Click here to read the entire article.

By Joseph Prabhu

Professor Raimon Panikkar, one of the greatest scholars of the 20th century in the areas of comparative religion, theology, and inter-religious dialogue, died at his home in Tavertet, near Barcelona, Spain, Aug. 26. He was 91.

Panikkar taught and lived in the United States from 1966-1987 and was known to generations of students here and around the world through both his lectures and his many books. What they heard and read were the arresting reflections of a multi-dimensional person, who was simultaneously a philosopher, theologian, mystic, priest and poet.

Panikkar was born the son of an Indian Hindu father and a Spanish Catholic mother Nov. 3, 1918. He received a conventional Catholic education at a Jesuit high school in Barcelona before launching his university studies in the natural sciences, philosophy, and theology, first in Barcelona and then in Madrid. Shortly thereafter, the Spanish Civil War broke out, and Panikkar was able to take advantage of his status as the son of a father who was a British citizen to go to the University of Bonn in Germany to continue his studies. When World War II started in 1939, Panikkar returned to Spain and completed the first of his three doctorates, this one in philosophy, at the University of Madrid in 1946.

It was around 1940 that he met Escriva de Balaguer, the founder of Opus Dei, with whom he had a close relationship. It was at Escriva’s urging that he trained for the Catholic priesthood and was ordained in 1946. Panikkar continued to be associated with Opus Dei for about twenty years, breaking effectively with the organization only in the early 1960s. He was tight-lipped about this period of his life, saying only that he did not regret it. It is clear, however, when one compares the Panikkar of the 1940s and the early 1950s with the later Panikkar better known to the world as a pioneer of inter-religious dialogue, that he had moved a long way from his early roots.

In late 1954 when he was already 36, Panikkar visited India, the land of his father, for the first time. It proved to be a watershed, a decisive reorientation of his interests and of his theology.

He had entered a dramatically new world, religious and cultural, from the Catholic Europe of his youth. The transformation was aided by his meetings and close friendship with three monks, who like him were attempting to live and to incarnate the Christian life in Indian, predominantly Hindu and Buddhist forms: Jules Monchanin (1895-1957), Henri Le Saux, also know as Swami Abhishiktananda (1910-1973), and Bede Griffiths, the English Benedictine monk (1906-1993). All four of them, in different ways, discovered and cherished the riches and the deep spiritual wisdom of the Indic traditions, and attempted to live out and express their core Christian convictions in Hindu and Buddhist forms. To some extent this multiple belonging was made possible by their embrace of Advaita, the Indic idea of non-dualism, which sees the deep, often hidden, connections between traditions without in any way minimizing the differences between them.

One of Panikkar’s many striking sentences looking back on his life’s journey asserts: “I left Europe [for India] as a Christian, I discovered I was a Hindu and returned as a Buddhist without ever having ceased to be a Christian.”

…

Conversant in a dozen or so languages and fluent in at least six, he traveled tirelessly around the world, lecturing, writing, preaching, and conducting retreats. His famous Easter service in his Santa Barbara days would attract visitors from all corners of the globe. Well before dawn they would climb up the mountain near his home in Montecito, meditate quietly in the darkness once they reached the top, and then salute the sun as it arose over the horizon. Panikkar would bless the elements — air, earth, water and fire — and all the surrounding forms of life — plant, animal, and human — and then celebrate Mass and the Eucharist. It was a profound “cosmotheandric” celebration with the human, cosmic, and divine dimensions of life being affirmed, reverenced, and brought into a deep harmony. The celebration after the formal service at Panikkar’s home resembled in some respects the feast of Pentecost as described in the New Testament, where peoples of many tongues engaged in animated conversation.

At the center of these celebrations, retreats, and lectures stood Panikkar himself and his arresting personality. People who heard or encountered him could not help but be struck by this physically small man who packed a punch and who managed to combine the quiet dignity of a sage, the profundity of a scholar, the depth of a contemplative, and the warmth and charm of a friend in his sparkling personality.

Click here to read the entire article.

Editor’s note: CNN’s Melissa Morgenweck brings us this story about a church in New York and its efforts to help rebuild New Orleans five years after Hurricane Katrina. Faith groups have been one of the driving forces behind helping people in New Orleans get back into their homes.

Grace Church New Orleans sent a letter asking for help from other Grace Churches around the United States after its building was flooded in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

Grace Church New York City responded, and eight volunteers traveled to New Orleans in 2006. The group helped with repairs on the church and volunteered with an Episcopal Community Services rebuilding program cleaning out flooded homes.

The Rev. Linda Bartholomew of Grace Church NYC says it was immediately evident that one volunteer trip would not be enough. She made the decision for Grace Church NYC to make a 10-year commitment to help rebuild New Orleans.

Nell Bolton, who heads up Episcopal Community Services New Orleans, says there was great power in that decision: “At a time when a lot of people in Louisiana were still in shock and awe of everything that needed to be done, Grace saw something that we couldn’t yet see.”

Click here to read the entire article.

Women religious leaders may be gaining more visibility in churches, temples and synagogues, but there are still some areas where women clergy are not welcome. Examples of institutional holdouts to allowing women to become ordained are Roman Catholic churches and Orthodox Jews. There is also continued resistance in most of the Islamic world to allowing women to worship in the same area as men during Friday services, let alone to letting them becoming Imams. I haven’t seen much written about this from the perspective of the women who are largely left out, so it was refreshing to see Maureen Fiedler’s anthology of interviews mostly conducted on her public radio show, “Interfaith Voices.” We talked by phone about her thoughts on womens equality in religious leadership and what the future might bring in this area.

How did you choose the title of this work? Not every house of worship has stained glass, for instance, though I like the use of the metaphor.

Fiedler: The phrase “stained glass ceiling” became fairly common among religious feminists when “glass ceiling” became common for other women.

Before you started your work on Interfaith Voices (a religion news magazine on public radio) what was your experience with women religious leaders?

Fiedler:There are many leaders in religious communities of women, like Mary Luke Tobin, SL. She was a leader, not only in Catholicism, but beyond that, and highly influential in carrying out the reforms of the Second Vatican Council nationwide. Nuns have long been presidents of universities and administrators of hospitals when other women could only dream of such positions. In my work with interfaith coalitions around issues like the Equal Rights Amendment, and Central American issues in the 1980’s, I also met many women leaders for justice, peace and equality.

Was there a particular interview that resonated with you more than the others? I was moved by the perspective of Julia Butterfly Hill and her spirituality, for instance. I found the women who had been ordained as Roman Catholic priests to be particularly interesting, considering the discussion of women’s ordination in the church recently.

Fiedler: I too liked those 2 interviews. But the two interviews that struck me most deeply were those with the two African women: Leymah Gbowee and Immaculee Illibagiza. I actually met Gbowee about three months after the interview when she came to the US and the DC area to receive a “Living Legends” award. She is every bit as powerful as her story! Organizing an interfaith coalition of women in Liberia to overthrow a dictator is no small feat! And Immaculee’s story still strikes me as one of the deepest examples of spirituality I’ve encountered… her willingness to forgive is something like one would read in the annals of saints, I think. I also felt that way about Hill, who claims no religious affiliation per se.

Click here to read the entire article.

This fall, acclaimed contemporary artist Jitish Kallat turns the landmark Art Institute Grand Staircase into a meditation on religious tolerance, drawing on the museum’s own history in concert with the most devastating terrorist attack on American soil. Public Notice 3 , a site-specific installation, brings together two key historical moments: the first Parliament of the World’s Religions, opening on September 11, 1893, in what is now the museum’s Fullerton Hall, and the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon 108 years later, on that very date. Public Notice 3–the first major presentation of Kallat’s work in an American museum–will be on view September 11, 2010 through January 2, 2011.

The Art Institute of Chicago has long held a unique historical connection with India. In 1893, during the World’s Columbian Exposition, the museum’s building served as the site of one of the most important gatherings in the history of modern religion, the first World’s Parliament of Religions. One of the opening speakers was a young Hindu monk from India, Swami Vivekananda, who stunned and enthralled the audience of 7,000 with an address that opened one of the first dialogues between Eastern and Western traditions and, importantly, argued passionately for universalism and religious tolerance. Exactly 108 years before the attacks in New York City and Washington, DC, Swami Vivekananda called for an end to all “bigotry and fanaticism” and pleaded for brotherhood across all faiths, a speech that was met with a standing ovation and was heralded by journalists as one of the pivotal moments of the Exposition. (Even today, the stretch of Michigan Avenue in front of the Art Institute is the honorary “Swami Vivekananda Way.”)

Kallat has chosen this historical event as the basis and site for his monumental installation. For Public Notice 3 , Kallat will convert the complete text of Vivekananda’s inspiring speech into LED displays on each of the 118 risers of the museum’s Woman’s Board Grand Staircase, which is itself adjacent to what is now Fullerton Hall, where Vivekananda made his original presentation. Drawing attention to the great chasm between this plea for tolerance of 1893 and the very different events of September 11, 2001, the text of the speech will be displayed in the five colors of the United States’ Department of Homeland Security alert system–red, orange, yellow, blue, and green.

This historical coincidence–and the fact that the speech was delivered at the earliest attempt to create a global dialogue of faiths–heightens the potency of Vivekananda’s persuasive words. The resulting work, Public Notice 3, creates a trenchant commentary on the evolution, or devolution, of religious tolerance across the 20th and 21st centuries. The installation will serve not as a passive commemorative act but rather as an actively contemplative space.

Public Notice 3 draws on Kallat’s earlier works, Public Notice and Public Notice 2, which also converted historic texts into large-scale installations.

Click here to read the entire article.

Click here to learn more about the exhibit.

Written by: Divya Bhatia, Shreya Bhatia, Maria Saraf

In her landmark book, Encountering God, Diana Eck discusses the increasing religious diversity in the world. She notes that “today people of all faiths are more or less aware of one another, and those who articulate the meaning of faith for today must do so in the complicated context of religious plurality.” Taking this reality of religious pluralism one step further, and proactively engaging with such diversity, is the idea behind Interfaith Action’s Youth Leadership Program, established in Sharon, Massachusetts. The program, nicknamed “the YLP” by its high school participants, gives teens the opportunity to learn more about the religious “other,” thereby reflecting upon and developing their understanding of their own beliefs on faith. The YLP gives teens an environment in which they can connect with other teens of different faiths.

Throughout the year, we participate in multiple facilitation and project management trainings to develop the leadership and communication skills we use to plan and run our youth-driven conferences and community events. By using the skills learned in the trainings, we create community programs through which the town embraces cultural and religious differences. As a goal to achieve a more pluralistic society, teens are in the driver’s seat to create the projects themselves, from start to finish. Watching a project fall into place, we enhance our leadership experiences and gain an enormous sense of confidence. The heart of the events we plan revolve around the importance of good communication skills that allow us to increase cooperation among diverse ethnic, religious, and cultural groups in our community. As leaders, we facilitate understanding among diverse people and encourage people to learn about each other and, by finding similarities and respectfully learning about differences, share ideas that benefit the community as a whole.

One of the main challenges to pluralism is the idea that we should work to understand those with beliefs different from our own. Although there is no simple answer, one way to think of it is that by being a part of the wider interfaith movement, we are not merely representing our own religious traditions, but strengthening our understandings of our own faiths by learning about other religious traditions.

Our meetings take place in various houses of worship in order to ensure that we become familiar with the traditions of others. From our own experiences, the best way to achieve a pluralistic society, one in which people actively engage in religious diversity, is to embrace diversity in our everyday lives. And we do that by attending one another’s events so we can walk away from them with new insights about ourselves, other people, and the world. For example, every spring, during the Hindu festival of Holi, YLP teens play a classic game of Holi by throwing powders of bright, exotic colors and water on each other, creating a vast array of colored shirts (that just minutes before playing were white). By participating in this festival and learning about Devika, whose story provides the foundation for the festival of Holi, we learn about Hinduism by experiencing it first-hand. Furthermore, during Ramadan, we hold an Iftar dinner to break the fast at sunset after a whole day of fasting. Many YLP teens also fasted for the whole day, experiencing directly what it is like for the millions of Muslims who fast during the holy month of Ramadan every year. After a full day without food or water, putting the flavorful biryani and delicious fresh fruit chaat in our mouths, we learned about the hardships faced by many in our world and the luxuries we take for granted. Taking part in these religious experiences, we create diverse groups and have everyday exposure to the religious “other,” realizing the shared values and ethics of various faiths around the world.

…

Being part of Interfaith Action’s Youth Leadership Program is not just about learning and experiencing each other’s religion; it is about forging strong bonds of friendship that will last a lifetime. Because of our contact with people of many cultures, we are more accepting, not only as an interfaith community, but as individuals. We ask more questions out of genuine interest. And by asking the right questions, we overcome the problem of ignorance.

Click here to read the entire article.

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.”

India is not only the world’s largest democracy, it also is one of the most spiritually diverse nations. It was born in a horrific spasm of religious bloodshed when British India was torn in two to create a Muslim homeland in Pakistan. Yet from the moment of its independence, India has been a resolutely secular nation and has managed to accommodate an extraordinary range of views on such fundamental questions as the nature of humanity, the existence of God and the quality of the soul.

Indeed, few places in India demonstrate so clearly the country’s genius for diversity and tolerance, the twin reasons that India — despite its fractures and fissures — has remained one nation.

Sikhism, which emerged in the Punjab region of India in the 15th century, strongly rejects the notion of caste, which lies at the core of Hinduism.

The Golden Temple, a giant complex of marble and glittering gold that sits at the heart of this sprawling, hectic city near the border with Pakistan, seeks to embody this principle. Nowhere is it more evident than in the community kitchen, where everyone, no matter his religion, wealth or social status, is considered equal.

Guru Amar Das created the community kitchen during his time as the third Sikh guru in the 16th century. Its purpose, he said, was to place all of humanity on the same plane. At the temple’s museum, one painting shows the wife of one of the gurus serving common people, “working day and night in the kitchen like an ordinary worker,” the caption says.

Volunteerism and community support are other central tenets of Sikhism expressed in the langar. When the Mughal emperor Akbar tried to give Guru Amar Das a platter of gold coins to support the kitchen, he refused to accept them, saying the kitchen “is always run with the blessings of the Almighty.”

Ashok Kumar, a Hindu with a scraggly beard, has been coming to the kitchen for the past five years — all day, almost every day — to work as a volunteer. “It is my service,” he explained, after reluctantly taking a very brief break from his syncopated tray sorting.

Click here to read the entire article.

The next meeting of one of the biggest interfaith gatherings in the world, the Parliament of the World’s Religions, could be hosted in Brussels, Belgium in 2014—and an ISKCON devotee is front and center in the bidding process.

ISKCON’s European Communications Director Mahaprabhu Dasa goes back 117 years to explain how it came to this.

“The Parliament of the World’s Religions was first held in Chicago in 1893 as part of a large fair called the World Columbian Exposition,” he says. “An historic event, it was the first major meeting between leaders and thinkers of both western and eastern religious traditions, and is now seen as the birth of formal interreligious dialogue worldwide.”

But it wasn’t until 1993, when the City of Chicago decided to celebrate the Parliament’s 100th anniversary by having an academic conference, that it became a regular occurrence.

“As they planned it, it developed into a popular event that drew over 8,000 people from many religious communities,” Mahaprabhu explains. “The organizers decided not to wait another 100 years to hold the next one. So they held another in Cape Town, South Africa in 1999.”

After this, the Parliament was established as an event that was held every five years. The next two, held in Barcelona, Spain in 2004, and in Melbourne, Australia in 2009, were similar successes.

“Since the first four had been held in America, Africa, Europe, and Australasia respectively, I was sure the fifth would be held in Asia, the only remaining populated continent,” Mahaprabhu says. “So I began to campaign for Delhi as a candidate. But when I returned to ISKCON’s Radhadesh community in Belgium, several friends of mine who had attended previous Parliaments—including a Rabbi from the Jewish group Lubavitch-Chabad—contacted me and said, ‘Why not have it in Brussels?’ They expected that I might be able to get the ball rolling because of my connections in the interfaith world.”

…

Whatever his position, however, and whichever city wins the bid, Mahaprabhu is all set to help increase awareness and plan the involvement of devotees from all over the world.

“ISKCON Communications and other ISKCON representatives have attended all four Parliaments so far,” says Mahaprabhu. “We had an especially good presence in Barcelona—there was an ISKCON Communications stand handing out free brochures, and a “temple shop” selling devotional and cultural products. ISKCON guru Sivarama Swami did a presentation on Hungary’s eco-village project Krishna Valley, ISKCON Deity Worship Minister Krishna Ksetra Dasa participated in a panel conference, and one devotee did a cooking course. We also performed a fire sacrifice, or yajna, and held our traditional temple morning program.”

ISKCON’s participation in the Melbourne conference, however, was minimal, and Mahaprabhu hopes that its presence can be brought to a much higher level for the next Parliament in 2014.

“We really need to plan it well in advance, and to convince ISKCON leaders of its importance and receive their support,” he says. “It’s important for us to be present and to contribute in a positive way, because the Parliament—although still in its pioneer phase—is set to become a major interfaith event. For instance, last year it received heavy coverage by the media and a White House delegation even attended. So we would like to have ISKCON’s most talented leaders, thinkers and academics from around the world making proposals for workshops, conferences and presentations.”

Click here to read the entire article.

In yeshivas, they are sometimes taunted as “monkeys” or with the Yiddish epithet for blacks. At synagogues and kosher restaurants, they engender blank stares. And dating can be awkward: their numbers are so small, friends will often share at least some romantic history with the same man or woman, and matchmakers always pair them with people with whom they have little in common beyond skin color.

They are African-Americans and Orthodox Jews, a rare cross-cultural hybrid that seems quintessentially Brooklyn, but received little notice until last week, after Yoseph Robinson, a Jamaican-born convert, was killed during a robbery attempt at the kosher liquor store where he worked.

At his funeral and in interviews afterward, a portrait emerged of a small, insular but energized community that is proud but underpinned by a constant tug of race and religiosity.

In Crown Heights, one of the city’s hubs of Orthodox Jewish life, blacks and Jews have long lived side by side and have occasionally clashed. In 1991, riots broke out after a car in a motorcade carrying a Hasidic leader veered onto the sidewalk, killing one black child and badly injuring another.

Nobody keeps track of how many black Orthodox Jews are in New York or across the nation, and surely it is a tiny fraction of both populations. Indeed, even the number of black Jews over all is elusive, though a 2005 book about Jewish diversity, “In Every Tongue,” cited studies suggesting that some 435,000 American Jews, or 7 percent, were black, Hispanic, Asian or American Indian.

“Everyone agrees that the numbers have grown, and they should be noticed,” said Jonathan D. Sarna of Brandeis University, a pre-eminent historian of American Jewry. “Once, there was a sense that ‘so-and-so looked Jewish.’ Today, because of conversion and intermarriage and patrilineal descent, that’s less and less true. The average synagogue looks more like America.

“Even in an Orthodox synagogue, there’s likely to be a few people who look different,” Professor Sarna said, “and everybody assumes that will grow.”

Click here to read the entire article.

Kristen Kelch did not find religion when the cab abruptly stopped in the middle of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive one recent morning, stranding her, her 19-year-old daughter and a friend in the middle of midday traffic. But she did find herself altered by what happened next.

The rattling taxi Ms. Kelch had hoped would take them from her home in Park Slope to the Metropolitan Museum of Art unexpectedly came to a halt near the Manhattan Bridge — squarely in the middle lane.

“I cannot repeat enough times,” said Ms. Kelch, who is in her 50s and had taken the day off from her job in public relations at the City University of New York, “that it was the middle lane.” A car came up from behind and nudged them to the right, but there was no shoulder, and as more cars zoomed by, whining and honking, Ms. Kelch tried very hard to remember whether it was safer for people in stalled cars to get out or stay in.

It was a reminder of the unlikely faith that New Yorkers, religious or not, have whenever they get into a cab, putting their lives in the hands of someone they have never met. Even more impressive, perhaps, is the faith cabdrivers have in their countless daily encounters with strangers, a trust cruelly punished this week, when Michael Enright, a student filmmaker, was charged with a hate crime in the stabbing of a Muslim driver.

The driver of Ms. Kelch’s stalled taxi seemed to have no big ideas about how to get them out of peril — later, he tried to charge her party $13 for the aborted trip. But there was another cabby, an off-duty driver in a crisp seersucker shirt, who stopped, at his own peril, in the middle lane, and offered the passengers a ride.

The women sprinted into the back seat of his cab and thanked him effusively. He was heading to an uptown mosque to pray, he told them, and could easily drop them off at the museum. Ms. Kelch is one of those people who always makes small talk with cabdrivers, but on this day, after all that had happened, she was invested enough to take on a riskier conversation: What did he make of the proposed Muslim community center two blocks from the World Trade Center site?

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.

Click here to read the entire article.