reading the King James Version of the Bible, after Protestants helped bring it into schools as a common textbook. Believers across the ideological spectrum later battled over whether science classes would teach the theory of evolution or the creation story from the Book of Genesis.
Mark A. Chancey, a professor of religious studies at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, said continued disagreements across the faith help explain “why we do see pushback against these initiatives from people at different points on the theological spectrum.”
“Not just liberal Christians,” he said. “But also often more conservative Christians who recognize that once you introduce this type of teaching about the Bible, there is the opportunity for people to promote their own religious beliefs over others.”
Mr. Chancey added: “That’s a well-founded fear.”
In some school districts, anxieties over giving teachers broad license to analyze Scripture — potentially drawing the ire of parents with different beliefs — are adding to the unease.
Rob Miller, the superintendent of Bixby Public Schools, in a suburb of Tulsa, said at a public event last week on the Oklahoma mandate that he struggled with the myriad ways that educators might explain the same biblical lesson or rituals.
“I, as a Christian myself who raised my children as a Christian, would be pretty skeptical of how that might look in various classrooms,” he said.
One of Mr. Miller’s sons attended vacation Bible school at a Baptist church in the summer, the superintendent said. At 10, the child was told by an adult there that “he would not be able to enter the kingdom of God” because he was baptized only as an infant.
Lutherans like Mr. Miller believe that newborns can be baptized as a means of grace, while the Baptist tradition says the ritual should be reserved for believers making a conscious decision.
“There are different interpretations of the word of God even within the Christian faith,” Mr. Miller said. “So we have to be really careful. Who’s going to dictate what the appropriate interpretation is?”
The push to teach a Christian historical perspective in public schools also comes as some religious conservatives have joined with free-market advocates to expand opportunities for parents to use public money to attend private religious schools through voucher programs.
That movement also does not sit well with some Christian educators.
Brandon Dennard, the superintendent of the Red Lick Independent School District in northeast Texas, told The Texas Tribune that the calls for more religious instruction in the state were “just one more idea that is clouding the line between private schools and public schools.”
“I’m a conservative Christian man,” said Mr. Dennard, who did not respond to requests for comment. “But I’m in public education because I want to serve all kids.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/16/us/c ... 778d3e6de3
Re: INTERFAITH ISSUES
At Bible Study for the Homeless, a Search for Meaning
Religion is often overlooked as a factor in the lives of the needy, but those who gather at a center in Virginia say it helps sustain them.
Six mornings a week, a call for quiet stills a day center for homeless people in Northern Virginia, and those so inclined gather to thank God, read scripture and ponder its message for their tribulations.
They come from shelters and tents under bridges. They come hungry and sick. They seek meals, showers, clothes, jobs and connections to health care and housing — all of which the Lamb Center provides with no religious message or test.
Some also come to talk about God.
The center’s Bible study group recently pondered the kingdom of heaven: why does Jesus compare it to hidden treasure so precious that the man who finds it would sell everything to buy the surrounding field?
An elderly man scoffed: He would not sell his possessions unless heaven were guaranteed. A newcomer said that heaven already exists for those who believe. Then a woman who said God had sustained her through nearly a decade of homelessness shot up a hand.
ImagePeople sitting at a long table reading books in a large room. There is a cross in the middle of the table. Other people are sitting at round tables with food.
Tim O’Connor, second from left, leading the Wednesday Bible study group at the Lamb Center in Fairfax, Va., last month.Credit...Moriah Ratner for The New York Times
“When you discover that God is real and taking care of you — that’s the hidden treasure,” said Kate Brady. “And it’s worth any price!”
Religion is often overlooked as a source of resilience among the poor, but the Lamb Center’s Bible study is in its 33rd year, and seats can be hard to find. Some people come to listen, some to vent, some to mull the parables through fogs of addiction or mental illness. They seek hope, but even when hope proves elusive the gatherings can provide a sense of community absent on the street.
In Bible study, no one is treated as an outcast or even a client. Everyone is a child of God.
“There’s no ‘us’ and ‘them’ around that table — just ‘us,’” said Tara Ruszkowski, the center’s director. “There’s such a richness to the faith lives of our guests. To have faith when so much is working against you is to have strong faith.”
Celebrating the faith of the poor makes some advocates for the needy uneasy. Proselytizers have used aid to coerce professions of belief. Rulers have promised heavenly rewards to quiet demand for earthly justice. Some calls for religion are covert attacks on government aid.
Image
A man talking while a woman listens and looks at the open Bible in front of her.
Kate Brady, right, during Bible study with Mr. O’Connor, a longtime volunteer leader of the Bible study sessions. He noted that the hardships the center’s clients had endured made them feel a special need for God.Credit...Moriah Ratner for The New York Times
But the center’s Bible study is wholly voluntary and prized by those who join. Whatever benefits it lends the dispossessed, it also offers a reminder that people lumped together as “the homeless” are not an undifferentiated mass but individuals with inner lives and needs that go beyond survival to the search for meaning.
“When I tell people that I study the religious lives of unhoused people, they’re usually surprised to hear that unhoused people have religious lives,” said Susan Dunlap, a Presbyterian minister who taught at Duke Divinity School and volunteered as a shelter chaplain. “It humanizes unhoused people to think they’re theologically interpreting the world.”
Few of the Lamb Center’s clients have undergone a faith journey with as much energy and purpose as Ms. Brady, 67, who filled her journals with hymns, scripture, prayers, and professions of belief before the center helped her find housing.
Her suffering might have shaken another person’s faith, but Ms. Brady said hers grew and helped her persevere. “I didn’t understand why God allows bad things to happen,” she said. “But I could feel his hand taking care of me. That was just a lifeline to my soul.”
Gathering for Support
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Cindy Murphy, right, a volunteer at The Lamb Center, helps serve lunch. The facility offers two free meals a day, dental care, showers, a subsidized jobs program and case managers to help clients find housing and health care. Credit...Moriah Ratner for The New York Times
The Lamb Center started humbly three decades ago with space above a pawnshop and a motto addressed to body and spirit: “Strong Coffee and Mighty Prayers.”
Now it has a $2.9 million budget and a staff of 20. It offers free breakfast and lunch, dental care, showers, a wash-and-fold laundry, a subsidized jobs program and case managers with master’s degrees to help clients find housing and health care. Its 54-unit building for the chronically homeless, scheduled to break ground next year, will be the largest in Fairfax County. None of those services impose religion.
But the center treats Bible study as equally vital, if not more so. The sessions gather some of the poorest people in one of the country’s richest counties. But few of them express class anger or ask why God permits their suffering.
They are more likely to say they feel God’s immediate presence. After a hard rain, Rommel Cariño praised God for a dry tent: “The water, instead of flooding, flowed around! Even now, he’s here!”
Tim O’Connor, a longtime volunteer leader of the Bible study sessions, said hardship makes clients feel a special need for God. “Their faith is raw — it’s part of their survival,” he said.
Mindful of the shame many unhoused people feel, Mr. O’Connor emphasizes a relatable Jesus who suffered his own setbacks. A favorite lesson involves Jesus returning to Nazareth, where he was chased from his hometown. “I use that to tell people to keep going, stay strong,” he said.
Image
Close-up of people at a table reading the Bible.
“There’s no ‘us’ and ‘them’ around that table — just ‘us,’” Tara Ruszkowski, the center’s director, said of the Bible study sessions.Credit...Moriah Ratner for The New York Times
The idea that faith can aid the afflicted finds support in a growing medical literature, summarized in an 1,100-page volume called the “Handbook of Religion and Health.”
“Religious practices and beliefs can be very powerful in helping people cope with mental illness and addiction,” said Dr. Harold Koenig, a Duke University psychiatrist and the work’s lead author.
Faith does not help everyone, he noted, and it is less a cure than a source of strength. Still, it works on multiple levels: it offers meaning and purpose, role models from scriptures and often a community. Moreover, no one needs a prescription. “It’s accessible to people in all circumstances,” Dr. Koenig said.
Few studies have focused on homelessness and faith, but one followed nearly 600 chronically homeless adults entering the services system. A year later, only about a quarter reported increased religiosity. But that group claimed better mental health, less substance abuse, and a higher quality of life.
The study could not separate cause and effect — whether faith promoted recovery or recovery promoted faith. Still “a lot of people experiencing homelessness draw on religion as a source of strength,” said Jack Tsai, a psychologist at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, who coauthored the study.
Image
Copies of the New Testament in English and Spanish piled behind a curtain.
The center’s Bible study is voluntary and open to those of all faiths. Credit...Moriah Ratner for The New York Times
The Lamb Center’s Bible studies reflect Christian teachings, but all are welcome and the sessions have drawn Muslims, Buddhists and atheists. A Muslim women’s group has sent kitchen volunteers.
“We’re not trying to convert anyone,” said Dave Larrabee, the pastoral director. “If anything, we’re happy to strengthen them in their faith.”
Part of the appeal is purely social. The gatherings give people accustomed to vigilance a chance to model a gentler self. “I love you,” Mr. Larrabee tells his guests, and some tell him the same.
Perhaps the welcoming atmosphere explains why the sessions often attract people with obvious mental illness, whom Mr. Larrabee calls “modern-day lepers” for the scorn they endure. “Even if you’re really out there, you can feel like you’re being heard,” he said.
While the sessions can connect people with services, sometimes they just showcase pain. One day a woman named Amna said she could not stop talking to herself on the street. “I go cuss myself out,” she said, and in response, people attack her. She was wearing a hospital bracelet.
“I’ve been outside in the cold, treated like crap!”
“We love you,” another guest said.
“You look at me on the bus like I don’t even exist!” Amna erupted, raging at an audience in her head. “My ankle is broken. I’ve gotten punched in the face!”
Her anguish silenced the room and she left.
‘I Needed to Believe’
Image
Profile view of Kate Brady
Kate Brady became homeless at age 53 after a series of setbacks. Throughout her trials, she said, her faith grew: “I needed to believe.”Credit...Moriah Ratner for The New York Times
Homelessness came suddenly to Ms. Brady at 53. She grew up middle class but abused, she said, beaten by a father who said he did not love her. She married and divorced, raised three children and enrolled in community college after her father offered to pay her bills, perhaps hoping to make amends. Then he died.
Even Ms. Brady struggles to explain how quickly she lost everything, from her apartment to her bearings. Perhaps the death, ending all chance of reconciliation, resurfaced the childhood trauma. “I had panic attacks, depression — just constant crying,” she said.
She lived in her car until it was repossessed, then moved into the woods. Her ID was stolen, making it hard to get aid. “I just had a psychotic break,” she said.
It is especially dangerous to be unhoused as a woman. She found a room in a Maryland boardinghouse in exchange for cleaning, but another resident broke her nose and left her in a wheelchair for months. She said she still grapples with the trauma of being raped in the Virginia woods.
But “strange as it sounds, my faith grew,” Ms. Brady said. “I needed to believe.”
She memorized scripture. She sang hymns in her tent. She found churches that welcomed the homeless. (Not all did.) She turned her journal into a running talk with God that spilled across hundreds of pages.
Image
Ms. Brady’s prayer journals run to hundreds of pages.Credit...Moriah Ratner for The New York Times
“I don’t understand why u let this happen,” she told God. “But I thank u for y’re Love, mercy, goodness, loving-kindness, helps, provisions.”
Though her faith had been lightly held, she heard the Holy Spirit offer reassurance, not as a thought in her head, she said, but a voice in her ear.
Ms. Brady prayed for help in overcoming her physical fears. “Trust in him,” she wrote of God. “No matter what.”
She also asked God to quiet the inner voice, left by her father, calling her unlovable. Her journal reflects what she took as God’s reassuring response.
“My name is not ‘stupid, dumb.’”
“I am loved by God, that’s who I am.”
While faith strengthened Ms. Brady, it did not cure her ailments, and she grew impatient. “I just didn’t understand why it was taking so long for God to work things out,” she said.
The Secular and the Spiritual
Image
An altar in a niche with a plain wooden cross and small figures and framed photos on a table.
The Lamb Center is scheduled to break ground next year on a 54-unit building for the chronically homeless that would be the largest in Fairfax County, Virginia.Credit...Moriah Ratner for The New York Times
When Ms. Dunlap, the retired Duke theologian, held services at a Durham, N.C., shelter, critics warned that religion encouraged the homeless to accept injustice. Her book “Shelter Theology: The Religious Lives of People without Homes” argues the opposite, that faith lends the downtrodden the agency to push back.
“It empowers people to resist dehumanizing stereotypes and to step into the identity of someone beloved by God,” said Ms. Dunlap.
So it did for Ms. Brady, who spotted herself one day in a missing persons alert. Her family was looking for her. In subsequent calls, she agreed to accept help if they found a Christian social services group. An internet search led to the Lamb Center, and her sons brought her.
A routine set in, with nights at church shelters, days at the center, and Bible study as a morning anchor. Mostly, the center provided secular services. A caseworker helped her enroll in food stamps, Medicaid, and mental health services, replace her ID, and join the waiting list for supportive housing.
But when Ms. Brady asked, the caseworker prayed with her, too, which helped her trust him. “I was treated like a whole person — my body, soul and spirit,” she said.
Image
People folding clothes in a room with large, stuffed plastic bags on shelves as well as labeled plastic bins.
Tina Wickham, right, and Damian Villanueva, volunteers, fold laundry for guests at the Lamb Center. Credit...Moriah Ratner for The New York Times
Sicker than she knew, Ms. Brady was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder and Lyme disease. She had two knees replaced and gall bladder surgery. Her needs moved her up the housing waiting list. In six months, she had a subsidized suburban apartment, with a caseworker if she needs help.
“I couldn’t believe it was for me!” she said.
After getting certified as a “peer recovery specialist” to help others with similar needs, Ms. Brady helped run a day center for the homeless. She left last year for medical reasons and now volunteers at the Lamb Center.
She was at the Bible study recently when it considered the prodigal son. The parallels to her story were inexact, but it did not take a theologian to guess why the story of a happy homecoming struck a chord.
Once lost, now found, Ms. Brady offered the closing prayer as the smell of meatloaf promised lunch for the faithful and faithless alike. “Heavenly Father, I’m just so thankful that you love us,” she said.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/24/us/b ... 778d3e6de3