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Is this anti-terrorism effort going to help? 12-19/20-15

I'm returning this weekend to a subject I wrote about here on Thursday -- Saudi Arabia. This oil-rich kingdom where Islam began became a major focus for Americans when it turned out that nearly all of the 19 hijackers on 9/11 hailed from there.

Mohammed-bin-SalmanMany analysts blame the austere Wahhabi version of Sunni Islam that the kingdom promotes for being an engine that helps to create terrorists. This Christian Science Monitor article focuses on just that criticism.

Which may explain why the recent announcement by Saudi officials that they are creating a 34-nation "Islamic military alliance" was greeted with both suspicion and hope, though suspicion pretty much overwhelmed the hope, as this Washington Post piece and this NBC News piece noted.

Indeed, the Saudi announcement raised lots of questions, including why some of the countries listed as part of the alliance seemed unaware of it and what, exactly, the alliance would do.

In addition, the fact that this seemed to be a free-lance operation unconnected to the United Nations or to any other world collection of nations raised questions about its legitimacy.

If this new alliance really is a sincere effort from inside Islam to undo Islamism, who could oppose that? By Islamism, I mean the radical jihadist violence that seeks to attach itself to the legitimate religion of Islam to justify its extremism. Islamism is not Islam, but it certainly has succeeded in giving Islam a bad name around the world among people who don't understand the difference.

The other question to be considered is what this new alliance will consider terrorism. The Washington Post piece to which I've linked you above quotes a skeptic about this new Saudi venture as saying that in the eyes of Saudi leaders "virtually any criticism of the kingdom's political system or its interpretation of Islam counts as terrorism."

If that's the case, then the new alliance becomes simply a Saudi public relations tool -- which will deserve to be ignored unless, instead of being helpful, it causes more trouble.

(The photo here today shows Saudi Defense Minister Mohammed bin Salman, who, along with the Saudi foreign minister, announced the new Islamic military alliance a few days ago.)

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WHAT TRUMP HAS DONE FOR SOME MUSLIMS

And now for something completely different: An American Muslim who gives thanks for Donald Trump. Well, sort of in the way that you might give thanks for a broken arm because it taught you how to write with the other hand. Still. . .


Do Muslims everywhere hate the U.S.? 12-18-15

The anti-Islam sentiment in the U.S. in recent weeks has risen, stoked not only by the terrorist attacks in such places as San Bernardino and Paris but also by the xenophobic rhetoric coming from Donald Trump and others.

AntiamericanismIt's easy to imagine that this rising anger at Muslims is equally reciprocated by Muslims around the world. In some ways it is, but the picture is much, much more complicated than you might imagine.

And in some ways -- at least until Trump and others began mouthing off -- the anti-American sentiment expressed in various Muslim-dominated countries has been improving over the last few years.

You can find the details about that in this Foreign Policy piece from a few days ago. It shows fairly widespread dissatisfaction with American policies among Muslims in various countries but those levels vary widely, and in some such countries the U.S. is looked upon pretty favorably -- and certainly more favorably than, say, 5 or 10 years ago.

As the piece notes, "But such (anti-American) sentiment has actually ebbed among Muslims in the Palestinian territories and Pakistan. And in both Indonesia and Nigeria, countries with some of the largest Muslim populations in the world, strong majorities voice a favorable view of the United States. In fact, their pro-American sentiment is stronger than that in Germany."

In sorting out all of this and understanding anti-American feeling, it helps to have a sense of history. And by history, I don't mean what many Americans seem to mean by history -- what happened two weeks ago. Rather, I mean the long view over many centuries, and particularly the last 150 or so years.

In his excellent 2011 book, Islam Without Extremes, Mustafa Akyol describes the shift in the Muslim world from a progressive spirit of reform to a more hostile spirit of anti-Western rhetoric:

"The reason for this marked change of spirit becomes quite clear when we look at the history of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In just a few decades, nearly the whole Muslim world was attacked, invaded and occupied by non-Muslim nations. The Ottoman Empire, the last big Muslim power, was destroyed in World War I, and almost all the Muslim states that arose from its ashes were colonized by Britain, France or Italy. These European countries, whose liberal values had impressed and inspired Islamic modernists, were now seen as trampling on the honor of Muslim nations, whose very borders were created arbitrarily by the new masters.

"Russia and the subsequent Soviet Union also played a role by crushing the whole Islamic presence, including the Jadidist movement, in Central Asia, after brutally suppressing the Basmachi Revolt (1916-1923), a Turco-Islamic uprising against Russian and then Communist rule.

"The foreign invasions changed the entire intellectual landscape of Islamdom. The West was no longer a model to emulate but rather an intruder to eradicate. The question, 'How can we be like the West?' would soon be replaced by 'How can we resist the West?'"

None of this history, of course, should be used to justify terrorism. Nothing makes terrorism acceptable under any circumstances.

But knowing this kind of history helps put current attitudes found in largely Muslim nations into some perspective. And it reminds Americans that history did not begin with the San Bernardino terrorist attacks or even with the misguided 2003 invasion of Iraq under the sorrowful direction of George W. Bush and his collection of neo-cons. Americans may not know much about the sort of world history about which Aykol writes, but you can be sure many Muslims do, and it affects their view of the U.S.

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ONE SMALL 'STAR WARS' NOTE

The Forward, a Jewish newspaper, has put together what it calls "Star Wars vs Star Trek -- A Jewish Celebrity Smackdown," which is sort of fun and which represents what I think will be the first, last and only time I write about the release today of the new "Star Wars" movie. You're welcome.

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P.S.: Yesterday here on the blog I made note of the disturbing story of Wheaton College suspending one of its teachers for saying a true thing -- that Christians and Muslims worship the same God. In my remarks, I mentioned Yale theologian Miroslav Volf and his terrific book, Allah: A Christian Response. It turns out that Volf himself was outraged by what Wheaton did and wrote this piece for The Washington Post.


A tiny reform in Saudi Arabia: 12-17-15

The recent local elections in Saudi Arabia in which women were allowed to vote is what passes for reform in this fascinating country that I visited in 2002.

Saudi-woman-flagBy most Western standards, Saudi Arabia -- and the House of Saud, which governs it -- is astonishingly backwards culturally, misogynistic and theologically rigid. Despite that, since creation of the kingdom in 1932 there have been reformers who have sought to drag the nation into modernity. Sometimes those reformers have paid a steep price for their views, while sometimes they have made a difference.

Indeed, the previous king, Abdullah, with whom I and other American and Canadian journalists met in 2002 when he was Crown Prince, was considered something of a reformer. It was Abdullah, after all, who eventually granted women the right to vote in some local elections. The current king, Salman, allowed that reform to move to action.

But it was a really, really modest step forward. About 131,000 women registered to vote, compared with 1.3 million men. And, of course, the women candidates couldn't campaign in front of men and had to vote separately from them. The Arab News story about voting day is here.

Does the strict Wahhabi form of Sunni Islam promoted (indeed, required) by the kingdom represent what Islam looks like (or has looked like) elsewhere? No. In fact, the variety of approaches to the role of women in Islam is quite remarkable, beginning with the time in the Seventh Century when the Prophet Muhammad introduced Islam to the world. That turned out to be quite a liberating thing for women. For instance, scholars who study Islam note that the Qur’an is the only sacred text to give women rights to inheritance, to own property, to keep their own wages, to create marriage contracts beneficial to themselves and to receive material and physical support from husbands.

That liberation, however, eventually got crushed in many areas into which Islam moved because of the patriarchal and unchanging nature of the culture into which Islam was introduced -- and, of course, the similarly patriarchal interests of religious leaders.

Even in more modern times, there has been a wide range of responses to women from Islam. A hundred years ago in Turkey, for instance, there were even two feminist clubs among many intellectual societies that formed in Istanbul, as reported by author Mustafa Akyol in his 2011 book Islam Without Extremes: A Muslim Case for Liberty. Some of that more liberating approach to women's issues spread to such countries as Egypt, too.

In the early to mid-20th Century, the regimes of Mustafa Kemal (known as Ataturk) in Turkey and Reza Shah in Iran pushed women's roles far beyond what most Muslims -- including many women themselves -- found acceptable.

"Encouraged by the Kemalist Revolution," Akyol writes of the shah after he came to power in Iran in 1925, "the shah launched a modernization program like that of Ataturk, but he was even more radical in its implementation, ordering the forceful unveiling of all women. As a result, Tehran police started to assault veiled women, tearing off their clothes."

As we know, of course, quite the opposite occurred in Afghanistan under the Taliban, which, in 21st Century American terms, preferred to keep women barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen. Or, if they acted up, to beat them up or shoot them.

The point is that there are many different ways in which Islam has responded to and treated women over the centuries, just as the same is true with other faiths, including Christianity, some branches of which still won't ordain women to be priests or pastors.

It all depends on how particular leaders in particular times and places choose to interpret sacred texts that deal with women and how the cultures in which those leaders operate help to define their limits.

Allowing a few Saudi women to vote should be applauded, even while we recognize what a tiny step it is in moving closer to equality between the sexes. But that equality -- seen from a Saudi perspective -- is much more a Western cultural norm than a Wahhabi norm, and until the Saudis move away from that austere form of Islam, letting a few women vote may be about as liberal a reform as we're likely to see for awhile.

(It may be a more hopeful sign that a coalition of Muslim nations has joined together to fight terrorism in Islamic lands. When I was in Saudi Arabia in 2002 there was widespread disbelief that terrorism was stemming from people doing it in the name of Islam. At least that denial has changed.)

(The image here today came from here.)

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WHEN CHRISTIANS MORTIFY OTHER CHRISTIANS

First it was the Rev. Jerry Falwell Jr., president of Liberty University, embarrassing Christianity recently by telling his students to get concealed-carry gun permits to arm themselves so they can shoot Muslims before Muslims shoot them. And now it's Wheaton College suspending a teacher there because she said Christians and Muslims worship the same God. Her position is a perfectly legitimate Christian conclusion that has been taken by many reputable theologians, including the great Miroslav Volf of Yale, who wrote a brilliant book, Allah: A Christian Response, a few years ago to make that very point. It's hard to figure out why Christians sometimes do things that reflect poorly on their own faith, but it happens a lot. In fact, as the author of this piece argues, it happened again and again at the Republican presidential debate this week.

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P.S.: Yes, some of us Kansas City Royals' fans still are celebrating the team's World Series win this fall. Santa, for instance, brought me the KC victory Santa hat you see in my mug shot here today. Youda man, Santa. But can you play second base or a corner outfield position for us next year?


Catholics need not convert Jews, church says: 12-16-15

Today I want to come back to a topic I just mentioned in passing here a few days ago -- the new Vatican document that says Catholics should not try to convert Jews to Christianity but, rather, work with them to oppose antisemitism.

Vatican-emblem StarofDavid-1When you think about how long Christianity (not just Catholicism) has preached anti-Judaism, has encouraged modern antisemitism, has failed to recognize Jews even as part of the human family, this is an astonishing and important document.

The history of anti-Judaism in Christianity is a long, sad story. I have this essay posted here on the blog that tells a good part of that story, and I encourage you to read it to give you more background for understanding this new Vatican document. In that essay, I try to make the point that although there is no direct line between early Christian hostility to Judaism and the Holocaust, Christianity's anti-Judaism (which is theological in nature) prepared the way for modern antisemitism (which is more racial and economic in nature), and without modern antisemitism the Holocaust is simply inconceivable.

It wasn't until 1965, as part of the Second Vatican Council, that the church officially absolved Jews of what the church had charged Jews with almost from the beginning -- the sin of being Christ killers. That 1965 document, Nostra Aetate ("In Our Time"), though still problematic in some ways, opened the door for much better Jewish-Catholic relations, one result of which is the new statement, called "The Gifts and Calling of God are Irrevocable."

In the years since Nostra Aetate, many Jewish-Catholic (and, more broadly, Jewish-Christian) conversations have taken place in an effort to find ways to respect one another and work together more closely on common goals.

Ten years ago, for instance, an international conference looked at Nostra Aetate 40 years after its publication, and one of the results of that conference was a trans-Atlantic theological research project, which resulted in the publication in 2011 of the book Christ Jesus and the Jewish People Today: New Explorations of Theological Interrelationships.

But even with that and other interfaith conversations (Lutherans have been prominent in them), it was hard to see the church some day saying that its members should not be trying to convert Jews. After all, throughout much of Christian history, the church has even forced some Jews to convert on pain of death. In 1492 in Spain, the monarchy gave Jews there a choice: convert or be driven out, for instance.

So this has been a long, slow, painful process -- and in thinking about it, we should not overlook the positive role played by the late Pope John Paul II, often called the best pope the Jews ever had.

One especially interesting part of the new Vatican document reaffirms the belief that there is but one path to salvation -- through Jesus Christ, but it says that doesn't mean Jews are damned: 

From the Christian confession that there can be only one path to salvation, however, it does not in any way follow that the Jews are excluded from God’s salvation because they do not believe in Jesus Christ as the Messiah of Israel and the Son of God.

So, as you can see, there will continue to be much to discuss as all people of faith try to get their heads around all of this.

Publication of this new Vatican document, of course, will not magically destroy antisemitism or even some continued anti-Judaism heard from Christian pulpits. But it's an important document that I hope churches and synagogues will take the time to study in considerable detail.

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ANOTHER TAKE ON NEW DOCUMENT

Religion scholar Mark Silk has written this take on the new Vatican document and its relationship to Jewish-Christian history. It's well worth a read, particularly in its acknowledgement of divine mysteries.

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P.S.: After yesterday's post about a house of worship for Jews, Christians and Muslims in Berlin was published, a reader alerted me to a similar Jewish-Christian-Muslim partnership in Omaha, Neb. You can read about that here. Good for Omaha, too.


Think of it as a 'mosqagogurch': 12-15-15

House-of-one

Let's give thanks today for the power of transformation. Think what Germany was 75 years ago -- a nation enthralled with one of the most evil rulers in world history and doing its best to destroy and conquer Europe while murdering millions of Jews just because they were Jews.

Today, Germany's chancellor, Angela Merkel, is Time Magazine's person of the year, in part because of her bold and encouraging leadership on the issue of handling the refugee crisis that has grown out of the Syrian civil war and related troubles -- leadership that contrasts greatly with the unconstitutional and insipid ideas about those refugees coming from some American politicians.

And today Germany also is providing a remarkable model for how three different -- and often at odds -- faith traditions can work together.

In Berlin, a combination mosque-church-synagogue is going to be built.

Here's a key part of what the story to which I've just linked you says:

Dubbed the House of One, the proposed shared prayer space is set to be built on the site of a 13th-century church — one that was repeatedly destroyed and rebuilt until the Second World War, at which point the lot on which it stood was simply paved over. . .

Since World War II, Berlin's religious landscape has been changing. Jewish life -- crushed in the Holocaust -- has experienced a resurgence. And Muslims are an increasing segment of the population. So the church that owns the site decided to join hands with Jews and Muslims and create a space that will be a worship center for all three of the Abrahamic faiths.

There are, of course, examples of similar kinds of space-sharing among different faith groups elsewhere. In the Kansas City area, for instance, Temple Israel of Greater Kansas City, a Reform Jewish congregation, holds its regular Friday evening Shabbat services in the chapel of Rolling Hills Presbyterian Church in Overland Park.

But I'm unaware of any single, newly constructed building created to be a worship center for Christians, Muslims and Jews. If you know of such a thing, let me know.

Given that the three faiths who will share space in Berlin are monotheistic, the name House of One is especially appropriate.

Good work, Germany.

(The architect's drawing of the House of One seen here can be found on the House of One website to which I've linked you above.)

P.S.: After this post was published this morning, a reader alerted me to a similar Jewish-Christian-Muslim partnership in Omaha, Neb. You can read about that here. Good for Omaha, too.

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THE POPE WANTS ENVIRONMENTAL ACTION

It's not clear exactly how much influence Pope Francis and his encyclical on the environment had on the recently concluded environmental agreement reached in Paris among some 200 nations, but surely it helped some. And now he is urging action to implement the agreement. How refreshing to have a world religious leader pushing the world forward instead of trying to hold it back.


When religious illiteracy hurts: 12-14-15

 Rel-lit-panel

When Sulaiman Salaam Jr. was a teen-ager, he was smitten by a beautiful girl in his school. Well, let him tell the story, as he did one morning last week at an American Public Square event on religious literacy:

"When I was about 16 or 17 years old," said Salaam, whose parents had converted to Islam about the time he was born in the late 1960s and who, thus, grew up Muslim, "there was this girl who went to my school that I was really crazy about. She was absolutely gorgeous and she just blew my mind.

"We would talk on the phone a lot and one day she called me and she was crying. She said, 'Sulaiman, I just came back from Bible study and my pastor said if you don't accept Christ as your savior you're going to hell. And I don't want you to go to hell so please accept Christ as your savior.

"Now, I knew that she was sincere. I knew that she meant it. . .But for someone who grew up as a Muslim -- and this is all I ever knew -- I'm saying (to himself), 'How am I supposed to respond to that?' I didn't know how to respond. So, unfortunately, I responded the way I thought I was supposed to because she was challenging my faith, my beliefs, everything I had been taught. I said, 'You don't need to worry about me, you need to worry about yourself. Now get off the phone.'"

But, he said, "as soon as I hung up the phone, I said to myself, 'Well, what if she's right? How can I say with 100 percent certainty that I'm right and she's wrong, if this is all I ever knew?'. . .So that, for me, began my journey of religious literacy."

Today, Sulaiman is still a Muslim. Indeed, he's imam of Al-Haqq Islamic Center in Kansas City, and last week he joined a rabbi, two Christian pastors and a secularist on a panel to talk about the need for religious literacy. The event was the second presented by the American Public Square in partnership with the Interfaith Religious Literacy Center, a special project of the Greater Kansas City Interfaith Council.

Rabbi Mark Levin, founding rabbi of Congregation Beth Torah, has a suggestion -- years too late, of course -- for how Sulaiman might have responded and how others in similar situations might respond today:

"My answer, if I'd been my age, rather than the age you actually were," he said, "would be, 'That's very interesting. Now, why do you think he thinks that?' And it seems to me that the basis of religious literacy in our society is being able to ask good questions and hear the real answers. And we tend not to do that."

Levin said that instead of worrying so much about knowing lots about different religions, "the question we want to ask ourselves is, How do we accept the other as part of our community and a part of our society without feeling threatened?"

It turned out that this conversation was extraordinarily timely, given the much-covered controversy about Donald Trump's ridiculous idea to ban all Muslims from coming to the U.S. now, even though the program was planned months ago.

The truth is that religious literacy is important all the time to help us avoid the kind of ignorance that leads to bigotry and even to violence.

A few other highlights from the morning's conversation, which took place at Village Presbyterian Church in Prairie Village:

* Secularists tend to be among those who are the most religiously literate, said Helen Stringer, executive director of Kansas City Oasis, which tries to bring together secularists who don't fit into faith communities. But even though they may know more -- or think they know more -- about religion than average Americans, "that doesn't mean it's accurate."

* "A lot of Christians have grown up at least in Kansas City and the Midwest in a culture where Christianity was predominant," said Evan Rosell, pastor of ministry leadership for Redeemer Fellowship. And because of that they weren't forced to learn or have great literacy in other religions. . .One of the questions I've been wrestling with. . .is, 'What's the difference between pluralism and relativism?' What's the difference between understanding and agreeing? Another way of saying that is to ask, 'What's the difference between ideological unity and relational unity?' I think the only way you can move forward in a way that honors each other and honors and honors all of us as human beings is to insist on relational unity without also demanding ideological unity."

 * Helen Stringer said secularists are trying to figure out how to rear their children so they are religiously literate in a broad way. After all, she said, religion "is part of the human narrative, part of the human phenomenon."

* Another problem in creating religious literacy, said Levin, is that "the amount of misinformation out there is overwhelming." The way to overcome that is to have calm, appreciate conversations in which you ask what others believe and then ask them to say more and more about that.

The Rev. Brian Ellison, executive director of the Covenant Network of Presbyterians, served as moderator of the panel. Two more programs about religious literacy will happen under the American Public Square sponsorship next year.

The hope is that eventually people will be better able to know how to respond when friends tell them they're destined for hell or when many other religious questions arise, including whether the U.S. should think about banning immigration by members of this or that religious group. Lack of religious literacy leads to the kind of foolishness about faith that we've seen in recent weeks on the presidential campaign trail. We can be better than that.

(By the way, the people attending the panel on Thursday morning were asked to fill out this quiz on religious knowledge from the Pew Research Center. Those who did got an average of 12.78 right out of 15, which is considerably better than the national average. Try it yourself. If you're one of my regular readers, you should ace it.)

(In the photo here today, left to right, you see Levin, Stringer, Ellison, Rosell and Salaam.)

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IF YOU ACED THE PEW QUIZ, TRY THIS ONE

Speaking of quizzes about religion, New York Times columnist Nickolas Kristof gave readers this one in a weekend column. And he did it to show that sacred writ can be complicated -- so much so that what we think is true of the Bible, say, or the Qur'an turns out not to be true at all.


The ISIS plan to create a nation: 12-12/13-15

For well over a year now, Americans have been struggling to understand just who the ISIS (or ISIL or Daesh) terrorists are and what they want.

ISIS-mapIf al-Qaida was (and is) terrible, ISIS clearly is worse, if that's possible. How did its members turn out the radical way that they did and what can we do to eliminate this scourge?

Part of the answer is contained in this Christian Science Monitor story, which in turn relies heavily on the British newspaper, The Guardian. It turns out that, unlike al-Qaida, which claimed responsibility for the 9/11 terrorist attacks, ISIS wants not just to carry out terrorist attacks on the West but also to create an actual state, with trash pickup, healthcare and pretty much whatever else a modern nation requires.

Here's a key paragraph in the Monitor's story:

The dawning realization that Islamic State is actually intent on establishing a 'caliphate' for the world's Muslims is underscored by a 24-page state-building manual leaked to The Guardian, which experts say should carefully guide Western nations' response to an increasingly global fight against the group's terror both at "home" and abroad.

Thus, ISIS has taken control (sort of) of parts of Syria and Iraq to be the location of the caliphate. And even though creating such a thing is pretty much a pipe dream that will never happen in any final way, we misjudge ISIS and its intents if we don't grasp its state-building goals.

A caliphate is an early Islamic form of government, overseen by a caliph (as Mustafa Akyol notes in his book, Islam Without Extremes, the word means "successor," and refers to the people who were successors of the Prophet Muhammad as leader of the Muslims). In some ways, even the Ottoman Empire, which collapsed in the early 20th Century, can be considered a caliphate. The appeal now of a caliphate to radical Islamists is that they can implement their own twisted, extremist version of Islam inside the caliphate and spread their vision beyond it.

So how is this state-building project going? The Monitor story summaries it this way:

Yet Islamic State's propaganda machine may be better at inspiring admiration abroad than at home: many who escape report a broken system short on doctors and other professionals, where heavy taxes are imposed to make up for unsteady business in oil and smuggling. And the relative safety and swift justice the group promises its citizens is only guaranteed for those who avoid angering fighters. 

And yet it would be unwise simply to depend on this phony caliphate to collapse on its own. That would take too long and endanger too many people in the meantime. But simply to bring violence against violence will not produce the results we want, but merely produce more violence. We must understand the state-building goal of ISIS and work to make sure it fails. An ISIS success in this matter would create a rogue state arguably as dangerous as a nuclear-capable Iran.

(The map here today is six months old. I found it here.)

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HOW SHE MODELS CHRISTIANITY

Time Magazine's person of the year describes herself as an evangelical Christian. But as this Religion News Service piece notes, Angela Merkel, chancellor of Germany, has lots to teach American evangelical Christians -- especially about welcoming the stranger. Hope some are paying attention.


The role of one-issue Christian voters: 12-11-15

When people of faith become one-issue voters they can turn into little more than tools in the hands of manipulative politicians who can figure out how to use them to their advantage.

Single-issue-votersSomething like that is going on right now, this analysis says, in the national Republican Party. As political writer Harry Enten concludes about the GOP "establishment's" distaste for Donald Trump:

To beat Trump, the establishment may have to defeat him in Iowa, but recently, the Iowa caucuses have been unwelcoming to establishment-approved candidates.

Still, there’s a way to square that circle. The GOP establishment doesn’t need to win Iowa — it just needs Trump to lose. And the establishment may have to rely on an old frenemy to make that happen: born-again and evangelical Christians.

This can make those Christian voters in Iowa a pawn in a chess game in which Iowa plays a role in determining the GOP presidential nominee every four years, but it's a role voters there play by indirection -- usually choosing someone with no prayer of winning either the nomination or the presidency but sometimes setting up future primary victories for whoever comes in second or third or even lower.

Voters who identify themselves as evangelical Christians often support candidates who speak in loud and rigid terms about one or two particular issues that appeal to such voters -- such as abortion or same-sex marriage or immigration reform. Giving away votes because of one issue tends to give victories to narrow candidates who cannot have a broad enough appeal in the general election to win.

So I fail to understand why such voters paint themselves into such a corner. Why not evaluate candidates on the basis of all -- not just one or two -- of their positions, recognizing that no single candidate will offer stances that will match every position held by the voters? Instead, the idea should be to look for candidates who hold a variety of reasonable positions but who also might actually be electable. Donald Trump, Ben Carson, Mike Huckabee, Ted Cruz -- all simply unelectable candidates.

If politics is the art of the possible, then Christians who wind up as one-issue voters support impossible candidates and allow themselves to be seen not as disciples of Jesus Christ but, rather, as bloc voters not much different from voters who choose a candidate just because he or she is a pacifist or an environmental activist.

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NO NEED TO CONVERT JEWS, THE CHURCH FINALLY SAYS

A new Vatican document says Catholics should not try to convert Jews. Only about 2,000 years late getting to this conclusion (earlier would have save tons of trouble), but the church finally got there. It will be fascinating to see what effect this now will have on Jewish-Christian relations. Stay tuned.


Some books for holiday giving: 12-10-15

You've still got time to pick out a good book for some family members as a gift for this holiday season, so today I'm going to catch you up on a few with spiritual topics that have crossed my desk recently.

I'm not going to do long reviews of them but, rather, give you a brief outline of them and then give you a link to learn more and maybe buy a copy.

Availability: The Challenge and the Gift of Being Present, by Robert J. Wicks. This small book originally was published in 1986 and has been a popular Catholic guide in the spirit of such spiritual giants as Henri Nouwen and Thomas Merton. This paperback edition has a new introduction that helps point readers to ways to be available to others, especially those in need.

51-percent-c51% Christian: Finding Faith after Certainty, by Mark Stenberg. This emergent church pastor, like many Christians, has struggled with what it means in 21st Century America to be a follower of Jesus Christ. He has tried and failed and tried again and, by his reckoning, sometimes succeeded as much as 51 percent in being a disciple. Like some other emergent church movement leaders (think Brian McLaren, Tony Jones, the late Phyllis Tickle and others) Stenberg is more than willing to wade into the failures of the church and to think aloud about how the damage they've caused might be repaired so that the transformative nature of the gospel might find hearts that are yearning for meaning. The chapter in which he suggests reading the Bible backwards, in a manner of speaking, is especially interesting. Stenberg's voice is one more among post-modern voices seeking to make sense of the demanding ancient faith of Christianity so others can discover why it can be so liberating.

Grace-wintry* Grace in a Wintry Season: Feeling our Creator's love in a world grown distant and cold -- and loving in return, by Edwin Steinmann. The author, a resident of St. James, Mo., and former assistant attorney general of Missouri, grew up a Catholic but has come to challenge some Catholic theology -- and especially has been challenged himself by the old question of theodicy: How can there be evil and suffering in the world if God is good and loving? This book is his story -- full of sensual dreams and visions -- of how those challenges have shaped his spiritual life and where, in the end, he has found spiritual comfort and sustenance. It will help you to understand the fullness and richness of grace in a new way.

* River of Grace: Creative Passages Through Difficult Times, by Susan Bailey. Using many water images, the author describes her many trips through the rapids of life and how she has come to cherish the sense of grace she has learned to discern in life's vicissitudes. The message of grace is common from religions but it's sometimes a hard message even to hear, much less to accept. This book offers a guide to help readers grasp divine grace being offered daily, even in the midst of disasters and loss.

* Befriending Silence: Discovering the Gifts of Cistercian Spirituality, by Carl McColman. The author is a lay Cistercian who grew up a Lutheran in the South. He opens up Cistercian spirituality not just for those who are unfamiliar with its deep commitments but also for those who think they know it well -- but perhaps not as well as they think. McColman unpacks the virtues of hospitality, humility, compassion and community, among others, and helps readers understand what those virtues and values might mean for them in everyday life, full of challenges and surprises.

Breath-god* Breath of God: Living a Life Led by the Holy Spirit, by Dave Pivonka. This book is, in effect, an ode to the Holy Spirit, offered by a Franciscan priest. He tells how, as a young Catholic, he first encountered the charismatic movement and came to a deeper understanding of how the Spirit could guide his life. Pivonka's concern is one expressed by many other Christians, which is that they tend to focus on God the creator and Christ the redeemer, often passing over the person and work of the Holy Spirit (save, perhaps, on Pentecost Sunday). "The challenge for us," he writes, "is to be able to perceive the breath of God. The only way this can happen is for us to stay close enough to God that when he breathes we are aware of it."

Badass-saints* My badass book of saints: courageous women who showed me how to live, by Maria Morera Johnson. If your vision of saints is full of perfect people without scars or scrapes, this book will disabuse you of that wrongheaded notion pretty quickly. The author, who has lived a pretty daring and somewhat messy life herself, describes two dozen women who have become saintly models for her. Even if you're Catholic, I'm going to guess you've never heard of some of them. I was especially glad that she included Irena Sendler, the Polish woman credited with helping to save some 2,500 Jewish children from the Warsaw Ghetto in World War II, because Sendler inspired my co-author and me to write our 2009 book, They Were Just People: Stories of Rescue in Poland During the Holocaust

Pope-coverAnd don't forget to buy dozens and dozens of copies of my own books, especially my latest, co-authored with the Rev. Dr. Paul T. Rock, Jesus, Pope Francis and a Protestant Walk into a Bar: Lessons for the Christian Church. E-mail me at [email protected] and I'll tell you how to get an autographed copy -- signed by both of us.

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WHEN YOU DON'T EVEN KNOW YOUR ENEMY

A Sikh house of worship, or Gurdwara, has been vandalized in California by fools who attacked it as if it were Islamic. It's proof that you can be not simply bigoted but both bigoted and stupid. It's one more reason there's a crying need for religious literacy education in this country. And speaking ignorance and bigotry, it did not surprise me a bit that the Rev. Franklin Graham, Billy's ideologue son, says he supports Donald Trump's call to ban Muslims from entering the U.S. I can't think of many social, political or cultural issues that Franklin Graham has been right about for years. Like Trump's words, his words simply aid and abet ISIS.

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P.S.: My latest National Catholic Reporter column now is online here.


The religion-science connection: 12-9-15

The conventional wisdom is that there's a big split between science and religion and that most scientists are, if not atheists, at least indifferent and maybe even hostile to religious traditions and insights.

Science-faithBut a new study released last week by Rice University's Religion and Public Life Program shows that this conventional wisdom is badly out of focus, if not often downright wrong.

As the Rice press release about the matter says, "The study’s results challenge longstanding assumptions about the science-faith interface. While it is commonly assumed that most scientists are atheists, the global perspective resulting from the study shows that this is simply not the case."

One interesting aspect of this study is that it was done worldwide. Researchers gathered information from 9,422 respondents in eight regions of the world: France, Hong Kong, India, Italy, Taiwan, Turkey, the U.K. and the U.S. Beyond that, they traveled to these regions for in-depth interviews with 609 scientists. Rice calls this "the largest worldwide survey and interview study ever conducted of the intersection between faith and science."

Over the years -- because both religion and science interest me deeply -- I have written a lot about the intersection of the two. And a decade or so ago I helped organize programs for an initiative, rooted in my congregation, that we called the Kansas City Religion Science Dialogue Project.

The idea was to explore ways in which science could learn from religion and religion could learn from science, recognizing that each seeks to answer questions that the other is not equipped to answer. After the holiday season, my congregation will return to this subject with a sermon series on religion and science led by our senior pastor, Dr. Paul T. Rock.

I hope your faith community is also finding ways to explore this important area.

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JEWS TARGETED MORE THAN ANY OTHER GROUP

This is a ridiculously tough time to be a Muslim in America, but it turns out that in 2014 most religious hate crimes were perpetrated against Jews, the FBI's annual report on this subject shows. Beyond that, most hate crimes had to do with race, not religion. Still, the ancient hatred of Jews manages to hang on. How sad.

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P.S.: My latest National Catholic Reporter column now is online here.