It’s not every day that the Vatican newspaper suggests that a man accused of paedophilia and said to have converted to Islam might be immortal. But that’s what L’Osservatore Romano did today. In a tribute to Michael Jackson — itself another sign of the “new look” that editor-in-chief Giovanni Maria Vian has given it — the paper included him in a pop music heaven at an unusually earthly location:

“But will he really be dead? It wouldn’t be surprising if, in a few years, he was spotted in a gas station in Memphis, perhaps with his former father-in-law Elvis Presley, another of those myths - like Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix or John Lennon - that never die in the imagination of their fans. And Michael Jackson, who died yesterday at the age of fifty, is definitely a pop music legend.”

The tribute reviews Jackson’s career, from the time “when he was still black” through his “humanly difficult … crossover” to “new genres not entirely attributable to any specific area, where one cannot distinguish between black and white.” It praises his mega-album Thriller “which is known also to those who do not frequent these musical worlds” and calls him a “great dancer” (grande ballerino).

The article ends on the delicate issue of accusations of paedophilia, a cloud that hung over Jackson’s later years and has dogged the Catholic Church as well. The singer hit his artistic peak with Thriller, it said, but always stayed enormously popular. “Not always, unfortunately, for artistic reasons,” it wrote. “His judicial ups and downs following allegations of paedophilia are well known. But no charge, even as bad and shameful, was sufficient to diminish his legend among the millions of fans around the world. The proof of the emotional reactions aroused by the news of his death. News many don’t believe. Maybe someone in Memphis has already seen him.”

(Photo: Michael Jackson in Munich, 9 June 1999/Michael Kappeler)

(Photos: Bernard d’Espagnat, 13 March 2009/Charles Platiau)

The German philosopher Immanuel Kant once wrote that he “had to deny knowledge to make room for faith.” The French physicist Bernard d’Espagnat hasn’t denied knowledge in his long career developing the philosophy that won him this year’s $1.42 million Templeton Prize. He was pursuing knowledge to better understand what we can know about the ultimate reality of the world. But just like his philosophy echoes that of Kant’s with its conviction that there are limits on knowing reality, his work leaves some room — he would say for spirituality — by saying that human intuitions like art, music and spirituality can help us go further when science searching to understand the world reaches the end of its tether.

D’Espagnat’s prize was announced at UNESCO in Paris on Monday. The quantum physics at the core of his work presents baffling insights about reality, but his philosophical conclusions from them sound like common sense. Science is an amazing discipline that opens vast areas of knowledge but cannot go all the way to explaining ultimate reality. There’s a mystery at the core of our existence that we can get a little closer to through the untestable but undeniable intuitions we have. That “little closer” still leaves a large black hole in our knowledge, but it is more than we have if we only rely on empirical science.

As often happens in cases like this, d’Espagnat was available for embargoed interviews several days before the prize was announced. I had the pleasure of meeting him on Friday at the Lutetia, a five-star hotel only a short bike ride from my more modest digs in Paris. Now 87 years old, d’Espagnat can look back on a long and illustrious career as a senior physicist at the CERN laboratory in Geneva, professor at the University of Paris (at its science hub in the suburb of Orsay) and guest lecturer at universities and conferences abroad. His latest book in English, On Physics and Philosophy, came out in the United States in 2006.

At the end, I asked what he would do with his prize money. After paying the taxes on it, he stressed as he started his answer, he would divide it into three equal parts. One would go to promote the study of “negative theology,” a theology that he says fits his spiritualist outlook and conviction that we can only describe God by concepts that say what God is not. The second part would go to associations helping the homeless. And the last third he and his wife would use to make their home more senior-friendly. “My wife is handicapped and she would very much like to remain at home as long as possible,” he said.

You can read our story here or consult the prize website for more information and an extensive collection of links about his work. Some excerpts from my interview with d’Espagnat are on the next page. Taking a page from Paul Krugman’s economics blog, let me put a health warning on it right away — (wonkish).

(more…)

It’s hard to write about the Taliban on a religion blog without giving the impression that this militant movement in Afghanistan and Pakistan is basically religious. It’s certainly Islamist, i.e. it uses Islam for political ends. But it’s hard to find much religion in what they’re doing, while there’s a lot of power politics, Pashtun nationalism and insurrection against the Kabul and Islamabad governments there.

(Photo: Pakistani pro-Taliban militants in Swat Valley, 2 Nov 2007/Sherin Zada Kanju)

It’s often difficult to separate religion and politics in groups like this, but President Barack Obama gave a basic rule of thumb in his speech at the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington last week:

“Far too often, we have seen faith wielded as a tool to divide us from one another – as an excuse for prejudice and intolerance. Wars have been waged. Innocents have been slaughtered. For centuries, entire religions have been persecuted, all in the name of perceived righteousness…

“No matter what we choose to believe, let us remember that there is no religion whose central tenet is hate. There is no God who condones taking the life of an innocent human being. This much we know.”

Zeeshan Haider, senior correspondent in our Islamabad bureau, clearly makes these distinctions in his feature “Militants killing laughter and music in Pakistan region” about the intimidation of musicians and comedians in Peshawar. The blame lies not with “Muslim militants” or “medieval Islam” — broad terms often heard when the Taliban first emerged as a force in nearby Afghanistan in the 1990s — but “Islamist vigilantes hell-bent on imposing Taliban-style values.”

(Photo: Polish geologist Piotr Stanczak before his beheading by militants demanding the release of Taliban prisoners, 9 Feb 2009/Reuters TV)

Haider also makes a distinction between the Islamist political parties in Pakistan, who banned music on public buses and movie posters featuring women, and the militants who went further and used murder and bombings to intimidate the population.

Read the whole feature here.

If “Amazing Grace” is not already the most widely sung hymn in Christianity — and cyberlists, for what they’re worth, say it is — it should be by the time the Amazing Grace Project is finished. The Anglican Church of Canada invited all its congregations to sing John Newton’s iconic hymn last Sunday and upload a video of their efforts to the church’s national office. The plan is to edit them into “one big, amazing “Amazing Grace” video and put it up on the web for all to enjoy by Christmas,” as the project website explains.

The uploads are piling up on YouTube (here’s the playlist) and it seems some congregations in U.S. states close to the Canadian border have joined in. There are a few entries from South Africa and a clip of bishops at the Lambeth Conference (see video above) enjoying the opportunity to sing from the same songsheet. If you want to be part of the final product, upload your video here by Dec. 1.

I first realised how widely known “Amazing Grace” was in 1999, at the end of the Yugoslav wars, when I was reporting from the Kosovo town of Prizren. The Serbian army had just left the town and NATO forces controlled the province. My Muslim interpreter and I happened to pass a Catholic Church one day and we went in for a look. To my surprise, a Mass was being said and the congregation was belting out a familiar tune. When I finally realised it was “Amazing Grace” in Albanian translation, I sang along softly in English. On leaving, the interpreter asked me “How do you know an Albanian hymn?”

How about you? Have you heard this famous hymn in languages other than English? If we get enough different examples, I’ll pass them on to the Amazing Grace Project.

MOUNT UNION, Pa. - It was muddy, it was loud and there were a lot of smiling, happy people offering free hugs and praising Jesus.

The Creation Festival drew around 70,000 people to rural Pennsylvania last month to listen to Christian music, ranging from hard rock to R&B, hip-hop and punk.

Check out the Reuters story on the festival along with an audio slideshow of pictures by Mike Segar, who got his feet wet to catch the moment when nearly 200 people were baptized in a pond. 

Now in its 30th year and growing bigger every year, the festival is in many ways like any secular summer music festival — thousands of young people camping out, getting muddy in the rain and eagerly hunting down their heroes for autographs.

But these music fans wore T-shirts with slogans such as “Virginity Rocks” and “Mosh for Jesus.” To read more about the unusual merchandise on offer, click here.

PICTURES: Reuters/Mike Segar.

Is Egypt’s Ministry of Religious Endowments planning to blindside people by quietly implementing an unpopular project to unify the adhan, the Islamic call to prayer?

That’s certainly the impression I got when I recently spoke to one of the ministry officials in charge of the project to enquire about its status. There has been talk for years about how chaotic and noisy it is to have each mosque in a city call out “Allahu akbar” at slightly different times, in quite different voices, sometimes in different musical keys and different tempos. A project unveiled two years ago to have one centralised call to prayer seemed to officials to be the answer.

The official was cagey at first, refusing to be drawn on whether the plan was going ahead or had been suspended, and refusing to give an ETA for the mythical unified adhan.

But then he relented and said, revealingly: “I’ll tell you something, one day you’ll find us, without media coverage… you’ll find (a unified) ‘Allahu akbar’ from the minarets.”

That goes some way to explaining why the whole thing seems to have dropped out of sight since it was “inaugurated” more than two years ago.

Back then, the project was hailed by officials as “a civilizing step.” In a ceremony at the ministry’s neo-Islamic offices in downtown Cairo, the minister handed out commemorative shields and monetary rewards to a number of people involved in the project. Everything about the news conference suggested the project would be up and running imminently.

But there’s been no almost no sightings (hearings?) of the unified adhan, save for some experiments carried out in a number of mosques, presumably to the delight of the plan’s many opponents - which includes the parliament’s religious affairs committee.

The committee expressed its opposition to the project in 2006 and said the money could be better spent elsewhere, on one of Egypt’s myriad problems, but local media quoted ministry officials as saying they were adamant about going ahead with it.

An IslamOnline report (in Arabic) on some of the ministry’s experiments described the scorn poured on the initiative by worshippers at the mosque where it was tested. “Flavourless, canned adhan” was how one described it. Another said he might just as well stay home and listen to the adhan on the radio. Others resented the mechanical nature of the thing, saying the move removed the human touch from the ritual and made it seem less spiritual.

The ministry says the move is meant to end the “clamour” that can result in areas with multiple mosques, where it can sometimes sound like the muezzins are attempting to drown each other out. They sometimes start seconds or even minutes apart.

Some Egyptians complain that the adhan in their neighborhood is too loud and disturbs their sleep. But sheikhs point out that the adhan is intended to do exactly that: wake people up to pray. They also say the argument that Egypt’s Christians shouldn’t be subjected to that is about as reasonable as expecting church bells to be silenced in Rome for the benefit of Italian Muslims.

IslamOnline also posted two fatwas prohibiting the use of an electronically transmitted adhan, saying that the recitation of the adhan is a ritual of worship in itself. The religious requirement was for an actual human voice at the location to recite the adhan.

They also point out that the performance of the adhan is a greatly meritorious deed. People draw lots for the privilege. Limiting the adhan to one person citywide or nationwide, they said, effectively denies people the spiritual reward.

The ministry says that currently, a lot of people with really horrible voices end up chanting the adhan, much to the discomfort of surrounding residents. The parliamentary committee responds that, well, maybe the ministry should carefully select the muezzin on the basis of vocal talents. And if noise pollution is the issue, how does the adhan compare to the 24/7 din of Egypt’s notoriously snarled and noisy traffic?

It looks like all that is moot, as the ministry seems unwilling to be deflected from a project that is way behind schedule, possibly over budget and almost certain to further alienate a large segment of Egypt’s devout Muslims and independent sheikhs.

The Washington Post carries an interesting story today examining how American Catholics are split when it comes to music — many older parishioners are partial to folk-style songs written in the 1970s, while many younger members want Gregorian chant and other older forms of music.

But a third style of music ruled the streets of Washington today, as thousands gathered to view the Pope’s motorcade. Several predominantly Latino church groups brought drums, tambourines and guitars to accompany energetic songs that would not have sounded out of place in a South American soccer stadium. Click here to listen.