From The Huffington Post

In a recent interview with former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, we discussed his attendance at the 2010 Clinton Global Initiative held earlier this year, the work of his Faith Foundation, and the importance of understanding religion in a rapidly globalizing world.

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Rahim Kanani: While your Faith Foundation’s primary goal is to promote and foster understanding amongst the world’s major religions, and the Face to Faith initiative you’ve described focuses on secondary school students engaging in interfaith and intercultural understanding, what is the role of colleges and universities in tackling interfaith education? Should such instruction be required learning in such a setting?

Tony Blair: My Foundation believes that young people have a pivotal role to play in building a harmonious modern world. After all, they are tomorrow’s leaders. It is therefore vital for students to have a firm grasp on the relationship between faith and globalization. So as well as a schools program my Foundation also has a universities program – the Faith and Globalization Initiative.

Seven universities around the world are currently part of the network: Yale University in the USA, The National University of Singapore, The University of Western Australia, Technologico de Monterrey University in Mexico, McGill University in Canada, Peking University in China and Durham University in the UK. The Faith and Globalization students who are drawn from a huge range of disciplines including international relations, law, theology, economics and business studies are examining the impact of religious faith on politics, business, society, and development in an increasingly globalized society. The focus here is on making the research findings from the university network accessible, meaningful and relevant to policymakers through publications, conferences and policy papers.

Each university customises the course to suit their local contexts and explores aspects of globalization which are particularly relevant to them, for example the key themes in Religions in the Contemporary World at the National University of Singapore are Religion and Technology, Urban Religiosity and Merchandising Religion which reflects the importance of technology in Singapore’s rapidly expanding economy.

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From Reuters

As the sun sets over a serene stretch of the mighty Ganges, a pair of smooth, grey dolphins arch gracefully out of the water, bringing hope that wildlife can again call India’s great river home.

Millions of Indians along the banks of the 2,500 km (1,550 mile)-long Ganges depend on the river, but unchecked levels of agricultural, industrial and domestic waste have poured in over the past decades, threatening the wildlife.

Five kilometres upstream from Narora, a five-hour drive west of New Delhi, the 350 megawatt nuclear power station that put this sleepy town on the map looms as a reminder of India’s unrelenting drive for industrialisation.

In Karnabas, a small village just upstream from Narora, a local drama troupe performs for more than 150 villagers.

“Humans are polluting our river!” an actor playing a Hindu god declared, a WWF banner celebrating World Dolphin Day hanging over the makeshift stage.

“The life of our Mother Ganga is endangered! Please do something!”

Distinguishable from its ocean-going cousin by a long, pointed snout, the Ganges dolphin is one of only four freshwater species in the world. The total population across India, Nepal and Bangladesh is estimated at 2,000, down from 4,500 in 1982.

But along a northern stretch of the holy river, a Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF) project is leveraging the religious importance of the Ganges for Hindus to teach villagers the virtues of conservation and protection of its sacred water. The upper stretch of the Ganges, from Rishikesh in the foothills of the Himalayas to Ram Ghat in the central state of Madhya Pradesh, holds great religious significance for Hindus.

Locations along the river figure heavily in the Hindu holy text, the Ramayana. A bathe in the river is a rite of passage.

“The religious sensibilities of the people are interlinked with the conservation of the river,” said WWF-India project leader Sandeep Behera as he stood on the river bank in the shadow of a Hindu temple, while young boys chanted hymns on a nearby pier.

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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/RNS

By Stephen Whitty
Religion News Service

(RNS) The New Testament warns about trying to serve two masters. But lately Hollywood’s ordered up a rewrite.

Moviemakers would prefer to have it both ways. And so multiplexes have been crowded with films that wrestle with spiritual questions even while battling for box-office attention.

These aren’t tiny indies, like the evangelical films that sprang up after “The Passion of the Christ” in 2004. Nor are these holy terrors like “The Last Exorcism” and “Paranormal Activity 2,” a subgenre that’s replaced Freddy and Jason with demons from hell.

These are the mainstream pictures — Woody Allen character studies like “You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger,” audience-friendly dramas like “Secretariat,” and big star-driven pictures like “Stone” and “Hereafter,” that explore subjects like spiritual awakenings and the possibility of an afterlife.

Faith-based film fans used to be seen as a niche audience. Now, in Hollywood, they’re just seen as the audience.

“I think audiences are often smarter than they’re given credit for,” said actor Edward Norton, who co-stars in “Stone.” “And I think they’re often drawn to films that raise genuine questions about our lives that demand a real ponder.”

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From The Chicago Tribune

As anyone who has faced tragedy knows – be it an individual, family, community or nation – it is ultimately not the tragedy itself, no matter how unjust and terrible, but the response to it, that makes all the difference.

I know a courageous woman whose son was severely injured in a bombing while walking the narrow streets of Jersusalem. As he endured operation after operation, she sat for months by his bedside, pondering what to do. With every right to be angry, she chose instead to work for peace; something she has done for the past decade as an Israeli Jew, working tirelessly among Palestinian Muslim and Arab Christian women.

It is how we respond to the unimaginable tragedy of 9/11 that will make all the difference for those who live together in the United States, and for our enduring relations with those beyond our borders.

We must never forget what happened. We must continue to remember those who were lost, those who continue to mourn their colleagues, friends, and loved ones, and to renew our resolve to prevent such acts of wanton and cowardice violence in the future, both at home and abroad.

Just as importantly, we must use the symbolic character of 9/11 to once and for all make the crucial distinction between the true religious aims of Islam, and the morally disciplined and peace-loving ways of the Muslim community – with all of the inevitable imperfect striving that goes with any human endeavor of any kind, for that matter – and the despicable act of a misguided, murderous terrorist cell that has sought to hijack Islam with its baseless justifications of a righteous jihad.

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From The Jerusalem Post

Two US marketers are trying to start a revolution with the flick of a switch – specifically, the off-button on wireless communication devices.

Eric Yaverbaum and his partner, Mark DiMassimo, call it “offlining” – deliberately being out of constant touch – and have started an ad campaign calling for Yom Kippur to be a “No-Device Day” for people of all faiths.

“You don’t have to be Jewish…to atone for your texts on Yom Kippur,” one ad reads, featuring a picture of shamed golfer Tiger Woods.

Another ad, accompanied by a picture of Mel Gibson, reads, “You don’t have to be Jewish to give up drunk dialing for Yom Kippur.”

What are these guys selling? Nothing, at least not yet, Yaverbaum said last week. Rather, they’re trying to influence behavior as a public service campaign.

Since starting their initiative in June, more than 10,000 people have signed the pledge on the Web site, http://offlining.com, to have 10 device-free dinners with their families. But, Yaverbaum said, this is just the beginning of the campaign to put a finger in the breaking dike of personal boundaries.

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From Atlanta Daily World

Members of the International College of Bishops will consecrate the Rev. Dr. Barbara Lewis King as the first bishop within the international New Thought Christian Movement of Churches.  This historic conseration service will take place on Sunday, Sept. 26, at 6 p.m. at the Hillside International Chapel and Truth Center located on Cascade Road in Atlanta.

“Dr. King has shown immense dedication, compassion and commitment to the work of the church for many years.  As an affirmation of her ministerial call and global impact, we — the members of the International College of Bishops — will consecrate her to the office of Bishop in God’s Universal Church,” said Bishop Carlton D. Pearson, Interim senior minister at Christ Universal Temple (Chicago), senior consecrator for the service.

The College of Bishops slated to consecrate Dr. King includes Bishop Yvette Flunder (San Francisco), Bishop Xavier (Ike) Eikerenkoetter (Malibu, Calif.), and Bishop Jim Swilley (Conyers, Ga.).  The Rev. Dr. Blaine Mays, president of the International New Thought Alliance, and the Rev. Dr. Della Reese-Lett, Understanding Principles for Better Living Church, will participate in the service along with Bishop Pearson. Spiritual leaders, stateswomen, and statesmen from around the world have been invited and are expected to attend the celebration, including Dr. Maya Angelou, Susan Taylor, Tavis Smiley, and Dr. Cornel West.

The living legacy of the Rev. Dr. Barbara Lewis King is a long-standing testimony of her qualifications for the position of bishop.

She is the founder minister/world spiritual leader and CEO of Hillside International Chapel and Truth Center Inc., one of the largest New Thought Christian churches in the world, and she has been enstooled as the first female chief at Assin Nsuta, Ghana, West Africa. Having had audiences with the Dalai Lama, South Africa’s former President Nelson Mandela, Archbishop Desmond Tutu; and having worked closely with His Holiness Sri Sri Ravi Shankar and Dr. and Master Zhi Gang Sha, she is known throughout the world.

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From NYT

AMRITSAR, India — The groaning, clattering machines never stop, transforming 12 tons of whole wheat flour every day into nearly a quarter-million discs of flatbread called roti. These purpose-built contraptions, each 20 feet long, extrude the dough, roll it flat, then send it down a gas-fired conveyor belt, spitting out a never-ending stream of hot, floppy, perfectly round bread.

Soupy lentils, three and a third tons of them, bubble away in vast cauldrons, stirred by bearded, barefoot men wielding wooden spoons the size of canoe paddles. The pungent, savory bite wafting through the air comes from 1,700 pounds of onions and 132 pounds of garlic, sprinkled with 330 pounds of fiery red chilies.

It is lunchtime at what may be the world’s largest free eatery, the langar, or community kitchen at this city’s glimmering Golden Temple, the holiest shrine of the Sikh religion. Everything is ready for the big rush. Thousands of volunteers have scrubbed the floors, chopped onions, shelled peas and peeled garlic. At least 40,000 metal plates, bowls and spoons have been washed, stacked and are ready to go.

Anyone can eat for free here, and many, many people do. On a weekday, about 80,000 come. On weekends, almost twice as many people visit. Each visitor gets a wholesome vegetarian meal, served by volunteers who embody India’s religious and ethnic mosaic.

“This is our tradition,” said Harpinder Singh, the 45-year-old manager of this huge operation. “Anyone who wants can come and eat.”

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From The New York Times

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Until that day, whenever the controversial project came up on the news, Ms. Kelch had few thoughts beyond niggling about geography. “I usually thought, what are they talking about, it’s not even near ground zero,” she said. She knew the place: it used to be a Burlington Coat Factory where she once bought a three-quarter sleeve raincoat she long regretted.

“I’m Protestant,” she noted. “Protestants tend not to have strong feelings about religion in general.”

Ms. Kelch was like a lot of people — occupied with children and jobs, letting the busy buzz of news cycles come and go, so inured to political rhetoric that she could hardly rouse herself to take it seriously.

Her hero cabdriver, a native of Morocco and apparently an astute observer, told Ms. Kelch he thought New Yorkers just liked to complain. “But I don’t think they should put the community center downtown,” she quoted him saying of the proposed project, known as Park51, which would include a mosque. The driver was not so much worried about ground zero being hallowed ground, but about logistics. So many Muslim cabdrivers; so few places to park nearby.

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FROM FIRE STORM TO ILLUMINATION:

Interreligious Reflections on the New York Center and Mosque Project

William Lesher, Chair Emeritus, Council for a Parliament of the World’s Religions

What some in the media have referred to as “a fire storm” over the mosque debate in lower Manhattan is turning out to be a catalyst to launch a much needed national discussion (and tutorial) on Muslims in America.

Since this discussion was intensified by the exaggerated rhetoric and distorted claims of Pamela Geller, a conservative blogger in her post on May 6, a consensus seems to be forming among constitutionally committed citizens across the political spectrum.  Fair-minded people are agreeing that the Imam and his wife in charge of the mosque project, Feisal Abdul Rauf, Daisy Khan and their supporters, have every right to expand their center and include a new worship space on the site.  They have worked from and worshipped in this place for many years, two blocks from the World Trade Center disaster.  Even though current polls claim that 7 out of 10 Americans oppose the project, opponents can hardly argue that the project planners do not have a constitutional right to carry out their vision.  As one letter to the NY Times editor put it, “As a legal matter, there is nothing to debate.  If a church or synagogue could be constructed on this site, so may a mosque.  Period. The first amendment means at least that.”

The location of the proposed Islamic Center touches the raw nerve that has elicited often shrill claims ranging from insensitivity to the families of the 9/11 victims and desecration of hallowed ground to an international Islamic conspiracy to subvert the nation.  Given the fact that the vast majority of Americans know little of Islam and know almost nothing of the history and intentions of the center planners in lower Manhattan, it is not surprising that the barrage of misinformation that initiated and continues to stoke the current national discussion has filled this vacuum and created the sharp negative and often heated responses.

But now, as the national discussion continues, one might cautiously hope, even anticipate, that the time is right for a nation-wide learning process to unfold.  This could become a time for Americans of fairness and goodwill to take the time to listen and to learn from people in the interreligious community and from Muslims themselves about the importance, the variety, and the beauty of this second largest religion in the world. And to hear as well, about the healing potential for having a thoroughly American expression of Islam close to the site of Ground Zero.

The Interreligious Movement in the US and around the world has been building bridges of understanding among religious communities, including Islam, for the last few decades.  Many religious people in the US are affiliated with local interreligious councils or with national and international organizations like United Religions Initiative (URI) or Religions for Peace (RFP) or have participated in one of the four modern Parliaments of the World’s Religions (PWR) with which I am affiliated. These people have led the way in this historic movement to develop knowledge, understanding, and respect for religious and spiritual communities of the world, many of whom have growing numbers of adherents in our towns and cities, states and nation.

People affiliated with the growing interreligious movement know about the great diversity that exists within Islam, not unlike the wide spectrum of beliefs, traditions and behaviors among different sectors in the Christian and Jewish communities. They know what William Dalrymple wrote about in an illuminating Op-Ed piece in the New York Times entitled, “The Muslims in the Middle,” that Islam is not a monolithic religion.  Rather it is as complex as Christianity and Judaism, with as many, perhaps more divisions, sects and traditions, some in opposition to others, as is true of every major religious group. Dalrymple helpfully teaches in his article how “Feisal Abdul Rauf…is one of America’s leading thinkers of Sufism, the mystical form of Islam which in terms of goals and outlook couldn’t be farther from the violent Wahabism of the jihadists.  His videos and sermons preach love, the remembrance of God and reconciliation…..But in the eyes of Osama bin Laden and the Taliban, he is an infidel-loving, grave-worshipping apostate…”

Members of the interfaith movement are also leading the resistance to the resisters and need to do so more and more.  In another New York Times article describing protests against mosques in several communities around the country, Laurie Goodstein focuses on Temecula, Ca.  There she writes: “In late June …members of a local Tea Party group took dogs and picket signs to Friday prayers at a mosque that is seeking to build a new worship center on a vacant lot nearby.”  She goes on to say that an estimated 20 – 30 people turned out to protest the mosque.  But then Ms. Goodstein states what many of us think is the real story in Temecula, “that the protesters were outnumbered by at least 75 supporters” who affirm the right of the Muslim congregation in Temecula to expand their mosque.  Something good is happening in Temecula when, less then a decade after 9/11, local citizens know and act on the difference between their mainstream Muslim neighbors and the terrorists whose actions violated the most basic tenants of Islam. It’s too bad that the NY Times headlined the Goodstein article, “Across Nation, Mosque Projects Meet Resistance” and missed the positive thrust of the Temecula story.

Speaking from the experience of the Parliament of the World’s Religions, the 2004 Parliament in Barcelona, Spain focused major attention on the issue of Religiously Motivated and Experienced Violence.  After several days of intense workshop discussions, participants from across the interreligious spectrum, agreed that the minimum responsibility of religious communities  is to come to the aid of any religious community whose house of worship is the target of an attack, vandalism, threat or destruction.

The recent Parliament in Melbourne, Australia in 2009 featured a strong focus on Islam.  Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf himself was a major presenter leading or participating in six interreligious programs with the following titles: “Applying Islamic Principles for a Just and Sustainable World”;  “Sacred Envy Panel: Exploring What We Love about Our Own Faith, What We Admire in Others and What Challenges Us in Both”;  “Purifying the Heart and Soul through Remembrance of Allah”; “Dhikr As An Islamic Devotional Act for Inner Peace”; “How Islam Deals with Social Justice, Gender Justice and Religious Diversity”; and “Islam and the West: Creating an Accord of Civilizations.”  How much could such a teacher of Islam help to bridge the gulf of misunderstanding about this great faith tradition by continuing his long and much admired ministry in lower Manhattan where he has built an international reputation for promulgating a modern version of Islam?

So, while some call it a “fire storm” and do their best to make it so, there are other voices that seem to be gaining strength.  Among the shouting and the uninformed outrage that sometimes seems ubiquitous, I sense that  responsible media outlets and people in the interreligious movement are grasping the significance of this moment and are helping to seed the discussion with historical facts, accurate information and a commitment to understanding and respect.  If this trend continues we will all learn important things about ourselves and about the most recent global religious tradition to enter the mainstream of American life.