Comments on Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams’s speech about sharia are starting to explore some of the ideas in more detail. Opinions are still mostly against the idea, but there are some defenders and there are more balanced arguments than the first wave of reactions. Here are some of the latest items we found interesting:

First of all, documentation — Ruth Gledhill came up with Williams’s Q&A after the speech, including the full text and the video. Note he insists he is talking about “supplementary jurisdiction” and not “parallel systems.”

muslimmatters.org argues in Shariah ‘Courts’ and Freedom of Contract that the issue is simply one of arbitration, something already allowed under the law: “The fact that the parties are choosing to settle their commercial or social disagreements by reference to the Qu’ran is therefore of no more consequence to society than if they decided to settle the same dispute by tossing a coin, asking a neighbour to decide, or any of the other myriad of ways in which human beings settle disagreements peacefully.”

altmuslim.com on One man’s sharia: “Now that the debate has become public, all concerned parties need to seek some clarity. What can be done through the courts that cannot today be done simply by mutual agreement? Proponents of sharia arbitration have not been detailed enough in their proposals to provide a suitable answer to this. If two parties want to agree to an Islamic solution that does not conflict with state law, then that is already happening in the form of arbitration. If the issue is enforcement, however, then by definition it is not mutually agreeable and the issue is about imposing a sharia interpretation that at least one party does not accept. It is this point that scares many non-Muslims and Muslims alike.”

UPDATE: Ekklesia has an interesting item called Muslims puzzled over Sharia row, but Evangelicals and inter-faith group urge debate which says: “Muslim lawyers say they are puzzled that Archbishop Rowan Williams raised the Sharia issue before they have had a chance to tackle some key concerns.” On the other hand, evangelicals are keen to start talking because they see this as a way to bring up their own concerns about secular laws. “We want to use this as a spring-board to find a way forward for those in our, and other, faith communities who feel disenfranchised on matters of conscience by the changing meaning of what it is to be British,” said the Rev Joel Edwards, General Director of the Evangelical Alliance.

The Washington Post’s On Faith blog has an interesting series of American reactions to Williams’s proposal, most of them not enthusiastic.

TotallyJewish.com reports on how Muslims are seeking advice from Orthodox Jews on how their Beth Din courts operate.

Mona Eltahawy slams what she calls Delusions in Canterbury and says the archbishop’s tolerance towards sharia “is a tolerance that condones only the most conservative options for Muslims. It is at best a form of the racism of lower expectations - the cheapest bargaining chip of liberal guilt… As a Muslim woman - born in Egypt, raised in Saudi Arabia - I can only laugh at the archbishop’s naïveté. In Egypt, as in many Muslim countries, the legal system has been completely modernized, with the exception of one area that remains caught in the web of edicts issued by Muslim scholars who lived centuries ago — family law. Shariah is used only to govern the lives of women and children.”

Ali Eteraz continues to examine the implications of using sharia law in a Western context. Two latest posts are When US Courts Apply Islamic Law and Concurrent jurisdiction would be used to coerce average believers.

The London Catholic weekly the Tablet has a nice cover showing Williams among the lions in the Colosseum in ancient Rome. It also has two interesting articles:

Theo Hobson says in Quiet Voice of modernity’s enemy that “...liberal Protestantism is basic to our national identity, although people don’t tend to think of it as ‘liberal Protestantism’ but as ‘our Christian heritage’ and ‘our liberal tradition’. This is what Williams seems not to grasp, or chooses not to.”

The editorial Crisis of Identity makes the point that “… the process of secularisation is eating away at society. Too often, people of faith feel they no longer fit.”

Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams has set off a storm in Britain by saying that some aspects of sharia Islamic law would have to be integrated into the legal system there. There has been almost unanimous criticism of his proposals, including from some Muslim politicians. I’ve read through both his BBC interview and Temple Festival speech to see if there is another message that is being drowned out by the headlines and hullabaloo. There are signs of one, but there are so many questionable assumptions and assertions about Islam and sharia in there that these issues naturally dominate.

The archbishop’s statement about some aspects of sharia being”unavoidable” is so clear that it is hard to argue in his defence that it was taken out of context or hardened up by headline-hungry hacks. This is not like Pope Benedict’s ill-fated Regensburg speech in 2006, where the pontiff quoted a Byzantine emperor slamming Islam and later said he didn’t mean to say he agreed with it. Williams talked about accommodating some aspects of sharia law and spoke in detail about this.

His main complaint seems to be summed up in this passage late in the speech: “One of the most frequently noted problems in the law in this area is the reluctance of a dominant rights-based philosophy to acknowledge the liberty of conscientious opting-out from collaboration in procedures or practices that are in tension with the demands of particular religious groups.” His example for this is the case of Catholic adoption agencies in Britain that have been told they must stop refusing to provide children to gay couples or risk being shut down. The law should allow opt-outs for cases of conscience, he argues, something that is already allowed for doctors who refuse to perform abortions. He also notes that Orthodox Jews have their own courts for some religious issues. So his argument seems to be that opt-outs are needed and Muslims need to have theirs.

Simon Barrow, director of the religion think tank Ekklesia, told me he thought “there may be a more reasonable case here than what’s come over.” But the former theology professor tripped up by trying to discuss the issues in public as if he were back in academe. The BBC interview only compounded this by adding the word “unavoidable.”

Williams made several assumptions and assertions about sharia law that cried out for explanation. If he held a news conference to explain his thinking, here are a few that I would expect to be challenged.

Some points by Williams (”ABC“) in the BBC interview:

ABC – “Sharia is a method rather than a code of law … there’s a lot of internal debate within the Islamic community generally about the nature of Sharia and its extent.” — Q. If sharia is so unclear, how can it be accomodated into something as exacting as a Western legal code?

ABC — “The principle, the vision, that animates the Islamic legal provision (on women’s rights) needs broadening.” — Q. Who will decide how to reform women’s rights in Islam and ensure that all sharia courts in Britain apply it? Who will suspend the traditional sharia rule that a woman is worth half a man when it comes to issues like inheritance or testimony in court?

ABC — “It would be quite wrong to say that we could ever licence so to speak a system of law for some community which gave people no right of appeal.” — Q. What is the purpose of allowing religious courts if defendants can turn around and appeal to civil courts to overturn decisions against them?

ABC — “That principle that there’s one law for everybody is an important pillar of our social identity as a Western liberal democracy, but I think it’s a misunderstanding to suppose that that means people don’t have other affiliations, other loyalties which shape and dictate how they behave in society.” — Q. Should Britain undermine such a fundamental legal principle to accomodate a minority (and probably a minority within that minority)? Is this the only way to do it? Would decisions by a sharia court, such as a divorce, have to be confirmed by a civil court?

Some points from the Temple Festival speech:

ABC — “There are a good many voices arguing for an extension of the liberty of ijtihad – basically reasoning from first principles rather than simply the collation of traditional judgments.” Q. — Aren’t most of those Muslims stressing ijtihad the kind of liberal Muslims whose views are rejected by the more traditional scholars who would man a sharia court bench?

ABC — “This account would be hotly contested by some committed Islamic primitivists, by followers of Sayyid Qutb and similar polemicists; but it is fair to say that the great body of serious jurists in the Islamic world would recognise this degree of political plurality as consistent with Muslim integrity. ” Q. — Who defines who the ‘primitivists’ are and whether their views get a hearing?

ABC –”There needs to be access to recognised authority acting for a religious group … if we were to see more latitude given in law to rights and scruples rooted in religious identity, we should need a much enhanced and quite sophisticated version of such a body, with increased resource and a high degree of community recognition, so that ‘vexatious’ claims could be summarily dealt with.” Q. – There is no single religious authority in Islam and Muslims themselves often disagree on certain issues. How can Britain succeed in creating something Muslims themselves have not produced?

Andrew Brown put it well in The Guardian Comment is Free blog: “Dr Williams, characteristically, is interested in the arguments over what sharia law actually says. The rest of the country is more interested in whether and how it might be enforced. Only if Islamic law can be reduced to a game played between consenting adults can it be acceptably enforced in this country; and that’s not, I think, how it is understood by its practitioners. Let’s hope I’m wrong.”

Have you noticed any other questions that should be put to His Grace?

Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, spiritual leader of the world’s Anglicans, has said the introduction of some aspects of sharia, Islamic law in Britain, was unavoidable. Other religions enjoyed tolerance of their laws in Britain, he told the BBC, and he called for a “constructive accommodation” with Muslim practice in areas such as marital disputes.

Williams stressed that “nobody in their right mind would want to see in this country the kind of inhumanity that’s sometimes been associated with the practice of the law in some Islamic states; the extreme punishments, the attitudes to women as well.

“There are ways of looking at marital dispute, for example, which provide an alternative to the divorce courts as we understand them. In some cultural and religious settings they would seem more appropriate.” He also said that the argument that “there’s one law for everybody … I think that’s a bit of a danger“.

Talk about opening a can of worms … Who would decide which sharia laws would apply and which would not? Would Muslims be able to choose between the civil and the sharia courts? Could defendants appeal to civil courts if they thought a sharia court decision violated their basic rights? And is Williams right to say there is a danger in having one law for everybody?

What do you think about this?

P.S. — By coincidence, Williams spoke up for sharia on the same day as Britain denied a visa to Sheikh Youssef al-Qaradawi, one of Islam’s leading preachers known for his sermons on the Arabic-language satellite television channel Al Jazeera.

Does the public have the right to know the reasons why Tony Blair converted to Roman Catholicism just before Christmas? I mean the real reasons — what does the Catholic Church give him in terms of spirituality, theology or tradition that the Church of England did not? The initial news stories and follow-up articles over the holidays repeated the known circumstantial evidence, such as the fact his wife and children are Catholic and he has attended Catholic mass for years. Many took a political angle, noting that he waited until he had left office. Some accused him of hypocrisy for doing so despite supporting policies the Vatican opposes. But they didn’t give the real reasons.

The articles didn’t report Blair’s innermost convictions because he hasn’t revealed them. And he may never do so. There is so much public use and misuse of faith in politics that he may have decided he did not want his beliefs torn apart by his critics or the media, so he waited until they could no longer argue the prime minister’s faith was a matter of public interest. Journalists regret this, because we always want to know more, but fair-minded people can respect it.

I mention this because the latest edition of the U.S. Jesuit magazine America has the most informative article on Blair’s conversion that I’ve seen. In “From Thames to Tiber,” Austen Ivereigh, a former adviser to London Cardinal Cormac Murphy- O’Connor, tells us that “Blair’s background is in liberal Anglo-Catholicism; his favorite theologians are Leonardo Boff and Hans Küng, not Joseph Ratzinger and Hans Urs Von Balthasar. He belongs to an ecclesial tradition in which the gate is wide, and bridges more important than borders.” He says Blair was attracted by “the Church’s vast international reach, its commitment to the poor, its capacity for mobilisation against injustice and its courage to stand firm on unpopular issues.” That goes a lot further in locating his faith.

On Catholics in politics, Ivereigh said: “It is one thing is to hold Catholics in public life to account: to question how Judge Antonin Scalia can be in favour of the death penalty, or John Kerry of abortion. But it is another to call them hypocrites, to pretend to know what choices faced them, and why they took the decisions they did. Politicians are not lackeys; they must govern in favour of the common good in a pluralist society. If a Catholic can only serve a government whose every act chimes with his conscience and with church teaching, he cannot be a politician.”

Do you think Tony Blair has a duty to tell why he converted? And are Catholic politicians held to more demanding standards than others? Is that more hypocritical than the hypocrisy they’re accused of?

Returning to news reporting after two weeks off feels like you’ve been away for two weeks. Returning to blogging after a holiday break feels like you’ve been away for an eternity. So much going on! My colleague Ed Stoddard in Dallas was minding the shop, but he was unexpectedly sent off to report the news from the campaign trail. That gave FaithWorld a very American accent, which was a timely twist given the role of religion in the Iowa vote. It’s back to the view from Paris now — here are some inital comments on recent events concerning religion around the world:

Benazir Bhutto — The assassinated Pakistani leader will speak from beyond the grave next month when her book Reconciliation: Islam, Democracy and the West is published. HarperCollins has announced it has brought forward to Feb. 12 the release of the book that Bhutto worked on before returning to Pakistan in October. In a statement, it called the book “a bold, uncompromising vision of hope for the future of not only Pakistan but the Islamic world. Bhutto presents a powerful argument for a reconciliation of Islam with democratic principles, in the face of opposition from Islamic extremists and Western skeptics.”

It will be interesting to see what she has to say about the role of Islam in Pakistani politics, especially after all the praise for her as a modern, secularist Muslim leader in comments after her assassination. Bhutto’s party is politically secularist and she pledged to fight against Islamist militants now challenging the Islamabad government. But let’s not forget that the Taliban emerged during her second stint as prime minister in 1993-1996 and were a key element in Pakistani policy towards Afghanistan at the time. She worked with an Islamist politician close to the Taliban then and now. It was also on her watch that, as historian William Dalrymple put it, Kashmir was turned into “a jihadist playground.” Whether she supported all this, couldn’t oppose the military people behind it or both (that’s my hunch) is something historians will debate long into the future. But it is clear that her record is more complex than some of the eulogies would have it.

Saying this is not meant to tarnish the reputation of this courageous woman. The Pakistanis who were ready to vote for her know all this already. Her father and political mentor Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, a left-wing populist who sported Mao caps and campaigned on the faith-free slogan roti, kapra, makan (bread, clothes, housing), played the Islamic card with concessions to religious pressure groups when necessary. It’s more a comment on how complex Pakistani politics are and how hard it is to fit its main actors into categories that readers readily understand.

BTW it’s disappointing to see Dalrymple, a fine historian of the Subcontinent, fall into the same trap as readers who want us to write about “Muslim riots ” in France. In his New York Times op-ed piece cited above, he said that former Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated by “Sri Lankan Hindu extremists.” The Tamil Tigers are Sri Lankan and presumably mostly Hindu, as most Tamils are, but their separatist struggle is nationalist and not religious at all. They were some of the first modern suicide bombers, but that’s as close to religiously inspired militants as they get.

Anglican Agonies — Will 2008 be the year of decision for the Anglican Communion? Yes, no, maybe… or maybe none of the above? It’s getting more complicated as July’s Lambeth Conference nears. The Global South primates have announced a rival meeting for June called the Global Anglican Future Conference (with the unfortunate acronym GAFCON). The news was hardly out before the Anglican Bishop in Jerusalem, Bishop Suheil Dawani, complained he had not been consulted and expressed concern it could boost tensions in the region. “I believe our Primate, Dr Mouneer Hanna Anis, is also concerned about this event,” he wrote. “His advice to the organizers that this was not the right time or place for such a meeting was ignored. I urge the organizers to reconsider this conference urgently.”

The organisers say primates can attend both Jerusalem and Lambeth, but it looks like this is the alternative Lambeth conference that Nigeria’s Archbishop Peter Akinola has suggested. It’s hard to see what Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams can do. “The Archbishop of Canterbury was never one for diktats,” Andrew Brown blogged at The Guardian. “Now his inaction has let those who would split the church get into a fine mess.”

The next Black Pope — The Society of Jesus, aka the Jesuits, open their General Congregation on Monday to elect a new Superior General, aka the “black pope.” The Jesuits are the largest order in the Roman Catholic Church, with a long intellectual heritage, checkered history and record of theological tussles with the Vatican. We’re covering this for news, so I won’t go into it much now, except to spotlight the Jesuit info page on the pow-wow and two previews from America, Commonweal , The Tablet and the National Catholic Reporter and interviews with the outgoing chief Fr. Peter-Hans Kolvenbach in Vatican Radio, Catholic News Service, Die Tagespost, La Croix, adnkronos and Katholiek Nederland (he’s Dutch). My favourite nugget from all this is that the four days they put aside for considering the new superior general is known as the murmuratio. There’s not supposed to be any campaigning, but they can murmur about the candidates.

Malaysia’s Allah Muddle — Another story on increasingly exclusive Muslim views from Malaysia, where a Catholic weekly has been told it cannot use the word Allah for God in its Malay-language articles, even though it is the usual Malay word for the deity. There seemed to be some flip-flopping over this, and the weekly eventually got its publishing permit renewed. But government officials later insisted the word Allah is from now on reserved for Muslims.

This is not just semantics. The Malaysian government has a policy of moderate Islam that it calls Islam hadhari, or civilisational Islam. It has been talking this up for a while now, just at a time when Washington has been looking for “moderate Muslims” to promote as a counterweight to Islamic radicals. But the trend in Malaysian Islam seems to be going the other way, as increasing complaints from minority Christians, Hindus and Buddhists indicate. As Malaysian political scientist Farish Noor notes: “The administration of Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi came to power on the promise that it would promote its own brand of moderate Islam that was pluralist and respectful of other cultures and religions. But time and again the Malaysian public — first Hindus and now Christians — have felt necessary to protest over what they regard as unfair, biased treatment and the furthering of an exclusive brand of Islam that is communitarian and divisive. The latest fiasco over the non-issue that is the name of God would suggest that Prime Minister’s Badawi’s grand vision of a moderate Islam has hit the rocks, and is now floundering.”

Ali Eteraz, a lively Muslim blogger in the U.S., says “Leaders in Malaysia promote supremacist, dominionist versions of Islam, because it makes political sense for them to do so. Sixty per cent of the country is Malay-Muslim; the rest are Chinese Buddhists, Tamil Hindus and animists. So, if you can control the Muslims, you will control the government.”

A few other stories from Malaysia chipped away further at its reputation for tolerance — Taoist statue deemed “offensive” to Islam and Malaysian Hindu loses case to ban conversion to Islam. Next door in Indonesia, there are reports of increased attacks on the Ahmadi sect, which many Muslims consider to be heretics, and an Islamic Defenders’ Front wants to ban it. Also, an Anti-Apostasy Alliance says conversion to Christianity “is a bigger evil than terrorism.”

(more comments to follow)

Christmas greetings of peace on Earth and good will to all — what could be more common during this holiday season? It’s heard so much that it’s practically a cliché. But this familiar tune takes on a new tone when the greetings come from leading Muslim scholars, clerics and intellectuals. The same group of 138 Muslims that invited Christians to a theological dialogue last October has just sent its Christmas greetings to the Christian world (see the text and our news story). What struck me the most about it is that it was even sent at all.

As a decentralised religion with no single leader or leadership group to speak for it, Islam (1.3 billion faithful around the world) has always been “structurally disadvantaged” in comparison to Christianity. The world’s largest religion (2 billion) has one highly centralised church, Roman Catholicism (1.1 billion), led by a highly visible pope. Other large Christian families like the Orthodox (220 million), Anglicans (77 million) and the many different Protestant denominations all have clearly defined leaders who can speak for the faithful. The absence of such figures in Islam has allowed a wide variety of pretenders to claim to speak in the name of Muslims. To put it in terms of the current season, they couldn’t all send a Christmas card to Pope Benedict or Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew or Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams because they had no forum for getting together to do so. Individual sheikhs, muftis, imams or mosque rectors might send their greetings to a friendly local bishop, vicar, preacher or priest they knew personally, but there wasn’t exactly heavy traffic.

The group of 138 that issued the appeal called A Common Word is changing that. Representing Sunnis, Shi’ites, Sufis and other schools of Islam, they can claim more than anyone else to speak for large numbers of Muslims. Sure, we can’t say how many they represent. Of course, they are a mixed group. Naturally, they don’t all agree on everything. And yes, there may be disputes within the group, maybe defections and additions as it develops. But they are from a broad spectrum of Islam and have organised themselves enough to first send a response to Pope Benedict’s Regensburg lecture (back when they were only 38), then propose a dialogue with the Christian world (which the major churches have accepted) and now send these Christmas greetings. Non-Muslim cynics might scoff that signing a Christmas greeting is not all that difficult. But anyone who knows anything about Islam can see this is a significant new step.

After the publication of the letter in October, the main focus was on what the Vatican would say. Many non-Catholic Christian leaders, Rowan Williams being the first among them, welcomed the dialogue appeal. The Vatican took its time and some officials, especially the man responsible for interreligious relations Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran , expressed doubt that a serious dialogue was even possible. But the Vatican finally answered positively and the path is now open for practical work.

Jordan’s Prince Ghazi bin Mohammad bin Talal, whose Royal Aal al-Bayt Institute for Islamic Thought in Amman is behind the dialogue appeal, recently responded to the Vatican’s acceptance with a letter proposing an initial meeting in February or March. Leading members of the group also plan to meet various Christian leaders at conferences planned over the coming year, so a network of Muslim-Christian discussions should develop. In his letter, of which I have obtained a copy, Prince Ghazi urges the Vatican not to want to make the best the enemy of the good. Dialogue is important, he argues,

“even if it transpires that there are differences between us in the interpretation or comprehension of the text of this letter… These differences themselves are presumably also a matter for discussion between us, and should be an occasion for mutual respect and celebration, and not divisive disputation.

“We, like you, also consider complete theological agreement between Christians and Muslims inherently not possible by definition, but still wish to seek and promote a common stance and cooperation based on what we do agree on.”

Reporters are often accused of “pack journalism” when they essentially write the same story from an event. So what should we call it when they write different reports about the same thing? That happened on Friday when Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams issued his Advent message. This was the long-awaited statement of his views on the crisis tearing away at the Anglican Communion. It turned out to be a grab-bag with something for everyone.

Jim Naughton over at The Lead blog on Episcopal Café noticed the problem and highlighted it in a quick review of the stories about the Advent message. The list shows how the same text can spawn different articles. For example, our story’s lead went for a broad overview, the AP story stressed a U.S. angle and the British papers highlighted details of the Anglican disputes.

“Reporters had their hands full yesterday trying to figure out how to pull a “lede” out of the Archbishop of Canterbury’s letter about the state of the Anglican Communion,” Naughton wrote. “He dumped cold water on everybody, so how to determine which side was wetter?”

Naughton, a veteran journalist who is spokesman for the Episcopal Diocese of Washington, added: “One thing I’ve picked up in conversations with reporters is how weary they are of covering this story, and what a difficult time they have in determining the significance of any given event. Many of them fervently wish the story would go away.”

This story is difficult to cover and some journalists might wish it would go away. But there’s no sign it will. The Lambeth Conference, a 10-yearly meeting of Anglican bishops from around the world, is coming up next July. We can probably expect more disputes over openly gay clergy and blessings for same-sex couples, more defections from the Episcopal Church and more warning declarations from the Global South as it approaches. If that weren’t enough, Gene Robinson, the openly gay Episcopal bishop of New Hampshire, plans to marry his partner only a few weeks before Lambeth begins. “I always wanted to be a June bride,” the University of Miami news service reported him as saying last month.

Do readers want this story to go away? Do they think it will?

Attenzione! The Vatican will issue an important doctrinal document on Friday “on some aspects of evangelisation.” Pope Benedict has a long track record of making sharp distinctions between Catholicism and other religions in his doctrinal declarations. Some of these have upset other Christians, others have angered Muslims and been challenged by Islamic scholars. This new text has been written by papal aides, not the pope himself, but it is expected to be a close reflection of his views. What Vatican observers are waiting to see is how clearly it states the Catholic view on converting others and how other religions react.

The document from the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, which Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger headed for over two decades before becoming pope in 2005, comes at a time of growing Catholic difficulties with Anglicans, Protestants and evangelical and Pentecostal Christians. Its hesitant reaction to an invitation leading Muslim scholars for a theological dialogue has raised questions about its interest in inter-faith relations. And evangelisation is now a sensitive topic for Christian churches. The Vatican is working with the World Council of Churches, the World Evangelical Alliance and Pentecostal leaders on a code of conduct for missionary work .

The declaration is expected to say that conversion remains a goal of Catholic missionary efforts and that Catholic theologians must not water this down by arguing that other faiths can be paths to salvation. This recalls Dominus Iesus, a document issued in 2000 by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) that said the Catholic Church was the only true church of Jesus Christ and others were “gravely deficient.” In fact, the document should be a guide on how to put Dominus Iesus into practice. The CDF began this process with a clarification of the 2000 document last June — a clarification that caused dismay among leading Protestant theologians.

Doesn’t the Roman Catholic Church have the right to restate its traditional beliefs? Of course it does. But it also operates in a broader context than the Catholic world alone, a context where Vatican documents are read carefully by other faiths for indications of how the world’s largest church thinks and what it plans to do. In a globalised world, leading religions are involved in inter-faith and ecumenical dialogues to foster better understanding among peoples. These efforts have led to much improved contact and comprehension among religions in the past few decades. Pope John Paul preferred this kind of dialogue, such as the 1986 World Day of Prayer for Peace in Assisi, Italy, but Cardinal Ratzinger kept his distance.

In recent years, this ecumenical drive seems to have slowed. Many faiths seem to be putting a renewed emphasis on their own identity. Again, that’s their right, but it does sometimes rub other religions the wrong way. Pope Benedict has done that before in the past, for example with Dominus Iesus (which upset Anglicans and Protestants) or with his 2006 Regensburg speech (which upset Muslims). He has shown more interest in working with the Eastern Orthodox churches. Wolfgang Huber, the top Lutheran bishop in Germany, has been especially critical of Benedict’s approach, for example calling the restatement of Dominus Iesus “an affront” to Protestants.

The line-up for Friday’s news conference in Rome about the new document indicates it is meant mostly as an internal text. It will be presented by CDF Prefect Cardinal William Levada, Cardinal Ivan Dias, Prefect of the Congregation for the Evangelisation of Peoples, Cardinal Francis Arinze, Prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship, and CDF Secretary Archbishop Angelo Amato.

Notably absent will be the two cardinals who head dicasteries — the Vatican equivalent of government ministries — that deal directly with other faiths. They are Jean-Louis Tauran, President of the Pontifical Council for Inter-religious Dialogue and Walter Kasper, President of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity. Kasper was openly critical of the CDF in a speech to cardinals in Rome last month, saying the powerful dicastery “aroused perplexity and created discontent” by issuing its document restating Dominus Iesus last summer.

A statement by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) last week stressed issues expected to be part of the CDF document as well. In that statement, the bishops criticised Father Peter Phan, a leading theologian teaching at Georgetown University in Washington, for creating “considerable confusion” about Christ, the Church and other faiths. They restated Church teaching that Jesus Christ Catholicism was the only true church, Jesus Christ was mankind’s only saviour and other religions were “a preparation for the Gospel.” (Read John Allen’s full analysis here)

How do readers who follow developments in ecumenical and inter-faith dialogue see the way relations between faiths are going under Pope Benedict? Is his emphasis on traditional Catholic positions making it easier or more difficult to promote understanding among religions?

What a difference a day makes. A post here yesterday noted that British media had all but ignored today’s debate about Christianophobia in parliament and asked whether that term was an appropriate one to use. Well, today several newspapers have taken up the issue, with different angles.

Andrew Brown in the Guardian says “Civilisation is safe” and sees influences from across the Atlantic for the debate: “The American nationalist right - and now an obscure Tory MP - would have us believe that Christian traditions are under threat. I don’t think so.” He also says that a BBC story about the debate was the second most emailed story on the BBC’s website. His post sparked a long list of comments.

A question on the Daily Telegraph site “How should we tackle ‘Christianophobia’ ?” also sparked a lively discussion. The Daily Express ran the blaring headline: “SOON ALL BRITAIN’S CHRISTIAN TRADITIONS MAY BE KILLED OFF.” The Daily Mail spoke of “rising Christianophobia and busybodies who downgrade Christian traditions.”

The British Humanist Association asked how one could speak of Christianophobia when “a third of state funded schools are ‘faith’ schools, the vast majority of which are Anglican; we still have an established Church with 26 Church of England Bishops sitting as of right in the House of Lords;” and religious groups have privileged access to government funds.

None of them asked whether the term “Christianophobia” was an appropriate term…

Covering religion may be harmful to your faith. Two leading religion journalists — one in Britain, one in the United States — have quit the beat in recent months, saying they had acquired such a close look at such scandalous behaviour by Christians that they lost their faith and had to leave.

Stephen Bates, who recently stepped down as religious affairs writer for the London Guardian, has just published an account of his seven years on the beat in an article entitled “Demob Happy” for the New Humanist magazine. Bates followed the crisis in the Anglican Communion for several years and even wrote a book on it, A Church At War: Anglicans and Homosexuality.

“Now I am moving on,” his article concludes. “It was time to go. What faith I had, I’ve lost, I am afraid – I’ve seen too much, too close. A young Methodist press officer once asked me earnestly whether I saw it as my job to spread the Good News of Jesus. No, I said, that’s the last thing I am here to do.”

Bates announced his move back in September in another interesting article, this time for the website Religious Intelligence. Writing from New Orleans, where he was covering the Episcopal Church’s House of Bishops meeting with Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, he said: “Writing this story has been too corrosive of what faith I had left: indeed watching the way the gay row has played out in the Anglican Communion has cost me my belief in the essential benignity of too many Christians. For the good of my soul, I need to do something else.” Bates, who says he still regards himself as a Catholic, said he was turned off by the intolerance he saw towards gays and the self-righteousness of Christians who “pick and choose the sins that are acceptable and condemn those – always committed by other, lesser people – that are not.”

Shortly before Bates called it quits, William Lobdell, who gave the Los Angeles Times first-class coverage of the Catholic Church’s sex abuse scandal in California, threw in the towel with a wrenching story of his own struggle with organised religion. His farewell story in July, “Religion beat became a test of faith“ was a moving testimony of a journalist who started off as a Presbyterian, was active with evangelicals and seriously considered becoming a Catholic. But, during his eight years on the beat, the Catholic clerical sex abuse scandal put him off religion so badly that he lost his faith altogether. For an example of what he came across, take a look at Missionary’s Dark Legacy, a powerful story from 2005 about the trail of sexual abuse a Catholic missionary left behind after seven years among the Eskimos. Nearly every boy in the settlement was abused.

What do readers think? Can you understand how Bates and Lobdell reacted? Do you think a journalist has to be a believer to be a good religion reporter?