As the premiere of the long-awaited Koran film by far-right Dutch politician Geert Wilders nears, it’s not uncommon to hear Muslims call for some way to censor what they expect to be a blistering condemnation of their faith.

But not all see the film — now expected to be broadcast by the end of this month — as an opportunity to revive the polarisation of the Prophet Mohammad cartoons clash in 2006, when freedom of expression and respect for faith were presented as implacable opposites.

Tariq Ramadan, one of Europe’s most prominent Muslim intellectuals, has never shied from confronting the critics of his faith. But his approach to the Wilders film aims to avoid a repeat of the cartoons controversy. At a recent conference in Sweden, he told Reuters that people could not be prevented from publishing material like the Wilders film and the Danish newspaper cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad that triggered protests across the Muslim world.

“My position is they have the right to do it and we don’t need new laws to prevent them from doing it,” Ramadan said. “But not everything which is legal is intelligent. Sometimes you have to think about a sense of decency and to live together.”

Ramadan went on: “My advice (to Muslims) is take an intellectual critical distance towards this. Say ‘we don’t like it’ but go ahead and just ignore it.”

Ramadan is optimistic that lessons learned from the Danish cartoons affair will help the Dutch authorities avert a similar crisis over the Wilders film, expected to be released on or around March 28.

His upbeat view was shared by Dutch security experts addressing the conference. One of them, Bob de Graaff of Leiden University, said the affair had fuelled interest in Islam among the Dutch population at large, with more visits to mosques by non-Muslims and a higher quality of media debate.

A newspaper poll this week showed a surprisingly high level of public knowledge about Islam, said de Graaff. He ventured to suggest many of his countrymen knew more about Islam than Christianity. “An intellectual middle class of Muslims in the Netherlands has established itself…They are causing some Dutchmen to retreat from the easy arguments of populism which they preferred for a while,” the academic said.

Other European experts praised the Dutch for taking pre-emptive steps to defuse hostile Muslim reaction to the film. The authorities have worked hard in recent months to reach out to the Muslim community, for example through imams and youth workers. They are also working through diplomatic channels with Islamic nations.

For a Reuters story on how the Dutch are trying to apply the lessons of the Mohammad cartoons crisis, click here.

Will it be enough? Some security analysts fear the Dutch will find it far harder to contain international anger and protests than to mollify the domestic Muslim community.

As if it weren’t enough to share a name with Karl Marx, the new Roman Catholic archbishop of Munich has now written a book called, you guessed it - Das Kapital.

Subtitled “a polemic”, Reinhard Marx’s book argues that “Capitalism has never triumphed so shamelessly as today,” and that “the poor are getting poorer and the rich richer,” because of global capitalism. Now doesn’t that sound familiar?

The book, which will go on sale in Germany from November 5, tackles issues such as the outsourcing of labour to cheaper countries and the effect chasing profits can have on the welfare of the workforce.

Marx, who became archbishop in the Bavarian capital earlier this year is an up-and-coming figure in German Catholicism — Munich was Pope Benedict’s old diocese and the new Das Kapital, to be published 140 years after the original, is sure to earn him attention outside of the church too.

So is the archbishop a revolutionary? “There are new and good reasons as to why Karl Marx should not just be left sitting on the shelf,” he says. Watch this space.

Is Martin Luther, the German monk who sparked the Reformation, going to be “rehabilitated” this year by Pope Benedict? Some media say yes, the Vatican says no way. Here is an interesting sequence of events that says a lot about how something can take on a life of its own, regardless of whether it may be totally correct.
0It all appears to have started on March 2, when ApCom, an Italian news agency, ran a three paragraph article, here in Italian , merely saying that the pope and some of his former PhD students (the so-called Ratzinger- Schlerkreis), would discuss Luther during their yearly summer encounter in August at the papal summer villa at Castel Gandolfo, south of Rome.
APcom, said the seminar would discuss whether Luther “wanted a rupture … or intended to reform the Church but without traumas”.
On March 5, two days after the APcom report, the Turin newspaper La Stampa ran a story with the headline “Ratzinger reforms Luther. ‘He had many Catholic ideas. The theologian pope summons his students for a seminar of study on the heretic.”The article, seen here in Italian, quoted Cardinal Walter Kasper, president of the Council for Promoting Christian Unity, as saying the choice of topics was meant “to favour a climate of encounter with Protestants.”
The day after the article in La Stampa, the Times of London reported that “Pope BenedictXVI is set to rehabilitate Martin Luther, arguing that he did not intend to split Christianity, but only to purge the church of corrupt practices.”
From there, the story took off,was repeatedby some news organisations around the world, was the buzz on the blogs, and even prompted an editorial critical of the pope by the Financial Times, called “Papal Indulgence - Cosmetic changes cannot hide Benedict’s dogmatism”.
The Vatican itself finally weighed in on March 8, when Father Federico Lombardi, the Vatican’s chief spokesman, told the Italian news agency Ansa, that the Financial Times editorial was “totally without foundation because no rehabilitation of Luther is foreseen.” The Ansa story went onto say that the specific theme of this summer’s meeting had not yet been finally decided.
What do you think about how the media covered this and do you think the pope should “rehabilitate” Luther?

DALLAS - In America, church and state may be separate but the distinction between religion and politics has become increasingly blurred over the past couple of decades.

In the just published book "The God Strategy: How Religion Became A Political Weapon In America," authors David Domke and Kevin Coe chart the rise of religiosity in American politics and discuss its implications. They do so by, among other things, comparing the religious language used in presidential addresses, party platforms and other political discourse over the decades.

This includes some imaginative charts such as one that gives the total word count for faith and family in the Republican and Democratic Party platforms from 1932 to 2004. (The Republicans were a bit behind at one time but since 1980 have soared ahead in this count).

Domke, who is a professor of communication at the University of Washington in Seattle, spoke to Reuters about the "God Strategy" which he says has been used with effect by Democratic presidents like Bill Clinton as well as the Republican George W. Bush.

Q: Can you imagine a party or presidential candidate who could be successful today without employing the "God Strategy?"
A: My answer is no. The reality is that in American presidential politics not willing to publicly emphasize your faith will mean you will not be a serious candidate on either side of the partisan aisle.

Q: How do you see the God Strategy playing out this November?
A: It really is interesting. About six months ago when I looked at the six major candidates from the two major parties, for the first time in decades the Democrats were better situated for a fusion of religion and politics. If you looked at the frontrunners for the Democrats, Clinton, Edwards and Obama, all three of them had been ... out publicly putting faith into their issue positions. Clinton had talked about her Methodist upbringing, Edwards had talked about it in terms of poverty, and Obama had talked about it in terms of God in the public arena. All three of them had been much more vocal than any of the major Republican candidates at that time, Huckabee wasn't really on the radar screen. But when you looked at Giuliani, McCain, possibly Thompson, the reality was that it appeared that the folks on the Republican side were going to be less comfortable with all of this. Now you have McCain who is not very comfortable talking about his faith but will do it. I think we will see some more of that from him. He'll do it as needed and that will work for him if Clinton is the nominee for the Democrats. If it's Obama then I think Obama has the higher ground on religion and politics.

Q: You say in your book that the God Strategy in some ways threatens the democratic vitality of the nation? Can you elaborate?
A: In many respects the fusion of religion and politics is absolutely contrary to what the founders desired for the country. They fled religious sectarian violence, religious persecution and they set out build a new place where God would be part of the equation but there wouldn't be a state, a national religion. And that was unprecedented ...

Click here for more Reuters 2008 campaign coverage.

DALLAS - Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) leaders on Monday shook up their flock by issuing their strongest statement to date on the potential perils of climate change and the need to take action on the issue.

The statement, which was signed by SBC President Frank Page, past presidents and other church leaders, was short on specifics but represents a significant departure from the group's past pronouncements on the issue, which have urged caution and not much else.

Monday's statement by some of the leaders of the 16 million-member SBC -- America's largest Protestant Church and one of its most conservative -- said such caution could be taken as "uncaring, reckless and ill-informed."

If the membership at large accepts the document, the Republican Party's presumptive presidential nominee John McCain could stand to gain as he has broken ranks with much of his party by highlighting the issue of global warming and talking about "common sense" ways to limit carbon emissions, such as promoting advanced energy technologies.

Having the SBC on the side on climate change could give McCain some needed traction with conservative evangelicals who have not warmed to him because of his failure to adopt their strident positions on a range of social issues from gay marriage to stem-cell research.

The SBC statement also is another step in closing the divisions between the old culture warriors of the religious right and the so-called "evangelical center," which sees a broader Biblical agenda that includes issues such as combating poverty and environmental degradation.

The statement was not entirely unexpected since many conservative evangelicals are known for their passion for the outdoors. A comprehensive nationwide survey in 2006 of licensed hunters and anglers commissioned by the National Wildlife Federation found that half of those polled identified themselves as evangelical Christian.

Hunters and anglers often are the first to note changes in the climate or environment.

Click here for more Reuters 2008 campaign coverage.
-Photo credit: Reuters/Larry Downing (SBC President Dr. Frank Page, second from left, meets with President Bush in the White House's Oval Office in 2006 with Dr. Morris Chapman, left, president of the SBC Executive Committee, and Chapman's wife, Dayle, right.

Are German authorities right to have decided against banning a children’s book about religion which critics say is subversive and promotes atheism? The book “How do I get to God? asks the little pig” follows a little pink pig and a hedgehog in their quest to find God. In the end, the two creatures decide God would not like any of the religions.

But what has angered some readers, including Germany’s Family Ministry, is that the priest, rabbi and mufti are all depicted as being crazy. That, argues the ministry, ridicules relgion and should not be allowed.

The ministry, which also argued the book was anti-Semitic, had tried to get it added to Germany’s list of literature which is dangerous for children. The book cover looks harmless enough, with its picture of a cute little pink pig in blue and white chequered dungarees and his hedgehog companion in Wellington boots, gazing quizzically upwards.

But inside, the illustrations do resort to stereotypical negative images. The rabbi has long black curls and an evil glint in his eye, the priest is extremely fat and the mufti is portrayed as a hate-preacher.  The German government department which is responsible for deciding whether books and media could be harmful for young people took a benign view on Thursday. After a thorough discussion, the 12-person panel decided the book could not be viewed as anti-Semitic since its attacks on Christianity and Islam were just as harsh.

On the broader point, the department said poking fun at religion posed no danger to young people.

Do you think children should be protected from these stereotypes?

After much anticipation, a Muslim delegation representing the “Common Word” Muslim appeal for a theological dialogue between Christianity and Islam finally came to the Vatican. The five-member delegation held two days of meetings on March 4-5 with the Vatican’s Council for Inter-religious Dialogue to prepare the groundwork for the meeting of representatives a larger delegation.
Both sides decided to establish the “Catholic-Muslim Forum,” the start of a permanent dialogue between the two religions, and hold the first meeting in November. It will include an address by Pope Benedict.
This is the joint statement on the meeting.
While the highlight of the meeting and a news conference are found in the Reuters story of that day, here are some interesting additional comments from the news conference by the Muslim delegation which give useful insight into their point of view:

Prof. Dr. Aref Ali NAYED, Director, Royal Islamic Strategic Studies Center, Amman, Jordan:
“By the end of the meetings, we emerged with a permanent structure that will ensure that the Catholic-Muslim engagement and dialogue continues into the future to work out issues and to work out an exchange of opinions about important matters. So, we together established something which is called the Catholic-Muslim Forum, which will be meeting every two years, one year in Rome and the subsequent meeting will be in a Muslim country, either Amman, Jordan or Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates, or Indonesia and there will be alternation. This structure ensures that this is not just a momentary, exciting event but a process that begins with love of God and love of neighbour and continues to build upon this main theme that we gather around to address real issues that concern humanity today.”

NAYED in answer to a question on the assertion by some Catholic officials in the past that theological discussion with Muslims is not possible:

“I think there was a bit of a misunderstanding which was clarified through the two-day meeting. Some people said that in our previous calls for the dialogue to be theological and spiritual , some people interpreted that as escaping from social and political issues. We clarified that we did not mean it that way, what we meant was that addressing social and political issues should be rooted in the revelation of God and in the theological teachings of our two communities, that we cannot just do social-political discussion devoid of theology, that our social-political doctrine and preaching is based on our revelation and our tradition and our theology and we gave that clarification and it was well taken.”

NAYED on the long-term hopes for the Forum:

“The forum will go on for years and I’m sure that we will address more and more issues and more and more difficult issues as we go along.

NAYED on the aftermath of Pope Benedect’s Regensburg speech:

“You see, this whole initiative is about healing. It is about healing the wounds of a very pained and in many ways destroyed world. We have cruelty all over the place, we have wars, we have famines, we have massacres, we have terrorist acts, we have torture, we have people who are kidnapped.”

“For some Muslims the (wounds of the pope’s Regensburg lecture) are not completely healed and there are some Muslims who are boycotting the Vatican, and some important Muslims and some important bodies of Muslim scholars still feel offended by that quite deeply. We, just because we are part of this initiative, does not mean that we are not hurt by this. However, we must not only dwell on the negative but also dwell on the positive. There have been some recent positive moves by the Vatican which are much appreciated.”

“We don’t like to dwell on the negative. We would like to dwell on the positive because we need hope. We need to build up trust rather than mistrust. We have systematically replied to the claims that were made in the German lecture, both at the individual level by various scholars and also collectively in a paper signed by 38 Muslim scholars and we take those replies to stand because there has not been any substantial reply to such comments. We feel that scholarly discussion and claims should be met with scholarly response rather than with violence or agitation or anything like that. We feel that we are in a healing process. We were treated with dignity and respect these two days in Rome and our delegation was treated with the utmost courtesy and we appreciate that and we want to build on it.

Dr. Ibrahim KALIN, SETA Foundation, Ankara, Turkey, on how the Forum will blend in with other initiatives and whether meeting only every two years will be enough:

“You have to keep in mind that this is one of the many ongoing initiatives and channels of communications between Catholic and Muslims. This is not the first initiative nor will it be the last one. A number of initiatives are already underway … but this one will probably be with a new impetus because it will involve the highest authorities in the Vatican and on the Muslim side it also represents a major consensus, being able to bring 138 leading Muslim scholars from every single major Muslim countries, from Africa to Asia, from the Arab world to Europe and the United States, and the number of signatories has gone up to about 240. That means there is growing consensus among the Muslim scholars and religious leaders to deal with this issue, so in that regard, we will see how things go, but we believe that this is a good start.”
NAYED on what they hope to achieve at the November meeting and if they are truly representative of world Islam:

“When you are in a dark cave and in a very dark place, a glimpse of light at the end of the tunnel or from above is extremely important for keeping your spirits up and for getting you out of the darkness you are in. Humanity today suffers tremendously from cruelty, it suffers tremendously from violence, from disrespect, from torments. We need signs of hope, so when you ask what we are trying to achieve by meeting the pope and not just the pope but other religious symbols like (Russian Orthodox Patriarch) Alexiy or the Archbishop of Canterbury or the evangelical leaders of the United States, we want the sight of these leaders with our leaders together, standing together in love of God, love of neighbour, so that we have signs of hope that the religious communities can a help to get humanity out of the cruelty cycle that it is in rather than being a cause for cruelty cycle.”

“The mainstream that I’m talking about represents 95-97 percent of humans who call themselves Muslims so if we can achieve peace amongst that community and the counterpart, that itself will give great hope and will also help us deal with the issue of extremism and violent minorities. Part of the amazing sort of negative dialectic is that by focusing on the negative all the time we make the negative grow. What we need is to refocus on the positive and the good so that the good can grow among us”.

KALIN:

“Muslims and Christians make up about 55 percent of the world and there will be no peace in the world unless there is peace between these two communities.”

NAYED on the structure of Islam:

“We believe that it is very important not to see the distribution of authority in Islam as a weakness. Some people say ‘you have a problem, you don’t have a pope.’ On the contrary, we feel that we are very strong even though we don’t have a pope … Islam functions perfectly without a centralised figure because of this phenomenon of distributed authority. It is God who meant it to be for us this way … “

Following up our blogs on the Turkish project to revise the hadith, we have interviewed Professor Mehmet Gormez, vice-president of Turkey’s Religious Affairs Directorate, or Diyanet. We also have the transcript of the interview as follows, translated from Turkish:

Q. What is the aim of the project?

A. The religion of Islam is based on two main sources (the Koran and the hadith). As time passes people have difficulty understanding (their religion). This is true of all religions. As the Koran is a major source of knowledge, many commentaries have been written through history. The hadith are very dispersed but also a major source. Each hadith has a reason, each hadith has a relation with culture and geography. When this is lost, it becomes hard to understand what the Prophet meant by the words used. Therefore, many efforts have been made (to explain the meaning). But in the modern world, people misinterpret this knowledge. I liken this source of knowledge (the hadith) to a pharmacy. When a person gets sick, he goes to the pharmacy and thinks that every medicine can be used in the same way. But some pills can end up making you feel worse, not better … A person may not know what kind of chemicals a medicine contains but
happily takes it. At present, we have been using the hadith lacking methodology. And this brings many problems with it… By taking advantage of methods used in the modern world to understand religious texts, we aim to make (them) better understood, better practised and to purify them of mistakes.

(more…)

DALLAS - Another exit poll has uncovered more evangelical Democrats and indicates that their agenda seems to be moving beyond the "God, Guns and Gays" focus of the Religious Right's old culture warriors.

An exit poll commisioned after Ohio's Tuesday primary by Faith in Public Life, the Center for American Progress Action Fund and Sojourners asked both Republicans and Democrats if they were evangelical or born-again Christian. Almost all other polls have only asked this of Republican primary voters as this group is widely regarded as a key base for the GOP.

The poll, conducted by Zogby International, found that 43 percent of white evangelical Ohio primary voters took part in the Democratic primary and 57 percent in the Republican one.

Other national polls still show over 60 percent of white evangelicals firmly in the Republican camp but analysts have said they do not expect them to play quite the same role in this November's election as they did in the 2004 White House race, when by some estimates  around 78 percent of those who cast ballots did so for President George W. Bush.

The Tuesday poll also found that 42 percent of Ohio's white evangelical voters ranked jobs and the economy as the most important issue area in deciding how to vote versus 14 percent who ranked abortion and same-sex marriage as the most important issue.

Such a finding may not be surprising in a Rust Belt state like Ohio, which has been shedding manufacturing and other jobs.  But the poll also found that 54 percent of white evangelical primary voters surveyed wanted a broader agenda such as ending poverty and protecting the environment.

The poll had a fairly wide margin of error of 5 percentage points.

Click here for more Reuters 2008 campaign coverage. 

The U.S. Episcopal Church is standing by for an initial court decision in what may be one of the biggest ecclesiastical property disputes in the country’s history. It is another tremor in the upheaval shaking the worldwide Anglican Communion, and if that weren’t enough, it has roots going back to George Washington.

A judge in Virginia is expected to issue a ruling shortly in a case he has been hearing since November involving 11 traditionalist congregations in that state that have left the Episcopal Church over orthodoxy issues, including the American-based church’s acceptance of an openly gay bishop.
 
Among the 11 are the Falls Church and Truro Church congregations, which have affiliated with the Anglican Church of Nigeria, led by Archbishop Peter Akinola. The congregations want to keep their property they said is worth at least $25 million combined. In colonial times, Washington and his father both served on the vestry at Truro.
 
The 2.4-million-member Episcopal Church claims that all church property belongs to it, and that when a congregation switches allegiance, the property is merely “abandoned.” The Virginia dispute is neither the first nor will it be the last, and the issue of who owns what has never been definitively settled in court.
 
The issue now before the judge is whether the Virginia churches are entitled to keep their property under a law written in the divisive era of the U.S. Civil War. The statute says any “church or religious society” that “divides” remains under the control of the majority, as does any property entrusted to it.
 
The law was adopted in response to numerous church splits during the 19th century before, during and after the Civil War, according to information supplied by the dissident Virginia group.
 
Both Methodists and Presbyterians successfully invoked the statute immediately after its adoption in 1867, the group said, adding that “Virginia has a long history of deferring to local control of church property, and the … statute says that the majority of the church is entitled to its property when a group of congregations divide from their former denomination and form a new one.”
 
According to Bishop Martyn Minns, a leader of the orthodox dissidents, the judge in Fairfax County, Virginia, Circuit Court has indicated he will rule either that the law can apply to the 11 churches in this case, or it may not because it would raise issues involving the U.S. Constitution’s guarantee of church-state separation since the national church is involved.
 
Under any scenario, Minns told his followers recently, “this will be only one of a number of issues on which (the judge) will ultimately rule.” With appeals, the case will go one for some time.
 
The church could face an even bigger dispute in California where the entire diocese of San Joachim recently voted to bolt. Such cases will take years to resolve. 

-Photo credit: Reuters/Jonathan Ernst (Archbishop Akinoa installs Rev. Martyn Minns)