LIONS BAY, B.C. -- While I'm taking a few days to spend time with long-time friends near Vancouver I didn't want to leave you without daily access to what's breaking in the field of religion.
So I want to connect you to a great site that collects links to exactly that kind of news and information. It's called "The Revealer: A daily review of religion & media," and you can reach it by clicking here.
The fact that "The Revealer" includes a link to my blog just shows how discerning its operators are, don't you think?
Another great source for what's happening in the field of religion is Real Clear Religion, which you can reach by clicking here.
As time and Internet access allows, I may be adding some notes here over the next few days, but mostly I'm in Canada for a breather so don't cry if my additional words from the road are rather infrequent. Or, well, cry if you must. Just don't tell me about it and make me feel bad.
* * *
SEATTLE -- I'm heading home but on Friday our silly GPS lady took us on not just the two ferry boats we expected but also on a late night third one. This will go in her permanent file.
LIONS BAY, B.C. -- While I'm taking a few days to spend time with long-time friends near Vancouver I didn't want to leave you without daily access to what's breaking in the field of religion.
So I want to connect you to a great site that collects links to exactly that kind of news and information. It's called "The Revealer: A daily review of religion & media," and you can reach it by clicking here.
The fact that "The Revealer" includes a link to my blog just shows how discerning its operators are, don't you think?
Another great source for what's happening in the field of religion is Real Clear Religion, which you can reach by clicking here.
As time and Internet access allows, I may be adding some notes here over the next few days, but mostly I'm in Canada for a breather so don't cry if my additional words from the road are rather infrequent. Or, well, cry if you must. Just don't tell me about it and make me feel bad.
* * *
VANCOUVER, B.C. -- It's been a wonderful, rainy, lovely week here in the Pacific Northwest with good friends. More later.
VANCOUVER, B.C. -- I'm always surprised when I give talks and ask my audiences which world religion has the most adherents. Inevitably someone thinks it's Islam.
No, Christianity has some 2.3 billion followers, compared with roughly 1.5 billion for Islam.
But that's not to say that Islam isn't growing. Indeed, here in Canada it's the fastest-growing religion, as a new study reported recently.
As the story to which I've linked you tells it, "The Muslim population exceeded the one-million mark in 2011, according to the survey, almost doubling its population for the second-consecutive decade. Muslims now represent 3.2 per cent of the country’s total population, up from the two per cent recorded in 2001."
So, like the United States, Canada is having to figure out how to live in religious harmony with an increasingly pluralistic religious landscape.
Because I'm here for some personal time off with friends, I'm not doing much reporting about this or any subject, but I at least wanted to give you something of a picture of the kinds of religious changes happening here within the borders of our northern neighbor.
Lions Bay, B.C. -- While I'm here north of Vancouver taking a bit of time off with friends for a few days, I thought it might be a chance to give you some links that would provide you a sense of how religion in Canada compares with religion in the U.S.
For a considerably more detailed view from the sometimes-reliable Wikipedia, click here. It's interesting to me that roughly the same percentage of the population in both Canada and the U.S. say they are Christian, 77 percent.
A Canadian newspaper last year did a fairly extensive survey about religious affiliation. For the results, click here.
But a recently released national survey shows that the religiously unaffiliated now account for almost one-fourth of the Canadian population. That compares with just under 20 percent of Americans.
My wife and I are here with five other couples, and I don't know if I'm going to have a chance to visit some faith communities in Canada, but now, at least, you've got access to a picture of what's here.
(For the image here today, I selected something that reveals one of Canada's true religions, hockey.)
* * *
P.S.: My latest National Catholic Reporter column is scheduled to be posted by mid-morning today. When it is, you can find it by clicking here.
While I'm taking a few days to spend time with long-time friends near Vancouver, B.C., I didn't want to leave you without daily access to what's breaking in the field of religion.
So I want to connect you to a great site that collects links to exactly that kind of news and information. It's called "The Revealer: A daily review of religion & media," and you can reach it by clicking here.
The fact that "The Revealer" includes a link to my blog just shows how discerning its operators are, don't you think?
Another great source for what's happening in the field of religion is Real Clear Religion, which you can reach by clicking here.
As time and Internet access allows, I may be adding some notes here over the next few days, but mostly I'm in Canada for a breather so don't cry if my additional words from the road are rather infrequent. Or, well, cry if you must. Just don't tell me about it and make me feel bad.
On this Memorial Day, I want to tell you a brief story that says a bit about the reality that everyone grieves deaths in our families in different ways and that sometimes we need help.
As some of you know, I serve on the board of Kansas City Hospice & Palliative Care (KCH). One evening last week KCH held its annual "Circle of Lights" service of memory at two locations. I was at the one at the Nichols fountain on the Country Club Plaza. This year my wife and I were especially remembering her sister, Leslie Von Bargen, who died of cancer last July in Vermont. You see her name on the luminaria bag that was part of the commemoration.
Before the service began, I spoke to a woman sitting behind me and asked if one of her family members had been in hospice care here with KCH. No, she said, though her mother died almost a year ago in hospice care on the East Coast.
The woman said that she was attending the service because when she returned to Kansas City after her mother's death, she was an emotional mess, so she called KCH and asked for grief counseling. We have a staff that can provide that service.
"It literally saved my life," she told me.
She said she has two siblings who live elsewhere but they have not used grief counselors.
I know nothing of why the death of this woman's mother slammed her so hard or why her siblings felt they didn't need help dealing with the situation. I know only that the woman is pretty sure she would not have survived had it not been for the help our KCH counselors provided.
Just as each death is unique, so is each grief. And no one ever should feel shame or feel somehow inadequate if grief strikes in ways that seem strange and out of the ordinary. Nor should anyone have to face grief alone if counseling can help.
* * *
P.S.: VANCOUVER, B.C. -- I'm on the road this week and may not be adding a second item, as I usually do, to the blog each day unless I have opportunity to do so.
I really do try to keep up with newly published books about matters of faith, but the publishing industry apparently operates 57 hours a day 16 days a week and 4,894 days a year.
So I get behind and occasionally need to heave lists of new books at you instead of longer reviews. But even when I simply mention the title of a book below I at least give you a link to a site where you can read more about it and discover for yourself whether it's one you'd like to explore further and maybe even buy a dozen copies a week for the rest of your life.
But let's begin this weekend's post with a few books that I want to tell you a about:
* God's Other Children: Personal Encounters with Faith, Love and Holiness in Sacred India, by Bradley Malkovsky. Almost every time I speak to people about the importance of interfaith dialogue and understanding I try to make the point that the object of such interaction is not conversion. Rather, it's to know and to be known. What interfaith conversation and contact almost inevitably produces is a greater commitment to one's own faith tradition. This engaging book demonstrates that very point as the author, a Catholic Christian, describes how his encounter with the religions of India increased his understanding and commitment to Catholicism while simultaneously helping him to appreciate what is beautiful in Hinduism, Islam (he married a Muslim), Buddhism and other faiths with Indian roots or presence. The book is full of personal stories told by this University of Notre Dame teacher, but most of them carry a universal message about seeing other traditions with appreciative eyes. And while we're talking about religion and India, let me also recommend India:
A Sacred Geography, by Diana L. Eck. I reviewed that last year here. These two books would make great companions.
* The Power of Parable: How Fiction by Jesus Became Fiction about Jesus, by John Dominic Crossan. Leave it to Dom Crossan to offer fascinating, if intentionally provocative, scholarship that drives many conservative or fundamentalist Christians crazy. He's been doing that for a long time and continues his tradition in this book, which is well worth reading even if the title suggests that nothing in the Bible about Jesus is historically accurate. That's really not what Crossan is saying, though he does conclude that "Jesus really existed, that we can know the significant sequence of his life -- from John the Baptist to Pilate the prefect -- but that he comes to us trailing clouds of fiction, parables by him and about him. . ." In the end, this is an argument against literalistic readings of the New Testament. It proposes that we always be aware of the uses of metaphor and parable and not get tied in knots over whether this or that particular incident reported in the gospels should be understood as history in the way we 21st Century Americans understand history. And Crossan is right about that.
* Nurturing the Soul of Your Family: 10 Ways to Reconnect and Find Peace in Everyday Life, by Renée Peterson Trudeau. No matter what some radio evangelists say (I'm looking at you, James Dobson), family is not the institution God created to be at the center of life. It is not the primary vehicle through which the sacred becomes available to us. Yes, family is important. Terribly important. But for Christians it is not the church and shouldn't be. This book offers sound and sane advice for how to make family life rich and nourishing without directly suggesting that the family is God's vehicle for salvation, although it's possible to draw that conclusion from this work. Indeed, the press release from the publisher, New World Library, asks this: "What if your family became your greatest source of joy?" Well, as a Christian I would answer this way: "It would mean the eternal God I meet in Jesus Christ no longer is my greatest source of joy." And that would be sad. So read this book for its wisdom about how to create families that are wholesome and happy, but don't read it thinking that families -- however you define them -- make up the whole point of existence. When you do that you make families an idol and the last thing we need is more idolatry.
And now some books I just want to list and allow you to explore further if you're interested.
* It Don't Get Any Better Than This: Stories from a Small Town Church, by David A. Shirey. There are engaging stories here from the author's experience as pastor of a Disciples of Christ church in Carthage, Tenn. Any book recommended by the great preacher Fred Craddock, as this one is, is worth a look.
* A Mystic Garden: Working with Soil, Attending to Soul, by Gunilla Norris. One-page chapters accompanied by poetry. Keep this one on your screened-in back porch to read as you look at your garden, if you have one. If you don't, make it up.
* Eyes of the Heart: Photography as a Christian Contemplative Practice, by Christine Valters Paintner. My wife and I take photos that we use on the cover of blank greeting cards. This book may give us ways to see what we're photographing through new, more spiritually sensitive eyes.
* The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: Tough Questions, Direct Answers, by Dale Hanson Bourke. No book about this subject will be read with complete sympathy and understanding by all the parties in this struggle, but this book seems quite even-handed and helpful, sticking more to fact than opinion.
What role is religion playing in the recovery from that terrible tornado in Oklahoma? It's pretty central, this report suggests. Despite the nincompoops who think such weather disasters are God's punishment for something or other, most people of faith find such catastrophes opportunities to demonstrate how their values affect how they react.
* * *
P.S.: Just curious what you made of Pope Francis' recent declaration that everyone -- not just Cathlics, but everyone, including atheists -- is redeemed through Jesus. That is, by the way, a traditional Christian belief, though it's rarely said so clearly, especially from the Vatican.
A year or two after the 9/11 terrorist attacks I attended a seminar in the Washington, D.C., area about Islam in America.
It was clear that both the immigrant stream of Muslims and the African-American convert stream were trying to figure out how to live out traditional Islam in the United States in a time when all Muslims seemed suspicious to many Americans.
The level of suspicion may not be quite as high today, though it's still at a troubling level as prejudice and rumor often overwhelm fact and our heritage of religious freedom.
With that background, I was struck by this piece I read in my now-digital version of Newsweek the other day.
It suggests that the best way to fight extremism engaged in by some Muslims is to build more mosques in the U.S., not fewer.
It quoted Jocelyne Cesari, a Harvard Divinity School lecturer, as saying that supporting a strong Islamic community won't add to radicalism but, rather, prevent it.
In the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombings, this is an important lesson that we'd all do well to heed. And after the brutal murder on London's streets this week, the United Kingdom might want to evaluate whether this advice would be good there, too.)
(The picture here of the Islamic Center of America in Dearborn, Mich., is one I took a few years ago and is an example of the kind of mosques needed for Muslims in the U.S.)
* * *
BEING VIGILANT ABOUT HATRED
Let's continue to be aware that virulent antisemites such as Louis Farrakhan continue to spew their toxic hatred, this time with some elected officials present. It's easy to think that such prejudice is a thing of the past, but it must always be found and exposed.
Over the centuries, traditional Christianity has produced many aberrations, but today I would suggest that what's become known as the Prosperity Gospel (or health, wealth and healing on demand) is a top candidate for the currently most distorted version of the original gospel.
Essentially its advocates (Kenneth Copeland, Joel Osteen, T.D. Jakes, Creflo Dollar and others) tell people that God wants them to be rich. Or, as they often put it, to be blessed.
Traditional Christianity asks followers to follow Jesus even if it costs them everything. Jesus himself tells people not to store up treasures on earth because where your treasure is there will your heart be also.
But the Prosperity Gospel preachers say you can have it all -- and should.
Why has this bogus Christianity become so popular, especially in parts of the African-American community?
Bowler lists at least four reasons: 1. The message "suited the economic mood." 2. As African-Americans participated in a reverse migration to the south and southwest, they "sought out prosperity churches to make sense of their new social location." 3. Interaction among megachurch leaders spread this distorted to gospel. 4. Churches that historically focused on mutual aid, including predominantly black churches, began to fall for "the materialism and hyper-individualism of the prosperity gospel."
In the end, churches began giving people what they wanted instead of the call to sacrificial giving and love that the true gospel issues. And what did the people want? Bowler: "People wanted churches that lifted their gaze, enlivened their spirits, and assured them that help was around the corner."
So we Christians have wound up with many churches that cater to the self-centered desires of people instead of with churches that point to the transformative experience of being in relationship with the one who loved us enough to die for us. It's a sad, though fascinating, story, and Bowler tells it well.
* * *
REALLY MONITORING RELIGIOUS LIBERTY
I mentioned here yesterday the just-released U.S. State Department report on international religious freedom. To follow up on that, here's a piece asking why State doesn't get tougher with countries that are so abusive. It's a good question.
Yesterday here on the blog I told you about an old evolution debate from the 1920s and earlier, one that affected my own denomination, the Presbyterian Church (USA), and others.
I want to follow that up today by linking you to this engaging piece about why so many Americans, who often seen so up-to-speed on scientific innovation and technology, are nonetheless drawn to reject macro-evolution and embrace the pseudoscience called creationism.
The reasons listed seem compelling to me but in no way an exhaustive explanation. Those reasons are that creationism:
* Appeals to our American democratic impulse.
* Demands fairness so all voices can be heard.
* Appeals to the authority of some people who reject evolution.
* Promotes freedom of inquiry for students.
* Rejects the scientific establishment's dismissive views of alternative theories.
* Appeals to the sympathy of Americans who learn that creationists are not embraced by academic institutions.
All that may be true, as the piece to which I've linked you suggests, but I think another major reason has been left out.
And that is this: Creationism reflects a literalistic reading of the Bible, and it's exactly that kind of reading that many branches of Christianity in America promote. In such a reading, the world was created in six literal days and is only a few thousand years old. Of course, the brains God gave us to examine our world must necessarily reject that as poppycock, but sometimes fundamentalist thinking overrides reason and scientific evidence.
One day, perhaps, some of the literalists will grasp the reality that all language is metaphorical and that religious language is especially so. Until then, however, we're going to have lots of Americans wandering about happily claiming the creationist label as long as that label means a literalistic reading of the Bible.
* * *
MONITORING RELIGIOUS LIBERTY
The U.S. State Department's annual report on religious freedom around the world was released this week. Good. I'm glad our government keeps doing this through the State Department and the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom. I also found worth reading the transcript of the remarks and press conference by our ambassador at large for international religious freedomk Suzan Johnson Cook. Have a read.
Posted with Blogsy