Archive for the ‘article’ tag
International Religion Reporting Gets a Boost
by Ruth Eglash
from Common Ground News Service
Reporting from Jerusalem–It’s an issue that affects people’s lives across the world everyday yet most media institutions do not dedicate much time, resources or manpower to covering religion.
That was the assessment of some 25 journalists from six continents and 23 countries who gathered last month in Bellagio, Italy to lay down the foundations of an international association aimed not only at boosting the prominence and professionalism of religion reporting but also to emphasise the need for responsible journalism that can unite instead of divide people.
Despite some of the obvious differences – linguistic, nationalistic, religious and political – between those that gathered in Italy from 20-24 March, the International Association of Religion Journalists (IARJ) was officially launched.
“We are living in a global society and our understanding internationally of religion is weak. With this association, journalists now have contacts in various countries and can work together”, commented US journalist David Briggs, a Pulitzer Prize nominee and the main driving force behind the initiative.
Briggs, who was elected as the association’s Executive Director during the meeting’s closing session, has been trying for the better part of the last eight years to establish a global association similar to the Religion Newswriters Association in the United States, which aims to promote high-quality media coverage of religion.
Social Justice as a Unifying Issue for Dharmic Communities
Joshua Stanton, Co-Founder, Journal of Inter-Religious Dialogue, State of Formation
by Joshua Stanton
from the Huffington Post
Religious communities are never the same once they reach America. In my view, they often become even more remarkable.
As a third-generation American Jew, it is at times even challenging for me to think of Judaism apart from the American experience. In spite of hardships early on for our community, the search for common threads between the disparate Jewish groups that came in droves to America two (and more) generations ago forced us to reexamine and hone our religious beliefs. What actually bound us together?…
As has become quite evident in the past several years, another set of religious groups, bolstered by recent waves of immigrants to America, is also looking to social justice as a possible unifying trope. Launched by Anju Bhargava, Hindu-American visionary and founder of Hindu American Seva Charities, this effort seeks to increase long-term collaboration between Buddhist, Hindu, Jain and Sikh communities through religiously inspired volunteerism, charity and social services.
Together, these groups — several of which are comprised primarily of immigrants from South and East Asia — represent what may be described as Dharmic religious communities and a new coalition in the American religious landscape. They are seeking a unique American identity and niche for their adherents. Like other religious communities that have flourished during and after waves of immigration, they appear poised to make essential contributions to American society.
World Malaria Day is April 25th
Rachel Finn and Nina Pine, Faiths Act Fellows for the Tony Blair Faith Foundation
by Nina Pine and Rachel Finn, Faiths Act Fellows for the Tony Blair Faith Foundation
While the two of us have been planning the San Francisco CROP Hunger Walk as our World Malaria Day Event, often we are asked the question, “Why are you supporting malaria prevention efforts at a hunger walk? Isn’t that a conflict of interest?”
The fact of the matter is, however, that malaria and hunger are incredibly intertwined. Just check out this video [http://www.youtube.com/watch?
Delivering food to a community in need is a noble act. It is a life-saving act. And yet unfortunately, it is not a sustainable act. Extreme hunger worldwide is not caused by a lack of food, but rather, systemic social corruption and flawed distribution. To change the narrative on hunger, we must change the systems of power and the societal structures in which communities live. To do so is a daunting task, and incredibly complex.
Yet, one effective step we can tangibly make is on the issue of malaria. Malaria is a disease of poverty – it has been eradicated in parts of the world with access to needed finances, such as here in California. Malaria is both treatable and preventable. And yet, a child still dies every 60 seconds from this deadly disease. It is less a problem of complexity than a lack of resources.
Malaria prevention, elimination, and hopefully one day, eradication, are excellent goals in and of themselves. And yet, the ripple effect from treating it has far larger reaches. It improves education, because children do not miss days of school due to severe illness. It improves maternal health by significantly decreasing the number of deaths in pregnant women. Perhaps most importantly, malaria elimination would drastically improve the situation of extreme hunger around the globe. Individuals will not have to miss days of harvesting crops due to illness. Families will not have to decide whether to spend their money on medicine for a sick child, or food for the rest. Men, women, and children will have the strength they need to fight against the societal blockades keeping them impoverished.
We hope you’ll support us this World Malaria Day in taking a holistic approach to tackling extreme poverty, by recognizing the interconnectedness of problems around the world. Please visit cropwalksf.org to learn more about our Walk and how to be a supporter.
Will you walk with us?
French Catholic School a Refuge for Muslims
Photo credit: Benoit Jurzynski
by Ruadhan MacCormaic
from the Irish Times
Marseille: It’s the Friday before mid-term break at Tour Sainte, and there’s a giddy mood in the yard as the children file out past Stéphane Thiébaut, the school principal. “Bonnes vacances,” he calls out to the parents and teachers milling about in the spring sunshine.
Tour Sainte has some of the best views in Marseille, its hilltop perch giving a wide panorama of the city and the Mediterranean. Birds are singing from the trees in the yard, while the glare of the warm sun against the peach buildings accentuates the calm. ‘We have built ourselves a little oasis of peace,” Thiébaut remarks.
A Scorecard Of Singapore’s Multicultural and Multi-Religious Bonds
by Yolanda Chin and Norman Vasu
from the Eurasia Review
In light of several incidents touching on race and religion in recent years, it may be tempting to wonder if Singapore’s multicultural harmony has possibly been strained. Such events included but are not limited to a senior pastor of the Lighthouse Evangelism church making disparaging remarks about Buddhists and Taoists in 2010 and former Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew calling into question the desire of Muslims to integrate in Singapore in the book Hard Truths to Keep Singapore Going.
In an attempt to more systematically discern if there has been such unease, the Centre of Excellence for National Security (CENS) at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS) conducted a study of two questions pertaining to the social fabric of Singapore: (1) Have Singapore’s multicultural ties been resilient between 2007 and 2011? (2) Were Malays, Christians and the Chinese consistently less inclusive than non-Malays, non-Christians and non-Chinese respectively between 2007 and 2011?
Click here to read the full article
Catholic Couple Embark on Interfaith “Pilgrimage,” Circle World on Religious Tolerance Quest
by Gillian Flaccus
from the Huffington Post
CLAREMONT, Calif. — Frederic and Anne-Laure Pascal are devout Roman Catholics who built their lives around their religion. When she lost her job last year, the young couple decided on an unlikely expression of their religious commitment: a worldwide “interfaith pilgrimage” to places where peace has won out over dueling dogmas.
Since October, the French couple has visited 11 nations from Iraq to Malaysia in an odyssey to find people of all creeds who have dedicated their lives to overcoming religious intolerance in some of the world’s most divided and war-torn corners.
The husband-and-wife team blogs about their adventures – and their own soul-searching – and takes short video clips for the project they’ve dubbed the Faithbook Tour.
Learning to Respect Religion
by Nicholas Kristof
from the New York Times
A few years ago, God seemed caught in a devil of a fight.
Atheists were firing thunderbolts suggesting that “religion poisons everything,” as Christopher Hitchens put it in the subtitle of his book, “God Is Not Great.” Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins also wrote best sellers that were scathing about God, whom Dawkins denounced as “arguably the most unpleasant character in fiction.”
Yet lately I’ve noticed a very different intellectual tide: grudging admiration for religion as an ethical and cohesive force.
The standard-bearer of this line of thinking — and a provocative text for Easter Sunday — is a new book, “Religion for Atheists,” by Alain de Botton. He argues that atheists have a great deal to learn from religion.
“One can be left cold by the doctrines of the Christian Trinity and the Buddhist Eightfold Path and yet at the same time be interested in the ways in which religions deliver sermons, promote morality, engender a spirit of community, make use of art and architecture, inspire travels, train minds and encourage gratitude at the beauty of spring,” de Botton writes.
The Surprising–and Continuing–Influence of Swami Vivekananda
The swami Vivekananda, the Bengali monk who brought yoga to the United States, meditating in London, in 1896. Courtesy of the Vedanta Society
by A. L. Bardach
from the Wall Street Journal
By the late 1960s, the most famous writer in America had become a recluse, having forsaken his dazzling career. Nevertheless, J.D. Salinger often came to Manhattan, staying at his parents’ sprawling apartment on Park Avenue and 91st Street. While he no longer visited with his editors at “The New Yorker,” he was keen to spend time with his spiritual teacher, Swami Nikhilananda, the founder of the Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Center, located, then as now, in a townhouse just three blocks away, at 17 East 94th Street.
Though the iconic author of “The Catcher in the Rye” and “Franny and Zooey” published his last story in 1965, he did not stop writing. From the early 1950s onward, he maintained a lively correspondence with several Vedanta monks and fellow devotees.
After all, the central, guiding light of Salinger’s spiritual quest was the teachings of Vivekananda, the Calcutta-born monk who popularized Vedanta and yoga in the West at the end of the 19th century.
These days yoga is offered up in classes and studios that have become as ubiquitous as Starbucks. Vivekananda would have been puzzled, if not somewhat alarmed. “As soon as I think of myself as a little body,” he warned, “I want to preserve it, protect it, to keep it nice, at the expense of other bodies. Then you and I become separate.” For Vivekananda, who established the first ever Vedanta Center, in Manhattan in 1896, yoga meant just one thing: “the realization of God.”
An Interview with Tony Blair on Interfaith Dialogue
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.
…
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.
Conservation Joins Religion To Save Ganges Dolphin
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.
