Lord Sacks has described religion as “the redemption of our solitude” during a parliamentary debate on the role of faith in society.
The chief rabbi, who will retire from his post in less than a year, suggested that while in secular times religion was often misunderstood as “a strange set of beliefs and idiosyncratic rituals”, it could be better understood for its teachings about “making sacrifices for the sake of others, through charity”.
“Long before these functions were taken over by the state, religious groups, here and elsewhere, were building schools and hospitals and networks of support,” he said, referring to Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam’s research on the role of faith groups in society.

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An atheist group at the University of Wisconsin-Madison seems on track to receive nearly $70,000 in student fees for staffing and programming next year, in what appears to be a first for the university and student atheist groups nationally.

The Atheists, Humanists, and Agnostics, or AHA as it’s called, said it will provide support services for students struggling with doubts about their faiths and offer a safe place where they can discuss religious issues without fear of recrimination.

“Religious groups have been receiving this type of funding for years,” said Chris Calvey, president of the organization, which helped stage a three-day Freethought Festival that drew hundreds of nonbelievers and skeptics from around the country to Madison this year.

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Sharing an obligation to spread the good news of salvation in Christ, all Christian communities are challenged by the fact that many people today do not think they need God, Pope Benedict XVI said.

“The spiritual poverty of many of our contemporaries, who no longer perceive the absence of God in their lives as a privation, represents a challenge for all Christians,” the pope said Nov. 15 in a meeting with members of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity.

Pope Benedict said authentic ecumenical prayer, dialogue and cooperation cannot ignore “the crisis of faith that vast regions of the planet are experiencing,” nor can Christians ignore signs that many modern people still feel a need for some kind of spirituality.

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It has been quite a year for Mormonism in America. Outside the faith, the presidential candidacy of Mitt Romney sparked unprecedented levels of interest and attention. Meanwhile, church leaders have transformed how young Mormons start their adulthood, affecting everything from education to dating and marriage.

Though you might not know it from Broadway’s “The Book of Mormon,” 12% of Mormon missionaries are women””a number that is about to skyrocket thanks to an unexpected change in official Latter-day Saint policy. The church announced last month that Mormon women are now eligible to begin serving missions at age 19 instead of 21, and that Mormon men may serve at 18 instead of 19.

The response was immediate. Within two weeks, the number of missionary applications jumped an astonishing 471%, from the usual 700 per week to more than 4,000. Slightly more than half of these applicants were women.

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“Mitt Romney has opened doors. He has made Mormonism much more respectable,” says Charles Dunn, a professor at Regent University, and author of numerous books on politics and religion.

“He came out of this campaign as an honourable person, and that bodes well. He is the best missionary Mormons could have.”

At the headquarters of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the official name of the Mormon Church) in Salt Lake City, Utah, there appears to be a similar mood of optimism. Although they have not given figures on whether membership numbers are up, enquiries certainly are. Mormons make up about 2% of Americans, but numbers are rising steadily.

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Kenneth Cragg stood out among scholars and theologians as one of very few who had the inner conviction to seek the truth in so deep an engagement with a faith other than his own. As a pen name that he used on a number of occasions emphasized, he sought above all to be a servant of mutual understanding. His desire was not to suggest that he is right but to find what is right and true, what truly expresses our best understanding about God and where Christians and Muslims are on common ground in this.

In seeking to ponder the depths of another faith, there was no suspension or dissolution of his own. At the core of his being was the conviction and experience of the saving grace of God in Jesus Christ. So there can be no dodging the hard questions, no intellectual bargaining or good-natured compromise. His wrestling with understanding Islam has never been a merely academic exercise. Personal relations have always been at its heart. One of his favourite concepts was that of hospitality, not merely in the meeting, listening and conversing but in the mind’s seeking the depth of Muslim intentions.

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“Bishop Kenneth Cragg held a unique position in the world of inter faith dialogue. His powerfully original mind, both analytic and poetic, was able to weave together themes and images from many and diverse religious backgrounds into a fresh theological perspective that still managed to do full honour to classical orthodoxy.

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(Via email–KSH).

Dear Brothers and Sisters,

Greetings in the Name of our Lord Jesus Christ!

It was sad to hear this morning that Bishop Kenneth Cragg has passed away. For the last few years, he was physically very weak, but mentally he was clear and alert. Although we were hoping that he would make it to be 100 years old in a few months time, his time came to be with the Lord.

Those who heard Kenneth Cragg talking about Jesus Christ could tell how much he loved the Lord. It is difficult for me to forget his tears every time he talked about the sacrificial love of Jesus.
Bishop Kenneth Cragg was very well-known here in the Arab World for his scholarly writings on Islam. He lived for many years here in the Middle East and developed friendships with many Muslims whom he sincerely loved. Many Muslim scholars loved and respected him too! He wrote and spoke about the major differences between Christianity and Islam, but the love that filled his heart towards Muslims embraced these differences. He also made a great contribution in revealing the common grounds between Islam and Christian-ity. I had the privilege of joining him in several seminars about Islam and Christianity here in Cairo and in the UK. His contribution to our Diocese and the Province of Jerusalem and the Middle East will never be forgotten. We re-member with great affection his time as an Assistant Bishop for the Diocese of Egypt and North Africa from 1970-1974. Until recently, continued to be a faithful and active member of the Egypt Diocesan Association. He was the one who chose the current site of All Saints Cathedral in Cairo, Egypt. We shall remember him as we celebrate the Silver Jubilee of All Saints Cathedral in November 2013.

Kenneth Cragg left a great heritage of the many books that he wrote and the love of God that he shared with many of us.
Please pray for his family.

May the Lord bless you!

–(The Most Rev.) Dr. Mouneer Hanna Anis is Bishop of the Episcopal / Anglican Diocese of Egypt with North Africa and the Horn of Africa, and President Bishop of the Episcopal / Anglican Province of Jerusalem and the Middle East

Six students at Cornell University, one at the University of Pennsylvania, and one at Yale took their own lives during the past academic year. One was a noted football player, almost certain to be elected captain. Another was a jokester, great student and kind soul. Two others were from notably affluent communities, Chevy Chase, MD and Boca Raton, FL. So, is this the end result of an academic culture that encourages a nihilistic questioning of all values, a rejection of God, and a moral permissiveness that leads to despair?

Since our [Saint Michael’s, Charleston] parish focus this year on “the hurting coast” (from Richmond to Maine) it’s worth pondering the great influence that our well-known public and private academic institutions in the northeast have upon our culture. We will soon have an “All-Ivy Supreme Court”, with seven of the nine justices having degrees from Harvard, Yale, Cornell, Columbia, and Princeton. And guess how many U.S. presidents have had degrees from these same institutions in the 20th century? If you exclude Nixon and Carter, Warren Harding and William Howard Taft, nearly every president of the past century had a degree from one of them ”“ or in a couple of cases from other similar colleges like Amherst and Stanford.

That is both impressive ”“ and troubling. It’s impressive because it signals the ability of these colleges to attract some of the best students. It’s troubling because of the disproportionate influence these institutions have upon the nation….

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The idea of Abrahamic religion is usually tied up with the notion of Abraham as the first monotheist. To the best-selling author Bruce Feiler, Abraham was “the first person to understand that there is only one God,” and this insight is “the shared endowment of the Abrahamic faiths.”

But the familiar image of Abraham as the discoverer of the true God and the uncompromising opponent of idolatry isn’t found in Genesis or anywhere else in the Hebrew Bible. It is an idea that originated in Judaism after most of the Hebrew Bible had been composed, and from there it spread into the literature of the Talmudic rabbis and later into the Quran, forming an important commonality between Judaism and Islam.

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The latest numbers suggest that an amazingly high percentage of women today””18.8 percent””complete their childbearing years having had no children. Another 18.5 percent of women finish having had only one child. Together, that’s nearly 40 percent of Americans who go their entire lives having either one child or no children at all.

And it’s a big change in behavior from the recent past. There have always been people who lived without having children””either by happenstance or by choice. But for all of American history, the numbers of this cohort were fairly small. In 1970, for instance, just about 8 percent of women completed their childbearing years with no children. (And only about 11 percent of women finished with only one child.) Over the next 40 years, those numbers rose almost without interruption. (The numbers ticked backward only once, in 2002.) This dramatic increase in childlessness””the number more than doubled””took place in just two generations and came at a time when medical advances were drastically improving the odds of infertile couples conceiving.

So what happened?

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It seems to me that Niebuhr’s appeal to many nonreligious people was because he treated idolatry as the root of the injustice they felt was so wrong and had to be opposed. Niebuhr did not require them to make a theological commitment in order to be more coherently opposed to injustice. He did not require them to first affirm “the God of Justice” (Isaiah 30:18) in order to then appreciate how injustice is not only an assault on humans, but it is an assault on truth itself.

What Niebuhr did try to persuade them was that their opposition to injustice would be more coherent if they understood that the injustice they opposed is not just the result of human error at the epistemological level, but that it is the result of human deceit at the ontological level – substituting a false god for the true God, even if they could now only affirm the possibility that there is such a God. And to affirm what is clearly a desirable possibility is the essence of hope. Hence Niebuhr gave their moral instinct a deeper and more hopeful intentionality.

So when Stanley Hauerwas criticizes Niebuhr for promulgating “an ethic for everyone,” I think Niebuhr would have taken that criticism as a compliment, for an ethic for everyone is precisely what ethics must be in order to have a voice in an idolatrous world. Clearly, Niebuhr would have liked for his nonreligious hearers to move into a position of faith in the God of the Bible, but he did not present that move as some sort of logical necessity. He knew full well that no one can be argued into faith, yet they can be argued into opposition against idolatrous injustice.

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Dozens of young men have been shot dead in Nigeria by the military in Maiduguri, residents in the north-eastern city have told the BBC.

An imam told the BBC about 11 youths from his street alone were killed, including four of his own sons.

The alleged extrajudicial executions happened as Amnesty International accused the security forces of abuses in its crackdown on Islamist militants.

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Established by Jewish philanthropists Charles Bronfman and Michael Steinhardt, among others, in collaboration with the Israeli government and various Jewish communal organizations, Birthright’s goal is “to strengthen Jewish identity, Jewish communities and solidarity with Israel.” As the generation that experienced the Holocaust and the creation of Israel grew older and died, younger Jews began to view the issue of a Jewish state with less and less urgency.

Birthright’s founders wanted to counter the waning interest in Judaism among the young. So far, the organization has sent more than 300,000 Jews from 59 countries to Israel””mostly from the U.S. and Canada.

Mark Shapiro, a former consultant for McKinsey & Co. who worked on the original plans for Birthright, says that some of the impetus for the project came from the 1990 Jewish Population Survey that showed an intermarriage rate for American Jews of greater than 50%….

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Mormonism is something we cannot escape right now. We are in a “Mormon Moment,” thanks to the candidacy of Governor Mitt Romney. Christians need to address this moment with truth and grace.

Right now, many are discussing what to call members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. Is it a denomination, a cult, or another religion? How should we discuss such things in the moment?

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While fewer Muslims are supporting Obama this year, Muslim support for Mitt Romney — at just 7 percent, according to the CAIR poll — is more than triple the 2.2 percent of Muslims who voted for GOP nominee John McCain in 2008.
“Muslims need tough love, not soft coddling to get over their illusions of Islamist fantasies,” said Ahmed Vanya, an engineer in San Jose, Calif.

Vanya fears that many Muslims won’t give Romney a fair chance.

“Many Muslims are not going to be happy with the way Romney would handle the civil rights issues,” Vanya said. “Even if he follows exactly the same policies as Obama, he would be perceived as worse for the Muslims.”

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A 19th century copy of the U.S. Constitution in Yiddish and Hebrew. A 15th century Hebrew book from Italy open to a page of passages that had been censored by the Catholic Church during the Inquisition. A 20th century “Curious George” children’s book translated into Yiddish.

Spanning across the centuries and the globe, they’re all part of a new exhibit, “Words Like Sapphires,” which celebrates 100 years of Hebraica at the Library of Congress.

The exhibit features some 60 objects, religious and lighter fare, drawn from the Library of Congress’ more than 200,000-piece Hebraica collection….

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Mallon: The greatest thing that I can hope for from this Synod is this pastoral conversion, which means we have to change the very culture of our Churches. The predominant culture of the Churches where I come from and my experience doing this work, is that we have a maintenance culture within our parishes. In the past we had strong Catholic cultures that helped people go to Church and to believe. Usually the only growth we had in parishes was from demographic shifts. We didn’t really have to do anything: we just had to schedule Masses and pay the light bills. And for the culture of the time that worked. There was no sense of being missional. Today the culture is toxic, not just neutral. If you do nothing you will be stripped of faith.

We have got to apply new methodology, which means we must move from a maintenance culture to a missional culture. That means addressing the values that we ”“ perhaps even unconsciously ”“ hold as local Churches within parishes. We can be very quick to say “I value this, this, and this.” But, it’s one thing to say what you value; it’s another thing to actually look at how you function as a Church, and what you put your money and resources and time into. By analyzing those, we find out what we truly value.

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At a Seattle synagogue, volunteers are running a phone bank urging voters to uphold Washington’s same-sex marriage law. In Maryland, Catholics are poised to preach from the pulpit opposing a similar initiative.

Voters in those states as well as Maine are less than two weeks from deciding whether to hand ballot-box victory to same- sex marriage proponents for the first time after more than a decade of defeat. Campaigns on both sides are targeting religious communities, where leaders holding on to centuries of opposition to homosexuality are often pitted against their congregants’ evolving attitudes toward gay nuptials.

“There has been some movement in recent years toward greater acceptance of same-sex marriage,” said David Masci, a researcher with the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life in Washington. “But the largest religious groups and the biggest churches remain opposed.”

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At least seven people have been killed and dozens injured in a suicide bombing during Mass at a Catholic church in northern Nigeria, officials say.

An explosive-laden vehicle drove into the church and detonated its load, ripping a hole in the wall and roof.

The attack happened in Kaduna, which has been targeted by Islamist militant group Boko Haram in the recent past.

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At school No. 20 in Russia’s troubled region of Chechnya, boys sit on one side of the classroom and girls in headscarves on the other. All are silent as the new teacher rises to speak.

“Do you say your morning prayers?” Islam Dzhabrailov, 21, asks, wearing a green prayer cap and a plain tunic, religious dress that is increasingly popular in the mountainous province in southern Russia’s mostly Muslim Caucasus region.

“It’s just as important as doing your homework,” he tells the students aged 14-15.

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According to a recent study by the Pew Research Center, American Protestants recently became a minority of the country (48%) for the first time””not just since the American Revolution, but since the establishment of the first English colonies on American soil. Even more notably, the same Pew research revealed that 20% of all Americans now say they are not affiliated with any religion.

At one level, this is a victory for religious pluralism””or, to use the politically correct term, diversity. At another, when one in five Americans has no religious affiliation, it is a commentary on the diminished importance of the moral underpinnings that characterized the United States for most of its existence.

At the country’s founding, even skeptics and Deists like Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin paid great respect to the morality and values that the vast majority of Americans accepted as God-given standards by which to live. These were standards rooted in Christian belief and teachings. Jefferson, as is well known, was a man of the Enlightenment who was genuinely skeptical about the supernatural claims of Christianity. Even he, however, believed in the need for virtue in national life as an essential ingredient for the safe continuation of the republic.

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Over the past decade, an anti-Muslim movement in America has pushed for anti-Shariah laws in some 23 states and helped generate anti-mosque protests in more than 50 communities.

Even more disturbing, poisonous anti-Muslim rhetoric has contributed to an atmosphere of anger and hate that provokes acts of intimidation and violence ”“ including the recent attack on a Sikh temple in Wisconsin where six people were murdered, apparently because the killer confused Sikhs with Muslims.

Groups involved in the “stop Islamization of America” campaign have spent more than $40 million attempting to convince the public that American Muslims practice an inherently violent and oppressive faith that seeks to subvert the Constitution, according to a 2011 study conducted by the Center for American Progress.

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Gerald Heard is the most influential religious thinker you’ve never heard of.

Without Heard, some of the major spiritual developments of 20th-century America — the introduction of Eastern mysticism, the development of the human potential movement and the spiritual use of psychedelic drugs — might never have happened. And at least one skeptical California newspaperman named Don Lattin might never have sobered up, stopped using, and found a measure of serenity and faith.

All bear the fingerprints of Heard, who has been called “the godfather of New Age” — an Englishman born at the end of the Victorian era who migrated to California and died here in relative obscurity.

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[Lamin] Sanneh acknowledges a debt to the missionary schools that unintentionally introduced him to a desiccated version of Christian faith, and he tells how as an earnest young man he wandered from pastor to pastor, desperately seeking baptism, only to be deflected by missionaries who had compromised mission in their uneasy accommodation to Islamic culture. The story would almost be humorous if it were not so sad. Yet even the account of the missionaries’ rebuff is less painful to read than the account of what he received at the hands of liberal, mainline North American pastors who had long before enmeshed themselves in their culture by reducing their ministry to caregiving rather than conversion. As for many frustrated would-be converts in our age, it was easier for Sanneh to find Christ than for him to find Christian community. Eventually he became a Catholic while at Yale.

–Will Willimon in a review of Lamin Sanneh’s new Summoned From the Margin (Eerdmans, 2012), Christian Century, the October 17th, 2012 issue, page 53 (emphasis mine)

A controversial Tanzanian Muslim cleric has been arrested for stoking religious hatred, police have said.

Sheikh Ponda Issa Ponda’s arrest comes after Muslim protesters vandalised and torched five churches in the main city, Dar es Salaam, last week.

The violence followed rumours that a Christian boy urinated on a Koran.

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Nomadic Muslim herdsmen attacked a Christian village in central Nigeria over long-running land disputes, killing at least 30 people in their latest assault, police said Wednesday.

The attack in Benue state comes as a bomb exploded Wednesday in northeast Nigeria, apparently killing a police officer and sparking reprisal attacks by the military in the region, residents said.

In Benue state, the attack Sunday targeted a rural village of Christian Tiv people called Yogbo in the state, police spokesman Daniel Ezeala said. After the attack, those living there fled, community leader Daniel Tsenghul said.

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It is a fact that few people become atheists either in foxholes or philosophy class. But having seen the minor outcry against criticism of the New Atheist position by their adherents, I have come to the conclusion that Ruse and Berlinerblau are right: the new atheism is a danger to American intellectual life, to the serious study of important questions, and to the atheist tradition itself.

I have reasons for saying this. Mostly, they have nothing to do with the canonical status of a few books and speakers who draw, like Jesus, multitudes of hungry listeners. At this level, emotion comes into play, celebrity and authority come into play. Perhaps even faith comes into play. The bright scarlet A of proud atheism as a symbol of nonbelief and denial becomes an icon in its own right: The not-the-cross and not-the-crescent. And again, as we reach beyond not believing into symbolism and the authority of speakers who can deliver you from the dark superstitions of religion, without having to die on a cross, we have come a long way from simply not believing. That is what Professors Ruse and Berlinerblau have been saying….
But the real disaster of the new atheism is one I am experiencing as a college teacher. Almost three decades back I faced opposition from students who denied that history had anything to teach them about their strong emotional commitment to a belief system or faith. Today I am often confronted with students who feel just the same way”“except they are atheists, or rather many of them have adopted the name and the logo.

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School teacher Darlene Derosier lost her home in the 2010 earthquake that devastated her country. Her husband died a month later after suffering what she said was emotional trauma from the quake. She and her two daughters now live in tents outside Haiti’s capital, surrounded by thousands of others made homeless and desperate by the disaster.

What has helped pull her through all the grief, she said, has been her faith, but not of the Catholic, Protestant or even Voodoo variety that have predominated in this island country. Instead, she has converted to a new religion here, Islam, and built a small neighborhood mosque out of cinderblocks and plywood, where about 60 Muslims pray daily.

Islam has won a growing number of followers in this impoverished country, especially after the catastrophe two years ago that killed about 300,000 people and left millions more homeless.

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Westerners may debate how moderate Egypt’s Islamists are, but for Copts the questioning is futile. Their options are limited. While Copts are the largest Christian community in the Middle East, they’re too small to play a role in deciding the fate of the country. They are not geographically concentrated in one area that could become a safe zone. The only option is to leave, putting an end to 2,000 years of Christianity in Egypt.

The sad truth is that not all will be able to flee. Those with money, English skills and the like will get out. Their poorer brethren will be left behind.

What can be done to save them? Egypt receives $1.5 billion in U.S. aid each year, and Washington has various means to make Egypt’s new leaders listen. Islamist attempts to enshrine second-class status for Copts in Egypt’s new constitution should be stopped. Outsiders should also keep an eye on Muslim Brotherhood politicians who are planning to take control of Coptic Church finances. At a minimum, donors should demand that attacks on Copts be met with punishment as well as condemnation.

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