Bill's 'Faith Matters' Weblog

Remembering Thomas Merton: 12-10-09

Forty-one years ago today, while attending a conference of monks in Bangkok, Thailand, Thomas Merton (pictured here), a Trappist monk and author, was accidentially electrocuted. It was an appalling loss of a brilliant writer and thinker, whose autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, published in 1948 when he was just 33 years old, gained international fame and still is read a lot today.

As the biography of Merton to which I've linked you in the previous paragraph notes, Merton was "arguably the most influential American Catholic author of the twentieth century."

I first became aware of Merton the year he died. I was working on the afternoon Gannett newspaper in Rochester, N.Y., and was then the editor of a weekly tabloid called "listen. . ." inside the paper. I wrote a piece about Merton's newly released book, Faith and Violence: Christian Teaching and Christian Practice. I thought it was full of challenging insights.

In fact, I still have my 1968 copy of that book, and inside the cover are the instructions to the newspaper's art department to turn the book's cover into a display 32 picas wide and 8 inches deep. Well, as I say, I thought then and think now that Merton is deeper than that, but that's apparently all the space I could devote to showing readers the book's cover then.

Merton lived at the Trappist Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani in Kentucky, producing hundreds of articles and dozens of books from 1941 until his death. If you never have read any Merton, you can decide which of his books might interest you. In the meantime, I'll recommend three related books, none of them very recent.

The first is The Abbey of Gethsemani: Place of Peace and Paradox, by Dianne Aprile, who when she wrote this was a columnist with the Louisville Courier-Journal and a member, with me, of the National Society of Newspaper Columnists.

Next is Keeping the Faith: A Skeptic's Journey, by Fenton Johnson, who grew up right next to Gethsemani. It's a fascinating read.

And finally, Thomas Merton: Monk and Poet, a Critical Study, by George Woodcock.

Perhaps you have a favorite book either by or about Merton. If so, let us know. It seems to me the world today has a severe shortage of brilliant contemplative minds like Merton's. I'm not sure why, but if Merton were around I'm sure he'd have some good guesses.

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A COURT CASE WITH BIBLICAL ROOTS

The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to rule on a really interesting case involving a Christian group at a college and the group's restrictions on membership that violate the college's rules about non-discrimination. The Christian Legal Society at the Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco no longer is a registered student organizaton because it decided that gays and lesbians could not be voting members or hold office. One appeals court ruled against the student group while in a different case, an appeals court ruled in favor of a similar group's membership restrictions. The high court will have to settle it. But, once more, none of this would be an issue if Christians did not misread scripture in such a way as to make them think discrimination of this sort of God's will. 

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ANOTHER P.S.: For your holiday giving, don't be shy about buying my new book, They Were Just People: Stories of Rescue in Poland During the Holocaust, co-written with Rabbi Jacques Cukierkorn. To read about it and find several ways of ordering it, click here. And remember, all the royalties go to Holocaust-related charities, so feel good about buying lots of copies. 

Where faith is growing: 12-9-09

In recent years scholars studying the demographics of Christianity have reported that the faith is growing rapidly in the Southern Hemisphere, particularly in Africa and Asia.

The books to read are The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity, by Philip Jenkins, and The New Shape of World Christian: How American Experience Reflects Global Faith, by Mark Noll.

At the same time, folks looking at the broader demographics about religion in general in the United States have shown that Protestants, who once were a huge majority of the citizens, now are barely a majority and may, in fact, be just a plurality now. And they've revealed quite a growth in the number of people who declare themselves religiously unaffiliated, whether atheists, agnostics or something else. A good place to get a handle on all this is by looking at the U.S. Religious Landscape Survey of the Pew Forum on Religion & Public LIfe.

Along these same lines, this report deals with a faith that is growing, too -- perhaps in a surprising place. Islam is said to be booming in Latin America.

The report focuses on Brazil -- especially Sao Paulo -- but it looks as if Islam is experiencing substantial growth in South America generally. Now, Christianity -- especially Catholicism -- still is overwhelmingly dominant on that continent, and there are even predictions that before this century is out South America will be predominantly Pentecostal.

So the ebb and flow of religious and non-religious growth must be seen over the long haul to make sure, for instance, that the recent spurt of Islam isn't a temporary phenomenon.

By the way, in early August I gave blog readers figures on world religious adherents. You can find that by clicking here and going to the end of that posting.

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STANDING AGAINST PREJUDICE

The ban on mosque minarets passed in Switzerland recently is drawing criticism from not just Muslims but also from Christians and Jews, this report says. Good. The referendum was xenophobic move that puts all religions on notice that their followers may be next.

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P.S.: Someone educated me about this the other day and I thought it worth passing along. Someone has put together a global Web site for Christians who want to make charitable donations to any of dozens of projects and ministries all over the world. Click here to have a look.

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ANOTHER P.S.: For your holiday giving, don't be shy about buying my new book, They Were Just People: Stories of Rescue in Poland During the Holocaust, co-written with Rabbi Jacques Cukierkorn. To read about it and find several ways of ordering it, click here. And remember, all the royalties go to Holocaust-related charities, so feel good about buying lots of copies.

On papal infallibility: 12-8-09

Over the years I've heard lots of misunderstandings about the idea of papal infallibility in the Roman Catholic Church.

Today is a good day to get into that subject because it was on this date in 1869 that the First Vatican Council opened, and it was that council that defined papal primacy and infallibility. This was contained in a document entitled Pastor Aeternus, and it affirmed that the pope possesses and exercises infallibility when he speaks ex cathedra (meaning from his chair) in his office as pope when defining doctrine regarding faith and morals.

Many people -- especially Protestants -- speak erroneously about the pope being infallible in everything he says or does. The Catholic Church has never claimed that. In fact, only two times has a pope specifically declared an "article of faith" to be dogmatically (an important word) infallible -- both times about Mary and once in 1854, before the First Vatican Council formally defined such infallibility. That 1854 declaration (which also happened on Dec. 8) had to do with the Immaculate Conception, which many people think refers to the birth of Jesus but actually refers to the birth of Mary, mother of Jesus. The other article of faith dogmaticaly declared to be an infallible teaching was released in 1950 and had to do with the Assumption of Mary.

This is not to say that the Catholic Church considers all other teachings fallible and perhaps even in error. Rather, as the online Catholic Encyclopedia notes, "That the church is infallible in her definitions on faith and morals is itself a Catholic dogma, which, although it was formulated ecumenically for the first time in the (First) Vatican Council, had been explicitly taught long before and had been assumed from the very beginning without question down to the time of the Protestant Reformation."

One informal way to think about this is that Catholic teaching is simply assumed to be without error. But if some dispute about it arises or it is challenged in some way, the pope may feel it necessary to declare the teaching an infallible article of faith just to make sure everyone is clear. Click here for an interesting blog entry about all of this.

There was some dispute about whether Pope John Paul II's mid-1990s declaration that the church would never have women priests was an infallible teaching. Click here for the idea that it was declared infallibly. Click here for the contention that it was not infallibly taught. This latter piece, by the way, contains a definition of three modes of infallible Catholic teaching.

Well, look, the point of all this is that people (especially those of us who are Protestants or at least not Catholic) would do well not to toss around the idea that everything a pope does or says is, in the church's view, infallible. That's just not so. And although we may not understand all the nuances of the teachings and doctrines of faith traditions other than our own, it seems to me we have an obligation not to spread misinformation -- and certainly not to do so willingly our out of purposeful ignorance.

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THE POPE'S WORD ON CLIMATE CHANGE

One of the things Pope Benedict XVI has not said infallibly but, nonetheless, well, is his message to the worldwide climate gathering in Denmark: Live responsibly. What that means for most of us is to simplify our lives. Boy, do we Americans need to paid heed to that lesson -- although, of course, it flies in the face of the hopes of people who want the consumer to lead us out of the recession.

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P.S.: For your holiday giving, don't be shy about buying my new book, They Were Just People: Stories of Rescue in Poland During the Holocaust, co-written with Rabbi Jacques Cukierkorn. To read about it and find several ways of ordering it, click here. And remember, all the royalties go to Holocaust-related charities, so feel good about buying lots of copies.

Faith this, faith that: 12-7-09

On this Pearl Harbor date that continues to live in infamy, I will offer you not a single overriding subject but, rather, a collection of things that have been kind of stacking up in my files.

* The first has to do with religion only tangentially in that it has to do with people. Do you have any idea how many people have ever lived and, out of that total number, how many may be alive today? Click here for at least one reasonable guess. Makes me curious what all those 106 billion plus people believed about God.

* A Catholic college in Virginia has been attracting publicity lately for its commitment to traditional (some would say conservative) Catholic values. Christendom College is said to be thriving with this approach, says this report from Newsmax magazine.

* A survey done for the National Fatherhood Initiative has some intriguing results about what mothers really thing -- intriguing especially for people of faith who think and worry about the shape of families in America. As a father I'm all for fathers being actively engaged in bringing up their kids. But I also know that sometimes fathers aren't present. And in such cases, I think it's part of the duty of faith communities to help provide some of what's missing, if the family in question is attached to such a congregation. It may or may not take a village, but sometimes it takes a congregation.

(So you're wondering what this photo today has to do with any of this? Nothing, really. I took it near San Francisco a few years ago, and I just thought it was a more peaceful water image to contemplate today than something from the attack on Pearl Harbor.)

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P.S.: For your holiday giving, don't be shy about buying my new book, They Were Just People: Stories of Rescue in Poland During the Holocaust, co-written with Rabbi Jacques Cukierkorn. To read about it and find several ways of ordering it, click here. And remember, all the royalties go to Holocaust-related charities, so feel good about buying lots of copies.

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NOTE: Any comments posted here today almost certainly will not get published until some time this afternoon. Thanks for your patience. Bill.

When was Jesus born? 12-5/6-09

 
The other day here (in fact for several days), some of the comments focused on what Christian traditions may have had roots in pagan or other cultures and what were original with early followers of Jesus.

It's an intriguing topic -- though not one that makes or breaks the faith.

Modern scholars are overwhelmingly of the opinion that we don't know the exact birth date (day or year) of Jesus, even though we celebrate it on Dec. 25, just a few weeks from now. Some have proposed that the date had something to do with the winter soltice or other ancient festivals that tried to brighten up the dead of winter.

What is important for Christianity is not exactly when Jesus was born but that the incarnation happened at all.

Still, the date of the birth is intriguing, and some scholars in past times have gone to great lengths to justify Dec. 25 as precisely the right date for the birth.

One was Alfred Edersheim, who wrote The Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah in the late 1800s. Here is what he wrote in a footnote to a sentence that begins, "It was, then, on that 'wintry night' of the 25th of December. . .":

"There is no adequate reason for questioning the historical accuracy of this date. The objections generally made rest on grounds which seem to me historically untenable. The subject has been fully discussed in an article by Cassel in Herzog's Real. Ency. . .But a curious piece of evidence comes to us from a Jewish source.

"In the addition to the Megillath Taanith. . .the 9th Tebbeth is marked as a fast day, and it is added, that the reason for this is not stated. Now, Jewish chronologists have fixed on that day as that of Christ's birth, and it is remarkable that, between the years 500 and 816 A.D. the 25th of December fell no less than twelve times on the 9th Tebbeth. If the 9th Tebbeth, or 25th December, was regrded as the birthday of Christ, we can understand the concealment about it."

This round-Robin-Hood's-barn reasoning strikes me as similar to that performed by 17th Century Church of Ireland Bishop James Ussher to set the date for the creation of the world as Oct. 23, 4004 B.C. Oh, puh-leeze.

As I say, though history is crucial to Christianity (if Jesus wasn't a real, historical person, the faith falls apart), setting specific dates for his birth or even his death and resurrection is not only difficult but ultimately irrelevant.

It's like wondering whether Adam had a belly button, thereby missing the point of the creation story. And, by the way, we now celebrate both Abe Lincoln's and George Washington's birthdays on Presidents' Day, so the exact date sometimes doesn't matter even when we know the exact date.

(The art work here is a photo I took several years ago in Bloomington, Ill., at a relief sale for the Mennonite Central Committee. It was a large handmade fabric.)

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AN IMPRESSIVE AWARD IN RELIGION

Eboo Patel, who spoke here in Kansas City last month, has won a prestigious $200,000 religion award. This is wonderful news for people who value interfaith cooperation and it raises up an articulate Muslim who works hard against the violent extremists who use Islam as a cover for their destructive ideology. For the blog posting I did right after Patel's visit to KC, click here.

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NOTE: Any comments posted here after early Sunday morning almost certainly will not get published until some time Monday afternoon. Thanks for your patience. Bill.

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P.S.: For your holiday giving, don't be shy about buying my new book, They Were Just People: Stories of Rescue in Poland During the Holocaust, co-written with Rabbi Jacques Cukierkorn. To read about it and find several ways of ordering it, click here. And remember, all the royalties go to Holocaust-related charities, so feel good about buying lots of copies.

Teaching about faith early: 12-4-09

My niece in California has a six-year-old son, Miles, who is in the first grade.

One of the subjects he's learning about is geography, although Miles is no slouch at that, having become fascinated a couple of years ago with license plate, which he started collecting and which his wise parents used to introduce him to information about the states from which they came.

So not long ago, Miles sent to me Flat Stanley, which is a tool his teacher is using to help students understand more about cities and states around the country. The people to whom Stanley, a cut out paper doll, is sent are to reply with information about their city that Stanley might have learned there.

Well, it's been a lot of fun to have Stanley around. He's met most of our six kids and six grandkids and he's been all over the place.

But I thought, given my interest in religion, that I'd include a bit about that in Kansas City, too. So I had Flat Stanley come to my church with us last Sunday. (There he is in the left photo next to our sign by the parking lot.) But I also wanted Miles to know that Kansas City is home to people who aren't, like me, a Presbyterian.

So I took him to visit the New Reform Temple, where my co-author and friend Jacques Cukierkorn is the rabbi. And he showed Stanely the three Torah scrolls in the synagogue's sanctuary. (As you can see in the photo on the right, Stanely even got to touch them.) 

I don't know if Miles will grow up to be a Presbyterian, a Catholic, a Buddhist, an atheist or something else. But I think it's important to begin teaching children that religion plays an important part in the lives of many Americans. Flat Stanley's visit gave me an opportunity to offer that lesson to one more child. My report to Flat Stanley's teacher should be to her soon.

What religion is Stanley? Not positive, but I think he's a Paperterian.

(Speaking of my church, our wonderful annual "Journey to Bethlehem" is being presented this evening and tomorrow evening. For details, click here.)

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EVEN THE HINDUS ARGUE WITH EACH OTHER

The ancient religion of Hinduism may appear to those of us on the outside to be calm and without much in the way of internal struggle, but in reality it has its divisions and controversies, as do all religions. For a sense of that, check out this recent interview with a professor who is the author of the book Why I Am Not a Hindu.

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P.S.: For your holiday giving, don't be shy about buying my new book, They Were Just People: Stories of Rescue in Poland During the Holocaust, co-written with Rabbi Jacques Cukierkorn. To read about it and find several ways of ordering it, click here. And remember, all the royalties go to Holocaust-related charities, so feel good about buying lots of copies.

Long-term interfaith work: 12-3-09

I have said here and elsewhere before that true interfaith dialogue and understanding takes time.

The folks who run the Stony Point Center, a national Presbyterian conference center in upstate New York, seem to understand that.

So they have created a five-year program called Community of Living Traditions, in which Christians, Jews and Muslims will begin living together, working together and worshiping and learning side by side. It strikes me as a bold and wonderful thing to try.

My guess is that even though the people committed to doing this have interfaith experience and are committed to nonviolence and peacemaking, they will find various challenges as they move through the process.

Most interfaith dialogue amounts to little more than a weeknight date. This will be more like a marriage, and anyone who ever has been married knows that marriage requires work, compromise but mostly love.

I hope to check in on this experiment from time to time over the next few years to see how people are doing and what they're learning. My hope is that they will gain wonderful insight that can be passed along to the rest of us interested in fostering harmonious interfaith relations.

Stony Point, by the way, is one of three national Presbyterian conference centers. The others are Montreat, in North Carolina, and Ghost Ranch, in northern New Mexico. For information about the weeklong seminar I'll be teaching at Ghost Ranch in July, look for the link under the "Check this out" headline on the right side of this page.

(The photo here today, from the Stony Point Web site, is of a meditation center there.)

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THE PREZ VS. HIS PARTY?

A new poll shows Americans think President Obama is friendlier toward religion than the Democratic Party as a whole. Seems like an odd comparison -- a person's views versus a party's views. A person is generally much easier to read than an organization as varied and spread out as a political party.

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P.S.: For your holiday giving, don't be shy about buying my new book, They Were Just People: Stories of Rescue in Poland During the Holocaust, co-written with Rabbi Jacques Cukierkorn. To read about it and find several ways of ordering it, click here. And remember, all the royalties go to Holocaust-related charities, so feel good about buying lots of copies.

What good theology does: 12-2-09

In the midst of a wonderful sermon this past Sunday by the associate pastor at my church, I heard him say three words that summed up an excellent lesson about religion that we'd all do well to remember:

"Good theology liberates."

Exactly. Theology that locks you into fear, that fills you with visions of enemies all around, that causes you to assume you know without doubt the eternal destiny of anyone, that gives you no reason to hope -- that kind of theology should be considered deeply suspect, however widely held it is.

Now, let's be clear that even the best and most liberating theology may not get everything it proposes right. We need to remember that our minds are finite and they simply cannot grasp everything about the infinite. So as we try to understand anything about God we are, in some ways, like dogs trying to learn algebra.

The other important thing to be said about the idea that "good theology liberates" has to do with what it means to be liberated. It does not mean that we then are free to do anything we like, even though the phrase "Love God and do as you please" has been variously attributed to both St. Augustine and Martin Luther.

And that phrase is exactly right in that it really means that if you love God, what you will want to do is what will please God. Being liberated does not mean we have no rules, no boundaries, no limits. It means we finally are free to choose the ways of God -- recognizing that we will have to spend time and effort to understand what those ways are.

So theology that divides in destructive ways,  that creates false categories of human beings, that gives people excuses to view others as less than human -- such theology imprisons people. Good theology liberates. And our task, no matter what our theology, is always to be modest theologians.

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THAT SWISS VOTE FOR DISCRIMINATION

The recent anti-Islam referendum in Switzerland banning further construction of minarets has provoked dissenting commentary (as it should) all over the world. First, for a Canadian view, click here. And for a collection of comments from newspapers in the Middle East, click here. I thought the Swiss generally were better than this. How sad.

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P.S.: For your holiday giving, don't be shy about buying my new book, They Were Just People: Stories of Rescue in Poland During the Holocaust, co-written with Rabbi Jacques Cukierkorn. To read about it and find several ways of ordering it, click here. And remember, all the royalties go to Holocaust-related charities, so feel good about buying lots of copies.

A fire's life lessons: 12-1-09

 
I am not sure why the deadly Dec. 1, 1958, Our Lady of Angels school fire has planted itself so clearly in my memory, but I recall it as if it were yesterday.

I was an eighth-grader at the time in a Chicago ex-urb and I remember watching the horrible news on TV that evening. When all the bodies eventually were counted, 92 children and three nuns perished.

You can read the details of what happened at the site to which I've linked you. I raise it today on the 51st anniversary of the fire because I think it tells us (or at least me) a lot about how we think about life and death and how we commemorate horrific deaths.

In taking note of these deaths, we reveal a great deal about whether and how faith informs our thinking and whether it makes any difference at all that those 95 people lived or died.

Death seems to have the final word. But Christian theology, which takes death with deadly seriousness, insists that death has been swallowed up in victory by the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Some other religions postulate an afterlife, too, and in some ways one's beliefs about that affects the way one thinks about and lives one's life.

One of the things the fire at Our Lady of Angels says to me now -- and said to me even as a teen-ager -- is that words about valuing children and valuing life aren't enough. You can read on the fire Web site the details of how the school building was woefully unprepared for fire. That tells me that school and diocesan officials at the time were not taking seriously their own professions about the value of the children inside the school.

I find it encouraging that many people still take time to remember those who died that bitter day. But the harsh reality is that some day no one will remember any of the children and this history will simply melt away. But, as I say, Christian theology's answer to that reality is that it's not so important that people keep alive the memory of the dead. What's important is that God will never forget them. (Take note that on the school fire Web site, the page devoted to "Friends of OLA" says the organization is "currently dormant." So the forgetting in some ways has begun.)

I remember feeling angry and sad and vulnerable that day 51 years ago, and I still wonder how many families in Chicago live with holes in their hearts because of the fire and whether their faith communities are helping them even now to honor the dead.

(The image here today is of the front page of the Chicago American -- now defunct, speaking of death -- of Friday, Dec. 5, 1958.)

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A GOOD WAY TO FIGHT AIDS

This being World AIDS Day (and my work with the AIDS Ministry of my church now having gone on for 20 years), I want today to pass along to you information about a practical book that offers ways to battle this awful disease. It's called "52 Ways to Create an AIDS-Free World," by Donald E. Messer. Some of the ideas are simple to state but more difficult to carry out. But all of them, if we took them seriously, would help reduce the incidence of acquired immune deficiency syndrome. So if your faith community isn't yet engaged in the effort to rid the world of AIDS and to minister to people who have it, what are you waiting for? (And for a column the author of this AIDS book did for the Washington Post's "On Faith" blog, "Thank God for Condoms," click here.)

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P.S.: For your holiday giving, don't be shy about buying my new book, They Were Just People: Stories of Rescue in Poland During the Holocaust, co-written with Rabbi Jacques Cukierkorn. To read about it and find several ways of ordering it, click here. And remember, all the royalties go to Holocaust-related charities, so feel good about buying lots of copies.

Contemplating the journey: 11-30-09

Twelve or 15 years ago, I met J.T. Knoll of Pittsburg, Kan., who, when he's not being a counselor, writes wonderful stories disguised as columns in the Morning Sun there.

We both were attending one of the annual conferences of the National Society of Newspaper Columnists, and we began to read each other's work.

Well, J.T. has a new book of these stories out. It's called Where the Pavement Ends: Retreats at Assumption Abbey and Other Contemplative Journeys. And it's a lovely book. My one-sentence review is found on the back cover: "J.T. does not walk sightless among the daily miracles."

J.T. approaches life from a Catholic sensibility. He is marinated in the faith, and his columns are infused with the language of faith in much the same way that Annie Dillard's language is. It's not overt stuff. Rather, this language flows out of the heart of who he is and who she is.

So today I'll share with you just a few sentences from a few of the columns in J.T.'s new book:

* As I drove I felt a surge of heartache thinking how, generation after generation, we keep going to the cemeteries until the day we step off the lip into the bottomless mystery of the grave and what precious little time is given here to savor a song, a laugh, a dance, a breeze or a morning parade.

* Anyway, it seems to me that the main function of a religion should be to provide a community of people who can support one another on their spiritual journey. A diverse community, some of whom can "keep the faith" when others in the community are struggling with theirs, and have the good sense to laugh when they take themselves too seriously.

* ASSUMPTION ABBEY -- At breakfast yesterday morning I visited with Brother Mike, a novice around my age. When I discovered he'd been a Marine helicopter pilot in Vietnam. I gave him a hug and said, "Welcome home." He went silent and moist-eyed, then said, "You're just the second person who's ever done that."

As I like to say, support your local columnist.

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A WORLD AIDS DAY PLEA

In advance of tomorrow's World AIDS Day, Pope Benedict XVI has called for both prayer and action (which many would argue includes prayer) to relieve suffering. Good call. Now, can he also get more realistic about the role -- partial and fallible, yes -- that condoms can play in slowing the spread of AIDS?

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P.S.: For your holiday giving, don't be shy about buying my new book, They Were Just People: Stories of Rescue in Poland During the Holocaust, co-written with Rabbi Jacques Cukierkorn. To read about it and find several ways of ordering it, click here. And remember, all the royalties go to Holocaust-related charities, so feel good about buying lots of copies.