Saddleback Valley Community Church, one of the largest evangelical churches in the United States, admits conservative Christians have been “late to the party” when it comes to active involvement in fighting HIV/AIDS.So the Church is making good use of acrostics to explain its stratgey to the 22,000 people who attend its weekly services in Southern California, as well as millions overseas who have been influenced by Pastor Rick Warren’s inspirational book “The Purpose Driven Life.”

Neatly side-stepping the controversial issues of homosexuality and condoms that have caused many a dilemma for U.S. conservative Christians, Saddleback has put its efforts into the way local churches around the world can help care and support victims — especially AIDS orphans in Africa.

Saddleback’s approach is an interesting contrast to the ABC of AIDS prevention (Abstinence, Being faithful, using Condoms) promoted by the Bush administration and several African countries.

The six things that followers can do at the outset are laid out in the simple to remember formula C.H.U.R.C.H.:

Care and support the sick
Handle testing and counseling
Unleash volunteers
Remove the stigma
Champion healthy behavior
Help with nutrition and medication.

P.E.A.C.E. is another acrostic that Saddleback has adopted to sum up the strategy Jesus might adopt on the AIDS pandemic, and which was heard repeatedly during a three-day conference this week on the Church’s role in the AIDS crisis:

Promote reconciliation
Equip servant leaders
Assist the poor
Care for the sick
Educate the next generation.

In the past three years, Saddleback has sent out more than 7,500 members to test its P.E.A.C.E. plan in 69 countries.

When Pope Benedict expressed his closeness to victims of AIDS in advance of World AIDS Day on December 1, one thing was conspicuously absent from his comments — either a specific mention or a reference to the use of condoms.

The Pope, speaking at his weekly general audience on Wednesday, called for increased efforts to stop the spread of AIDS and said victims of the disease should not be treated with disdain. He criticised international agencies he said were spreading abortion. The C-word was not present in either in letter or spirit in his two-paragraph comments in Italian.

When his predecessor John Paul spoke of AIDS, whether he was speaking in the Vatican or during his trips abroad, he often mentioned, either directly or indirectly, that condoms were not the answer.

The Catholic Church opposes the use of condoms in general because they block the possible transmission of life and teaches that fidelity within heterosexual marriage, chastity and abstinence are the best way to stop the spread of AIDS. It says promoting condoms fosters immoral and hedonistic behaviour that will only contribute to its spread. It teaches that homosexual acts are immoral in the first place.

In fact, the Catholic Church’s position on the use of condoms to stop the spread of AIDS has never been made totally clear or definitively pronounced.

Perhaps by not mentioning condoms, Pope Benedict has decided to take a more subtle approach to the problem.

In recent years, several top Church officials have called for a change in Vatican policy on condoms to allow their use by married couples where one partner is affected by HIV or AIDS. But the Vatican has so far been loath to issue any document that could be interpreted as a green light for the use of condoms to stop the spread of AIDS, fearing it would endorse promiscuity.

Little has been heard about a possible Vatican document recently. In November, 2006, Cardinal Javier Lozano Barragan, head of the Vatican’s Council for Health Pastoral Care, told reporters a study commissioned by the Pope had effectively passed its first hurdle.

“This is something that worries the Pope a lot,” Barragan said of AIDS at the time. The study, which Barragan at the time said was carried out from both a scientific and moral point of view, had been passed on to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and would eventually be passed up the Pope for his use as he saw fit in a document of his own or a pronouncement. It is not clear at what stage the document is now but perhaps, judging by the Benedict’s words, he has decided not to confront the issue the way his predecessor did — at least for now.

Hillary Clinton, AIDS and U.S. evangelicals might not seem like natural bedfellows but a three-day international conference at the influential Saddleback Valley Community Church in Southern California this week is seeking to change all that.

Among the numerous calls at the conference for conservative Christians to actively care for and support HIV/AIDS victims around the world was the suggestion that the 1,500 attendees get themselves tested for the virus.The idea is for white evangelicals to abandon judgement and put themselves in the shoes of those millions in the United States and around the world who have the disease.

Saddleback Church officials said about 100 people had already taken advantage of the free finger prick blood HIV tests offered on the vast campus in the first 24 hours of the conference. About 400 are expected to take the test — results in 10 minutes — and counseling by the end of the three-day meeting of Christian pastors, non governmental organizations and AIDS victims from around the world.

“We have had all ages, nationalities and demographics come through ” said Kirk Tilly, a Saddleback volunteer who helped organize the testing. “We’ve got a pretty low risk population here. Some people are getting tested because they have never done it before, but the second reason is to reduce the stigma.

“Even if you have very low risk factors, if you had never had a test somehow your heart still patters and you get a little anxious,” Tilly said.

Last year, U.S. Senators Barack Obama and Sam Brownback along with Saddleback pastor Rick Warren — author of the best selling book “The Purpose Driven Life” — all took public AIDS tests at the conference.

But there were no plans for this year’s celebrity guest — Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton — to publicly go through the procedure.

The Vatican announcement welcoming the appeal by 138 Muslim scholars opens the way to a broad and deep dialogue between Christianity and Islam. The Roman Catholic Church — with more than half the world’s 2 billion Christians — could have scuttled the whole thing if it had said “no, thanks.” That first hurdle is now out of the way, but it’s going to be a long and slow process before we see results. Although it goes against the instincts of a wire service reporter to say it, that’s not such a bad thing. Taking time to discuss differences and clear up misunderstandings has got to help relations.

In fact, even this “Waiting for Benedict” phase has been quite active. On my recent trip to Rome, I heard quite a few Catholics — cardinals and Islam experts — speaking positively about the idea. But I don’t want to give the impression that only the Vatican counts here. There have been interesting developments among Protestants and Muslims in recent days.

On the Christian side, four Yale Divinity School professors drew up a positive response to A Common Word. About 300 mostly Protestant theologians and religious leaders have signed the statement (published in the Nov. 18 New York Times), ranging from professors at divinity schools, several leading evangelical figures and a few Catholics and Orthodox. The full list of signatories is here.

Last Monday in Abu Dhabi, Sheikh al-Habib Ali al-Jifri, Director of the Tabah Foundation in Abu Dhabi, thanked the Yale group in the name of the 138 Muslim sigantories. Egypt’s Grand Mufti Ali Gomaa also sent a statement of support. There have been other comments as well — the Common Word website is keeping track of them as they come in.

Cynics might say that talk is cheap. Since dialogues among religious leaders have a tendency to stall after the “getting-to-know-you” phase, that has to be expected. But we haven’t seen Christians and Muslims talking this much — and so positively — in a long time. As Paris Cardinal André Vingt-Trois pointed out last week, “I remember a few years ago how we regretted that there weren’t any Muslim leaders who could take a public position, for example against terrorism.”

That said, this initiative now goes into the long haul. Given some of the Catholic objections that have been mentioned (for this, see the long analysis by Sandro Magister’s on his informative site www.chiesa), there is a lot to talk about — and disagree about — if they really get down to discussing the serious theological differences between them. But there’s an optimism surrounding this initiative. The Catholic Bishop of Arabia Paul Hinder, based in Abu Dhabi, expressed some Catholic concerns about the dialogue two weeks ago. But he made clear to the Abu Dhabi daily al-Itihad on Thursday that he did not think this was a deal-breaker. “Saying that dialogue is difficult or will take time does not mean that it is impossible,” he said. “I personally do not believe that the situation is such. Rather, I believe that dialogue is possible.”

If these scholars are going to talk about the misunderstandings between Christians and Muslims, what do you think they should discuss? Do you think a dialogue among these people can really make a change in day-to-day relations between Christians and Muslims?

Until now, there have been two explanations for the origin of the Giant’s Causeway, that magnificent collection of interlocking rock formations on the County Antrim coast in Northern Ireland. Geology tells us it is made of columns of basalt that formed after intense volcanic activity millions of years ago. Irish folklore tells us that it was a bridge that the giant Fionn mac Cumhaill (Finn McCool) built to cross over to Scotland to fight another giant. The geologists are right, of course, but the old Irish tale is harmless fun.

Now Biblical creationists are trying to add a third interpretation. The Belfast Telegraph reports that a new group called the Causeway Creation Committee wants to add a creationist explanation to a tourist centre project being discussed.

The newspaper writes:

Their belief is that the causeway was created by a huge watery catastrophe - Noah’s flood… The committee has been set up to lobby for information on their theories to be included in any future visitors’ centre at the causeway. They say more than 1,000 people have so far signed the petition.

Founding member Stephen Moore (30) is a Christian evangelist who runs outreach programmes for young people in Portrush.

He explained: “We don’t believe God created it the way it is, it was definitely a result of volcanic activity. Where we differ from the official theory is that we believe the cause of that activity was the flood we read about in The Bible. It says the fountains of the great deep opened up and because of that there was volcanic activity.

“The other main difference in our view is the date. They say the causeway was created 60 million years ago but we believe that’s a fairy tale. When you follow The Bible timetable it is about 4,500 years ago and due to volcanic activity that surrounds the events of a global flood.

“I take issue when people talk about the scientific view because our view is scientific as well. We use the same evidence and observations, we just interpret it differently.

“It just comes down to what glasses you are wearing.”

Further down, the report says:

But a longer term goal for the committee is to have intelligent design theories taught as science as part of the curriculum in our schools. Intelligent design is the assertion that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection.

Its website states: “We also desire to see the fact of Intelligent Design being taught alongside the Theory of Evolution in our local schools.”

The issue has been discussed on several blogs in the area — see here and here.

Is this just a case of “what glasses you are wearing?” Is one explanation just as good as another?

As soon as a riot starts in one of the poor suburbs around Paris, we get emails from readers and see comments on blogs accusing the media of hiding the supposedly key fact about the unrest. That fact, they tell us without providing any proof, is Islam. Why don’t we call this violence “Muslim riots?” they ask. What are we trying to hide by not identifying the rioters as Muslims? Do the MSM have a hidden agenda? Don’t we have the courage to “tell the truth?”

We’ve had rioting this week and the same questions came again. This blog has discussed this issue already in a post last month called “Smoke without fire - there was no Paris intifada in 2005.” That dealt with the 2005 riots in detail. This latest unrest is a good opportunity to explain why we don’t write “Muslim riots” — and ask in return why readers so far from the events are so convinced that we should.

We mention race and religion in Reuters news stories when they are relevant to the event being covered. It would be absurd to write “Presbyterian second baseman XYZ…” in a baseball story. He may be a Presbyterian, but he is not at second base as a Presbyterian, but as a baseball player.

When Muslims marched in Paris demanding the end to a ban on headscarves in public schools, we called them Muslim protesters. When French Muslim Council members speak out on an issue, we call them Muslim leaders. These people are speaking as Muslims, so we identify them as such. They also have other identities — they may be French or foreign citizens, male or female, football fans or music lovers — but these other identities would be irrelevant to a story about Muslim issues.

In this week’s events, young men, often hooded, roamed the suburbs at night and firebombed cars, dumpsters and a library. They did not shout Muslim demands, spray Muslim graffiti or wear the trademark beards and baggy pants of a salafi. They did not gather at mosques or shout “Allah-o-akbar!” They avoided journalists, presumably seeing them as part of “the system” that they oppose, and made no demands related to Islam. When those detained were questioned by police, they were not asked about their religion or ethnic identity — that’s not allowed in France.

So my first question is — how are we supposed to write as fact that they are Muslims? Where are the facts to justify phrases like “Muslim riots” or “French intifada?”

Some might say that we know these riots happen in “Muslim neighbourhoods.” But when journalists go visit them, they find neighbourhoods that are multiracial, multicultural, multilingual and multifaith. Judging by the faces seen on the streets, there are Arabs (mostly from North Africa), blacks from Africa and the Caribbean, people from the Indian Subcontinent (often Sri Lankans) and whites — yes, poor French whites. There are Muslims who pray in mosques and Christians who attend various churches, including a growing number of African evangelicals. Here and there in Paris or its suburbs, you even find poor Jews who moved to France from North Africa — some even still speak Arabic and live peacefully with their Muslim neighbours. And don’t forget there are a lot of agnostics and atheists out there — this is France, after all, where the average rate of regular attendance in churches, synagogues and mosques is about 10 percent.

Since France does not collect data on its residents’ religion or ethnic background, there are no official statistics on the population of these suburbs. The mix varies according to neighbourhood. Even if we call an area a “Muslim neighbourhood,” what does that mean? Many of these people have family roots in majority Muslim countries like Algeria, but they are French citizens who identify themselves as French. Many do not regularly pray in mosques (local Muslim leaders admit this). You see women and girls wearing headscarves, but they are not in the majority in these neighbourhoods. Many of them are actually older immigrant women who’ve always covered their heads, not “neo-orthodox” or “born-again” young French-born women who wear headscarves to assert their Muslim identity.

So my second question is — why should we inject religion into this when these neighbourhoods are actually a religious patchwork and there is no sign that faith has been a factor in the rioting?

How about going by the names of the detained rioters? After the 2005 riots, police reported that half of the 3,000 or so they took in were males under 18. Some 640 of them were eventually arrested and most of them already had police records. Most had Arabic or African names, true, but the lists of detainees in some areas had many French, Italian and Portuguese names. Does this show a religious element? How can we tell? Would youths of French, Italian or Portuguese descent join an intifada?

Suprised by the Portuguese? In Seine-Saint-Denis, the département north of Paris best known for its unruly housing projects, they are the second largest ethnic group after North Africans, according to the urban development association Profession Banlieue. That study also mentions growing communities of Southeast Asians, which would be Vietnamese and Cambodians.

So my third question is — how do you define an group of unidentified rioters from a mixed ethnic area simply as “Muslim”? What essential information do you provide if you stick a label on these rioters that you cannot prove?

Among all this patchwork, there are some unifying factors that apply to the large majority of residents in these suburbs. They are poor. They live in substandard housing. The schools are bad, there aren’t many shops or cinemas and it’s unusually difficult and time-consuming to get into Paris by public transportation. They live amid and often suffer from widespread unemployment (up to 40 percent in some areas). Politicians who promised a “Marshall Plan” for the suburbs after the 2005 riots have not delivered .

There is also a serious crime problem in the suburbs, especially organised crime involving drug dealers. There has been a worrying rise in firearms circulating in the suburbs, many smuggled in from the former Yugoslavia. President Nicolas Sarkozy has stressed this criminal aspect, decrying the “thugocracy ” he says was driving the unrest.

Many residents face discrimination when seeking jobs or housing outside these suburbs. This goes for poor whites too — they say can clear the name hurdle (the point where job applications from Mohammads and Mamadous get binned) but stumble when employers see they live in a “hot” suburb. The French police, who can be intimidating even to the white majority in the better parts of Paris, are quite aggressive towards minorities and are accused of harrassing them often in the suburbs, for example with regular I.D. checks. Although they may make up about a fifth of the French population, the ethnic minorities are all but invisible on television and in public life. They have almost no political representatives on the national level. Even the mayors of these suburban towns are almost all white males. Muslims as a group have almost no national non-Muslim organisations or movements fighting for their intersets.

Listing these problems does not excuse the rioters, not by a long shot, or exonerate the French system for its many shortcomings. But it does show how youths in these suburbs could be so frustrated that they turn to violence, whether their background is Muslim, Christian, Hindu, Buddhist or agnostic/atheist.

So my fourth question is — why stress religion over the economic, social and political complaints that people in these suburbs express when they are asked what leads to the protests? Why ignore factors that apply to the broad majority of suburban residents?

In researching this post, I ask my Reuters Paris bureau colleague James Mackenzie what he found during his night out reporting in the riot-hit suburb of Villiers-le Bel. “It’s a mixed immigrant community,” he told me. “People saw the TV crews and came up to us to say it wasn’t just about youths rioting. They accused the police of beating the youths. They also said there were constant I.D checks there … I haven’t heard or seen any credible suggestion of any Muslim mobilisation behind this. There may be Muslims among the rioters, but nothing even vaguely religious was mentioned when we talked to residents there.”

For another view, I called Ahmed El Keiy, the news editor of Beur FM, a radio station popular among young French of North African origin (”beur” is the slang name for these French-born youths). El Keiy runs an evening call-in show to discuss the news (I wrote about his Ramadan call-in about Islam just last month). “The main problem is the relationship between police and young people,” he said. “The police are seen as enemies. They don’t know how to talk to these youths. They also have to produce results — they’ve been told they have to expel 25,000 illegal immigrants a year, so any Arab or African face they see, they think they’re illegals and they do I.D. checks. It’s very tense.”

Having spent a long evening sitting in his studio last month listening to El Keiy and three imams discuss Ramadan and Islam with French Muslims who called in, I thought he if anyone would be sensitive to any Muslim angle to the rioting. “In 2005, we heard the politicians blaming the unrest on polygamy or saying there had been cries of ‘Allah-o-akbar’ but that was just the politicians talking,” he said. “This time around, there was no mention of that. The religious element is not present in this at all.”

Finally, a personal note. I’m the Reuters religion editor and I live in Paris. In 2005, when Nicolas Sarkozy was putting out the story that Muslims fundamentalists were behind the rioting, I went out to the suburbs and found the people out there weren’t buying it. This time around, there is not even any suggestion from anybody here that religion has anything to do with it. If I thought it did, I’d write about it.

So my fifth question is — what would it take to convince these readers that there is no hidden agenda here? Is it possible that the hidden agenda lies elsewhere?

Teacher Gillian Gibbons, who was jailed in Sudan for allowing her students to name a teddy bear Mohammad, has been pardoned by the country's president.

She was sentenced last Thursday to 15 days in jail for insulting Islam.

Gibbons, 54, had left her home town of Liverpool in July and had only been in Sudan for four months. The case rapidly escalated into a diplomatic incident and Muslim hardliners in Sudan protested after Friday prayers. The Muslim Council of Britain has said it is "appalled."

But should Gibbons have perhaps been more aware of the possible consequences of so naming a toy animal? She may not have been in the country long but she must have known of the furore in 2006 when a Danish newspaper published cartoons of Mohammad and of the sensibilities of producing any image of the Prophet.

Is this just a case of an innocent abroad or a serious failure to take into account the possible dangers to Westerners of living and working in strict Muslim countries?

Tell us your view.

Plenty of artists, be they writers, painters or potters, have spoken about the rise of self-censorship when it comes to potentially contentious issues like religion. The trouble is that whatever is self-censored does not see the light of day, and so will never be recorded.

That is why it was interesting to read comments attributed to Perry Grayson, a British cross-dressing potter and winner of the prestigious Turner Prize, in which he said he had consciously avoided commenting on radical Islam in his otherwise provocative work out of fear of a threat of reprisals.

That raises two issues.

One is the broad question pitting freedom of expression against the sensitivities of a particular group or religion, the kind of debate that surrounded moves by a Christian activist to take a BBC executive to court for the broadcaster's decision to air "Jerry Springer-The Opera", which many Christians found offensive.

The other is whether artists are more nervous when dealing with Islam than they are with other religions, Christianity included. It is an argument made recently by the lawyer representing Stephen Green, the Christian pursuing the "Jerry Springer" case, who said no theatre would have staged the musical had it targeted Islam not Christianity, and nor would the BBC have aired it. Many would argue that the broadcaster is also unlikely to have run such an unrestrained send-up of Judaism.

Should artists have complete freedom of expression, without fear of reprisals? Or do they have a responsibility to take into account the feelings of communities who may not agree with their position? Should they treat one community or religion differently from another? There have been many cases highlighting the dilemmas in recent years, and there are likely to be many, many more.

The Rome trip’s over and it’s back to other interesting religion topics — like Islam in Turkey.

The evolution of Islam and politics in Turkey is one of the most interesting recent developments in the Muslim world. One of the most interesting writers following this is Mustafa Akyol, an Istanbul journalist who is deputy editor of the English-language Turkish Daily News and regularly posts his TDN columns on his blog The White Path. Some of his articles require familiarity with today’s Turkish political scene, but his latest is an informative stand-back guide to how “Turkey now nurtures an interpretation of Islam that is in harmony with modern values such as democracy, liberalism and capitalism.”

Akyol’s blog flags the article as “Turkey’s Veiled Democracy [A Must-Read Article].” It’s published in the November/December issue of The American Interest (here it is in PDF). In it, Akyol surveys the emergence of modernising trends in Islam during the Ottoman Empire, the creation of the secularist Turkish Republic by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and the rise of modern “neo-orthodox” Muslims who formed the governing AKP party.

A fascinating aspect is the changing place of religion in Turkish politics in recent years:

“… a survey entitled “Religion, Society and Politics in a Changing Turkey”, carried out in 2006 by political scientists Binnaz Toprak and Ali Çarkoglu, revealed that not only is religiosity thriving in Turkey; it is also moving away from political Islam. In response to the question, “Should there be political parties based on religion?” the percentage of respondents answering “yes” has dropped from 41 to 25 percent in the past seven years. Moreover, demand for “a religious state based on sharia” has dropped dramatically from 21 percent to 9 percent. Only 2 percent support harsh sharia measures such as stoning. Turkish Islam is flourishing, but not as an obscurantist or anti-modern movement—just the reverse.“

Another point he makes is the influence of a Muslim middle class in Turkey. Many militant Islamists combine Muslim religious thought and Third World liberation politics. The religious vocabulary might be from the Koran, but the political vision owes much to the anti-colonialist theorist Frantz Fanon and his 1961 classic The Wretched of the Earth. Akyol notes the socialist slant of political thinking in the Islamic world in the 20th century and then writes:

“The rise of an Islamic entrepreneurial class is a remarkable phenomenon, marking the beginning of a new stage for Islamic civilization. Most people understand religion not only according to its textual teachings, but also according to its function within their everyday social environment. Islam’s social environment has been feudal, imperial and bureaucratic in the past and present for the most part. Now, in Turkey and in a few other Muslim counties such as Malaysia, Islam is being transformed into a religion of the middle class and its rational, independent, individualist ethos. Anyone who thinks this social transformation won’t change religion knows nothing about the sociology of religion.”

A frequent argument about Islam in western countries is that it cannot reform and is not compatible with democracy. Akyol makes a strong case for the opposite. Are the people arguing that Islam is inherently undemocratic watching what is happening in Turkey? Do you think it shows there are more options within Islam than the ones usually seen in the news?

Pope Benedict made an interesting comment at the consistory installing 23 new cardinals on Saturday. He warned against “careerism” in the Church and noted that the disciples James and John who asked Jesus to give them seats to the right and left of him in Heaven (Mark 10:37) had “a crude conception of merit.” Here’s his sermon (in Italian). Now, I don’t want to get into a game of “spot the careerist at the Vatican” — others do that well enough — and I don’t want to cast any doubts about the new cardinals or any Vatican officials. But reading through the biographies of the new cardinals, I had a kind of sociological interest in seeing if any single factor stood out in their pasts.

And yes, one did.

About three-quarters of the new cardinals studied at one or more of the pontifical universities in Rome. There are a dozen of these Catholic universities here specialised in theology, canon law, scripture and philosophy, with students from around the world. They used to teach in Latin, but gave that up in 1967. Most of the students are bright young seminarians sent over to Rome because their superiors spotted their potential. Others are ordained priests doing graduate work, again often sent by bishops with an eye for talent. While they’re here, they not only study, they see how the Vatican works, make contacts among professors, Vatican officials and other students and they learn Italian, an advantage for any cleric on his way up the career ladder.

The numbers said a lot. Of the Europeans who got the red hat, 7 had studied in Rome and 5 had not. That’s not so surprising, since Catholic universities in Spain or France or Belgium can provide just as good an education (if not better, some say). But among the non-Europeans, there was no contest. Ten had a Roman degree and only one didn’t.

So clerics should not be careerists … but one who wants to start his career the right way might be advised to do it in Rome.