Friday, May 25, 2012
Thursday, May 24, 2012
COMMENTARY: Grandiose claims about God poison the common good - Articles
NORTHAMPTON, Mass. (RNS) Poor memory? Hard to say. I'm just glad I don't remember details of my college road trips to Northampton and my .000 batting average with Smith College women.
That means I can approach stopping by this charming college town as a pleasant diversion with my wife after a family lunch in nearby Worcester. I can escape shadows of feeling lost among the hyper-sophisticated Smithies. Some history deserves to be forgotten.
Moreover, what merits remembering requires reflection and fresh engagement, not just a sense of cyclical dread.
The ugly political morass of 2012 isn't just Reaganism redux: It's not just another variation on the "trickle-down" delusion – make the rich rich enough and they will discover how to share – and the economic and political destruction that flowed from chasing that fantasy. Nor is it another dabbling in McCarthyism's politics of fear and scapegoating.
No, today has its own lessons.
The relentless drive of wealth to grab more wealth – as if a searing near-depression conferred no need for new ideas or community-minded gumption – bespeaks a collapse of leadership and social ethics. JPMorgan Chase's immediate return to its former high-risk ways, accompanied by whining for government favors, signals a larger collapse of accountability and consequences.
When the greedy buy politicians and promote delusional fiscal and economic policies – social welfare for the wealthy, for example – it isn't history repeating itself. It's a future being foreclosed by people who simply don't care what damage they cause.
When advertisers lie about competitors, it isn't a 1950s Madison Avenue game on instant replay. It's falsehood replacing ideas and honesty as political capital.
When people make grandiose claims about "God's will" and "American values" and demonize others who hold different views, we haven't just channeled a tragic yesterday and its wars and pogroms. We have poisoned the well of community on which our nation depends today and made a mockery of God and faith.
Those who make political attack ads grounded in distortion and fear aren't just clever tricksters from Nixonian paranoia. They are evil promoters of intolerance, propagandists for an America that cannot survive its worst instincts.
We need to study today's public square, not just compare it to former eras. There is a sickness at work today that has its own reality: an unconcern for consequences and a scorn for others that seem disturbingly fresh. The quest for power -- bankrolled by an obsession with wealth -- has gone beyond the quaint aristocratic pretensions of the Gilded Age, the tragicomic swagger of robber barons pretending to be philanthropists.
We are seeing a vacancy of soul, a victory of narcissism, an enshrining of personality disorder as normal rough-and-tumble. In that mindset, nothing outside oneself stands for anything. No other views or needs have value. In that view, I define reality, and I am entitled to buy a weapon or a congressman to impose my reality on others.
It's also a victory for helplessness and passivity. In that mindset, if my life has pain, someone else must have caused it, and they need to be punished. I myself am helpless to chart a fresh course. This opens the door to demagogues who promise to do the naming of enemies and the punishing, in exchange for loss of freedom.
We can't just see yesterday in today and relax into a soothing chorus of, “Oh well. We survived that nonsense, we can survive today's.” No nation is that strong. We must study today and resist its deliberate march toward demagoguery.
Show Caption | | Details Tom Ehrich is an Episcopal priest, author and former Wall Street Journal reporter living in Winston-Salem, N.C. RNS photo (Tom Ehrich is a writer, church consultant and Episcopal priest based in New York. He is the author of "Just Wondering, Jesus" and founder of the Church Wellness Project. His website is www.morningwalkmedia.com. Follow Tom on Twitter @tomehrich.)
KRE/AMB END EHRICH
Maurice Sendak’s Jewish legacy lives on along with the ‘Wild Things’ - Articles
(RNS) When the mind that first imagined the Wild Things disappeared for good last week, the children-turned-adults who adored Max and his wild rumpus with big-eyed monsters didn't just mourn the loss of Maurice Sendak; they also grieved for their own ever-fading childhoods.
Show Caption | | Details Maurice Sendak created some of the world’s best-loved contemporary children’s books, including 'Where the Wild Things Are'. RNS photo by John Dugdale/courtesy Harper Collins Publishers Since his death on May 8 at age 83, Sendak has been referred to frequently as the most important children's author of the 20th century. His millions of fans crossed borders of age, race, gender, nationality and religion.
It's a measure of Sendak's imagination that his stories — so infused with a very particular Jewishness — are absent evidence of Judaism or anything else besides a good read to his most important readers.
"As a child, I wasn't thinking about the Jewishness in his books," said Laurel Snyder, an author of children's books. "I was a kid."
Snyder said she grew up with "Zlateh the Goat," a 1966 story by Isaac Bashevis Singer, illustrated by Sendak. By then, Sendak had already won the Caldecott Medal, the highest honor for children's literature, for "Where the Wild Things Are," and Singer was one of the most important writers in America.
The pairing of two American literary superstars for "Zlateh the Goat" was important for both adult and children's literature, said Snyder.
Show Caption | | Details Maurice Sendak at the Rosenbach Museum & Library, 1985. RNS photo by Frank Armstrong/ Courtesy, Rosenbach Museum & Library "Teaming them up not only brought a Jewish book like that into the limelight, but also brought a layer of literary legitimacy into the children's book world," she said.
Sendak's relationship to Judaism was perhaps most shaped by the Holocaust.
"The Holocaust has run like a river of blood through all my books," Sendak told The New York Times in 2006. "Anything I did had to deal with that — with my family, the ruination of my childhood, the humiliation of being a victim."
Neal Sokol, who included many pieces of Sendak's original artwork in his 2010 show, "Monsters and Miracles: A Journey Through Jewish Picture Books" at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles, said Sendak continually used the "ordeals and odysseys" of Jews from both Old World shtetls and New World city streets to inform his stories.
"Jewish culture defined his work and he wasn't ashamed of that," said Sokol.
Sendak, whose parents traveled to the U.S. from Poland in the 1920s, was often sick as a child in Depression-era Brooklyn. His later writings and illustrations borrowed from his memories of childhood's dark corners and the way children can tap into their imaginations to escape those corners.
"It is always amazing to me that children survive childhood, that they go on to have professional careers and run countries," Sendak said at a talk at Washington University's Graham Chapel in 1989. "I think it's due to their tremendous courage. They have to be very brave. And that loyalty and courage and bravery is the subtext of everything I have ever written."
Sendak based the monsters in "Where the Wild Things Are" on his aunts and uncles that his parents had managed to bring to Brooklyn from the old country.
Show Caption | | Details Final drawing for 'Where the Wild Things Are' - pen and ink, watercolor. RNS photo © Maurice Sendak, 1963, all rights reserved. Courtesy, Rosenbach Museum & Library "I hated them all," he said at Graham Chapel. "They were grotesque, with their huge noses, their great cascades of hair, their bad teeth."
Early in his career as an illustrator, Sendak received commissions from Jewish organizations including B'nai B'rith and the United Synagogue Commission on Jewish Education. In 2010, according to The Wall Street Journal, Sendak gave $1 million to the Jewish Board of Family & Children's Services, a mental health and social service agency in New York, where his life partner of 50 years, Eugene Glynn, worked as a psychiatrist.
When he designed a series of pamphlets on anti-Semitism for the Anti-Defamation League early in his career, Sendak based the drawings on sketches he made of kids in his Bensonhurst neighborhood in the 1940s.
While Sendak's parents were able to bring his mother's family out of Poland, his father's family was wiped out by the Nazis. As a teenager, Sendak studied the black-and-white photographs of his murdered relatives.
Patrick Rodgers of the Rosenbach Museum & Library in Philadelphia, which houses the largest collection of Sendak's work, said the legacy of the Holocaust is "the biggest thing" in Sendak's work.
Show Caption | | Details The Chertoff Mural. RNS photo © 1961 by Maurice Sendak, all rights reserved. Courtesy, Rosenbach Museum & Library "His relationship to Judaism is a mostly secular one," Rodgers said. "He struggled growing up semi-kosher. He didn't do much in the way of worship. He couldn't relate to the world his family came from, but he became really aware of it when that world was falling apart."
As absorbed as Sendak was with his Jewish roots, his God was not Abraham's God. In 2003, he told Terry Gross, host of NPR's "Fresh Air," that religion "made no sense to me."
"You know who my gods are, who I believe in fervently?" Sendak asked. "Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson — she's probably the top — Mozart, Shakespeare, Keats. These are wonderful gods who have gotten me through the narrow straits of life."
Rodgers said Sendak's form of worship "was being an artist and trying, almost in a platonic way, to access other art that moved him deeply."
"Listening to Mozart while looking at Blake and transmogrifying them into what he did — that was his spiritual practice," he said. "That was where his soul was."
(Tim Townsend writes for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in St. Louis.)
KRE/AMB END TOWNSEND
Wednesday, May 23, 2012
Obama campaign taps young adviser, Michael Wear, for faith outreach - Articles
Show Caption | | Details President Barack Obama speaks at Intel's Fab 42 in Chandler, AZ on January 25, 2012. RNS photo courtesy Intel Photos/Flickr (http://www.flickr.com/photos/intelphotos/6763303437/) WASHINGTON (RNS) President Obama's re-election campaign has tapped a 23-year-old executive assistant in the White House faith-based office to head up its outreach to religious communities.
Michael R. Wear, who has worked in the White House for the past three and half years, will move to Chicago to become the campaign's Faith Vote director next week, White House officials confirmed on Monday (May 14).
"It has been an honor working with Michael Wear to create positive faith-based and nonprofit partnerships to serve people in need," said Joshua DuBois, executive director of the Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships. Wear was DuBois' executive assistant.
A native of Buffalo, N.Y., Wear was an intern during Obama's 2008 campaign, specializing in outreach to religious groups. He helped arrange candidate Obama's appearance at a presidential forum at Rick Warren's Saddleback Church in California as well as a meeting between Obama and prominent Christian leaders in Chicago.
After organizing the prayer service at the Washington National Cathedral following the president's inauguration, he went to work for DuBois, who himself headed religious outreach for the campaign before assuming the directorship of the faith-based office.
At the White House, Wear has been involved in a wide range of religious issues, with particular responsibility for adoption and foster care. He also sought to build connections with young evangelicals, including those involved in the campaign to capture Ugandan guerilla leader Joseph Kony.
"Michael has spent a number of years in the faith-based office so he knows the territory," said Amy Sullivan, author of "The Party Faithful," a book on religion and American politics. "But the Republicans would put somebody senior with years and years of experience and a big Rolodex in that position. And I guess that tells you something about how Democrats still view faith outreach and its importance."
Wear graduated from George Washington University with a B.A. in political science in 2011. He turns 24 on Wednesday.
(Daniel Burke contributed reporting.)
DSB/AMB END SILK
Tuesday, May 22, 2012
Monday, May 21, 2012
Beyond Mother’s Day cliches: Towards celebrating a Day of Care (and caregivers) - Blog: What Would Muhammad Do?
Mother’s Day is a somewhat complicated occasion for Muslims, and I suspect, many other people.
The lovely Robert Fulghum, the wise soul behind the “All I needed to learn I learned in Kindergarten” recalls how once in his function as a minister he attempted to interject some grit and reality into a Mother’s Day sermon, only to be told by a member of his congregation that people have gone to hell for saying much less than he did.
In spite of that warning, allow me to venture into the territory of acknowledging yet trying to move beyond the trite and occasionally hollow celebration of Mother’s Day. (And I won’t even get into how Mother’s Day has been co-opted by Hallmark and the chocolate industry.)
It is no wonder that so many traditions, including the Christian tradition,
use the love of a mother for a child (the Virgin for Christ) as a potent symbol of Divine love for humanity.
On one hand, there is the annual observation that in Islam, “Every day is Mother’s Day.”
This has become so trite among Muslims who now joke on Facebook that they are looking forward to the clichés of the above observation.
This remembrance is often amplified by the lovely teaching of the Prophet that states:
The Prophet Muhammad said, may God's peace and blessings be upon him:
Your Heaven lies under the feet of your mother (hadith).
These types of statements from the Prophet are often the first sayings that many Muslim mothers teach their children, to make sure that they never forget the Prophetically sanctioned cherishing of mothers.
In other sayings of the Prophet, there are reminders that serving one’s mother takes precedence over almost any other duty, including that of serving one’s father. One of the well-known accounts of the Prophet remembers him listing serving one’s mother three times before moving on to serving anyone else. One companion of the Prophet asked him:
'Messenger of Allah, to whom should I be dutiful?'
'Your mother,' he replied.
I asked, 'Then whom?'
'Your mother,' he replied.
I asked, 'Then whom?' 'Your mother,' he replied.
I asked, 'Then to whom should I be dutiful?'
'Your father,' he replied, 'and then the next closest relative and then the next.'"
And yet, and yet, somehow it feels hollow to leave it there.
The truth of the matter is that part of the honoring of mothers on one day a year seems connected to taking them for granted the rest of the year. And honoring people for one day a year does not make up for the other 364 days of a year.
Honoring Mother’s Day, and mothers, reminds many of us of the ways in which religious traditions come to honor iconic female saints whose chastity is distinctly beyond the possibility of almost any mortal, male or female. So our religious communities marginalize and oppress women while praising here a Virgin Mary and a Joan of Arc and there a Khadija and a Fatima.
Also, in listening to my friends carefully, I am reminded that for many among us, Mother’s Day doesn’t really feel like a day to celebrate, because:
*For many, their own mother was not someone who provided care and compassion. Honoring those mothers on these days feels like a hollow and obligatory, as opposed to a heartfelt, ritual.
*For many who have no children, not being a mother on mother’s day is a source of immense sorrow and grief for the most important missing part of their lives.
*For many who have lost a child, mother’s day is a day of mourning over a loved one.
*For many single parents, being a mother is a reminder of the unpaid, exhausting, 24x7 job that leaves them drained even as they try to carry on work/school.
*Lastly, many Muslim women have critiqued how almost all the honorific statements in Islam about women are connected to their childbearing and mothering functions, and not to them being women as such.
So, what to do?
Where to go from here?
How do we acknowledge the good work, the immense service that million of mothers provide day in and day out?
And how do we acknowledge that there are some mothers who embody all these lovely qualities of love and services,
that there are some mothers who do not,
that there are many women who are not mothers,
and many mothers who are tired of being taken for granted 364 out of 365 days ever year?
I suggest a move away from the commercialized “Mother’s Day” celebration to celebrating the Ethics of Care.
Let us honor and acknowledge all those who care for others, whether family or simply fellow human beings. Let us recognize compassion put into the service of humanity as what actually takes us not into the unreal, surreal realm of idealized and sanitized motherhood, but simply into the realm of fully and completely human.
When there are mothers who embody this ethics of care, let us celebrate.
When there are fathers who embody this ethics of care, let us celebrate.
When there are women, not mothers, who serve fellow human beings, let us celebrate.
Let me end not in the abstract,
but in the fully particular details of one set of lives, including my own.
Let me celebrate some of the people who in my own life have embodied these qualities:
For my mother, Pouran (pictured at the right), whom I remember as staying awake through the night, keeping vigil by my bedside when I was four and burning of a fever.
For my mother, Pouran, who left behind her family, the home, and the country that she knew,
so that I could some day have a better life here in this country.
For my father, Ali (also pictured at the right), who is my very model of what it means to be not just a man, but a full human being.
For my father, Ali, whose gentleness and compassion I recognize now as the very model of what it means to be a caring father.
For the mother of my children, Holly, who raised a boy under the most difficult of circumstances as a single mother,
putting the welfare of that sweet boy before her own.
For the mother of my children, Holly, who has raised four beautiful children and struggles every day to care for children
while competing in a world where her colleagues have no such demands at home.
For all of them, I say, Happy Mother’s Day, and more than that, Happy Day of Care.
Images are courtesy of Shutterstock and Wikipedia.
The Catastrophe: The expulsion of Palestinian refugees and Israel’s founding in 1948 - Blog: What Would Muhammad Do?
These days we are facing a painful catastrophe that is at the very center of the Palestinian/Israeli tragedy, one of the longest human rights disasters in the last century. This catastrophe is that of the violent and forceful Israeli expulsion of some 700,000 Palestinians from their indigenous homeland in 1948. This depopulation, or as it was referred to in 1948, “cleansing”, remains at the heart of the Palestinian experience and deserves to be remembered as a genuine human rights catastrophe today. Furthermore, it is in need of urgent remedy.
The Palestinian/Israeli conflict is a struggle reflecting not an “ancient and eternal enmity” as we have been told. The casting of the Palestinian/Israeli conflict as an religious conflict or an eternal conflict is often an attempt to throw up one’s hands and pretend that Arabs and Jews come out of the womb hating one another, and there is nothing that one can do to heal their enmity for one another. On the contrary, there was a time that Arabs and Jews lived together in peace, and provided one is willing to take measured and courageous responses to re-establish peace and justice, those days of mutual and peaceful co-existence can be with us again.
Many assume that the main obstacle to peace is Hamas or Palestinian terrorism (on one hand) or the illegal Israeli settlements in West Bank (on the other). The truth of the matter is that the genesis of the problem goes back somewhat further than Netanyahu, or the 1973 war, or even the 1967 war. In other words, the root of the problem goes back before the forty-plus year illegal Israeli occupation of West Bank (and until recently, Gaza).
The root of the issue is 1948. Here we get what Israelis celebrate as the joyous founding of the modern nation of Israel, and simultaneously remembered by Palestinians and many Muslims, indeed many human rights activists worldwide as simply the “Nakba”, the Catastrophe.
The Catastrophe is not simply the founding of Israel. It is what in today’s world we would call Ethnic Cleansing. Here is a truth, simple and powerful, yet rarely discussed in American media. In order to create modern nation state of Israel, the Jewish military forces ethnically cleansed Palestine.
Half of the indigenous population of Palestine, somewhere in excess of 700,000 Palestinian Muslims and Christians; men, women, and children, were driven into exile. The overwhelming majority of these refugees still remain in exile, over sixty years later.
Any Jew from anywhere in the world can easily petition to move to Israel. The Palestinians who were driven out violently in 1948 from their ancestral homeland are not allowed to set foot on their own homeland. This double standard is one of the most painful realities of the racist policies of the Israeli state.
The Nakba was not a random, accidental event. Leading Zionists going back to Theodore Herzl had fantasized about driving out the “penniless” Palestinian natives across the borders. On the subject of ethnic cleansing, the first Israeli prime minister, Ben-Gurion, wrote in 1937:
"With compulsory transfer we [would] have a vast area [for settlement] ....
I support compulsory transfer. I don't see anything immoral in it."
(Benny Morris, Righteous Victims, p. 144)
The ethnic cleansing (the Israeli sources themselves use the phrase “cleansing” to refer to driving out the indigenous Arab population) was achieved through violence, rape, and murder. Much of the information has come to us through Israeli historians who have opened up the archives of the Israeli military. One of them is Benny Morris, who in a famous interview with the Israeli newspaper Haaretz in 2004 stated the following:
Question: According to your new findings, how many cases of Israeli rape were there in 1948?
Benny Morris: "About a dozen. In Acre four soldiers raped a girl and murdered her and her father. In Jaffa, soldiers of the Kiryati Brigade raped one girl and tried to rape several more. At Hunin, which is in the Galilee, two girls were raped and then murdered. There were one or two cases of rape at Tantura, south of Haifa. There was one case of rape at Qula, in the center of the country. At the village of Abu Shusha, near Kibbutz Gezer [in the Ramle area] there were four female prisoners, one of whom was raped a number of times. And there were other cases. Usually more than one soldier was involved. Usually there were one or two Palestinian girls. In a large proportion of the cases the event ended with murder. Because neither the victims nor the rapists liked to report these events, we have to assume that the dozen cases of rape that were reported, which I found, are not the whole story. They are just the tip of the iceberg."
Question: According to your findings, how many acts of Israeli massacre were perpetrated in 1948?
Benny Morris: "Twenty-four. In some cases four or five people were executed, in others the numbers were 70, 80, 100. There was also a great deal of arbitrary killing. Two old men are spotted walking in a field - they are shot. A woman is found in an abandoned village - she is shot. There are cases such as the village of Dawayima [in the Hebron region], in which a column entered the village with all guns blazing and killed anything that moved.
"The worst cases were Saliha (70-80 killed), Deir Yassin (100-110), Lod (250), Dawayima (hundreds) and perhaps Abu Shusha (70). There is no unequivocal proof of a large-scale massacre at Tantura, but war crimes were perpetrated there. At Jaffa there was a massacre about which nothing had been known until now. The same at Arab al Muwassi, in the north. About half of the acts of massacre were part of Operation Hiram [in the north, in October 1948]: at Safsaf, Saliha, Jish, Eilaboun, Arab al Muwasi, Deir al Asad, Majdal Krum, Sasa. In Operation Hiram there was a unusually high concentration of executions of people against a wall or next to a well in an orderly fashion.
Usually when these kinds of evidence is presented to audience members who are not familiar with them, there is a typical charge that the speaker must be somehow either anti-Semitic or a “self-hating Jew.” How much more disturbing to realize that the above historian, Benny Morris, is actually a committed Zionist Israeli who thinks the only mistake in the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians was that “only” 50% of the Palestinians were expelled instead of all of them. Here is the evidence in his own words:
Morris: "If he was already engaged in expulsion, maybe he should have done a complete job. I know that this stuns the Arabs and the liberals and the politically correct types. But my feeling is that this place would be quieter and know less suffering if the matter had been resolved once and for all. If Ben-Gurion had carried out a large expulsion and cleansed the whole country – the whole Land of Israel, as far as the Jordan River. It may yet turn out that this was his fatal mistake. If he had carried out a full expulsion – rather than a partial one – he would have stabilized the State of Israel for generations."
[Interviewer:] I find it hard to believe what I am hearing.
Benny Morris: "If the end of the story turns out to be a gloomy one for the Jews, it will be because Ben-Gurion did not complete the transfer in 1948. Because he left a large and volatile demographic reserve in the West Bank and Gaza and within Israel itself."
In other words, honest historians do not disagree about the fact of what took place in 1948. The debate in Israel is whether the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians is justified. That is where we are with respect to “the only democracy in the region”, the commonly used though woefully inaccurate euphemism used for Israel, arguing about the justification of ethnic cleansing of 700,000 human beings. This is simply not how a real democracy behaves. And it can not become a real democracy until and unless it comes to atone for the very violent atrocity that is at the very heart of its founding event.
Of course we have much more than simply the Israeli archives to provide us with the evidence of this ethnic cleansing and forced expulsion. One of the most powerful evidence comes from the Palestinian refugees themselves, many of whom are still alive. Palestinian scholars themselves have put together the “living history” narratives of these Palestinians and their families.
The United Nations immediately set out to issue a statement against the 1948 ethnic cleansing, and called for Palestinian refugees to be allowed to return to their home land.
"Article 11 of the United Nations resolution reads:
(The General Assembly) Resolves that the refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return and for loss of or damage to property which, under principles of international law or in equity, should be made good by the Governments or authorities responsible."
To this date, some 60 years later, the Israeli state has refused to allow for Palestinians to return, arguing that if Palestinians return Israel would no longer be a Jewish majority state.
Neither Muslims nor Jews particularly believe in the notion of an “original sin”, yet if one may excuse the metaphor, it might be said that the Nakba is the original sin that exists in the very founding of the modern nation state of Israel. It would be impossible, as the Christian Palestinian leader Hanan Ashrawi has said, to move to a peaceful resolution without addressing it:
Al-Nakba is therefore not merely a historical date to be commemorated. It is the collective memory of Palestinians, which shapes their identity as a people. Al-Nakba is not a distant memory but a painful reality that continues to fester, as the rights of refugees continue to be denied and the inalienable rights of our nation remain unfulfilled.
It is time to recognize that Al-Nakba is as real for Palestinians as it should be for Israelis. It is an inescapable story of loss, dispossession and a great historic injustice that targeted the most precious characteristic of any people: its identity.
For readers who want to see a more detail account of the Nakba, I recommend this interview from Democracy Now:
Perhaps it is best to give the last word to Hanan Ashrawi, the eloquent Palestinian peace activist:
For peace to prevail, for two states to live side by side, for a future of security and prosperity to begin in the region, Israel should not be afraid to recognize Al-Nakba and learn the lessons of its history. Israel must come to recognize its historic accountability in creating Al-Nakba for neither denial nor distortion can serve the cause of peace.
Genuine recognition is a sine qua non for the process of historical redemption. Peace is a phase of healing that must be established on truth, justice, transparency, and equality. There is no other formula. By recognizing our historical narrative and suffering, Israel will be embarking on a true journey for a just and comprehensive peace.
Sunday, May 20, 2012
Saturday, May 19, 2012
Monday’s Religion News Roundup: Romney at Liberty, Obama (a heretic?) at Barnard, no gay prom, more breast-beating - Articles
Mitt Romney gave the commencement address at Liberty University on Saturday and tried to woo evangelicals while finessing his own Mormonism.
The reviews are many and generally positive, depending on what you were looking for. Mark Silk calls it “an exceptionally well-calculated performance.” CBN’s David Brody says it was “a winning effort.”
Romney himself tells CBN that he’s not running to be “pastor-in-chief.”
Black churches react to Barack Obama’s evolution on gay marriage. Are opponents being hypocritical?
Obama could hit some culture war issues today when he addresses the graduates at Manhattan’s women-only Barnard College, a speech he asked to make. And after he’ll headline a $5,000-a-ticket fund-raiser in Chelsea co-hosted by LGBT Leadership Council and singer Ricky Martin.
A student at a Lexington, Kentucky Catholic High School claims she was barred from prom because she planned to bring a date of the same sex.
Elsewhere in the country, Gallup says acceptance of homosexual relations is “the new normal.”
Nancy Pelosi says her Catholic faith “compels” her to support same-sex rights, much as President Obama said his more Protestant version tells him to do the same.
A top priest in Washington says Obama is embracing heresy.
Atheists aren’t going to shame liberals like E.J. Dionne into leaving the Catholic Church.
Do talk-radio standards justify Richard Land's plagiarism? (That is copied almost verbatim from EthicsDaily’s headline, by the way.)
Lawmakers in Kansas say you can’t be too careful, so they are the latest to pass a bill to outlaw the use of Islamic Shariah law in civil courts.
An appeals court says no official Day of Prayer for Colorado.
Is China training Tibetan women to assassinate the Dalai Lama? All very Bond-ish.
The Lama was less forthcoming about his views on whether Tibetan monks should self-immolate.
Shocked by that Time magazine cover of the breastfeeding kid? Matthew Schmitz suggests you think again. And he includes a gallery of images, like the one above, to help.
David Gibson
Photo credit: First Things
Friday, May 18, 2012
Syrian Christians live in uneasy alliance with Bashar Assad - Articles
DAMASCUS, Syria (RNS) Hani Sarhan is a Christian who says none of his relatives works with Bashar Assad's regime or has anything to do with it.
"But what we heard from (the protesters) at the beginning of this revolution saying, 'Christians to Beirut, Alawites to the coffin,' started us thinking about the real aim of this revolution," he said. "So from this point of view, fearing for my life, I declared my support for President Assad."
Muslims dominate this nation of 22 million people, but Christians can be found at all levels of Syrian government, business and military. The 2 million Christians here trace their roots to ancient communities and have survived under many rulers as Christian enclaves in other Arab nations, such as Saudi Arabia, have withered.
The rebellion of hundreds of thousands of Muslims against Assad that began in March 2011 has not seen Christians abandon their support for the Alawites, the Muslim sect to which Assad belongs and that has controlled Syria for decades. Christians have largely remained quiet as Assad's forces pummeled rebel cities and towns with artillery, killing close to 10,000 people, according to the United Nations.
Many of Syria's Christians continue to stand by the regime not out of support for Assad but out of fear of civil war if rebels gain strength, or worse, if they win and install an Islamist government that's hostile to religious minorities.
Qatana, a town 20 miles southwest of Damascus, is home to a Christian community of several hundred families. Protests here against the Assad regime have prompted military incursions and clashes between renegade soldiers and the regular army. At checkpoints surrounding the town, some Christians chat to Alawite security officers. Others offer water and whiskey.
Christians firmly believe that the Alawite regime will keep them safe. With the town's two churches located in Sunni Muslim neighborhoods, for months many families were too fearful to attend service, Christians here said. But a teacher at a Christian school said life is better now than before.
"The crisis is almost over," she said, asking her name be withheld because she feared retribution. "Our church was full on Easter Sunday; last year, it was practically empty. We were allowed to parade around the town, when last year we could only go in the street outside the church."
Yet Christian communities elsewhere have seen trouble.
A church in Homs, Um al-Zunnar, was badly damaged during the military's monthlong shelling of the city in February. Christians in Homs said the church was attacked by "foreign-backed armed gangs." Syrian state TV aired interviews with civilians who said the rockets were fired from the mountains dividing Syria from Lebanon, where rebels have arms-smuggling routes.
The uprising has also hurt Christians' standard of living.
Foreign visitors are nowhere to be seen in the Christian neighborhood of Bab Touma in central Damascus, a once-popular tourist attraction characterized by winding alleyways, traditional Arab-style hotels and ancient churches.
In 2010, tourists from the Persian Gulf, Europe and North America added $8 billion to the Syrian economy. Since the revolt began, Syria's tourism sector has dropped off by 60 percent, according to the Tourism Ministry, and Christian businesses are among those suffering.
These days, many conversations in the close-knit communities turn to "the crisis," as it is called. Families watch Arab television broadcasts by the extremist Salafist sheik Adnan Arour, who from exile in Saudi Arabia calls for jihad against the Assad regime and death to those who actively support it.
Pro-regime commentators on state-run Syrian TV pounce on figures such as Arour and say Assad is all that stands between extreme Islam and stability. Christians here talk of letters sent to churches saying they are the next to go after Assad, and a mortar that struck a monastery in the Christian town of Saidnaya, north of Damascus, was blamed on rebels.
There is little evidence that the rebels are responsible for such acts, and Christians here say Arour does not appear to have a lot of support. But recent suicide bombings in Syria have the look of al-Qaida, which seeks Islamic law over all.
Many Christians simply do not want to upset their way of living in a country where their fate will always be decided by Muslims, according to Syria experts.
Christian doctors, lawyers and dentists have established successful and stable careers. Others occupy leading positions in the Syrian army, though a new constitution mandates the head of state must be Muslim.
"They do support (Assad) and are feeling quite anxious," said Joshua Landis, director of the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Oklahoma and a Syria expert. "Even so, there are plenty of Christians (in Syria) who believe that democracy in the long run is the best protection for Christians."
(Stephen Starr and S. Akminas write for USA Today.)
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Thursday, May 17, 2012
Black churches conflicted on Obama’s gay marriage decision - Articles
(RNS) The pulpits of the nation's black churches took measure Sunday (May 13) of President Obama's decision to support gay marriage, and the result was conflicted.
Show Caption | | Details Members of Mount Airy Church of God in Christ in Philadelphia take part in a service. RNS photo by Mary Godleski Some churches were silent on the issue. At others, pastors spoke against the president's decision Wednesday — but kindly of the man himself. A few blasted the president and his decision. A minority spoke in favor of the decision and expressed understanding of the president's change of heart.
Bishop Timothy Clarke, head of the First Church of God, a large African-American church with a television ministry in Columbus, Ohio, was perhaps most typical. He felt compelled to address the president's comments at a Wednesday evening service and again Sunday morning. He was responding to an outpouring of calls, emails and text messages from members of his congregation after the president's remarks.
What did he hear from churchgoers? "No church or group is monolithic. Some were powerfully agitated and disappointed. Others were curious — why now? to what end? Others were hurt. And others, to be honest, told me it's not an issue and they don't have a problem with it."
What did the bishop tell his congregation? He opposes gay marriage. It is not just a social issue, he said, but a religious one for those who follow the Bible. "The spiritual issue is ground in the word of God."
That said, "I believe the statement the president made and his decision was made in good faith. I am sure because the president is a good man. I know his decision was made after much thought and consideration and, I'm sure, even prayer."
Clarke asked his church "to pray for the president and pray this will not become a political football with uncivil language and heated rhetoric. We can disagree on this, as we do on many things, and still love each other."
The conflicted sentiments within African-American churches reflect a broader struggle in the American public. A USA Today Poll showed that slightly more than half of Americans agreed with the president's decision. A scientifically valid breakdown of African-Americans was not available, but past polls have shown blacks generally opposed to gay marriage.
African-Americans are a key voting bloc for the president this November. In 2008, exit polls showed Obama lost to John McCain among white voters but won more than 95% of the African-American vote.
Dwight McKissic, senior pastor at the Cornerstone Baptist Church in Arlington, Texas, said last week he would not speak on gay marriage Sunday because it was Mother's Day and his wife would lead the church.
However, he planned to focus directly on the topic in next week's sermon. "President Obama has betrayed the Bible and the black church with his endorsement of same-sex marriage," McKissic said.
On the opposite side of the issue, pastor Enoch Fuzz of Corinthian Missionary Baptist Church of Nashville, Tenn., said last week that he understood why many pastors opposed gay marriage, but he planned to discuss Sunday why he supports gay marriage. "I know many in the black community have trouble accepting gay marriage," he said. "But all of us have gay friends or family, and we love them."
Fuzz said he thinks the president's comments won't hurt him politically, although some African-American Christians may be upset with him. "There's really no better option. People are not going to go out and vote for Mitt Romney."
In Columbus, Mayor Michael Coleman is confident black churches and voters will stick with the president, even if they disagree over gay marriage. The four-term African-American mayor made the same conversion himself on the issue of gay marriage — for the same reasons — this year.
"I had to evolve on the issue and think it through, too, and I came to the conclusion it was the right thing," said Coleman, a Democrat who supports Obama. "When it is the right thing to do, politics is irrelevant."
Coleman discussed his change with the leader of Columbus' largest black church. "He disagrees with me rather strongly," Coleman says. Will it endanger his political support? "No. We're very close."
Obama won't be abandoned by black churches either, not in the key swing state of Ohio, Coleman said. "Many in the pastoral community appreciate his courage in making the decision, even if they disagree," Coleman says.
In North Carolina, where black churches helped pass a constitutional amendment last week banning gay marriage, Ron Gates, president of the Interdenominational Ministerial Alliance of Asheville/Buncombe County, decided not to focus on gay marriage in his Sunday sermon but instead make it "a footnote," so his continued support for the amendment was clear.
"I support my president and love my president, but I think he is wrong," said Keith Ogden, pastor of the predominantly black Hill Street Baptist Church in Asheville. "He is not God, and he doesn't speak for all black folk because he is African-American."
(Dennis Cauchon writes for USA Today.)
(Contributing: Bob Smietana of The Tennessean (Nashville); Jon Ostendorff of the Asheville (N.C.) Citizen-Times.)
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Wednesday, May 16, 2012
Tuesday’s Religion News Roundup: Kosher laws are kosher, beating kids, not. Robertson good with Romney, Luther insults you. - Articles
Religious freedom updates: The state can say what’s kosher and what’s not, says an appeals court.
And encouraging parents to use wooden rods to spank misbehaving children, including infants, because the Bible tells you so is actually not protected under the religious freedom doctrine.
But is criticizing your pastor in an online forum protected as freedom of speech? The Oregon pastor in question doesn’t think so, and is suing to the tune of half a million bucks.
Christ and couture: A Texas pastor wants clergy to show some fashion flair.
A new Tennessee law aims to keep kids from getting to first base, or in Gov. Bill Haslam’s words, away from “Groin Central Station.”
Pat Robertson is the latest Christian conservative to give Mitt Romney absolution, if not an outright endorsement: “The question is, if you have two candidates, you don't have Jesus running against someone else. You have Obama running against Romney.”
Here’s a somewhat different way that evangelicals can talk to, and about, Mormons.
Rhode Island’s governor says the state will recognize same-sex marriages performed in other states.
Colorado will not be one of those states: Republicans nix a gay civil unions bill.
An Iowa Catholic diocese and a Catholic high school have forged a compromise over how to present a scholarship award to a gay student from a foundation that supports gay rights: An Eychenar Foundation representative will be permitted to present the award to Keaton Fuller but will not be allowed to speak at the ceremony.
Pope Benedict XVI seems closer than ever to preparing a special place to welcome back Traditionalist rightwing schismatics. Some of the rejectionists may split off again, however, because, well, that’s what they do.
John Allen handicaps the latest speculation on Benedict’s potential successors.
For Catholics (and everyone else) who may not feel dissed enough as it is, there is a “Lutheran Insulter” site. “You sophistic worms, grasshoppers, locusts, frogs and lice!” (Calm down, that was Martin, not me – from “Against Latomus,” pg. 150 of Luther's Works, Vol. 32)
Michael Peppard just wishes it were in the original German. That’s a theologian for you.
A Minnesota grand jury indicts a national right-to-die group in connection with the 2007 suicide of a suburban Minneapolis woman.
The Dalai Lama is giving most of his Templeton Prize money ($1.7 million) to Save the Children India.
David Gibson
Photo credit from Wikipedia: Luther looking so fed up with you, by Lucas Cranach the Elder
Maurice Sendak’s Jewish legacy lives on along with the ‘Wild Things’ - Articles
(RNS) When the mind that first imagined the Wild Things disappeared for good last week, the children-turned-adults who adored Max and his wild rumpus with big-eyed monsters didn't just mourn the loss of Maurice Sendak; they also grieved for their own ever-fading childhoods.
Show Caption | | Details Maurice Sendak created some of the world’s best-loved contemporary children’s books, including 'Where the Wild Things Are'. RNS photo by John Dugdale/courtesy Harper Collins Publishers Since his death on May 8 at age 83, Sendak has been referred to frequently as the most important children's author of the 20th century. His millions of fans crossed borders of age, race, gender, nationality and religion.
It's a measure of Sendak's imagination that his stories — so infused with a very particular Jewishness — are absent evidence of Judaism or anything else besides a good read to his most important readers.
"As a child, I wasn't thinking about the Jewishness in his books," said Laurel Snyder, an author of children's books. "I was a kid."
Snyder said she grew up with "Zlateh the Goat," a 1966 story by Isaac Bashevis Singer, illustrated by Sendak. By then, Sendak had already won the Caldecott Medal, the highest honor for children's literature, for "Where the Wild Things Are," and Singer was one of the most important writers in America.
The pairing of two American literary superstars for "Zlateh the Goat" was important for both adult and children's literature, said Snyder.
Show Caption | | Details Maurice Sendak at the Rosenbach Museum & Library, 1985. RNS photo by Frank Armstrong/ Courtesy, Rosenbach Museum & Library "Teaming them up not only brought a Jewish book like that into the limelight, but also brought a layer of literary legitimacy into the children's book world," she said.
Sendak's relationship to Judaism was perhaps most shaped by the Holocaust.
"The Holocaust has run like a river of blood through all my books," Sendak told The New York Times in 2006. "Anything I did had to deal with that — with my family, the ruination of my childhood, the humiliation of being a victim."
Neal Sokol, who included many pieces of Sendak's original artwork in his 2010 show, "Monsters and Miracles: A Journey Through Jewish Picture Books" at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles, said Sendak continually used the "ordeals and odysseys" of Jews from both Old World shtetls and New World city streets to inform his stories.
"Jewish culture defined his work and he wasn't ashamed of that," said Sokol.
Sendak, whose parents traveled to the U.S. from Poland in the 1920s, was often sick as a child in Depression-era Brooklyn. His later writings and illustrations borrowed from his memories of childhood's dark corners and the way children can tap into their imaginations to escape those corners.
"It is always amazing to me that children survive childhood, that they go on to have professional careers and run countries," Sendak said at a talk at Washington University's Graham Chapel in 1989. "I think it's due to their tremendous courage. They have to be very brave. And that loyalty and courage and bravery is the subtext of everything I have ever written."
Sendak based the monsters in "Where the Wild Things Are" on his aunts and uncles that his parents had managed to bring to Brooklyn from the old country.
Show Caption | | Details Final drawing for 'Where the Wild Things Are' - pen and ink, watercolor. RNS photo © Maurice Sendak, 1963, all rights reserved. Courtesy, Rosenbach Museum & Library "I hated them all," he said at Graham Chapel. "They were grotesque, with their huge noses, their great cascades of hair, their bad teeth."
Early in his career as an illustrator, Sendak received commissions from Jewish organizations including B'nai B'rith and the United Synagogue Commission on Jewish Education. In 2010, according to The Wall Street Journal, Sendak gave $1 million to the Jewish Board of Family & Children's Services, a mental health and social service agency in New York, where his life partner of 50 years, Eugene Glynn, worked as a psychiatrist.
When he designed a series of pamphlets on anti-Semitism for the Anti-Defamation League early in his career, Sendak based the drawings on sketches he made of kids in his Bensonhurst neighborhood in the 1940s.
While Sendak's parents were able to bring his mother's family out of Poland, his father's family was wiped out by the Nazis. As a teenager, Sendak studied the black-and-white photographs of his murdered relatives.
Patrick Rodgers of the Rosenbach Museum & Library in Philadelphia, which houses the largest collection of Sendak's work, said the legacy of the Holocaust is "the biggest thing" in Sendak's work.
Show Caption | | Details The Chertoff Mural. RNS photo © 1961 by Maurice Sendak, all rights reserved. Courtesy, Rosenbach Museum & Library "His relationship to Judaism is a mostly secular one," Rodgers said. "He struggled growing up semi-kosher. He didn't do much in the way of worship. He couldn't relate to the world his family came from, but he became really aware of it when that world was falling apart."
As absorbed as Sendak was with his Jewish roots, his God was not Abraham's God. In 2003, he told Terry Gross, host of NPR's "Fresh Air," that religion "made no sense to me."
"You know who my gods are, who I believe in fervently?" Sendak asked. "Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson — she's probably the top — Mozart, Shakespeare, Keats. These are wonderful gods who have gotten me through the narrow straits of life."
Rodgers said Sendak's form of worship "was being an artist and trying, almost in a platonic way, to access other art that moved him deeply."
"Listening to Mozart while looking at Blake and transmogrifying them into what he did — that was his spiritual practice," he said. "That was where his soul was."
(Tim Townsend writes for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in St. Louis.)
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