Mitchell Landsberg in the Los Angeles Times, June 9, www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-claremont-20100609,0,4360922.story

Calling multi-faith expansion the next step, the Theology School will offer training for Muslims and Jews in a program that strains its historic ties to the Methodist Church.

In a bow to the growing diversity of America’s religious landscape, the Claremont School of Theology, a Christian institution with long ties to the Methodist Church, will add clerical training for Muslims and Jews to its curriculum this autumn, to become, in a sense, the first truly multi-faith American seminary.  This ends centuries of tradition in which seminaries have hewn not just to single faiths but often to single denominations within those faiths. Eventually, Claremont hopes to add clerical programs for Buddhists and Hindus.

On Wednesday 26th May, 2010 the General Assembly invited Professor Mona Siddiqui to address them. Professor Siddiqui is a professor of Islamic Studies in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at Glasgow University.

A video-clip of her address can be seen by following this link:

stream1.churchofscotland.org.uk/generalassembly/archive/2010/special_guest.php

H.H. The Dalai Lama writing in The New York Times, May 24, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/25/opinion/25gyatso.html

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WHEN I was a boy in Tibet, I felt that my own Buddhist religion must be the best — and that other faiths were somehow inferior. Now I see how naïve I was, and how dangerous the extremes of religious intolerance can be today.

Though intolerance may be as old as religion itself, we still see vigorous signs of its virulence. In Europe, there are intense debates about newcomers wearing veils or wanting to erect minarets and episodes of violence against Muslim immigrants. Radical atheists issue blanket condemnations of those who hold to religious beliefs. In the Middle East, the flames of war are fanned by hatred of those who adhere to a different faith.

Such tensions are likely to increase as the world becomes more interconnected and cultures, peoples and religions become ever more entwined. The pressure this creates tests more than our tolerance — it demands that we promote peaceful coexistence and understanding across boundaries.

Granted, every religion has a sense of exclusivity as part of its core identity. Even so, I believe there is genuine potential for mutual understanding. While preserving faith toward one’s own tradition, one can respect, admire and appreciate other traditions.

An early eye-opener for me was my meeting with the Trappist monk Thomas Merton in India shortly before his untimely death in 1968. Merton told me he could be perfectly faithful to Christianity, yet learn in depth from other religions like Buddhism. The same is true for me as an ardent Buddhist learning from the world’s other great religions.

A main point in my discussion with Merton was how central compassion was to the message of both Christianity and Buddhism. In my readings of the New Testament, I find myself inspired by Jesus’ acts of compassion. His miracle of the loaves and fishes, his healing and his teaching are all motivated by the desire to relieve suffering.

I’m a firm believer in the power of personal contact to bridge differences, so I’ve long been drawn to dialogues with people of other religious outlooks. The focus on compassion that Merton and I observed in our two religions strikes me as a strong unifying thread among all the major faiths. And these days we need to highlight what unifies us.

Take Judaism, for instance. I first visited a synagogue in Cochin, India, in 1965, and have met with many rabbis over the years. I remember vividly the rabbi in the Netherlands who told me about the Holocaust with such intensity that we were both in tears. And I’ve learned how the Talmud and the Bible repeat the theme of compassion, as in the passage in Leviticus that admonishes, “Love your neighbor as yourself.”

In my many encounters with Hindu scholars in India, I’ve come to see the centrality of selfless compassion in Hinduism too — as expressed, for instance, in the Bhagavad Gita, which praises those who “delight in the welfare of all beings.” I’m moved by the ways this value has been expressed in the life of great beings like Mahatma Gandhi, or the lesser-known Baba Amte, who founded a leper colony not far from a Tibetan settlement in Maharashtra State in India. There he fed and sheltered lepers who were otherwise shunned. When I received my Nobel Peace Prize, I made a donation to his colony.

Compassion is equally important in Islam — and recognizing that has become crucial in the years since Sept. 11, especially in answering those who paint Islam as a militant faith. On the first anniversary of 9/11, I spoke at the National Cathedral in Washington, pleading that we not blindly follow the lead of some in the news media and let the violent acts of a few individuals define an entire religion.

Let me tell you about the Islam I know. Tibet has had an Islamic community for around 400 years, although my richest contacts with Islam have been in India, which has the world’s second-largest Muslim population. An imam in Ladakh once told me that a true Muslim should love and respect all of Allah’s creatures. And in my understanding, Islam enshrines compassion as a core spiritual principle, reflected in the very name of God, the “Compassionate and Merciful,” that appears at the beginning of virtually each chapter of the Koran.

Finding common ground among faiths can help us bridge needless divides at a time when unified action is more crucial than ever. As a species, we must embrace the oneness of humanity as we face global issues like pandemics, economic crises and ecological disaster. At that scale, our response must be as one.

Harmony among the major faiths has become an essential ingredient of peaceful coexistence in our world. From this perspective, mutual understanding among these traditions is not merely the business of religious believers — it matters for the welfare of humanity as a whole.

Eboo Patel writing in The Washington Post, May 26, newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/eboo_patel/2010/05/the_dalai_lama_on_interfaith_c.html

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The Dalai Lama on interfaith cooperation

On Sunday, I was privileged to share the stage with His Holiness the Dalai Lama at St. John the Divine Cathedral in New York City for a conversation on interfaith cooperation. It was the end of a long tour of major public teachings and high powered private meetings for His Holiness, but he arrived exhilarated to talk about one of the topics that is central to his work in the world.

There were two main messages in the Dalai Lama’s presentation at the Cathedral, messages that are further emphasized in his new book and his recent New York Times article (above):

1) Interfaith cooperation is a major public issue that needs to be advanced by a mass movement;

2) Positive interactions between people from different faiths and an appreciative knowledge of the world’s religions are key to building this movement.

The Dalai Lama sees a day when the evening news is no longer dominated by stories of religious conflict. Impossible? I don’t think so. I just think we have our work cut out for us. Consider standing at the foot of the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., in 1965 – could anyone have dreamed that America would elect a black president 50 years later? Imagine staring out at the smouldering cities of Europe after World War II – could anyone have dreamed of a European Union 50 years later? We’ve witnessed remarkable changes in the past half-century. Building a bridge from the shore of religious conflict, bigotry and ignorance to the shore of interfaith cooperation is no less important, and requires no less investment and no less work, than any other major change.

Bridges are built by leaders who believe that we can get to a new and better place, and have the vision, knowledge-base and skill-set required to help us get from here to there. The leaders who build interfaith bridges need a history of positive interactions with people of diverse faiths, and an appreciative knowledge of other traditions.

At St. John the Divine, His Holiness spoke about his friendship with the great Trappist monk Thomas Merton, his visits with Muslim leaders in India, his long-running dialogue with Rabbis. There is a beautiful chapter in the Dalai Lama’s new book in which he lifts up prayers, scripture passages and stories from different faiths on compassion. In the New York Times, the Dalai Lama wrote about how Gandhi’s life was an embodiment of compassion. The message is clear – live out the view of compassion in your own faith or secular tradition, learn to admire views of compassion in other traditions, come together across faiths on the common ground of compassion. As he writes, “(Compassion is) a strong unifying thread among all the major faiths. And these days we need to highlight what unifies us.”

What if that chapter on compassion was required reading for every high school senior? After all, we require every seventeen year old to dissect a frog to graduate. Shouldn’t we proactively advance an appreciative knowledge of the traditions that animate and sustain the lives of the vast majority of humankind, especially in an era when extremists are dominating the dialogue about religion? What if our houses of worship encouraged the kind of interfaith exchange and friendship that characterized the Dalai Lama’s personal development? What if it was simply status quo for college campuses to have interfaith councils and for cities to host large interfaith youth celebrations? This is what it looks like for interfaith cooperation to become a social norm.

And as the Dalai Lama emphasized, the stakes could not be higher: “Harmony among the major faiths has become an essential ingredient of peaceful coexistence in our world. From this perspective, mutual understanding among these traditions is not merely the business of religious believers – it matters for the welfare of humanity as a whole.”

Martin Whittingham and Jenny Taylor writing in The Guardian: comment is free, May 28, www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2010/may/28/rethinking-islamic-reform-ramadan-yusuf

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Shaykh Hamza Yusuf and Tariq Ramadan’s presence promised much, but these scholars never got down to the nitty-gritty.

Can Islam be reformed? What role, if any, should government play in bringing about reform? Shaykh Hamza Yusuf, a charismatic white California-based American who converted to Islam in 1977, and the equally charistmatic Egyptian/Swiss scholar Tariq Ramadan, tip-toed elegantly around the subject on Wednesday night without setting off any of the fire alarms.

WCC News, May 27, www.oikoumene.org/en/news/news-management/eng/a/article/1634/wcc-welcomes-turkish-move.html

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The World Council of Churches (WCC) general secretary Rev. Dr Olav Fykse Tveit has welcomed a recent Turkish government decree allowing for a better protection of the rights of non-Muslim religious minorities in Turkey.

Leon Symons writing in the Jewish Chronicle, May 27, www.thejc.com/news/uk-news/32236/salmond-scots-jews-are-not-persecuted

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Scotland’s First Minister has dismissed the claim that the country’s Jewish community is shrinking because of a rise in antisemitism.  But speaking this week to a meeting arranged by Glasgow Jewish Educational Forum, Alex Salmond did acknowledge that there were incidents.  He went on: “I don’t share the analysis that the Jewish community is suffering a wave of persecution or that antisemitism in Scotland is rapidly growing and such a severe problem that it is jeopardising this community.”

Kate Hilpern writing in The Independent, May 27, www.independent.co.uk/news/business/analysis-and-features/advice-for-employers-employers-have-nothing-to-fear-from-faith-1984326.html

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With recent headlines announcing pagan police officers’ right to attend rites and dance naked, it’s no wonder that employers are unsure about what they are expected to do to support their employees’ religious and philosophical beliefs. With legislation also covering less well-known religions and beliefs, such as paganism, Rastafarianism, druidism, Darwinism, creationism and atheism, there’s understandable concern about tripping up and being taken to an employment tribunal.

In fact, says Rachel Krys, campaign director at the Employers Forum on Age and Belief, of all the employment laws relating to discrimination, those on religion and belief – set up in 2003 and due to be amalgamated into the Equality Act 2010 from this October – tend to frighten companies the most.

But Krys says there’s no cause for alarm. Employers are not required to do anything beyond acting reasonably and are certainly not expected to put their employees’ beliefs before their own business needs. This was illustrated when a Muslim warehouseman claimed that Tesco had indirectly discriminated against him by expecting him to handle alcohol. Tesco successfully argued that supplying alcohol to its stores was a legitimate aim and requiring him to handle it was a proportionate means of achieving that aim. Another case involved a Seventh-Day Adventist who claimed the travel agency who employed her had discriminated indirectly by requiring her to work on some Saturdays, when her faith dictates she abstains from secular activity. She also lost her case, because the tribunal agreed there was a compelling business need outweighing the disadvantage to the employee.

Clyde Haberman writing in The New York Times, May 27, www.nytimes.com/2010/05/28/nyregion/28nyc.html

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Since long before the Islamist terrorist attack of Sept. 11, 2001, a storefront mosque has been sitting on West Broadway in TriBeCa, a dozen blocks from the World Trade Center. No one seems to have ever minded its being there.  Now, assuming he can raise the money and clear some remaining bureaucratic hurdles, the spiritual guide of that mosque intends to build a multistory Islamic community center, including a space for prayer, on Park Place, two blocks from what is routinely called ground zero.

Oliver Luft writing in the Press Gazette, May 26, www.pressgazette.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=1&storycode=45500&c=1

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Roger Bolton, veteran presenter of BBC Radio 4’s Feedback show, has called on the BBC to appoint a religion editor to reverse a “key weakness” in the corporation’s output.  He rounded on BBC television for its lack of religious programming, saying it seemed to be in the hands of “the secular and sceptical, who view religious coverage as a rather tiresome obligation to be minimised rather than a rich and promising area to explore”.  While praising the recent appointment of commissioning editor of religion, Aaqil Ahmed, Bolton was doubtful of the impact he could have.

“I believe BBC news requires a religion editor, able to appear on the networks to interpret the latest religious story at home and abroad, but more importantly to bring a religious perspective to the vast range of areas such as foreign affairs and medical dilemmas where that perspective is so often, and so bafflingly, absent, both on air and behind the scenes in internal editorial discussions.”