Posts Tagged ‘ Religion ’

8 Reasons My Interfaith Family Celebrates Hanukkah and Christmas

December 24, 2011
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Susan Katz Miller, Huffington Post, Dec.13, www.huffingtonpost.com/susan-katz-miller/interfaith-family-christmas-and-hanukkah_b_1133561.html

At this time of year, a blizzard of articles about the so-called December Dilemma swirls up like snowflakes rising from the floor of a snowglobe. Every year, I take calls from journalists looking to, perhaps, shake things up: to dramatize what they are sure must be a conflict between Christmas and Hanukkah, and between interfaith parents. And yet, having chosen to fully educate our children about both family religions, the dilemma essentially disappears and December becomes primarily a delight. We celebrate both Hanukkah and Christmas, with all of the trimmings, and seek to help our children to understand the religious meanings of both holidays.

Our pathway is controversial: not every interfaith couple can or should choose both religions for their children. For many families, choosing one religion makes sense, and there is a vast literature out there to help these families negotiate the holiday season. But in our local community of more than 100 interfaith families, we believe that both Christian and Jewish stories and rituals can be inspirational, are essential to literacy in Western culture, and are part of the heritage of our children.

Read the complete article here.

Finding Common Ground

December 20, 2011
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CBS News, Dec. 18 , www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=7392008n&tag=cbsnewsLeadStoriesAreaMain

CBS News Religion & Culture looks at the history of the interfaith movement and what interreligious cooperation looks like in Reading, Pennsylvania.

This link will take you to a very interesting 27 minute video clip.  Well worth watching!

Newt Gingrich: A Catholic Running Against Islam?

December 7, 2011
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Eboo Patel, Huffington Post, Dec.5, www.huffingtonpost.com/eboo-patel/newt-gingrich-catholic_b_860995.html

Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker and high-profile conservative intellectual, announced yesterday that he is officially in the running for the Republican nomination for president. Along the way he’s been playing the politics of religion.

In the speeches and media appearances he did in preparation for his run, he has emphasized two things. The first is the importance of God and morality in the public square, referencing his own conversion to Catholicism to give him credibility. The second is to rail against the dangers of Islam in America.

This two-pronged approach underscores just how far we have come in America on issues of religious tolerance, and also how far we have to go.

Read the complete article here.

The Big Interfaith Tent at Occupy Oakland: Faithfully Engaging the 99%

November 20, 2011
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Laura Rose, Huffington Post, Nov.18, www.huffingtonpost.com/rev-laura-rose/interfaith-occupy-oakland_b_1101997.html?ref=religion

Fourteen members of the Interfaith Tent at Occupy Oakland locked arms in front of the tent and were arrested early Monday morning as the police raided the encampment. It is not surprising that our words and actions have been reduced to a few sound bites and fleeting images by the mainstream media, but there is a deeper, better story to be told.

Our Interfaith Tent is Big — spatially and spiritually. The tent has been a sacred space of solace at the encampment, but it has also provided a spiritual canopy for an interfaith coalition of Indigenous Elders, Buddhists, Christians, Muslims and Jews in solidarity with the Occupy Movement, locally and globally.

One sure sign that people of faith are called to create a sacred space is that after the police raid on the Oakland encampment, the only tent standing was the Interfaith Tent. It stayed until noon, the hardest to tear down.

Read the complete article here.

Pakistani parliament criticizes murders of Hindus

November 20, 2011
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Anto Akkara, ENInews, Nov.16, www.eni.ch/featured/article.php?id=5286

Pakistan’s parliament on 15 November condemned the killing of three Hindu brothers at a medical clinic in what observers said was an unusual show of support for religious minorities.

The National Assembly observed a minute’s silence in solidarity with the families of Ajeet Kumar, Naresh Kumar and Ashok Kumar, who were shot dead by unidentified gunmen on motorbikes in Shikarpur in Sindh province on 8 November.

“It is a positive development that all the political parties have condemned this shocking killing in one voice,” Michelle Chaudhry of the All Pakistan Minorities Alliance (APMA), told ENInews on 16 November. “The demand for a parliamentary inquiry into this massacre shows that atrocities on minorities have reached alarming levels,” said Chaudhry, spokesperson for the organization founded by Shahbaz Bhatti, the minister for religious minorities who was assassinated last March.

“Non-Muslims are citizens of Pakistan and any form of violence against them is absolutely not acceptable … We are Pakistanis; our religion is a personal matter,” said the APMA. Nearly 95 percent of Pakistan’s 180 million people are Muslims while Christians, Hindus and other minorities account for five percent.

Read the complete article here.

Why the world needs faiths

November 20, 2011
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Tony Blair, Washington Post, Nov.17, www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/guest-voices/post/why-the-world-needs-faith/2011/11/17/gIQAf0d5UN_blog.html

There will be no peace in our world without an understanding of the place of religion within it. The past decade has seen many convenient myths which disguised the importance of religion, stripped away. Many thought: as society progressed, religion would decline. It hasn’t happened.

Then there are those that insisted that as the Arab Revolution knocked over long established regimes and created movements for democracy, so those societies’ religiosity would take second place to the new politics. It hasn’t happened. Religion is fundamental to those societies and if anything, in the foreseeable future, will become more so. And do we seriously think the issue of Jerusalem can be resolved without at least some discussion of its religious significance to all three Abrahamic faiths?

The virus of terror based on a perversion of the proper faith of Islam, shows no signs of abating. But it is not only the acts of terror that should alarm us. It is the extremism that promotes persecution of religious minorities too. The challenge is that much greater where human dignity is not respected and freedom of religion denied. This results in a general oppression of people of faith. It means we must support Muslims in Gujarat, India; non-Orthodox Christians in Moldova; Bahai’s in Iran; Ahmadis in Pakistan; all Christians in North Africa; Hindus in Sri Lanka; Shi’a in several Sunni majority countries, and other places.

The basic point is this: On every side, in every quarter, wherever we look and analyze, religion is a powerful, motivating, determining force shaping the world around us.

Read the complete article here.

Interreligious University

November 20, 2011
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Tim Dalrymple, World Magazine, Nov.19, www.worldmag.com/articles/18836

The liberalization of American seminaries is an old story. The inauguration of “the world’s first interreligious university” is not.

The Claremont School of Theology is collaborating with the Academy for Jewish Religion in California and the Islamic Center of Southern California to produce Claremont Lincoln University, an ambitious endeavor to train religious leaders for a multi-religious world. The member institutions of the consortium will still ordain the pastors, priests, rabbis, and imams, but the university will offer a concentration on interreligious studies as well as master’s and doctoral degrees.

As Philip Clayton, provost of the new university, explained in a symposium on the future of seminaries, “We are in the midst of the biggest change in American religiosity since the founding of this country.” Interreligious tensions are many and strong. So we can remain “ensconced” in the old forms of academia and ecclesia, or we can become “change agents” to “educate the next-generation leaders for an emerging church.”

Read the complete article here.

Interfaith group seeks help from banks in housing crisis

November 1, 2011
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Jeremy Borden, Washington Post, Oct.31, www.washingtonpost.com/local/interfaith-group-seeks-help-from-banks-in-housing-crisis/2011/10/30/gIQAhPAzZM_story.html

Members from more than 40 religious institutions across Northern Virginia are asking some of the country’s largest banks to commit to helping rebuild neighborhoods that have been devastated by housing foreclosures.

Virginians Organized for Interfaith Community Engagement (VOICE) drew a crowd of about 900 congregants, political leaders and representatives of two major financial institutions — Bank of America and J.P. Morgan Chase — to Freedom High School in Woodbridge on Sunday to discuss the issue.

Leaders of the two-year-old interfaith group — representing every major religion — say they hope that pressure on banks from area congregations helps struggling homeowners and assists in rebuilding neighborhoods.

Venus Miller, a VOICE leader who attends Mount Olive Baptist Church in Woodbridge, said she hopes the banks agree to help because it is the right thing to do. “But wouldn’t that be great to put the fear of God in them?”

Read the complete article here.

Speed-faithing: speed-dating from a religious point of view

November 1, 2011
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Manya A. Brachear, Chicago Tribune, Nov.1, www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/ct-talk-speed-faithing-20111101,0,5799441.story

For those who want to hook up with a Hindu, there is speed-dating at an Old Town neighborhood lounge on Wednesday.

But for those who want to meet a Muslim, Buddhist, Christian or Hindu and get to know a little about their faith, there will be a speed-faithing event Tuesday at Dominican University in River Forest.

Designed by students, the event which follows a public lecture by Interfaith Youth Core founder Eboo Patel, will rotate participants through five-minute conversations about their beliefs. Long enough to establish common ground, short enough to avoid offense, said Cassie Meyer, director of content for the Interfaith Youth Core who co-teaches a course on interfaith literacy with Patel.

“You’re not trying to say everything about your religion before you switch,” she said.

Nor should you, she said. Just like speed-dating, talking about religion can be scary.

“The stereotype of speed-dating is you have two minutes to judge someone,” she said. “There’s something to be said for speaking really quickly off the cuff about something. You’ll have a chance to be thoughtful, but you don’t have a chance to obsess about it.”

Instead of seeking particulars, participants will be urged to ask more general questions: Do you think interfaith cooperation is important? What compels you to serve others? How and when do you pray, reflect or meditate?

Read the complete article here.

What place do people of faith have at Occupy Everywhere?

October 23, 2011
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Jonathan Oskins, State of Formation, Oct.23, www.stateofformation.org/2011/10/what-place-do-people-of-faith-have-at-occupy-everywhere/

News agencies were already slow to cover the movement in New York, so it is no surprise that reporting on the involvement of religious people at Occupy Together took even longer. But the wait was worth it, with fellow State of Formation contributors having written on their personal participation: Mary Ann Kaiser wrote a great piece on her hands-on work as part of Occupy Austin and Anna DeWeese posted on her experience at Occupy Wall Street. Faith & Reason also has terrific summaries of the reasons why different faiths have become involved, including a great link to a HuffPost Religion post on an Occupy Wall Street Yom Kippur. Another HuffPost Religion post does a good job of highlighting the variety of religious groups at Occupy Wall Street, including Jumah at #OccupyDC, Occupy Torah, Occupy Judaism and Occupy Sukkot.

 

Read the complete article here.

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