Posts Tagged ‘ Encounter ’

The power of face-to-face encounters between Israelis and Palestinians

July 6, 2011
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Yonatan Gur, Common Ground News Service, Jul.5, www.commongroundnews.org/article.php?id=30026&lan=en&sp=0&isNew=1&partner=rss&emc=rss

One of the most significant events of my life took place in March 2005 in Anata, a Palestinian village north of Jerusalem. It was the first time I participated in a meeting organised by Combatants for Peace, a movement of Israelis and Palestinians leading a non-violent struggle against the Occupation.

What was so significant to me about that meeting was the fact that it was the first time I had experienced a face-to-face encounter with Palestinians who today are my friends and comrades in a cause.

Since then I have felt a need to make it possible for other Israelis and Palestinians to experience such encounters. The face-to-face experience between equals is, I deeply believe, the foundation for peace and reconciliation between our peoples.

Since the Arab Spring there has been lots of talk about the opportunities offered by new technologies as a means to encourage the forging of relationships across boundaries – the kind that will transcend a culture of incitement of hatred. But does the Internet really enable such encounters?

One of the explanations for road rage is that drivers cannot see the face of the driver next to them, and there are no means for communicating, verbally or otherwise. The Internet carries a similar risk.  The Internet encourages short, simple and, at times, aggressive exchanges, as evidenced in the harsh and verbally violent sphere of “talkbacks”.

I don’t mean to be discouraging. I am anything but reactionary and I believe that the Internet and social networks are nothing less than wonderful.  But, as we witnessed in each and every one of the mass events that have been taking place in the recent months – from Manama to Madrid – what really matters is what happens beyond Facebook – on the street.

Read the complete article here.

Religious leaders will not pray together at Assisi

April 11, 2011
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Cindy Wooden, Catholic Herald, Apr.6, www.catholicherald.co.uk/news/2011/04/06/vatican-religious-leaders-will-not-pray-together-at-assisi/

Pope Benedict XVI and representatives of the world’s major religions will make speeches and sign a common commitment to peace when they meet in Assisi in October, but they will not pray together, the Vatican has said.

In fact, Pope Benedict’s formal prayer service will be held at the Vatican the evening before the encounter in Assisi with leaders of other Christian communities and representatives of the world’s main religions.

The October gathering will commemorate the 25th anniversary of Pope John Paul II’s “prayer for peace” encounter in Assisi. The 1986 event was seen by many as a milestone in interreligious relations but was criticised by some Catholics who said it appeared to inappropriately mix elements from Christian and non-Christian religions.

Read the complete article here.

Inter-Religious Dialogue in 16th-Century Guatemala

March 1, 2011
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Garry Sparks,Journal of Inter Religious Dialogue, Feb.28, irdialogue.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/In-the-Middle-Ground-Sparks.pdf

There are, in fact, very few times in human history when two or more sizably significant groups of people encounter each other and neither one has any actual idea who, or even what, the other group is.

At the turn of the sixteenth century, Spaniards had no idea where they were or what they were encountering, and the indigenous peoples of the Americas had no idea what had washed up on their shores. While an encounter with the radically cultural and religious “other” is not new within the history of Christianity, the arrival of mendicant missionaries – namely Franciscan and Dominican – to Mesoamerica is unique because it provoked and provided a paper trail authored by both voices of western Christianity from late medieval and early modern Iberia and, to a lesser degree, their indigenous American hosts, resisters, and converts.

While Christian thought has always addressed, in some form, the intersection between aspects of cultures and the claims of a Christian faith, the encounter between Hispano-Catholicism and Maya religion is one the earliest – if not the earliest – incidents to include contemporaneous minority reports by survivors of Christendom or colonial Christianity.

Read the complete article here.

Jewish-Christian Dialogue Today

February 23, 2011
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Yehudah Mirsky, Jewish Ideas Daily, Feb.21, www.jewishideasdaily.com/content/module/2011/2/21/main-feature/1/jewish-christian-dialogue-today

How do today’s Jews and Christians encounter one another? The most obvious way is in the countless interactions of Jewish and Christian colleagues and acquaintances in a host of daily settings, including exchanges on their respective religious attitudes and experiences. More specifically, there are the ties of many evangelical and other Christian groups with the state of Israel. Then there are the formal and by-now common meetings between clergy of the two religious traditions, as well as higher-level institutional ties that resemble a kind of ongoing ecclesiastical diplomacy. There are also collaborations and/or friendly debates among communal representatives on issues of shared concern.

No such meeting would be conceivable without the modern sea-change in Christian attitudes toward Jews. True, the 19th and early-20th centuries saw burgeoning forms of Jewish-Christian amity and even philo-Semitism, aided on the Jewish side by the ground-breaking ideas of Franz Rosenzweig, for whom Judaism and Christianity constituted distinct but also complementary revelations. But it was the Holocaust that compelled many Christians fundamentally to rethink historical attitudes and teachings.

The major turning point was the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965), where, after much deliberation and negotiation, the Catholic Church formally renounced the millennial charge that “the Jews” were responsible for the crucifixion; condemned anti-Semitism and anti-Jewish discrimination generally; and affirmed “the community of all peoples” as God’s creatures. While the declaration did not go as far as many Jews had hoped, it triggered waves of what came to be known as Jewish-Christian dialogue.

Read the complete article here.

World Christianity’s changing context

February 18, 2011
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WCC News, Feb.17,  www.oikoumene.org/en/news/news-management/eng/a/article/1634/central-committee-discuss.html

As the World Council of Churches (WCC) takes new steps to promote Christian unity and inter-religious harmony, will the challenges of organizational governance and re-structuring drain “the life out of the ecumenical movement”?

Speakers at this week’s meeting of the WCC central committee  including delegates from Sri Lanka, Indonesia and Germany shared the effects of inter-religious dialogue and cooperation on their ministries. Rev. Ebenezer Joseph, a Methodist from Sri Lanka, spoke of the benefits he had discovered in working with people of other faiths.  Inter-religious gatherings with Buddhists, Hindus and Muslims happen at every level of church and society in Sri Lanka, Joseph said. “There is the dialogue of life, with lots of public expressions of faith,” he explained. There are no ulterior motives in such encounters, “just positive religious engagement.”

Read the complete article here

A British Muslim who would rather talk

January 24, 2011
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Charles Moore, Daily Telegraph, Jan.24, www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/charlesmoore/8277811/A-British-Muslim-who-would-rather-talk.html

In ‘Wandering Lonely in a Crowd’, S?M?Atif Imtiaz’s desire for genuine discussion about Islam in Britain is striking and compelling.

Last week, I reviewed a book by John Gross about growing up Jewish in London 70 years ago.

Much of the book’s interest lies in the encounter between Jewishness and Britishness. The young Gross was well educated – much better than most Gentiles – in the history and culture of the country his parents had adopted. Jewishness and Britishness intertwined, each benefiting the other. Since there are now something like two million Muslims in Britain – a far larger grouping than the Jews – one longs for some comparable process with them.

So I find it most interesting to hear the different tone of voice in which Atif Imtiaz speaks. He is a youngish community activist from Bradford, and now works as academic director at the Cambridge Muslim College. This book is a collection of his essays and short stories ordered round the question of what the author calls “the Muslim condition in the West”.

This book starts with an essay which the author wrote shortly after 9/11. I am glad that he included it because it shows how his attitude has developed since then. There, he indulges some of the paranoia about the media that often afflicts Islamic conversation, and seems to find it impossible to understand why non-Muslim reaction to a massive terrorist attack committed by Muslims in the name of their religion should be alarmed and hostile.

In the rest of the book, though, Atif Imtiaz is trying hard to get his fellow Muslims to move outside their half-comforting, half-terrifying world of conspiracy theories and play their part in the life of the nation which they inhabit. And he wants to persuade the rest of us that there is no absolute contradiction between Islam and freedom.

Read the complete article here.

How Christians, Muslims can find peace

January 3, 2011
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Paul Moses, CNN, Jan.2, edition.cnn.com/2011/OPINION/01/02/moses.saint.sultan.unity/index.html

Speaking hours after a terrorist attack killed 21 people in a Coptic church in Alexandria, Egypt, Pope Benedict XVI announced that he would hold an interreligious meeting in October in Assisi, Italy, to discuss with other religious leaders how religion can promote world peace.

It would mark the 25th anniversary of the World Day of Prayer for Peace that Pope John Paul II held there on October 26, 1986. The choice of Assisi, a town in Central Italy, as the venue is certainly not for its access to an airport: It is chosen as the home town of St. Francis, the beloved Christian saint whose generosity of spirit and constant striving for peace are exemplified in a remarkably amicable encounter he had with Egypt’s Sultan Malik al-Kamil in the midst of the Fifth Crusade in 1219.

With Francis’ example beginning to inspire Christians in interreligious dialogue, it’s time to say that Sultan al-Kamil, too, can be a model.

Sultan al-Kamil, nephew of the great Muslim warrior Salah al-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub, or Saladin, led Egypt for some 40 years as viceroy and sultan. He thrived during a difficult period marked by famine and attacks by the Mongols from the east and the crusaders from the west.

When Francis crossed enemy lines to reach the sultan’s camp near the Nile during the summer of 1219, the sultan had every reason to dismiss a man who wanted to preach his enemy’s faith. But he allowed the friar to remain for several days of discussions.

Read the full story here.

Christmas should be for everyone, atheists included

December 29, 2010
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Alom Shaha, Guardian – Comment is free, Dec.24, www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2010/dec/24/christmas-atheist-celebration

We should rejoice in the fact that Christmas is celebrated by people of all faiths and even those with none.

I love Christmas. Despite being an atheist who was brought up as a Muslim, Christmas is a religious festival I have totally embraced, midnight mass and all. I have loved it since I first encountered it at primary school, where we seemed to spend weeks preparing for this wonderful, magical day – we’d start singing carols in assembly in the mornings, proper lessons would be replaced with making paper chains and other decorations and there would be lots of rehearsing, as well as making props and costumes for the nativity.

“Multicultural” policies were in their infancy and, as far as I recollect, there was no sense that making such a big deal out of Christmas might not be an entirely appropriate thing to do when a significant proportion of the school’s population were not Christians. Not aware that my cultural sensitivities should have been hurt, I lapped up everything to do with Christmas.

Read the full story here.

“New Neighbors, New Pluralism?”

December 21, 2010
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Jenny Replogle, Inter-Religious Dialogue, Dec.19, irdialogue.org/articles/new-neighbors-new-pluralism-by-jenny-replogle/

During hevruta with a fellow seminarian, I encountered the depths of my own Christian faith in a new way.  This was my first experience of hevruta, the study of the Torah with a partner, but it was familiar for my partner, Gideon, a rabbinical student.  He had never read the text we studied, Luke 10:25-37, but I knew it as both a foundational story of my religion and a favorite Christian justification of interfaith relations.  After reading the text aloud, Gideon asked me what I thought it meant.  Reeling through years of Sunday school explanations to seminary theology, I offered the common explanation for the parable: the Samaritan demonstrates the command to love one’s neighbor in a way which we are to emulate.  Gideon responded, “But that’s not what it says.” I do not remember the conclusion to our discussion that day, but I realized that Gideon might be right.  Surely Jesus calls us to love everyone and to care for the needs of all as the Samaritan did, but my familiarity with the text blinded me from seeing other meaning.

Prior to my conversation with Gideon, I assumed that this pericope meant that I should recognize people all over the world who were different from me as my neighbor, but the command to love the Samaritan was not surprising because Samaritans were different religiously and ethnically, but because they were living in the same land.  Rabbi Jonathan Sacks points out “the Hebrew Bible in one verse commands, ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself’, but in no fewer than 36 places commands us to ‘love the stranger.’” This was surely known by the expert in the law questioning Jesus.  Were the Samaritans too strange to be a neighbor, and too near to be a stranger?

The ambiguous nature of the Samaritan is particularly significant to us today. In her description of A New Religious America, Diana Eck explains, “Adherents of other faiths are no longer distant metaphorical neighbors in some other part of the world but next-door neighbors.” The religious other is now one among us, like the Samaritan, and our very lives and faith depend on our ability to recognize them as our neighbor.

Read the full article here.

The Word Of God And Interreligious Dialogue

November 13, 2010
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Pope Benedict XVI, “Verbum Dei“, Nov.12,  www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/apost_exhortations/documents/hf_ben-xvi_exh_20100930_verbum-domini_en.html

The value of interreligious dialogue

The Church considers an essential part of the proclamation of the word to consist in encounter, dialogue and cooperation with all people of good will, particularly with the followers of the different religious traditions of humanity. This is to take place without forms of syncretism and relativism, but along the lines indicated by the Second Vatican Council’s Declaration Nostra Aetate and subsequently developed by the magisterium of the Popes. Nowadays the quickened pace of globalization makes it possible for people of different cultures and religions to be in closer contact. This represents a providential opportunity for demonstrating how authentic religiosity can foster relationships of universal fraternity. Today, in our frequently secularized societies, it is very important that the religions be capable of fostering a mentality that sees Almighty God as the foundation of all good, the inexhaustible source of the moral life, and the bulwark of a profound sense of universal brotherhood.

In the Judeo-Christian tradition, for example, one finds a moving witness to God’s love for all peoples: in the covenant with Noah he joins them in one great embrace symbolized by the “bow in the clouds” (Gen 9:13,14,16) and, according to the words of the prophets, he desires to gather them into a single universal family (cf. Is 2:2ff; 42:6; 66:18-21; Jer 4:2; Ps 47). Evidence of a close connection between a relationship with God and the ethics of love for everyone is found in many great religious traditions.

Dialogue between Christians and Muslims

Among the various religions the Church also looks with respect to Muslims, who adore the one God. They look to Abraham and worship God above all through prayer, almsgiving and fasting. We acknowledge that the Islamic tradition includes countless biblical figures, symbols and themes. Taking up the efforts begun by the Venerable John Paul II, I express my hope that the trust-filled relationships established between Christians and Muslims over the years will continue to develop in a spirit of sincere and respectful dialogue. In this dialogue the Synod asked for a deeper reflection on respect for life as a fundamental value, the inalienable rights of men and women, and their equal dignity. Taking into account the important distinction to be made between the socio-political order and the religious order, the various religions must make their specific contribution to the common good. The Synod asked Conferences of Bishops, wherever it is appropriate and helpful, to encourage meetings aimed at helping Christians and Muslims to come to better knowledge of one another, in order to promote the values which society needs for a peaceful and positive coexistence.

Dialogue with other religions

Here too I wish to voice the Church’s respect for the ancient religions and spiritual traditions of the various continents. These contain values which can greatly advance understanding between individuals and peoples. Frequently we note a consonance with values expressed also in their religious books, such as, in Buddhism, respect for life, contemplation, silence, simplicity; in Hinduism, the sense of the sacred, sacrifice and fasting; and again, in Confucianism, family and social values. We are also gratified to find in other religious experiences a genuine concern for the transcendence of God, acknowledged as Creator, as well as respect for life, marriage and the family, and a strong sense of solidarity.

Dialogue and religious freedom

All the same, dialogue would not prove fruitful unless it included authentic respect for each person and the ability of all freely to practise their religion. Hence the Synod, while encouraging cooperation between the followers of the different religions, also pointed out “the need for the freedom to profess one’s religion, privately and publicly, and freedom of conscience to be effectively guaranteed to all believers”: indeed, “respect and dialogue require reciprocity in all spheres, especially in that which concerns basic freedoms, more particularly religious freedom. Such respect and dialogue foster peace and understanding between peoples”.

Read Verbum Dei in full.