From The American Chronicle

After a decade, Nepal is due to hold its census for the eleventh time in 2011. The history of census in Nepal goes back a hundred years to 1901. National census can facilitate planning of projects targeted towards specific groups if it records actual figures and conditions of those groups. The past censuses of Nepal are often termed to be “deliberate undercounting of [indigenous] communities…” and erroneous with omissions and misreported data , thus providing false picture of population composition. This has particularly concerned the indigenous nationalities of Nepal struggling for their identity and rights. Currently, Nepal has 59 ethnic groups identified as indigenous nationalities and many other groups are striving to be listed. The country has recently been transformed from a Hindu kingdom to a secular federal republic. The 2011 census – the first one since the country became a republic – thus holds a specific importance.

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From CNN

Can people strengthen the brain circuits associated with happiness and positive behavior,  just as we’re able to strengthen muscles with exercise?

Richard Davidson, who for decades has practiced Buddhist-style meditation – a form of mental exercise, he says – insists that we can.

And Davidson, who has been meditating since visiting India as a Harvard grad student in the 1970s, has credibility on the subject beyond his own experience.

A trained psychologist based at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, he has become the leader of a relatively new field called contemplative neuroscience – the brain science of meditation.

Over the last decade, Davidson and his colleagues have produced scientific evidence for the theory that meditation – the ancient eastern practice of sitting, usually accompanied by focusing on certain objects – permanently changes the brain for the better.

“We all know that if you engage in certain kinds of exercise on a regular basis you can strengthen certain muscle groups in predictable ways,” Davidson says in his office at the University of Wisconsin, where his research team has hosted scores of Buddhist monks and other meditators for brain scans.

“Strengthening neural systems is not fundamentally different,” he says. “It’s basically replacing certain habits of mind with other habits.”

Contemplative neuroscientists say that making a habit of meditation can strengthen brain circuits responsible for maintaining concentration and generating empathy.

One recent study by Davidson’s team found that novice meditators stimulated their limbic systems – the brain’s emotional network – during the practice of compassion meditation, an ancient Tibetan Buddhist practice.

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From The Huffington Post

Many sociologists of religion, as well as the general public, seem to take for granted the causal relationship between higher education and the decline of religion. The more educated someone becomes, the theory goes, the less religious they are likely to be. As European and American universities broke free from the control of the church in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, science and the scientific worldview arose to become the prime competitor to religious authority. With this historical trend, it was assumed that those who occupy these elite places of learning would also shed the trappings of irrational religious belief. However, more and more sociological evidence reveals that this may not be the case.

In a recent article published in Sociology of Religion, sociologists Neil Gross and Solon Simmons use data from a new, nationally representative survey of American college and university professors to test the long-running assumption that higher education leads to irreligiousness. Based on their research, they argue that “while atheism and agnosticism are much more common among professors than within the U.S. population as a whole, religious skepticism represents a minority position, even among professors teaching at elite research universities.” This has been a long-running debate amongst those who study religiosity in higher education and pay attention to trends in societal secularization.

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From The Washington Post

Is knowledge of religion important? Why?

The Pew poll of religious knowledge, in which atheists/agnostics scored ever-so-slightly higher than Jews and Mormons demonstrates at least four significant facts about what we know and why we know it. Appreciating these facts would go a long way toward ending the ugly fighting between theists and atheists. Of course they would need to want to stop their mutual mistreatment and disrespect for that to happen, but that is a different matter altogether.

First, Knowing God is different than Knowing about God and knowing about religion should not be confused with following a particular faith. That atheists and agnostics (why they are lumped together is a question for another time) scored highest is actually not that surprising. In fact, one might assume that knowing about religion plays a similar role in the lives of atheists/agnostics as does having religious experience does in the lives of believers – each is a source of personal identity.

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Turning Park51 Into a Teachable Moment: Curriculum Guide and Fact Sheets

The controversy surrounding the Park51 Cultural Center in lower Manhattan has been at the forefront of the media and the nation’s consciousness recently. Chances are, your students have encountered this issue and are thinking about it. And chances are this issue is going to reach your classroom this fall – especially around 9/11.

From The Huffington Post

We all have our personal “theories” about what motivates religious terrorists. To go from personal theories to real ones, we need to study the issue scientifically. One recent study draws the provocative conclusion that ritual participation more than religious belief may be behind suicide attacks.

From a scientific standpoint a suicide attack represents an extreme form of parochial altruism — a self-sacrificial act made on behalf of one’s in-group, involving aggression against an out-group. Religious belief, some have argued, is the prime motivator for such an attack. The attacker believes that his or her sacrifice will lead to a glorious reward in the afterlife (e.g., Islam’s famous 70-some-odd virgins-awaiting). This explanation can be called the “belief hypothesis,” and it would predict that those who demonstrate increased devotion to religious beliefs or deities would be more supportive of suicide attacks. In the context of a recent study (Ginges et al., Psychological Science, 20, p. 224), devotion was measured by prayer frequency. Thus, those who prayed more were assumed to be more devoted, and some preliminary analyses confirmed that this was indeed the case.

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From RNS

Washington, D.C.—Atheists and agnostics, Jews and Mormons are among the highest-scoring groups on a new survey of religious knowledge by the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life, outperforming evangelical Protestants, mainline Protestants and Catholics on questions about the core teachings, history and leading figures of major world religions.

On average, Americans correctly answer 16 of the 32 religious knowledge questions on the survey. Atheists and agnostics average 20.9 correct answers. Jews and Mormons do about as well, averaging 20.5 and 20.3 correct answers, respectively. Protestants as a whole average 16 correct answers; Catholics as a whole, 14.7. Atheists and agnostics, Jews and Mormons perform better than other groups on the survey even after controlling for different levels of education.

On questions about Christianity (including the Bible), Mormons and white evangelical Protestants show the highest levels of knowledge. Jews, atheists and agnostics stand out for their knowledge of world religions, including Buddhism, Hinduism and Judaism. Jews, atheists and agnostics also do particularly well on questions about the role of religion in public life, including what the U.S. Constitution says about religion.

While previous surveys by the Pew Research Center have shown that America is among the most religious of the world’s developed nations, this survey shows that large numbers of Americans are not well informed about the tenets, practices, history and leading figures of major faith traditions—including their own. Many people also think that the constitutional restrictions on religion in public schools are stricter than they really are.

These are among the key findings of the “U.S. Religious Knowledge Survey,” a nationwide poll conducted from May 19 through June 6, 2010, among 3,412 adults.

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Muslim women at a fruit and vegetable market in Berlin.

From Pew Forum

Over the past two decades, the number of Muslims living in Western Europe has steadily grown, rising from less than 10 million in 1990 to approximately 17 million in 2010.¹ The continuing growth in Europe’s Muslim population is raising a host of political and social questions. Tensions have arisen over such issues as the place of religion in European societies, the role of women, the obligations and rights of immigrants, and support for terrorism.  These controversies are complicated by the ties that some European Muslims have to religious networks and movements outside of Europe. Fairly or unfairly, these groups are often accused of dissuading Muslims from integrating into European society and, in some cases, of supporting radicalism.

To help provide a better understanding of how such movements and networks seek to influence the views and daily lives of Muslims in Western Europe, the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life has produced profiles of some of the oldest, largest and most influential groups – from the Muslim Brotherhood to mystical Sufi orders and networks of religious scholars. The selected groups represent the diverse histories, missions and organizational structures found among Muslim organizations in Western Europe. Certain groups are more visible in some European countries than in others, but all of the organizations profiled in the report have global followings and influence across Europe.

The profiles provide a basic history of the groups’ origins and purposes. They examine the groups’ religious and political agendas, as well as their views on topics such as religious law, religious education and the assimilation of Muslims into European society. The profiles also look at how European governments are interacting with these groups and at the relationships between the groups themselves. Finally, the report discusses how the movements and networks may fare in the future, paying special attention to generational shifts in the groups’ leadership and membership ranks as well as their use of the Web and other new media platforms in communicating their messages.

It is important to note that the report does not attempt to cover the full spectrum of Muslim groups in Western Europe. For instance, it does not include profiles of the many Muslim organizations that have been founded in Western Europe in recent decades, including local social service providers, or the governing councils of major European mosques. Rather, the primary focus of the report is on transnational networks and movements whose origins lie in the Muslim world but that now have an established presence in Europe. Influential Islamic schools of thought, such as Salafism or Deobandism, are discussed in terms of their influence on various Muslim groups and movements rather than in separate profiles.²

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From The Journal of Inter-Religious Dialogue

Greetings,

We hope this finds you well. We are excited to announce that we are now accepting nominations and self-nominations for Contributing Scholars for our new blog, State of Formation, and we’d like to give you the opportunity to weigh in.

The current American discourse on religion and ethics is primarily defined by established leaders – ministers, rabbis, academics and journalists.

There is an entire population of important stakeholders without a platform: the up-and-comers.

To remedy this, the Journal of Inter-Religious Dialogue, in partnership with the Parliament of the World’s Religions, is set to launch State of Formation, a forum for up-and-coming religious and philosophical thinkers to draw upon the learning that is occurring in their academic and community work. Articles will frequently reflect on the pressing questions of a religiously pluralistic society and challenge existing religious and philosophical definitions.

State of Formation is a community conversation between young leaders in formation. Together, a cohort of seminarians, rabbinical students, graduate students and the like – the future religious and moral leaders of tomorrow – will work to redefine the ethical discourse today, particularly as it is used to refract current events and personal experiences.

…

Nominees should be currently enrolled in a seminary, rabbinical school, graduate program, or another institution for theological or philosophical formation. We are looking for exceptional and visionary young leaders who are currently learning about and reflecting on religious and moral issues. Does this describe you or a young leader you know? Please take a moment to fill out our brief online nomination form here or e-mail us your one-page nomination to chris@irdialogue.org. Nominations are due October 15, 2010.

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From URI

Alarmed by the rising tide of Islamophobia and resulting backlash against the Muslim community that we have seen taking place across the United States as well as in other parts of the world, we here at the URI office in San Francisco were compelled to take action.

We are happy to share with you the URI Toolkit – Responses to Hostility Against Faith Communities. We invite our Cooperation Circles, particularly those in North America and Europe, to consider how you might integrate some of these ideas and resources into your ongoing work. Because Eid, the holy day that ends Ramadan, falls on or near September 11th this year, this is an opportune moment to reach out to Muslim communities and Muslim members of your community, and make an effort to transform the ignorance and fear into understanding and respect.

We were inspired by a toolkit we received earlier from the Council on American-Islamic Relations called their Teachable Moment Community Response Guide and wished to create a toolkit of our own, specifically designed for interfaith audiences. We have adapted portions of CAIR’s toolkit with their permission, and have also included some exceptional opinion-editorials by fellow interfaith organizers Eboo Patel from the Interfaith Youth Core and William Lesher from the Council for the Parliament of the World’s Religions. The toolkit includes a number of useful media resources, ideas for individuals, and ideas for how faith communities, interfaith councils and interfaith CCs can respond.

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