Almost two weeks after the killing of around 25 Copts during an anti- discrimination demonstration in front of the headquarters of state TV on 9 October confusion continues to surround the carnage. There is no clear plan to punish the killers, who remain unidentified, and no guarantees that root cause of the problem is being addressed.

Immediately following the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces’ (SCAF) public denial during a press conference on 12 October of any culpability on the part of soldiers or military police in the killing of demonstrators protesting against the illegal demolition of churches, the Coptic Church questioned the council’s version of events. Speaking hours after the press conference, Pope Shenouda denied that military police had been forced to defend themselves after demonstrators shot at them. “The demonstrators were not armed,” he stated.

The position of the Church has received support from across civil society, with videos emerging that purport to reveal the details of bloody Sunday….

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A Muslim organization is working to counter radicalization by providing the work of progressive Islam scholars online in simple, youth-friendly language.

Muslims for Progressive Values (MPV), a nonprofit group that has established liberal Muslim communities in the U.S. and Canada, created the “Literary Zikr” website to provide an alternative to the fundamentalist versions of Islam that pervade the Internet.

“We take the scholarship and present it to the people,” said Yarehk Hernandez, a board member of MPV.

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The Archbishop of Canterbury… [Wednesday] sent wishes for ”˜a very joyful and blessed Diwali’ to Hindu communities.

In his greeting, Dr Williams speaks of the idea of ‘the return home’ as a central concept in the Ramayana, where the believer returns not to a specific place, but ‘to God and finding a home in God’.

Speaking of the similarities with which Hindu and Christian mystical texts refer to ‘homecoming’, he says “I hope that through reading these different passages together in Hindu and Christian dialogue we can find a basis from which to work together as communities and develop greater understanding of the nature of God and of what it means to dwell with and in him.”

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Mormonism is not something I could accept as a faith — you will never get the Catholic out of me, even if I attend an Episcopal church in Georgetown.

Mormons believe in the salvation story that makes Christianity a separate faith, not merely a separate sect, from Judaism. However, Mormons also believe mortals possess the potential for divinity — to live a life like God in the hereafter — if they live a truly just life here on earth.

The potential for our own divinity sounds farfetched and cult-like to rigid and inflexible Christians, such as Texas Gov. Rick Perry supporter Rev. Robert Jeffress, but no more so than did the divinity of Christ and the Christian salvation story to First Century Jews or their Roman rulers. What is more important is what Mormons believe and teach to their children about what God expects from each of us in our relationships with our fellow human beings — or what it takes to live a good life.

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From here:

I take exception to Marilyn Gibson’s letter, “Placing Mormon faith” (Forum, Oct. 20), when she claims that Episcopalians “don’t think Mormons are Christian.” While I applaud her ability to back up her research using the trusted source Wikipedia, I urge her to broaden her research before asserting that my religion does not consider our Latter-day Saint brothers and sisters to be Christian.

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In recent years, [Richard] Land has numbered himself among those who describe Mormonism as a kind of fourth Abrahamic tradition, a new faith that has reinterpreted the past under the guidance of its own prophet and its own scriptures. In this case, he said, “Joseph Smith is like Mohammad and The Book of Mormon is like the Koran.” Mormons believe they have restored true Christianity, while Trinitarian churches reject this claim that they have lost the faith.

Thus, it’s not surprising that a new LifeWay Research survey of 1,000 liberal and conservative Protestant clergy in America found that 75 percent disagreed with this statement: “I personally consider Mormons (Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints) to be Christians.” The surprise was that 48 percent of mainline Protestant pastors strongly agreed that Mormons are not Christians.
Meanwhile, the Vatican in 2001 addressed the issue of “whether the baptism conferred by the community The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, called Mormons in the vernacular, is valid.”

The response from the late Pope John Paul II was blunt: “Negative.”

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The traditional model for the mourning of the dead has been set in concrete for millennia. The Anglican model was described 250 years ago in Thomas Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard. Here he describes death in a small village community where the burial ground is at the centre of village life and where every death has meaning for the community. Ceremonies honed by time helped family members and the community to acknowledge the death and start the process of recovery.

Fast forward a quarter of a millennium and the shape of society is so different. Our communities are huge and contain unknowable amounts of people whose lives and deaths are inconsequential to us. We couldn’t give a tinker’s cuss about the thousands of Australians who die weekly. As the life expectancy has rocked up into the eighties, most of us who die in the affluent west will do so at a great age in care, invisible to the outside world. We have become less practised at mourning (which is not bad thing). This deskilling of ritual and mourning has been exacerbated as faith has moved from the centre of Australian life. So death is now less frequent and less mourned, for the death of the aged inspires far less grief than the death of the young and the old rituals are now forgotten and seldom rehearsed.

There is a ritualistic vacuum that calls forth both uncertainty and innovation.

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A common argument runs this way:

Mormons aren’t Christians. Why? Because Mormons differ dramatically from the Christian mainstream, rejecting major doctrines (for example, the Nicene Trinity) that developed in the centuries after Christ.

Critics often accuse us of deceptively claiming to be traditional Christians, and puzzled outsiders sometimes ask why we claim to be Christians while rejecting certain doctrines and traditional creeds.

But we don’t claim to be mainstream Christians, and these objections conflate or confuse “mainstream Christianity” or “traditional Christianity” or “historical Christian orthodoxy” with “Christianity” as a whole. They mistakenly assume that “Christianity” and “mainstream Christianity” are synonyms.

Make sure to read that last statement again several times (my emphasis). Then take the time to read it all–KSH.

We hypothesize that white Catholics and mainline Protestants are fine with Mormons because they are not bothered by the same theological issues as are evangelicals, who are theologically conservative and question whether Mormons are really Christians. Nor are these politically moderate groups troubled by the same political issues as staunchly secular Americans and racial minorities, who are politically liberal and disagree with Mormons’ conservative political views.

It’s clear, then, that whereas evangelicals present a problem for Mr. Romney as he competes in heavily evangelical primary states like Iowa and South Carolina, his Mormonism would be unlikely to hurt him if he survives and wins the Republican nomination. Neither secular nor minority voters are prone to vote for Republicans anyway, and evangelicals are equally unlikely to cast a ballot for a Democrat. Of course, evangelicals may hurt a Romney candidacy by staying home on Election Day 2012, but their strong opposition to President Obama and their past high levels of turnout suggest that they will take to the polls to try to oust the incumbent. Meanwhile, other churchgoing Americans””especially white Catholics and mainline Protestants””appear unconcerned with Mr. Romney’s religion.

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British philosopher A C Grayling has withdrawn from attending an interreligious event to promote world peace hosted by the Vatican.

Although the professor of philosophy had originally planned to attend the third “Prayer for Peace” in Assisi, Italy, he later changed his mind on discovering that it was an event for pilgrims.

Professor Grayling told The Catholic Herald: “I thought it was originally to have a discussion with the Pope about the place of religion in society but then it turned out it was a minor event and what they wanted was these guests to accompany the Pope on a pilgrimage. So I decided to withdraw.”

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Just as former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney tries to overcome unease about his Mormon faith in his bid for the Republican presidential nomination, a new ad campaign promoting the religion is drawing attention.

“I’m a Mormon” billboards and television commercials aimed at improving the religious group’s public image have surfaced over the past week in states almost certain to be battlegrounds for next year’s presidential contest.

But don’t expect to see Romney in a commercial proclaiming “I’m a Mormon.” The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, whose members are commonly called Mormons, says its ad campaign has nothing to do with the candidate. (Federal law prevents nonprofit organizations such as the LDS church from participating in political campaigns.)

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U.S. Army Cadet Command officials say a complaint by an advocacy group on behalf of a Ravenwood High School student has sparked a review of regulations spelling out what kinds of religious wear students may wear in the Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps Program.

The review comes in the wake of a bias claim by the Council of American-Islamic Relations that a local JROTC program was discriminatory when it didn’t allow a high school freshman to wear her headscarf to march in a homecoming parade.

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Along with countless Christians and Muslims alike throughout the world, I want to express my deep concern about the current situation in Egypt as it affects all our Christian brothers and sisters and to promise our continuing prayers and support especially for His Holiness Pope Shenuda and the community he serves. In modern times the significant Coptic Christian population in Egypt has been free from repression ; Muslims and Christians have happily shared a loyalty to the one Egyptian state….

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: In his Rite and Reason articles last July/August, Prof James Mackey’s central thesis is that the theory of evolution (which he describes as “Dawkins’s Darwinism”) is unfit to serve as a moral code for the human race.

I agree. It is not. And no atheist that I know, particularly Richard Dawkins, has ever suggested that it is or should be or even could be.

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[In the 18th century James]…Madison led the effort to enshrine the right of religious conscience in the First Amendment. To Madison, this was the most sacred of all rights. For him, the First Amendment included the most significant principle claimed by the founding generation.

Surely, Fischer and Jeffress believe deeply in their brand of Christianity. They also, no doubt, believe that they should be free to urge their followers to eschew a candidate who does not follow their brand of Christianity. They have, however, failed to grasp the crowning principle of our Constitution ”” the freedom of conscience. They also seem to have forgotten how tenuous religious liberty is.

Before religious leaders in the 21st century declare a religious test for political purposes, they should remember Madison’s caution that their own brand of Christianity could, under such a principle, one day be disfavored in diabolical ways that will lead to persecution.

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Mecca, we have a problem.

It is not America, nor Europe, and no, it is certainly not Israel.

The problem is Christian persecution. Some 14 centuries after the prophet Mohammed wrote, “Christians are my citizens, and by God, I hold out against anything that displeases them,” Christian persecution has become the norm in too many Muslim-majority nations.

A few days ago, 25 Christians were killed in Egypt after state television falsely accused them of creating violence ”” while they peacefully protested violence against their churches. Rather than fight for the rights of Christians, the Muslim mob attacked them.

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It speaks volumes for the state of America’s political dialogue that a new book defending nation-building mentions the word “Islam” in passing just twice, not counting footnotes or index. Robert Kagan reviews Prof. Jeremi Suri’s little tome entitled Liberty’s Surest Guardian: Nation-Building From the Founders to Obama in Sunday’s New York Times….

It is astonishing that Prof. Suri, who holds an important chair at the University of Texas at Austin, could publish a book on the subject without so much as a nod towards the cultural, religious, and sociological issues that make democracy in the Muslim world a vastly different proposition than in Italy. And it is just as lamentable that Robert Kagan would lump the Catholic Philippines of 1900 together with the Muslim Afghanistan of 2011, as if such issues made no difference at all.

To Kagan, Suri, and most of the nation-builders, religion does not make a difference, for they all come out of a school of “political philosophy” that believes (with Thomas Hobbes) that religion is useful for socializing the masses but never to be taken seriously, and that what human beings really care about is individual self-preservation.

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Islamic hard-liners have attacked about a half-dozen shrines in and around Tripoli belonging to Muslim sects whose practices they see as sacrilegious, raising religious tensions as Libya struggles to define its identity after Moammar Gadhafi’s ouster.

The vandalism has drawn concern at the highest levels as Libya’s new rulers seek to reassure the international community that extremists will not gain influence in the North African nation.

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As Jews around the world gather to celebrate Simchat Torah next week””the raucous holiday marking the completion of the annual cycle of public Torah readings””I am reminded of one of the more curious practices among Soviet Jews in the final decades of the Communist regime.

Living under duress, these Jews gathered illegally in homes or even in the streets to celebrate a holiday for an object that most had never seen, let alone read from. Such celebrations persisted despite systematic anti-Jewish persecution by the Soviets, including university quotas, discouragement from certain jobs, and an all-out effort to eradicate Jewish culture and religion.

And yet 20 years after the Soviet Union’s fall, this act of defiance has taken on an entirely different character….

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A new push is under way to get people reading the Bible ”” a sensible antidote to Americans’ well-documented biblical illiteracy. Behind the drive are influential Texas pastors Randy Frazee and Max Lucado, who both have new books out to guide people through the Scriptures. As capable as these read-your-Bible champions are, however, theirs is not the most straightforward task.

For starters, they are fighting against a social current that is making book-reading of any sort a harder sell. But perhaps even more significant are the disturbing discoveries awaiting readers who are lured back to the “the good book” ”” content that might come as an unpleasant surprise to Christians convinced it’s only certain other religions that must account for violence in their sacred texts.

As becomes unavoidably clear from a stroll through the Old Testament, the Bible can be gruesome, too.

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The push to recognise sharia law in Australia has entered an ambitious new phase that draws on the tactics that have handed success to Islamists in Britain.

The latest move, under the guise of helping Muslim women, would give sharia law priority over Australian divorce law.

If enacted, this plan would prevent Muslims from obtaining a civil divorce unless they first divorce under Islamic law.

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An Anglican priest here says he’s working with the U.S. Embassy to persuade the handful of Jews who still live in Baghdad to leave because their names have appeared in cables published last month by WikiLeaks.

The Rev. Canon Andrew White said he first approached members of the Jewish community about what he felt was the danger they faced after a news story was published last month that made reference to the cables.

“The U.S. Embassy is desperately trying to get them out,” White said. So far, however, only one, a regular confidante of the U.S. Embassy, according to the cables, had expressed interest in emigrating to the United States.

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Throughout the nation’s history, American soldiers have fought for God and country. During the Civil War, the bonds of country were blurred, but faith in God remained strong on both sides, blue and gray….

…[Yesterday], the S.C. Confederate Relic Room and Military Museum debuts a new exhibit ”” “Through Fiery Trials: Religion in the Civil War” ”” taking a look at that faith. It is the second in a series of special exhibits commemorating the war’s 150th anniversary.

While the stars of the exhibit are Bibles belonging to Confederate Gens. Robert E. Lee and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, on loan from Virginia museums, one of the most moving items is local: The bullet-pierced Bible of Sgt. Walter Henry Counts of Lexington.

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A decision by Ohio officials to remove all pork products from prison menus in response to a lawsuit by Muslim inmates is not sitting well with the state’s pork producers and processors.

Both promise action of their own, including a possible counter lawsuit, to address what they consider an unfair and illogical decision.

“We really think it’s not in the best interest, frankly, of the whole prison system,” said Dick Isler, executive director of the Ohio Pork Producers Council. “It seems like we’re letting a small group make the rules when it really isn’t in the best interest of the rest of prisoners.”

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L’Osservatore Romano (English, September 21) reprinted an essay, “God in Madrid,” by the Peruvian novelist and Nobel Prize winner, Mario Vargas Llosa, from the Spanish paper El País about the meaning of the papal visit….

[In the essay Llosa says that] contemporary culture is rather vapid, a kind of “light entertainment.” Within it is a “cabal of incomprehensible and arrogant experts, who have taken refuge in unintelligible jargon, light years from common mortals.” Culture has not replaced religion, particularly that religion originating in revelation….

Most human beings suspect that the answers need a “higher order” of existence to locate the center of their lives. Atheism’s self-satisfied defenders no longer stand on the solid ground they once assumed. Science itself is looking like it has to admit that the origin of the universe lies in some transcendent, extra-cosmic, intelligent source even to explain science….

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Jews, Muslims and their allies cheered Sunday (Oct. 2) as California Gov. Jerry Brown signed a bill prohibiting all local bans on circumcision, making it illegal for local authorities to restrict the medical or religious practice.

Anti-circumcision activists had gathered enough signatures to place the issue on the ballot in San Francisco. Voters would have been asked to decide if infant circumcision should be banned as an unnecessary genital mutilation, a misdemeanor punishable by a $1,000 fine and up to a year in jail.

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The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints will launch a new media campaign Monday in 12 major cities.

The “I’m a Mormon” campaign ”” mostly TV spots and billboards ”” will encourage people to learn about Latter-day Saints by visiting the mormon.org website, which features video profiles of thousands of Mormons from around the world.

“These are real people,” said Cindy Packard, the LDS Church spokeswoman for the metropolitan Phoenix area. “There are no scripts, no fake stories, no wardrobe, just real people talking about their lives.”

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… in recent years, the break-fast party has become part of the Jewish social calendar. From Los Angeles to Chicago to New York, many are attending large, crowded break-fasts, where the spirit of the High Holy Days can get lost in the mixing, and where the day’s solemnity quickly abates, smothered by large quantities of cream cheese and hummus.

Vanessa Ochs, who teaches religion at the University of Virginia, says the new, bigger break-fast raises theological questions. Even before the day of repentance is over, many people are forced to think about the meal they will be serving.

“In the last 25 years, the break-fast has, in some friendship groups, become such a moment for gratitude and coming together that people will stay home from services to cook and prepare,” Dr. Ochs said. “That isn’t what they’re supposed to be doing, but from a non-halakhic” ”” extra-legal ”” “perspective, if this meal marks who is in your friendship circle, and who is going to be there for you, then this is a holy communal feast.”

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For an atheist, Maxim Schrogin talks about God a lot.

Over lunch at a Jewish deli, he ponders the impulse to believe ”” does it come from within or without? Why does God permit suffering? Finally, he pulls out a flowchart he made showing degrees of belief, which ranges from unquestioning faith to absolute atheism. He stabs the paper with his pen.

“This is where I fall,” he said. “Zero.”

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Listen to it all (a little under 28 1/2 minutes).