For the settlers, the presence of the Christian workers has more practical applications.

“Today we have more than 200 acres. It’s a lot of agriculture and it takes a lot of work,” says Veret Ben Sadon, who helps run the Tura Winery. “We saw that we cannot work alone. I can say for sure that without this help, we cannot do what we are doing today.”

Essentially she gets free labor for the heavy seasonal work that needs to be done. She says there is a labor shortage in the area and the Christians fill the gap.

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American Christians would be understandably outraged if they learned of Muslims burning the Bible. Muslims have an even greater reverence for their holy book. Omid Safi, who teaches Islamic studies at the University of North Carolina, notes that Muslims look at the Qur’an the way Christians look at Jesus. “In an Islamic universe . . . the word becomes not a person, but a book,” he says. “For a Muslim to see the Qur’an burnt . . . it would look and feel like someone burning Jesus, or a crucifix.”

Christians should at least understand and respect the way Muslims look at the Qur’an. Most Muslims have a higher regard for the Bible than most Christians have for the Qur’an. It is unlikely that a Muslim would ever burn a Bible.

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…for the Apostle Paul, diversity, not uniformity, in every aspect of human life and language and culture, characterizes the unity and catholicity of the church (1 Corinthians 12:12-31). His own speech, he admits, is “not with plausible words of wisdom, but with a demonstration of the Spirit and of power” (1 Corinthians 2:4).

“Interestingly,” Tim [Griffin] writes, “for purposes of both ecumenical and interfaith discussions, this approach of humble shared ignorance provides a basis of shared experience. We can begin to see that the categories from which we, as Christians and as Episcopalians, have expressed our understanding of the Holy are limited and provisional. When we acknowledge that, we may be more willing to “listen and listen” and hear, to paraphrase Isaiah. And we will no doubt be more willing to show radical hospitality when we acknowledge that our practices are simply ways of clothing the mystery.”

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Although the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints promised in 1995 to stop including Holocaust victims in its ritual, the church admitted last week that Anne Frank had been “baptized” in a Mormon church in the Dominican Republic. On Wednesday, The Boston Globe reported that Daniel Pearl, a reporter for The Wall Street Journal who was kidnapped and killed by terrorists in Pakistan in early 2002, was baptized last June in Twin Falls, Idaho; Mr. Pearl was Jewish.
Also on Wednesday, the church released a letter reiterating its policy that “without exception, church members must not submit for proxy temple ordinances any names from unauthorized groups, such as celebrities and Jewish Holocaust victims.”

In proxy baptism, a living Mormon immerses himself or herself in a baptismal font on behalf of a dead person. A church spokesman, Michael Otterson, said Friday that the ritual was done in the spirit of love, and that people’s souls were free not to become Mormons.

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Methodist and Latter-day Saint historians, theologians, preachers and congregants gathered Friday in Washington, D.C., like long-lost family members becoming reacquainted.

The common roots and differences between Methodists and The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints were explored at an interfaith conference titled “At the Crossroads, Again,” hosted by the Foundation for Religious Diplomacy and the Wesley Theological Center.

The Foundation for Religious Diplomacy exists to build trust and friendship between religious traditions which are often suspicious of each other, foundation president Randall Paul said.

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Politicians and academics have paid tribute to a world-renowned Birmingham philosopher who “would not flinch from controversy” and who was once accused of heresy.

Professor John Hick, seen by many as the most influential philosopher of religion of recent times, has died just weeks after celebrating his 90th birthday.

The former University of Birmingham academic and church minister is remembered for helping to stop South African apartheid-era cricketers playing in Birmingham.

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The Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Center denounced the news.

“We are outraged that such insensitive actions continue in the Mormon temples,” said Rabbi Abraham Cooper, a spokesman at the centre.

The Mormon religion allows baptism after death, and believes the departed soul can then accept or reject the baptismal rites.

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In a time when disdain for other faiths is commonplace, even blessed in some religious circles, how does a Bible study instructor contrast the teachings and doctrines of another tradition and his own without seeming intolerant? And conversely, can the increased sensitivity to multiculturalism and religious diversity in early 21st-century America gradually diminish the celebration of one faith tradition’s distinctive place in the theological spectrum?

“If you’re going to take your religion seriously, you should feel it’s superior to others. Why else believe in it?” said Alan Wolfe, director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College. “On the other hand, society does require a hands-off attitude toward other faiths in order for us to all live together. It’s a dilemma.”

Thomas, who was on staff at Concordia Seminary in Clayton for 18 years, said he believes the Bible studies at St. Paul’s have stayed on the respectful side of the line. His goal with the classes, he said, is to explain the teachings of another religion and to ask why Lutherans don’t believe the same thing.

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Perhaps the gravest under-publicized atrocity in the world is the persecution of Christians. A comprehensive Pew Forum study last year found that Christians are persecuted in 131 countries containing 70 percent of the world’s population, out of 197 countries in the world (if Palestine, Taiwan, South Sudan, and the Vatican are included). Best estimates are that about 200 million Christians are in communities where they are persecuted. There is not the slightest question of the scale and barbarity of this persecution, and a little of it is adequately publicized. But this highlights the second half of the atrocity: the passivity and blasé indifference of most of the West’s media and governments.

It is not generally appreciated that over 100,000 Christians a year are murdered because of their faith. Because Christianity is, by a wide margin, the world’s largest religion, the leading religion in the traditionally most advanced areas of the world, and, despite its many fissures, the best organized, largely because of the relatively tight and authoritarian structure of the Roman Catholic Church, the West is not accustomed to thinking of Christians as a minority, much less a persecuted one.

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Archbishop of Canterbury Dr. Rowan Williams met with Chief Rabbis Yona Metzger and Shlomo Amar on Thursday during a week-long personal pilgrimage to Israel and the West Bank.

The office of the Diocese of Jerusalem of the Anglican Church said that during Williams’ visit he emphasized “the importance of constructive dialogue and co-existence between all religions,” and the need to “consolidate the peace process between the people of this region.”

Invited by the head of the Anglican Diocese of Jerusalem Bishop Suheil Dawani, Williams was on a private tour and so did not make any public statements.

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Traveling to Israel with Jewish colleagues earlier this month had a transforming effect on the Rev. Susan Sica, vicar of Saint Gregory’s Episcopal Church in Parsippany.

“It would have been easy to go to Israel and have a sanitized experience that only touched on Christian sites ”” where Jesus walked, and that sort of thing. But then we would never have really looked at what Israel is today,” she told NJJN in a phone conversation a few days after returning.

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The United States is currently in what some have called the “Mormon Moment” ”“ a time when the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is gaining attention due, in part, to the popularity of Mormon celebrities and politicians. Many Mormons, however, are leaving the church to embrace traditional Christianity, but such radical shifts in thought don’t come easily.

The Western Institute for Intercultural Studies (WIIS), a think-tank organization dedicated to helping Christians understand and witness to those of other religions, has come up with a program which includes DVDs and a workbook that are designed to help ex-Mormons have an easier transition into Christianity.

Nearly 70,000 people left the Mormon Church in the U.S. in 2007, according to the Mormon Social Science Association via the first Transitions DVD. Some of the thousands of Mormons who have left the church have turned to Christianity, which is why WIIS created “Transitions: The Mormon Migration from Religion to Relationship,” a six-part program that helps “immigrants” to Christianity address both personal and doctrinal issues.

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The founders of Neve Shaanan, a neighborhood in southern Tel Aviv, planned their streets in the shape of a seven-branched candelabra – a symbol of their Jewish faith. Ninety years later, the streets are full of Christmas decorations, reflecting a flowering of Christianity in Israel’s economic and cultural capital.

Tens of thousands of Christian foreigners, most of them laborers from the Philippines and African asylum seekers, have poured into the neighborhood in recent years. They pray year-round in more than 30 churches hidden in grimy apartment buildings. But in late December, their Christian subculture emerges in full force in the southern streets of Tel Aviv, whose founders called it the “first Hebrew city.”

On the Saturday before Christmas, the center of festivities was the city’s central bus station, a hulking seven-story maze of concrete.

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Christopher Hitchens will be remembered as many things: an acerbic essayist, connoisseur of Scotch and cigarettes and roguish writer whose forceful pen was fueled by an imposing intellect.

Yet his impact on American life, which will be felt long after his death at age 62 on Thursday (Dec. 15), is likely to be the unabashed atheism he championed throughout his life, and the public voice he gave to growing numbers of unbelievers.

Even his foes””whose prayers he simultaneously welcomed and rejected as he battled esophageal cancer””say his acid-tongued arguments against God sharpened their own.

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Recently, we had to move out of our historic building because of damage caused to our walls by the August earthquake centered in Virginia. Within days we received several offers to help house our various services from Lutherans, Methodists, fellow Episcopalians and our generous neighbors at Mount Zion AME Church.

The next thing we know, we are benefitting from the gifts of our fellow citizens and worshiping on Sundays at 11:15 at the oldest Catholic parish in the Carolinas, St. Mary’s on Hasell Street….

…[and later] picture my surprise as an invitation came from the president of Kahal Kadosh Beth Elohim Synagogue across from St. Mary’s to have Christmas services at their location. Did I get that right? Did our Jewish brothers and sisters just invite us for Christmas at the synagogue?

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This last point suggests a further implication of the basic argument. The Anglican legacy includes a tradition of working with the grain of a culture: it begins in the unashamed attempt to devise a form for Catholic ecclesial life that is thoroughly ”˜native’ to the realms governed by the Tudor dynasty. Hooker is consistently concerned to defend an ecclesiastical polity that is bound up with the laws and customs of this particular society. This can be ”“ and often has been ”“ an excuse for the odd cultural fundamentalism which assumes that communicating Christianity means communicating (or imposing) certain cultural habits; it is the familiar caricature of Anglicanism abroad which has produced replicas of Gothic churches in tropical climates and a musical repertoire mostly focused upon translations of Victorian hymns. But the principle with which Hooker worked is logically one that allows cultural diversity and flexibility. At least some Anglican missions took this fully on board ”“ notably in the Pacific, when we think of the work of Selwyn and Patteson. And, to push it a little further and to link it with the reflections of Vincent Donovan in his classic, Christianity Rediscovered, this means that we should be careful of trying to control too tightly the forms that arise in response to the sharing of the Gospel.

Thus, even if a dialogue has within it a hope and prayer that it may open the door to some kind of explicit acknowledgement of Christ, it must recognize that this will not dissolve all the ”˜otherness’ that a dialogue will have involved. Just as we wait to hear what Christ has to say to us in the voice of the dialogue partner who has no explicit vocabulary for speaking of the relation that already exists with this Christ, so we wait to see what particular effect, within this thought world, this set of customs, words about Christ may have. And whatever the outcome in respect of this, the readiness to hear and learn from the ”˜stranger’s’ hidden relation to Christ must be always to the fore. I don’t think this is an appeal to an anonymous Christianity in the other: it is rather an appeal to the hidden Christ active in the other, the eternal Word who cannot but be acting in union with the historical Jesus.

To repeat the Christological point: although the Word is never without Jesus, and the Word’s acts in human history (and indeed in the universe) will be inseparable from the agency of Jesus as a human being, it would be a mistake to say that what we can say about the human Jesus exhausts what we can say about the Word.

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Five years after Pope Benedict XVI’s Regensburg address that ignited protests around the Islamic world, the Catholic-Muslim Forum established to improve interfaith relations has said that what began as formal dialogue has become increasingly characterised by friendship.

The forum, which grew out of Muslim dissatisfaction with comments in Pope Benedict’s 2006 Regensburg speech, held its second round of theological consultations in Jordan last week. The fate of Middle Eastern Christian minorities amid the Arab Spring’s Islamist renaissance provided a sombre background to the meeting, much as perceived Christian misunderstandings about Islam preceded the first session of the forum at the Vatican in November 2008.

But increasing contacts between Catholic officials and Muslim scholars of the Common Word initiative, the 2007 Islamic dialogue appeal to Pope Benedict, have created bonds that helped both sides tackle sensitive issues.

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Copts and other Christian com­munities in Egypt fear that the unexpectedly large turnout in the first of the three rounds of voting in parliamentary elections will be translated into a resounding success for the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party. Other parties representing more conserva­tive Islamists ”” Salafis and Jihadis ”” are also likely to fare better than had been thought.

“The signs are very worrying,” a schoolteacher in Alexandria, Gabriel Ghali, said. “We are all worrying about what the huge queues will mean in terms of the votes cast, and we suspect it will mean a victory for the Islamic groups ”” and that’s bad news for us.”

Tens of thousands of Christians have emigrated since the overthrow of the Hosni Mubarak regime, and the outbreak of attacks on mem-bers of the community and their property.

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From Gerald McDermott’s conclusion:

In sum, then, Mormon beliefs diverge widely from historic Christian orthodoxy. The Book of Mormon, which is Mormonism’s principal source for its claim to new revelation and a new prophet, lacks credibility. And the Jesus proclaimed by Joseph Smith and his followers is different in significant ways from the Jesus of the New Testament: Smith’s Jesus is a God distinct from God the Father; he was once merely a man and not God; he is of the same species as human beings; and his being and acts are limited by coeternal matter and laws.

The intent of this essay is not to say that individual Mormons will be barred from sitting with Abraham and the saints at the marriage supper of the Lamb. We are saved by a merciful Trinity, not by our theology. But the distinguished scholar of Mormonism Jan Shipps was only partly right when she wrote that Mormonism is a departure from the existing Christian tradition as much as early Christianity was a departure from Judaism. For if Christianity is a shoot grafted onto the olive tree of Judaism, Mormonism as it stands cannot be successfully grafted onto either.

Read both essays carefully.

Christianity might have stayed just a fascination [for Amy-Jill Levine], but for an unfortunate episode in second grade: “When I was 7 years old, one girl said to me on the school bus, ”˜You killed our Lord.’ I couldn’t fathom how this religion that was so beautiful was saying such a dreadful thing.”

That encounter with the dark side of her friends’ religion sent Dr. Levine on a quest, one that took her to graduate school in New Testament studies and eventually to Vanderbilt University, where she has taught since 1994. Dr. Levine is still a committed Jew ”” she attends an Orthodox synagogue in Nashville ”” but she is a leading New Testament scholar.

And she is not alone. The book she has just edited with a Brandeis University professor, Marc Zvi Brettler, “The Jewish Annotated New Testament” (Oxford University Press), is an unusual scholarly experiment: an edition of the Christian holy book edited entirely by Jews. The volume includes notes and explanatory essays by 50 leading Jewish scholars, including Susannah Heschel, a historian and the daughter of the theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel; the Talmudist Daniel Boyarin; and Shaye J. D. Cohen, who teaches ancient Judaism at Harvard.

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I would suggest that the conversation in ethnically diverse and cosmopolitan cities such as London – and to a lesser extent Sydney and Melbourne – needs to move beyond advocating working “side-by-side,” and instead should discuss what it means to be part of a robust civil society within which religious groups undertake shared political action in pursuit of goods in common – not to mention where such action may well involve conflict with the priorities and policies of government and business corporations in pursuit of a critical yet constructive relationship with both.

Real encounter, dialogue and understanding is, I would suggest, best generated as a by-product of shared civic action, because in such shared civic action the focus is neither on face-to-face encounter nor even on simply working side-by-side.

Rather, the focus is rightly on the pursuit and protection of goods in common – or, to put it another way, it is through the relationships that emerge between people of different faiths and none, as they identify and uphold the things they love and hold dear, that something genuinely worthwhile emerges.

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“I want to thank the Muslim Council of Wales and Saleem Kidwai, its Secretary General, in particular, for all he has done to foster good interfaith relationships in Wales over the last decade. Because of his commitment to our common Faith journey and because the fostering of good interfaith relationships has been high on the agenda of our own Welsh Government, I also want to thank the First Minister for continuing the sterling work of his predecessor Rhodri Morgan for this. Wales has not seen some of the problems encountered in other parts of the United Kingdom.

“The purpose of an evening such as this is for both Christians and Muslims to set out as cogently as they can, the kernel of what they believe so that we can understand one another better. What I have deeply valued over the last ten years in our relationship is the willingness to be totally open and honest with one another. We have not attempted to gloss over our differences and pretended that there aren’t any. Although our two faiths have much in common there are crucial differences as well and it honours no-one to pretend that that is not the case.”

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Minority Jews and Christians are putting their faith in Tunisia’s nascent democracy to ensure its new Islamist-led leadership respects their rights in this traditionally secular state.

Religious minorities in the Arab world have mostly lost out when dictators are toppled and radical Islamists exploit the power vacuum to attack non-Muslims. The targeting of Christians in Iraq and Egypt constitutes a frightening example.

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Is there anything the Church can learn from the umma, the worldwide community of Muslims?
Yes. I mean, this is one of the reasons for dialogue. For instance, when I am talking to Muslims I am remind-ed very strongly of the biblical doctrine of the unity of God. Christians sometimes talk of the Trinity in a kind of trigger-happy fashion but, whatever else we may say about God, our starting-point must be that God is one.

Is there anything Christians can do to help the umma to rid itself of religious extremism?
Well, in a way it’s up to Muslims themselves, but yes, I think we can, for instance, in the context of dialogue, urge Muslims to say something about freedom of be­l­ief: freedom to express one’s beliefs, freedom to change one’s beliefs. In my dialogue with [the ancient Islamic university] al-Azhar al-Sharif, which I led for the An­glican Communion for many years, freedom was al­ways on the agenda. Just before he died, I did a joint lecture in Cairo with the sheikh of al-Azhar, Sheikh [Muh­am­mad] Tantawi, and he said that people are free in Egypt to believe whatever they like – it is not the business of the state and it’s not the business of religion. I think that is a very significant ad­vance. Similarly, the Grand Mufti of Egypt has issued a very progressive fatwa declaring that apostasy from Islam is not punishable in this life.

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On Pope Benedict’s words in Assisi: “I thought it was very interesting that, in typical style, he did a very sophisticated analysis of different kinds of denial, different kinds of violence, and I think what he was driving at was ”¦ the denial of God sooner of later involves a denial of humanity, and if you want to have a real humanism, it must be somehow open at the top. Without that, you get the anti-humanist religion of the terrorist and the anti-religious humanism of the secularist and they’re neither of those good for us as a world.”

On his own intervention in Assisi: “I quoted yesterday one of my favourite poets – and it’s possibly the first time a Welsh Quaker school teacher has been quoted in this sort of context – but this particular writer, Waldo Williams, for him the notion of recognition is at the very heart of what he’s doing in his poetry, what he was doing as a Christian, as a peace activist, recognition that something strikes you in the other as so like you, that you can not any longer treat them as a stranger and that’s the moment of breakthrough, morally and spiritually”

On his unscheduled visit during the lunch break in Assisi: “The Holy Father was resting, but the Ecumenical Patriarch and I were whisked away to visit the new house which the Bose community has established in Assisi ”“ for those of us who know Bose it had an immediate family feeling, the beauty and simplicity of the chapel , the warmth of the welcome about a dozen of the brothers had come down for the day, so I’m very glad I didn’t miss out on that ”“ even if I did miss out on the siesta!”

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A common thread ran through many of the speeches and invocations of this year’s “prayer for peace” encounter in Assisi: the uneasy sense that the world is facing not merely conflicts and wars, but a much broader crisis that affects social and cultural life in every country.

Environmental damage, the rich-poor divide, erosion of cultural traditions, terrorism and new threats to society’s weakest members were cited as increasingly worrisome developments by speakers at the interfaith gathering in the Italian pilgrimage town Oct. 27.

Pope Benedict XVI, addressing the 300 participants, echoed those points in his own analysis of the state of global peace 25 years after Blessed John Paul II convened the first Assisi meeting.

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Let us try to identify the new faces of violence and discord more closely. It seems to me that, in broad strokes, we may distinguish two types of the new forms of violence, which are the very antithesis of each other in terms of their motivation and manifest a number of differences in detail. Firstly there is terrorism, for which in place of a great war there are targeted attacks intended to strike the opponent destructively at key points, with no regard for the lives of innocent human beings, who are cruelly killed or wounded in the process. In the eyes of the perpetrators, the overriding goal of damage to the enemy justifies any form of cruelty. Everything that had been commonly recognized and sanctioned in international law as the limit of violence is overruled. We know that terrorism is often religiously motivated and that the specifically religious character of the attacks is proposed as a justification for the reckless cruelty that considers itself entitled to discard the rules of morality for the sake of the intended “good”. In this case, religion does not serve peace, but is used as justification for violence….

If one basic type of violence today is religiously motivated and thus confronts religions with the question as to their true nature and obliges all of us to undergo purification, a second complex type of violence is motivated in precisely the opposite way: as a result of God’s absence, his denial and the loss of humanity which goes hand in hand with it. The enemies of religion — as we said earlier — see in religion one of the principal sources of violence in the history of humanity and thus they demand that it disappear. But the denial of God has led to much cruelty and to a degree of violence that knows no bounds, which only becomes possible when man no longer recognizes any criterion or any judge above himself, now having only himself to take as a criterion. The horrors of the concentration camps reveal with utter clarity the consequences of God’s absence.

Yet I do not intend to speak further here about state-imposed atheism, but rather about the decline of man, which is accompanied by a change in the spiritual climate that occurs imperceptibly and hence is all the more dangerous….

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Benedict’s decision to include agnostics, to whom he dedicated the conclusion of his address, was the choice most revealing of his priorities. In acknowledgment of their presence, Thursday’s official program called for “reflection and/or prayer,” and the day itself was rechristened one of “reflection, dialogue and prayer.” Thus at a gathering of religious leaders, worship had become optional.

This change, redefining the group as united not by faith but by the desire for peace and justice, ruled out any interpretation of their meeting as an advertisement for religious syncretism. Even more importantly, opening the dialogue to nonreligious “seekers of the truth” underscored one of the major themes of Benedict’s pontificate: the need for Western culture to restore its dialogue between faith and reason, and thus to rehabilitate the concept of objective truth in the realms of metaphysics and ethics.

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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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