Vienna Cardinal Christoph Schönborn is one of the Catholic Church’s most vocal critics of what he calls evolutionism, which he defines as an ideology that applies Darwin’s theory of natural selection to a wide variety of questions beyond biology. He usually directs his criticism at scientists and philosophers who say evolution proves that God does not exist.

(Photo: Cardinal Schönborn, 16 March 2007/Leonhard Foege)

In an interview with the Austrian provincial newspaper Vorarlberger Nachrichten on Jan. 5, Schönborn, a former student and close associate of Pope Benedict, said his criticism also applied to the current financial crisis:

Q, One of your favourite topics is evolution and creation. Wouldn’t it be more reasonable to devote yourself to more practical things than those that cannot be proven anyway?

A. Look at the current economic crisis. The question of evolutionism and the economic crisis are very closely linked. What we can call the ideological Darwinist concept that the stronger survives has led to the economic situation we’re in today. I think that if education only focuses on making young people fit for the rat race and doesn’t teach them the great human values that society needs, it’s because it’s based on an image of humanity linked to ideological evolutionism. So it has very, very practical consequences.

Q. Where is this discussion leading and what can emerge at the end of it?

A. We can’t say, but (scientific) research continues. Very successful, very exciting. On the one hand, it certainly is going very strongly in the direction that says all life can really be proved to be linked together. In this respect, the scientific theory of evolution is, of course, supported and carried by very strong arguments.

(Photo:Staff at Lehman Brothers in London, 11 Sept 2008/Kevin Coombs)

On the other hand, one must clearly highlight the distinctive qualities of humans, their dignity and their intellectual abilities and responsibility in the face of reductive thinking that understands them in a materialistic way or as just a product of evolution. That is certainly insufficient.

The interview is here in German (registration required) and a summary (open access) in the Vienna daily Die Presse is here.

How ironic is this? When the financial industry was riding high, many bankers and brokers had no time for charity work. Now that lots of them have been laid off and have the time, Rebekah Curtis reports from London, many can’t find a charity that can use their skills.

It turns out the economic downturn is forcing charities to cut back their own staffs and many can’t find a way to use the skills the laid-off finance wizards are offering. The British international development charity VSO (Voluntary Service Overseas) said it received 2,572 enquiries for voluntary work between September and mid-November this year, more than double the 1,233 it received for the same period in 2007, but it could hardly place most of them.

“It’s a shame,” said VSO spokeswoman Catherine Raynor. “People are keen to offer their time and commitment, so it’s never easy to say they’re not right … if you’ve had management experience within your role … rather than very specific financial skills, then we’d love to hear from you.”

Read the whole story here.

Articles about Islamic finance are usually long on finance and short on Islam. Knowing that the various schools of Islam can interpret and apply sharia in different ways, I recently wondered how this looked in the financial sector, especially since Islamic banking has spread in recent years and non-Muslim institutions and investors were getting into the business. A conference on Islamic banking in France brought several sharia scholars to Paris, so I took the opportunity to interview them for the news story posted here.

While the financial side wants as much standardisation as possible, the scholars insist it would be un-Islamic to impose rules that apply fully around the world. So rulings from the sharia boards of financial institutions can differ, although the existence of voluntary standards — such as those worked out by the Accounting and Auditing Organisation for Islamic Financial Institutions (AAOIFI) in Bahrain — has helped to harmonise them. Also, the fact that individual scholars sit on several sharia boards at the same time brings a certain conformity.

But, as Mufti Barkatulla told me, there are not enough young scholars entering the field. A sharia board needs a minimum of three members and can have up to 10, depending on its workload, he said. The problem is that acquiring the needed knowledge can take years. Barkatulla himself was a sharia judge at London’s Central Mosque for 30 years, mostly ruling on family issues such as divorce, before getting involved in Islamic finance five years ago. Like him, Sheikh Nizam Yaquby of Bahrain, another scholar at the Paris conference, continues to decide such family cases in addition to his work in the world of finance.

In my story, Mufti Ahmed Said Louqman Ingar from Reunion, the French Indian Ocean island, explained how Islamic financing products there needed approval by local scholars before clients would trust them. Jérôme Pignolet de Fresnes, a French banker with experience in Islamic finance in Reunion, said his bank gets two sharia rulings for its new products, one from a local and one from a foreign sharia board. “We try to take the lowest common denominator so everyone can accept the product,” he said.

The non-story at the conference was the question of Islamic retail banking in France. The government is adjusting local regulations to allow French financial institutions to compete with London in the lucrative Islamic bond market. But although bankers outside France often point to its 5-million-strong Muslim minority — the largest such group in Europe — as a natural market for Islamic retail banking, a Finance Ministry official said there was no demand for it there and so no plans to accommodate it.

At a time when many critics are calling for tighter regulation of the worldwide financial industry, Muslim scholars are saying that Islamic finance cannot be more tightly controlled for theological reasons. The Islamic finance industry has long been marked by divergent interpretations of Sharia, or Islamic law.

(Photo: Traders at Saudi Investment Bank in Riyadh, 8 Oct 2008)

Now, amid calls for standardisation, the scholars say the Islamic concept of ijtihad — reasoning to reassess  sharia in light of modern developments– bars any tighter regulation or coordination of this $1 trillion industry.

It’s rare that religious scholars get to dictate terms to business, but this might be one because Islamic finance is expressly built upon the principle of sharia compliance.

Here’s a report from Frederik Richter, a correspondent in our Bahrain bureau:

Scholars reject strict Islamic finance standards

MANAMA, Nov 10 (Reuters) - Islamic scholars on Monday cautioned against enforcing legal standards in the Islamic finance industry, even though the lack of standardisation is widely seen as an impediment to growth.

Scholars said at the conference of the Accounting and Auditing Organization for Islamic Financial Institutions (AAOIFI) that legally binding norms would challenge the Islamic concept of ijtihad, or reasoning, that continuously re-assesses sharia, or Islamic law, in light of modern developments
This would make the industry more vulnerable to risks, they argued.

“There should not be sharia standards except in the form of reasoning, which gives different windows to solving problems,” said Mohamed Saeed al-Booti, professor at the University of Damascus and member of AAOIFI’s board of trustees.

(Photo: AmIslamic Bank in Kuala Lumpur, 11 Aug 2008)

Scholars said introducing binding legal standards for the industry would limit the diversity in Islamic banking products that they say has helped the industry weather the global financial crisis.

Sharia scholars play an important role in Islamic banking as they advise banks on whether specific loans and investments  comply with sharia, which bans interest and prohibits investments in certain areas such as gambling and alcohol.

The $1 trillion Islamic banking industry has ridden the boom in Gulf Arab oil earnings, but is struggling to reconcile vastly different interpretations of Islamic law.

Regulators and industry practitioners said legally enforced industry standards are badly needed to increase investment certainty and lower transaction costs.

“Western banks and lawyers find it difficult to understand how to enforce a contract that one group of Islamic scholars opposes and the other doesn’t,” said Neil Miller, partner at international law firm Norton Rose.

He added the industry needed to discuss how to address this issue without moving away from its diversity, which he said has been valuable to the sector.

The revival of Jewish life in post-unification Berlin could suffer a setback if the current financial crisis forces the closing of the first rabbinical college opened in central Europe since the Holocaust. As Berlin reporter Josie Cox writes, the Abraham Geiger College is falling short of funds because its donors in Europe and the United States are getting short of cash themselves. Read the full story here.

The college opened at the University of Potsdam in 1999 and graduated its first rabbis — a German, a Czech and a South African — in September 2006.

“We need many, many more rabbis in Germany. We have a great hunger for rabbis,” Dieter Graumann, vice president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, said at the time.

The Common Word group of Muslim scholars met Christian leaders and theologians in Cambridge and London this week. Discussions in this interfaith dialogue have mostly been theological, based on the idea that the love of God and neighbour is a core dogma of both religions. In a statement on Wednesday, they included a paragraph about the world financial crisis. There have been lots of comments from various faith leaders about the crisis, but this is the first Christian-Muslim statement I’ve seen.

Here’s the paragraph:

We live in an increasingly global world that brings with it increased interdependence.  The closer we are drawn together by this globalisation and interdependence, the more urgent is the need to understand and respect one another in order to find a way out of our troubles.  Meeting at a time of great turbulence in the world financial system our hearts go out to the many people throughout the world whose lives and livelihood are affected by the current crisis.  When a crisis of this magnitude occurs, we are all tempted to think solely of ourselves and our families and ignore the treatment of minorities and the less fortunate.  In this conference we are celebrating the shared values of love of God and love of neighbour, the basis of A Common Word, whilst reflecting self-critically on how often we fall short of these standards.  We believe that the divine commandment to love our neighbour should prompt all people to act with compassion towards others, to fulfil their duty of helping to alleviate misery and hardship.  It is out of an understanding of shared values that we urge world leaders and our faithful everywhere to act together to ensure that the burden of this financial crisis, and also the global environmental crisis, does not fall unevenly on the weak and the poor.  We must seize the opportunity for implementing a more equitable global economic system that also respects our role as stewards of the earth’s resources.

Do you see any link between faith and the financial crisis? Could this crisis lead to tensions between people of different religions — or bring them closer together?

One recurring theme in Pope Benedict’s speeches is the need he sees for Christians to speak out more in public on moral issues. A group of European politicians has taken up the challenge and held a brainstorming session in Paris to “find forms of political commitment that responds to their convictions and to the challenges of the 21st century,” as their hostess, French Housing and Urban Development Minister Christine Boutin, put it. The meeting was held at the Collège des Bernardins, the refurbished medieval college where Benedict spoke only last month about Europe’s Christian roots.

Although most politicians there could be described as Christian Democrats, there was no question about starting a specifically Christian political party. Instead, speakers stressed they wanted to bring Christian values back into the general political discourse after decades of being derided as old-fashioned. Several speakers from France mentioned the way secularists had sidelined them in politics. “We Christians have gotten used to living under a kind of house arrest,” said Jean-Pierre Rive, secretary general of the Church and Society Commission of the French Protestant Federation. “We have to get back into politics.”

The financial crisis, they said, provided a dramatic example of what can happen when greed and shady bank practices sideline values such as solidarity and concern for the poor. “A new world is being built and we Christians must play our part,” said Boutin, one of the most outspoken Catholic activists in French politics, at the Oct. 10 meeting. “Christians in France have lost the habit of communicating their experiences. There are politicians who are open to new ideas now. Let’s meet them and talk with them.”

“Christians in politics are often afraid of being written off as hypocrites. Who can deny that some have earned that description?” she added. “We should not act as Christians, but in a Christian way.”

Kris Vleugels, a Belgian evangelical who is vice-president of the European Christian Political Movement, said European Christians had “accepted the prevalence of non-Christian values for too long. Christian values such as charity, humility and service can be put into action in politics. They are more important than profit.”

The most senior of about 250 participants was the European Parliament President Hans-Gert Pöttering, a German Christian Democrat. He stressed that the European Union, despite its unwillingness to openly proclaim the continent’s Christian roots, reflects many Christian values. But he said: “Mere commitment to the European Union does not absolve us of our duties as Christians.” At the same time, he insisted on a division of labour. “You can never expect politicians to do exactly what the bishops expect. They have different roles.”

Among other participants were French Senate President Gerard Larcher, Czech Legislative Council President Cyril Svoboda, Irish MEP Gay Mitchell and several French, Dutch and Italian politicians. A Catholic bishop, Protestant pastor and Orthodox theologian from France took part, as did Andrea Riccardi, founder of the Sant’Egidio lay Catholic community in Rome. The participants agreed to hold meetings every six months to exchange ideas. The next one is due in April in Prague.

It’s not clear how much influence these politicians will have, but the financial crisis has certainly created conditions favourable to a more ethical emphasis in public policies.

Fed up with this market crisis? Looking for a change? Take a look at how one former Nasdaq broker got away from it all:

Brother Nikanor, a Nasdaq broker turned monk, advises former colleagues to put a jar with soil on their desks to remind them where we are all heading and what matters in life.

As western banks fold into each other like crumpled tickets and commentators portray the current crisis as the last gasp of modern capitalism, Hristo Mishkov, 32, shares the pain — and offers home truths.

“Many people… in the world do not realise that they have not earned the food they eat, that they take without giving. But if someone consumes more than they have earned, it means someone else is starving.

“It is right to see people who consume more than they deserve shattered by a financial crisis from time to time, to suffer so that they can become more reasonable.”

The whole feature ran on the Reuters wire today.  Read it here.