Tag Archives: religion

The first girls to graduate from high school in Deh'Subz, an Afghan district outside Kabul. Photo by Beth Murphy, Principle Pictures.

Taught, Post-Taliban: A Review of What Tomorrow Brings

What Tomorrow Brings is an intimate portrait of a girls’ school in rural Afghanistan and the challenges its students face in trying to get an education.

In an early scene of What Tomorrow Brings, Pashtana, a seventh-grader at a girls’ school in rural Afghanistan, describes just how much her education means to her. “My biggest hope is to finish school,” she says, smiling brightly. “That’s how my life will turn the corner, and I’ll be on my way.”

Her smile fades. “But I’m worried there are people around me who will try to stop me.”

Continue reading Taught, Post-Taliban: A Review of What Tomorrow Brings

Chelsea Rudman is an international development professional and freelance writer who lives in Washington, DC. Her writing has previously been published in the NY Press and Matador Travel.

 

Born Again: A Conversation with Writer Joy Castro

Best of In The Fray 2013. At an early age, Joy Castro ran away from an abusive home and renounced her faith as a Jehovah’s Witness. What she found instead was a new set of beliefs and truths for herself.

When Joy Castro was fourteen years old, she ran away from her abusive family, who had adopted her at birth. Raised as a Jehovah’s Witness, in an environment where she was to proselytize “the truth,” Castro sought refuge in the church. But after the church failed to protect her from the emotional and physical anguish she endured on a daily basis, Castro reached beyond their teachings to forge her own path to salvation.

This past year has been a busy one for Castro. Her 2005 memoir detailing her childhood, The Truth Book, was re-released. This coincided with the publication of Island of Bones, a collection of essays that continues Castro’s story of survival and resilience as she moves through adulthood. In addition to her nonfiction work, Castro’s debut crime novel Hell or High Water also recently hit the shelves.

In The Fray spoke with Castro about letting go of traditional concepts of faith, becoming a parent, her attraction to the crime fiction genre, and her definition of truth.

You were raised in an environment where the concept of “truth” was steeped in paradox. What is your understanding of truth now?

When I was growing up as a Jehovah’s Witness, “the truth” was the short-form term we used to refer to the belief system of our religion. Someone was “in the truth” or “not in the truth.” From infancy, I was taken to the Kingdom Hall for five hours each week, and my mother read to me regularly from Jehovah’s Witness literature at home. We went preaching door to door. I prayed morning and night and before every meal in the way I had been taught. So, it was pretty much a full-immersion experience.

I was a believer. Another option was impossible for me to conceive when I was a child. It was only as I got older — ten, eleven, twelve — and had been exposed to enough contradictory material at school that I began to question the tenets of our faith. I ran away at fourteen and stopped attending the Kingdom Hall at fifteen. As we know, “truth” is something that’s energetically debated by political and religious systems all over the world, so it wasn’t as though, when I was fifteen, I moved from a brainwashed state into one of clarity. Truth remains up for grabs.

Now, I just prefer to believe in kindness, compassion, the attempt at honesty about one’s experience and perceptions, and the effort to create justice. As a species, we need a variety of competing voices, competing subjectivities, in order to be able to figure out the best strategic ways forward.

You’ve written about there being freedom in accepting one’s own imperfections and inability to conform to social expectation. As a woman who grew up in poverty and a survivor of childhood abuse, how have you learned to constructively carry the confines of your personal history?

It has meant relinquishing the dream of having had a beautiful childhood — or, within academia, the psychic comfort of having an intellectual pedigree. I cannot compete with people who sailed or had families full of love or went to Harvard. I cannot compete with people who were not raising a child in poverty or riding city buses or doing without. By writing transparently about my own experiences and making them public, I’ve gradually let go of the desire to have been someone else, someone more socially acceptable.

How did unintentionally becoming a parent influence this process for you?

Becoming a parent at twenty, while perhaps not ideal in terms of timing, was overwhelming and transformative for me. Parents will tell you that their souls broke open when they had children. That was true in my case. That radical empathy, that willingness to sacrifice and defend, that compulsion to make a better world for all children — it’s so powerful.

For me personally, it was an opportunity not to neglect, not to abandon, not to abuse, not to commit suicide — all the things my own [adoptive] parents did that left my brother and me damaged and bereft. It was a chance to face down the deep, brooding fear of becoming an abuser. It offered a long series of moments in which to choose to say “yes” to love and growth. While that sounds like a positive, obvious, easy thing to do, it’s not so easy for people who’ve shut down after multiple traumas. For me, opening up and committing to someone in such a profound way was risky and difficult. And, ultimately, so worthwhile.

Before my son was conceived, I was never the sort of person who consciously longed to have a child. Unexpectedly becoming pregnant derailed what I thought my life would be, but in a good way. It carved out a kind of generosity and compassion in me that probably would not have otherwise developed.

My son is twenty-four now, so I’ve been this person for a long time. Lately, my focus has been on changing into someone who does not have a child, like a compass that steers all her choices, at the center of her life anymore. That has been the real challenge for me for the past few years. I think I’m getting the hang of it.

For those of us with unenviable pasts, writing can be a kind of coping mechanism employed to escape or manage the darker realities of our lives — which makes writing both painful and necessary. Has this been your experience?

For me, writing has been a beautiful gift, an escape — as you say — and a way to manage painful truths. It has also been one of the most profound pleasures of all. Using our imaginations to shape and reshape the world is a magnificent gift. What power! And hearing our own voices and exploring our own thoughts in a noisy world is such a soothing, beautiful, private thing that writing allows us to do. I’m grateful for it.

You’ve recently published your first crime novel, Hell or High Water. Does writing crime fiction allow you to explore issues in a way your previous work did not?

As a child and adolescent, I loved reading mysteries. I enjoyed the puzzles and the suspense. I still do. But now, as a writer of crime fiction, I’ve come to appreciate how devoted the genre is to issues of justice. Writing crime fiction has been a method for translating the insights of the academy for a broad audience. I’m not sure crime fiction provides additional freedoms; it’s just a different vessel for exploration.

Joy Castro head shotYour novel is set in New Orleans, a place known for its stark contrast between the lives of blacks and whites, rich and poor. What do you find compelling about placing a struggling Latina journalist in this post-Katrina backdrop?

There are a couple of reasons. First, like many people, I love the city of New Orleans. My husband grew up on the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain, and he lived, went to college, and worked in the city as a young adult. When we met in graduate school, he took me home to meet his family, and I fell in love with the city as I was falling in love with him. I’ve been going there regularly for twenty years now, and my affection and respect for New Orleans made me want to set a novel there.

You’re right about the black-white construction of race and ethnicity in New Orleans. While there has famously and historically been a great deal of mixing, it has usually been defined along a black-white continuum, though the influx of Latino construction workers and their families has shifted the demographic somewhat since Katrina. I was interested in exploring how a character lives her Latinidad in an environment where there’d been almost no Latino community.

You have personal experience with that as well.

Being a Latina without an ethnic community was my own experience growing up. Though I was born in Miami, we quickly moved to England, where we lived for four years when I was little. Then, after two more years in Miami, we relocated to West Virginia, where I lived until I graduated from high school. In the 1980s, I was the only Latina student in my high school, and my Spanish teacher was the only Latina I knew outside my family. Being culturally isolated is something I knew well. So, I wanted to tell a story about cultural isolation, and the strange pressures and loneliness that come with that.

There are similar feelings of isolation that come with “escaping” poverty and climbing the social ladder that your main character contends with throughout the novel.

I don’t see [the main character] as a social climber in the negative way we usually construe the term: someone who sacrifices her ethics and true feelings to attain prestige and wealth. She’s a newspaper reporter, after all, because she believes in justice. But it’s true that she did climb her way out of poverty, and she did leave some people behind, which she regrets.

Bright, poor, ambitious people in our society often live that painful story. Our social structures frequently push gifted young people to choose between pursuing their talents fully and remaining in the community that raised them. Either way, people sacrifice. It’s unfortunate.

A theme in your writing is finding redemption in telling the truth, though the result is not always a victory. Why do you embrace the mistakes people make?

It just seemed more realistic, more true to what I’ve experienced in the world. I have failed in ways that schooled my soul. Even when we’re trying, we make mistakes. We have blind spots. Knowing that about myself helps me to be compassionate with others who fail.

It’s often the case that various forces — commercial forces, political forces — don’t want uncomfortable truths to become public, and they sometimes have the power to squelch those stories. Other times, the route to a public hearing is beautifully clear. It’s a process, and it’s a choice. There will be hits, and there will be misses. The important thing is to keep telling your truth.

Mandy Van Deven was previously In The Fray’s managing editor. Site: mandyvandeven.com | Twitter: @mandyvandeven

 

The Center Cannot Hold

The Shahbad Dairy Slum: Shoes
Saving Souls, by Benjamin Gottlieb.

The stories now featured on the site touch on many issues, but one theme they have in common is the role that religion plays in driving people to get passionately involved politics and activism — and how difficult it is to find secular ways to kindle the same fire. In Saving Souls, Benjamin Gottlieb profiles an enterprising humanitarian group that is busily educating poor children in Delhi’s slums. But the work of COI and other evangelical Christian groups continues to draw controversy in India, a once-colonized nation now booming economically and working mightily to assert its own cultural identity. In Losing Zion, Rob York reviews the book The Crisis of Zionism, which argues that the two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is dying, ruined by extremism in Israel and the apathy of the liberal American Jews who could help bring about a broad-based peace movement.

Religious groups have been almost unmatched in their ability to train activists and build social movements. In America, the most obvious recent example is the pro-life movement and the cultural warriors it has drawn from the pews of evangelical, Catholic, and other congregations. But the civil rights movement, too, acquired its power and breadth by filling the streets with churchgoing protesters, and filling its rhetoric with the biblical language of freedom, struggle, and redemption.

Wherever people congregate, they organize. Social scientists talk about how churches (and other houses of worship) serve as reservoirs of social capital — the web of relationships that connect people and bring about various benefits, including the ability to rally around political causes. Generally speaking, this is great for democracy. And many religious groups have managed to find a balance between doing God’s work and respecting views that diverge from their own. But in America, Israel, and elsewhere, it seems the people getting inspired and engaged come from the extreme, intolerant ends of the political divide, trapped in their own dogma and their own sets of facts.

I used religion as a jumping-off point for my comments, but really the problem is not religion, but fundamentalism of whatever kind — religious or economic or nationalist or otherwise. The Tea Party, for example, is crusading on behalf of an uncompromising economic fundamentalism that verges on religious fanaticism, with its own patron saints in F.A. Hayek, Frédéric Bastiat, and Ayn Rand — ironically, a mirror image of the earlier cult of communism. But religion appears to motivate many of these true believers, too, and may help explain the movement’s success in organizing. On the question of Israel and Palestine, too, the same dynamic seems at work: the more devout and dogmatic speak louder.

Perhaps the recent wave of global protests against corruption and austerity — for example, the indignados demonstrations in Spain, or Occupy Wall Street and its related movements  in America — will help balance the scales. Churches and synagogues have been heavily involved in the organizing of the Occupy actions across this country, reminding us that the religious right is not the only voice of faith in the streets and on the megaphone.

That said, younger Americans seem to be turning away from religion, while the secular ways that ordinary people have traditionally gotten involved in politics are in decline. Labor unions have been dwindling away in America for decades — the one bright spot in recent years was public-sector unions, and the recent failed Wisconsin recall election may have been their Waterloo. Political parties rely increasingly on big donors and independently wealthy candidates, while the old political machines that groomed leaders out of local wards are disappearing.  Young people continue to rally to various causes on college campuses, but it will be hard to fill in the hole left by these institutions, which could organize in a sustained, concerted fashion and appeal to broad segments of the population.

This is yet another reason that we can expect politics to become more partisan and extreme in the coming years. The hard-liners are hungry for power, while more reasonable men and women stand by and watch. It brings to mind words by the Irish poet W.B. Yeats: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.”

The center cannot hold, as Yeats wrote. And things didn’t end too well in that poem.

Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen

 

Saving Souls

Home to one-third of the world’s poor, India attracts hundreds of Christian humanitarian groups seeking to do God’s work in its slums and hinterlands. But while these groups make up in vital ways for the failings of government and markets, their work comes with a consequence: conversion.

On a sun-kissed Saturday morning in March, Rahul Kumar whips through a squalid Delhi neighborhood, his ashen buttoned-down shirt tucked into his dress pants and thick black hair gelled back from his forehead. He is headed to the Sanskar Centre, a bare, one-room school run by a Christian nonprofit in the city’s Shahbad Dairy slum. Every day, Rahul walks to the schoolhouse for his lessons, the best education to be had for many of the district’s poor migrant families.

Just twelve years old, Rahul is already a leader among the neighborhood children, who flock to his side as he walks, eager to embrace him. Though short for his age, he has an outsized ambition: one day, he says confidently, he will dance in Bollywood’s biggest productions. But first, Rahul says through a translator, “I need to get a job to help my family. I need to study hard.”

Rahul’s family moved to Delhi from northern India several years ago, lured by the prospect of a better life. But the situation for Shahbad Dairy’s 100,000 residents is overwhelmingly grim, their opportunities circumscribed by severe, endemic poverty. While some parts of the district enjoy government support—a public school, a maintained latrine, a health care center—most of the slum’s inhabitants live in jhuggis, or slum dwellings, without running water or proper sanitation. A thick expanse of garbage and sewage surrounds the slum and is patrolled by scavenging children and feral pigs alike.

“[Shahbad Dairy] has the dynamics seen in every ghetto or slum,” says Alfred Gnanaolivu, special projects director for Cooperative Outreach of India (COI), the Christian group that runs Rahul’s school. “You have turf warfare. You have the influence of drugs and alcohol … Unfortunately, the main victims are the children.”

A nongovernmental organization, COI works extensively in Shahbad Dairy’s slum blocks, offering clean water, food, and education to local families. Children account for 50 percent of the district’s population, Gnanaolivu notes. That’s where COI—along with the hundreds of other faith-based NGOs operating in India—can have an impact: educating the children of impoverished families that are neglected by the Indian government.

But like many NGOs working in India, COI has a slant. It provides the 500 children enrolled in its schoolhouse an education—but with evangelical undertones. Young boys and girls recite Christian hymns during class, not conscious that they are being indoctrinated. Their faith-driven education is reinforced by COI’s pastoral care workers, or religious counselors, who help the slum’s families with their economic and personal problems using a Christian form of therapy. COI says this “results in transformation of the communities.”

Rahul posing in front of the brick wall of his home
Rahul Kumar, twelve, outside his home in the Shahbad Dairy slum in Delhi, India.

While Shahbad Dairy’s families—most of which are Hindu and from India’s lower or scheduled castes—are aware of the Christian sculpting, they believe that COI is giving their children a better chance at life. And as their relationship with their Christian benefactors deepens, some families are even converting.

“Very often, children are lured in the name of providing [a] good education,” says Chandan Mitra, a Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) representative in India’s upper house of Parliament. “They don’t understand very often why they have become Christians until they are older.” Religious conversion is banned in many Indian states, but the laws are “violated frequently,” Mitra adds. (In Delhi, conversion is legal.)

Of course, proselytizing Indians is not a new phenomenon. Christianity has existed in India for centuries, and Protestant missionaries have been working in Delhi since the early eighteenth century. Today, Christianity is India’s third-largest religion, with approximately twenty-four million followers.

What is different today is the growth of a politically independent, economically powerful India, a rising nation of a billion-plus people that has become more comfortable asserting its culture. In India (and Indian America) today, there is a willingness now to question the outside influences that for many years were tolerated as the price of doing business. Meanwhile, India has become home to roughly a third of the world’s poor, according to World Bank data. As a result, the country is a magnet for humanitarian aid organizations, many of them Christian.

The conversion of destitute Indian families to Christianity enrages many Indians, and on blogs wild accusations fly that Christian NGOs are committing “culture murder” in India. Mitra—whose Hindu nationalist party is one of India’s two major political forces—takes a more evenhanded stance. Christian NGOs may be indoctrinating children with Christianity, he says, but they are also educating and feeding an entire community that would otherwise remain overlooked.

For its part, COI believes that its religious message helps break down some of the barriers that keep Shahbad Dairy’s residents in poverty. “The caste system has dehumanized human beings,” says Ramesh Landge, COI’s executive director. “We need to help these children, give them a reason to live, and provide them with a childhood.” Among “the few hundred families that have adopted our changes, our teachings,” Landge adds, “we’ve seen success.” He notes that before COI began working in the slum, none of the children had birth certificates, making it nearly impossible for them to enroll in government schools.

Donald Miller, a professor of religion and sociology at the University of Southern California, points out that the evangelical Christian organizations working in India today tend not to fit the colonial-era stereotypes: brazen missionaries coming over to save souls by any means necessary. “Conversion by these groups is more often a side effect as opposed to a direct, manipulative attempt to indoctrinate people,” says Miller, who studies the social ethics of religion. It’s not that they don’t want to see conversions take place. But today’s faith-based humanitarian work, particularly by evangelical organizations, “has much more language about partnership and shared goals,” he says.

Before it was a slum, Shahbad Dairy was cattle country, settled by a Hindu Haryana community of dairy farmers. In 1987, the Indian government ceded a small parcel of land to the local inhabitants to build slum dwellings. Today, most of the shanties in Shahbad Dairy are illegal. Their occupants are immigrants from across India, who left their villages to find work in the sprawling city of Delhi, India’s second largest.

Rahul’s family is originally from Uttar Pradesh, a state about 500 miles to the north. His mother, Reena Kumar, supports the family by extracting the iron from automobile tires to sell as scrap metal. Asked why she moved to the slum, far from her ancestral homeland, Kumar’s response is simple: “To survive.”

The Kumar home in Shahbad Dairy amounts to four scantily constructed shacks, which house Rahul, his mother, and five siblings. A lone television is mounted in the master bedroom, powered by stolen electricity patched in from a nearby power line.

Back from school, Rahul navigates the Indian airways to his favorite Bollywood channel. His brothers, sisters, and friends pack the tiny room, waiting to watch him perform the dance steps.

Gnanaolivu watches the children with a smile. The work that his Christian group is doing, he says, will give children like Rahul much-needed opportunities, so that one day they can achieve their dreams—in Bollywood and beyond. “If they can be given that direction and sustained love … then we can save them.” In the end, it still comes down to saving souls.

Benjamin Gottlieb was previously In The Fray’s art director. Twitter: @benjamin_max

 

Holy cats and dogs!

Only a chosen few will be taken in the Rapture. The rest of us will be left down here to suffer for eternity. And your little dogs, too.

A large number of people way more than will actually be saved in this Rapture-thingy think they will get to go upstairs. Believing so must give them a sense of joy, maybe even  hope. But this is tempered by a major concern what about the beloved pets?

Well, would-be-Rapturees, it's your lucky day! For 110 dollars and 15 dollars per additional pet, rest (in everlasting peace) assured that Rover will go to a good atheist home after you've magically disappeared.

Y'all, there's a menagerie of musings in my head about this.

To begin with apparently, this is not a joke. In fact, there's more than one site offering such a service. But it is most certainly a scam. 110 dollars? Whoever created this is a genius!

I want in on this. For 110 dollars, even 10 dollars per person (greed is a sin, you know), I'll take care of your dry-clean only clothes and furs after you've gone. You don't want the damned heathens looting your walk-in closets and tossing your silks in common washing machines, do you? Hell no!

Ok, in all fairness, one site does include the following note: "A portion of income generated from advertising on this site is contributed to community food shelves/food banks in Minnesota and New Hampshire." But just a portion, mind you. Not the whole amount to feed the living humans here and now that would be crazy!

Next, a question about the souls of the cute and furry. If God created all creatures, why don't the animals get to go, too? One trip on the Arc all those millenia ago and that's it? Is peeing on the rug really such a terrible sin?

There are 6.7 billion people on Earth. We are all sinners, some more than others. I'm thinking this Rapture selection will be very small, very exclusive. So, how will we know when it has happened? So many people disappear everyday, and we don't even notice. How do we know the Rapture hasn't already happened?

Also, what if you just happen to be kidnapped or disappear or die naturally and lay undiscovered, Rre-rapture, but the network of atheists doesn't know? What if Snowball ends up starving in your apartment, and later on, gets taken in by devil-worshipping (e.g., liberal) neighbors or given to a kill pound by relatives? And you've paid $100 or more for nothing!

I guess a sucker is left behind everyday.

While browsing through these sites, I did have a reality-based idea and was pleased to find that others had thought of it too. Military pets. There are networks out there for soldiers who don't have anyone to take care of their pet during their overseas deployments. I love that there's an alternative for military personnel to giving up their pets for good and never seeing them again. They sacrifice so much to serve their country it's not too much to ask to come home to a best fuzzy friend. One program even has sponsors like Pedigree and Whiskas these are not scams, they're just awesome.

Obviously, I have not done my usual thorough research. I don't know the details about the Rapture or where the religions stand on animal souls. Nor do I want to. I have better things to do with my time. But, occasionally I like to take a break from health care, tea parties, foreclosures, and endless wars and amuse myself. So please, don't enlighten me. Don't correct me. Instead, use that energy to volunteer at an animal or human shelter and do your little part to make the world a better place. Because, honey, we're all stuck here.

 

World’s dumbest logic

When gay marraige was making headlines four years ago, some opponents suggested that gay marriage would justify humans marrying animals. So it was only a matter of time before the nonsense started again following yesterday’s California ruling striking down a ban on gay marriage.

 
In my inbox today was a press release with a subject line that read:

Courts Rule That Ramadan Shall Last Only 20 Days (re: Courts Rewriting Marriage Definition)

 

Naturally, I wasn’t sure what gay marriage had to do with Ramadan, so I decided to open the message. (Let this be a lesson to PR types: nonsensical or provocative subject lines can grab readers’ attention.) Here’s what it said: 

Courts Rule That Ramadan Shall Last Only 20 Days

·        The court has taken it upon themselves to interpret a covenant relationship that God ordained in two major religions and redefine the act of marriage according to today’s cultural standards

·        Why stop there? Why not force Muslims to cut short their practice of Ramadan because it is unequal protection for local restaurant owners. The court can prove that there is a compelling state interest to cut it short because it can be proven that a 40-day fast hurts the economy.

"Unequal protection for local restaurant owners"? That’s the best argument this person could come up with as to why the state would tinker with Ramadan next? Clearly, the person who wrote this is a. not an attorney (at least not one I’d want defending me) and b. never took a logic class.

 

Religion advocating for the environment

According to the media, one of the latest green movements is happening in churches, synagogues, and mosques around the country. Several news organizations have already done stories about people from different faiths who all have the same goal of saving the environment.

The Weather Channel’s "Forecast Earth" profiles Baptist pastor and environmental advocate Dr. Gerald Durely, who was inspired by the environmental film The Great Warming. Dr. Durely says in the piece: "As one who believes that the Earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof, is that we have an obligation to ensure that what God has created, we keep together." The pastor has taken his environmental message and movement to his congregation because he says it will "make a difference for my children, my grandchildren, and generations to come when we begin to conserve and do what it is on this Earth that is so important."

ABC News looked into a North Carolina church that for the second year in a row is having a so-called "carbon fast" for Lent:

"Lent is a traditional time when we talk about reducing," said the United Church’s pastor, Richard Edens.

Lent is the 40-day period in which Christians fast and atone to prepare for Easter. This year the congregation has weekly themes; for example, one week they save water, another week they eat only locally-grown produce. And they are part of a growing international movement of carbon-fasters.

New Jersey Jewish News reports on a Jewish environmental organization’s call to synagogues to become more environmentally friendly by changing their old incandescent lightbulbs to energy-efficient ones:

"We’re trying to make our synagogue more energy-efficient, so it was a natural process," [Kevin Fried of Montclair, NJ’s Bnai Keshet synagogue] said. "We’re doing our part to help the environment. A couple of weeks ago we held a screening of An Inconvenient Truth (Al Gore’s documentary on global warming) and had CFLs [compact fluorescent lightbulbs]" on hand for people to see and purchase.

The article also features other energy-saving tips from the Coalition for the Environment in Jewish Life.

CNN reports on the "greenest" Canadian Church that is a model of eco-renovation. Father Paul Cusack of St. Gabriel’s Parish says he is "trying to raise the consciousness of people through the beauty of creation." And asks his parish: "What are we going to do as individuals in this community to change our lifestyle or anything else to facilitate the healing of the Earth?" The renovated church itself is a model of environmental-friendly architechture.  Among its Earth-friendly features are large windows to draw in solar heat and a living wall that is a natural air purifier. And as Father Paul says, "It’s not words that make the difference, it’s actions."

The Washington Post and Newsweek‘s "On Faith" section online addressed interfaith environmental care. Eboo Patel’s Interfaith Youth Core brings together Evangelicals and Muslims to work for the greater good. Patel writes:

The Holy Qur’an teaches that God created Adam to be His servant and representative on Earth with the primary task of caring for the beauty and diversity of creation…In my Muslim outlook, I believe this is moving creation in line with the intention of the Creator.

Among Patel’s interfaith initiatives are Earth Day programs involving different faiths.

keeping the earth ever green

*Please note that ever green is religion neutral and does not advocate for or against any religion, but I am always happy to report on anyone or anything that is helping the environment regardless of motivation.

 

Heath Ledger: “Fag Enabler”?

You may remember Fred Phelps, the founder of Kansas’ Westboro Baptist Church, whose followers have been attending funerals for U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq, holding up signs saying things like “God hates fags” and “God hates you.” (Why? In Phelps’ mind, God is wreaking havoc on American soldiers in Iraq out of vengeance for “a country that harbors gays.” He’s referring to the United States, in case you were wondering.)

Well, Phelps and company are back in the news. Queerty is reporting the Phelps’ church is planning to picket 28-year-old actor Heath Ledger‘s funeral. According to a statement from Phelps: 

Heath Ledger thought it was great fun defying God Almighty and his plain word; to wit: God Hates Fags! & Fag Enablers! Ergo, God hates the sordid tacky, bucket of slime seasoned with vomit known as ‘Brokeback Mountain’ and He hates all persons having anything whatsoever to do with it.

 

Heath Ledger is now in Hell, and has begun serving his eternal sentence there beside which, nothing else about Heath Ledger is relevant or consequential.

There are many things I could say about this. But any of them would require taking Phelps far more seriously than he deserves to be taken. So I’ll let his plan, and his words, speak for themselves.

 

Fatwa frenzy

"We have to be clear what is at stake here…When each and every person's unqualified opinion is considered a fatwa, we lost a tool that is of the utmost importance to rein in extremism and preserve the flexibility and balance of Islamic law."

— Sheikh Ali Gomaa, Egypt's Grand Mufti (or Muslim cleric holding the highest official post for Islamic law) quoted in today’s New York Times article about the problems arising from the proliferation of fatwas, or non-binding legal opinions.

The article highlights two highly publicized and amusingly embarrassing fatwas about urine drinking and breast feeding, but it does point to a significant issue: the decentralized nature of authority in Islamic law and a proliferation  helped by technology such as the Internet, phones, and satellite television  of fatwas, many of which typically concern mundane questions that arise in quotidian life about what is appropriate and in accordance with Islamic law. What the article neglects to sufficiently underscore, however, is the fact that there has always been a wealth of legal opinions in the field of Islamic law  the quantity of fatwas should not, in themselves, be alarming. Rather, what is newer and more relevant is the proliferation of new religious authorities in societies where, as the proportion of individuals receiving a traditional religious education declines, the criteria by which to judge a religious authority can be blurred, unclear, or insufficiently scrutinized.

 

The Pope backtracks

“The change highlights the importance of inter-religious dialogue.”

Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, Vatican Secretary of State, stating to the Italian newspaper La Stampa that the Vatican would rescind its previous decision and will restore the Pontifical Council for Inter-Religious Dialogue as its own department.

Pope Benedict XVI downgraded the council, which addresses the Islamic world, in March 2006 and sent its president, Archbishop Michael Fitzgerald, to Cairo as a Papal Nuncio (diplomatic representative) to Egypt and to serve as the Vatican's representative at the Arab League in Cairo. By reversing his previous decision to merge the council with the Vatican's culture ministry, the Pope is clearly acknowledging the need to directly engage with the Islamic world, but it has not been announced whether he will also reinstate Archbishop Fitzgerald — a seasoned veteran in his former post — as head of the Pontifical Council for Inter-Religious Dialogue.

 

Translating for God

“I decided it either has to have a different meaning, or I can’t keep translating…I couldn’t believe that God would sanction harming another human being except in war.”
— Laleh Bakhtiar, speaking about Chapter 4, Verse 34 of the Muslim holy text the Qur’an, which concerns the appropriate treatment for a rebellious woman. The appropriate meaning and translation of the verse has been debated, and Laleh Bakhtiar plans next month to add her new translation to the 20-odd extant translations of the Qur’an. Among the interpretations of the verse is the understanding that it advocates a three-fold measure in which the woman is first reprimanded, then abandoned in bed, and then beaten, which is one meaning of the verb “daraba.” Laleh Bakhtiar has, to significant controversy, translated the instruction as “go away from them.”

 

Jailed for blogging in Egypt

Despite the fact that Egypt is scheduled to host a forum in 2009 on the topic of Internet governance, Egypt today put a blogger behind bars for four years after he was convicted of insulting Hosni Mubarak, Egypt’s seemingly eternal president, and insulting Islam.

Abdel Karim Suleiman, 22, a former law student at Egypt’s al-Azhar University, a traditional seat of learning, was sentenced during his five-minute court session to one year for insulting President Mubarak and three years for insulting Islam.

Amnesty International decried the sentence as “yet another slap in the face of freedom of expression in Egypt.”