It came as a surprise to discover that monks were no longer involved in the beer-making at Trappist brewer Westmalle during a visit to research for a feature of Trappist beers. With the exception of small-scale Westvleteren that is pretty much the case at all seven Trappist breweries in Belgium and the Netherlands.
It is largely the result of demographics – the average age of monks at many monasteries in western Europe is up in the 50s, 60s or 70s, hardly an age to be pushing around barrels. The modern brewery is also very much automated, requiring fewer people on the factory floor, but a number of trouble-shooting experts – a monastery has no guarantee of having an brewing engineer in its flock. 
Monks at Koningshoeven Abbey in the Netherlands do still prepare gift packages of its La Trappe beer. It helps that their average age is just below 60. “We are a bit lucky,” admitted brewing chief Gijs Swinkels.
So what makes a Trappist beer different from any other brew? It’s not the taste, the colour or even the strength – from 5 percent Achels to the 11.3 percent alcohol of the Rochefort 10.
The answer is threefold and applies to other Trappist products such as cheese, biscuits and chocolate: 1. It must be made within the walls of a Trappist monastery; 2. It must be controlled by monks; and 3. The profits must be used for upkeep of the monastery and its community and for its charitable projects.
Sure enough monks do take key decisions on investment, production size and the limited level of marketing.
However, the very ageing that has forced monks to cease day-to-day tasks raises questions about the future of the beers — the pinnacle of brewing to some beer connoisseurs, but just a means to an end for the monks.
Trappist monks accept that some communities may die out, while others emerge. Will some of the Trappist beers die out too?

With the financial crisis erupting around the 500th anniversary of the birth of the Protestant theologian John Calvin, many people in the Netherlands — where his thinking played an important role in forming the local culture — are looking back at his influence and what he might say of the current crisis and the people involved.

(Photo: Dutch Old Masters used skulls and stubby candles to portray the Calvinist idea of the vanity of greed/Robin van Lonkhuijsen/United Photos)

Several of the issues are described in my feature “Moral rebound finds Dutch exploring Calvin.” One of the most interesting elements was an online survey by the Protestant newspaper Trouw called “C-Factor.”

“Test how Calvinist you are, in your convictions, at work and in your love life,” it said in its challenge to readers. It asks 25 questions (sorry, only in Dutch) such as:

“I should really work harder.”

“Making exceptions to rules weakens the rules.”

” I like to dine in luxury.”

“Other people are more important than me.”

“I borrow money for nice things even when I don’t really need them.”

Tests like this are amusing, but you have to wonder about the results. A Dutch reporter in our Amsterdam bureau, who grew up in the Dutch “Bible Belt” and went to a high school in Kampen named after Calvin, got an unexpected 47 percent. A Catholic colleague with a solid Jesuit education got 58 percent. I’m a Brit with no links to Calvinism in my background, and I ended up scoring 75 percent.

Have you ever taken these “test your religion” tests? Were you surprised?

Right-wing Dutch MP Geert Wilders, who is being prosecuted at home for anti-Islam remarks, has been barred from entering Britain.

He had been invited to show the House of Lords his film "Fitna," which argues that the Koran incites violence, but was told his opinions could "threaten community harmony and therefore public safety" and sent back home again when he arrived at Heathrow.

Defending the decision to bar him, Foreign Secretary David Miliband said: "A hate-filled film designed to stir up religious and racial hatred in this country is contrary to our laws."

But Wilders called Gordon Brown the biggest coward in Europe and added: "I think a discussion is always better than barring people or turning people away."

Do you think he should have been allowed in to show his film?

Religion reporters often get asked how they keep up with developments in different faiths. One way is to read the leading publications in the field. Keeping up with the latest trends in Islam is about to get harder for those of us who are regular readers of one of the most interesting journals on Muslim issues, the ISIM Review published in English by the International Institute for the Study of Islam in the Modern World (ISIM) at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands.

(Photo: Head scarf exhibit in Amsterdam Historical Museum, 6 March 2006/Paul Vreeker)

Not only is the Review closing down — ISIM itself, a Dutch academic institute set up by the universities of Leiden, Amsterdam, Utrecht and Nijmegen 10 years ago — is being closed for lack of funds. The University of Leiden announced this on Dec 17 (here in Dutch) and ISIM announced it here in English. Surprisingly, it got almost no coverage in the media (here’s one short piece from De Telegraaf in Dutch).

The Dutch experience with Islam is one of the most strained in Europe, as seen by the murder of film maker Theo van Gogh and the rise of far-right politicians like Geert Winters Wilders. ISIM’s excellent research has been a useful antidote to that, presenting a much better informed view of Islam both in the Netherlands and abroad. I’ve found it very informative as background to the current issues concerning Muslim and a tip-off for scholars to consult when I’m writing about them. There aren’t enough of these publications around and it’s sad to see such a good one, and the institute that produces it, disappear.

Oddly enough, a February 2008 peer review commissioned by the Dutch Ministry of Education — the same ministry now pulling the plug on ISIM — gave the institute high marks for its work. It said that “the Institute has succeeded in using its very limited means to constitute itself as a prominent centre with great international attraction. Clear indicators for this are its appeal for prominent colleagues from all over the world (cf. the success of its Visiting Fellows Programme), the great international appreciation of its research projects, and its ability to attract younger scholars (PhDs and post-docs), again from very different regions and backgrounds … this solid academic reputation … has made the institute a focal point within Europe for comparative debates, workshops and conferences on a wide array of questions concerning Islam and its rising presence in the continent.”

Alexandre Caeiro, an ISIM PhD who’s an expert on Islamic fatwas in Western Europe, told me a group of scholars associated with ISIM has been circulating a petition to the Dutch Ministry of Education urging it to reconsider. If you know and appreciate ISIM (or just discover the ISIM Review now by searching through its archive) and want to support it, you can contact Caeiro at isim2009@gmail.com.

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Of all the things to get exercised about, yoga would seem to be an unlikely candidate for controversy. But such has been the case in Malaysia this week.

Malaysia’s prime minister declared on Wednesday that Muslims can after all practice the Indian exercise regime, so long as they avoid the meditation and chantings that reflect Hindu philosophy. This came after Malaysia’s National Fatwa Council told Muslims to roll up their exercise mats and stop contorting their limbs because yoga could destroy the faith of Muslims.

It has been a tough month for the fatwa council chairman, Abdul Shukor Husin, who in late October issued an edict against young women wearing trousers, saying that was a slippery path to
lesbianism. Gay sex is outlawed in Malaysia.

The council’s rulings, and other religious controversies, might at first blush seem to indicate a growing strain of conservative Islam in mostly Muslim Malaysia. But it could also
reflect the growing unease of Islamic authorities in defending the faith in a rapidly modernising Malaysia where non-Muslims constitute 40 percent of the population and are increasingly
asserting their rights.

The yoga fatwa stirred up a hornet’s next, not only in the blogosphere where that could be expected, but in another deeply conservative Malaysian institution — the sultans.  Sultan Sharafuddin Idris Shah, who presides ceremonially over the central state of Selangor, said Abdul’s fatwa council should have consulted the nine hereditary Malay rulers who take turns being Malaysia’s king before announcing the ruling.  The highly unusual comment from one of the sultans on a
policy matter suggests some discord about who speaks for Malaysia’s Muslims on matters of faith. Islam is the official religion in multi-religious Malaysia and the constitution designates the nine sultans as guardians of the faith. The (rotating) king is the head of Islam in Malaysia.

The sultans, for their part, have seen what remains of their secular powers eroded over the years, particularly under the two-decade administration of former prime minister Mahathir
Mohamad. They could be defending a last bastion of royal prerogoative in the religious arena.

Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badaw, who has been preaching a moderate brand of Islam called Islam Hadhari, moved to contain the damage saying Muslims can do exercises like the “sun
salutation” so long as they don’t start chanting.

The fatwa council’s rulings, in any case, are not legally binding until they are adopted as national laws or sharia (Islamic) laws in individual states. There seems to be little appetite for that. No laws have been made against young women wearing trousers. The government in May dropped a proposal to restrict women from travelling abroad by themselves after a storm of derision from women activist groups.

But even as the flap over yoga is relaxing, the government is crossing swords with Christian groups.

A Christian federation  claimed Bibles were seized at entry points earlier this year. Malaysian Catholics are having an ontological argument with the authorities about the word “Allah”.
The government banned the Malay-language section of a Catholic weekly newspaper from using the word, saying it creates confusion among Muslims. Catholics say Allah is simply the Arabic word for
“God”, and has long been used in Malay-language Bibles. (A Dutch bishop has stirred debate in Europe with a similar argument)

Non-muslims, who constitute 40 percent of Malaysia’s population, sometimes worry that things such as the fuss over fatwas and words for God, may augur a mini-clash of civilisations in Malaysia, which last year saw a harsh crackdown on Indian rights protesters. It was one year ago that 10,000 ethnic Indians defied tear gas and waterr cannon to voice complaints of racial and religious discrimination in its biggest ever anti-government street protest.

It’s already been a big theme in Germany, France, Turkey and the Netherlands, and now the Austrian far right is asking: Should public employees be allowed to wear Muslim headscarves at work?

Two women have become the first schoolteachers in Vienna to wear headscarves while teaching.

One is also a local centre-left Social Democrat politician.

Teachers in other parts of the country already wear headscarves, and there is no law banning public employees from wearing such items as there is in some other European countries.  

But the two women have now found themselves featured on the front page of the Austrian daily Oesterreich and have drawn criticism from the resurgent far right, which won a combined one-third of the vote in a parliamentary election several weeks ago.

“Headscarves are a symbol of Islamism and female oppression. They have no place in Austria,” says Heinz-Christian Strache, head of the far-right Freedom Party, which has now become Austria’s third most powerful.

The director of the state schools in that part of Vienna fully supports the women — one-third of the school children come from Turkish families so the women “break down linguistic and cultural barriers”, she says.

But some feel a division between religion and state is more important.

“Something that would be unthinkable in Turkey is a reality in red (left-leaning) Vienna,” says Martin Strutz, the general secretary of the right-wing Alliance for Austria’s Future.

“The (Vienna) Social Democrats don’t value the separation between church and state any more,” he adds, calling for a complete ban on headscarves and veils in public office.

While Freedom and Alliance call for symbols of Islam to be removed from state schools, they do not seem to object to symbols of Christianity in Austria, which is predominantly Roman Catholic.

The ban on religious symbols in France, on the other hand, covers all faiths in a strict separation of religion and state. The arguments to uphold the ban there also focused more on women’s rights, rather than equating the veil with Islamism.

By targeting Muslims specifically and raising fears about Islam, the Austrian far-right parties can touch on the kind of themes that helped them win so many votes in September 

Are we headed for another “Rushdie affair” over the yet-to-be-published novel The Jewel of Medina? First an American publisher withdrew its plan to publish the novel about A’isha, the child bride of the Prophet Mohammad, out of fear of a backlash from Islamist radicals. Then a British publisher announced he had bought the rights and would print the “once feared historical novel“. Now comes the news that the publisher’s London office has been the target of an arson attack and police have arrested three men on suspicion of terrorism.

Some early signs are not encouraging. The Daily Telegraph quotes Anjem Choudhary, a radical cleric based in Ilford in east London, as saying: “It is clearly stipulated in Muslim law that any kind of attack on his honour carries the death penalty.” While his unbending interpretation of Muslim law is certainly debatable, his warning that publication of the novel could cause further protests is not.

On the other hand, Muslim Council of Britain spokesman Inayat Bunglawala wrote last week that the mood among British Muslims had changed since they clamoured for Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses to be banned. “Is this rethinking now widespread amongst British Muslims? Yes, my impression is that it certainly is with many now accepting that the Satanic Verses affair served to create (and for others reinforce) the unfortunate view that Muslims were backward, anti-intellectual, prone to violence and saw themselves as being somehow above the law,” he wrote.

“It is painful to admit it, but on the need to uphold the freedom to offend, Rushdie was right. The consequences of not doing so should be apparent by now to Muslims above all. Earlier this year, the leader of the far right Dutch Freedom Party, Geert Wilders, called for the Qur’an to be banned because he found some passages in the book offensive. And there’s the rub. Who is to decide what is offensive or not? What may be offensive to me may be just harmless fun to you and vice versa.”

There’s a lot of political manipulation behind these “spontaneous” outbursts of violence against anyone accused of blaspheming Mohammad (as we saw in the Danish cartoons controversy). There are also ways of trying to counter this. The failure of Wilders’ much-hyped film Fitna to incite anti-Muslim tension in the Netherlands is a case in point. None other than the top Dutch counterterrorism official noted that the debate preceding the film’s premiere helped bring Christian and Muslim groups together to discuss their views and maintain calm when the film was aired.

If The Jewel of Medina is published, protests in the Muslim world (such as the burning of a Rushdie effigy in Pakistan last year pictured above) might be par for the course. The question is whether they will be matched by copy-cat violence in Europe.

London’s highly competitive newspaper market loves blaring headlines and shock quotes. There are bound to be more coming in this story and they may be justified. As this story progresses, I’m curious to see how Muslim groups in Britain and elsewhere in Europe react and whether those defending the principle of free speech get as much coverage as those railing against it.

Do you think the mood has changed among Muslims in Europe? Or is a repeat of the Rushdie affair on the cards?

Did Rick Warren’s Saddleback Civil Forum with John McCain and Barack Obama violate the separation of church and state? Was it right for a pastor to ask U.S. presidential candidates about their belief in Jesus Christ or their worst moral failures? Will the success of the Saddleback Civil Forum mean that major televised interviews or debates about faith will become a regular fixture in American political campaigns?

I didn’t think questions like this got enough of an airing in U.S. media before Saturday’s event. The fact that Warren made it such an interesting evening made me think the fundamental question — should there be a televised “faith quiz” at all? — would be crowded out of the public debate. The initial reactions angled on the winner/loser question or the “cone of silence” issue seemed to bear this out. But some commentators and blogs are now zeroing in on the deeper question.

In the New York Times, columnist Willian Kristol (Showdown at Saddleback) applauded the event and said: “Rick Warren should moderate one of the fall presidential debates.” That says a lot about the quality of the usual televised debates but little about the church-state question. Ruth Ann Dailey’s op-ed in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette put her answer about the church-state question right in the headline: At Saddleback, the wall stands firm.

On the other side, Kathleen Parker wrote in the Chicago Tribune that Candidates’ church chat erodes U.S. principles. DeWayne Wickham of USA Today wrote the Next president need not be the vicar of Saddleback.

Hat tip to the Washington Post On Faith blog for probably the most comprehensive selection of views for, against and in the middle. This is not a simple question and it was good to see so many thoughtful responses.

As religion editor, I naturally have a strong professional interest in seeing religion discussed in public. I also think a candidate’s religious views are relevant when they clearly shape his or her political stands. So I’m not against asking such questions in principle. But a session like the Saddleback Civil Forum raises some fundamental questions about the role of religion in politics and where lines between the two should be drawn. There is no hard and fast rule. Anyone who reads religion news from around the world regularly, though, has surely seen enough cases of politics interfering too much in religion or religion interfering too much in politics to take the issue of church-state relations lightly. Just saying “it can’t happen here” isn’t good enough.

Since television loves to repeat a successful formula, it’s a good bet we’ll see more of these sessions in campaigns to come. With that in mind, here are a few questions I hope to see debated before the next “God quiz” rolls around:

• Has this “soft” kind of interview created a “soft” religious litmus test? One that does not require a certain religious belief, but some religious belief, to pass?
• Is there a border line between appropriate and inappropriate questions? Are some questions too prying, something only for a private session with a spiritual advisor?
• If there is going to be one televised faith “showdown,” should it should be conducted by only one interviewer from a specific faith tradition? Does that skew the questions to the kinds of questions that faith tradition asks, and favour answers that faith tradition gives? Does it give the impression that questions that are high priority for that tradition — in this case, evangelical — are the only faith questions out there?
• What about Jews, Muslims and others, even other Christian denominations? Are they overlooked in this process? Would a mixed panel of interviewers be more inclusive?
• What about atheists and voters who believe such events violate the separation of church and state? Will they have a televised forum?

P.S. Since we take a world-wide view of religion news, I did a quick search for comments on the event in some non-U.S. media. It’s striking how many chose the term “confession” to describe the event.

U.S. religious forum would not have happened here - The separation of church and state is more notional than real in the U.S. (Montreal Gazette, Canada)

Obama&McCain:Confession in front of puritans (Journal du Dimanche, France)

McCain and Obama confess their sins (Elsevier, Netherlands)

Campaign launched for religious voters – Obama and McCain “confessed” to the pastor of the nation (DieStandard.at, Austria)

McCain trumps Obama at faith summit (Spiegel Online, Germany)

“Television Confessional” (Financial Times Deutschland, Germany)

Religion test for Obama and McCain - an unusual event in the U.S. campaign (Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Switzerland)

Obama and McCain proceed to the media confessional (Libération, France)

Obama and McCain reveal their dark sides on stage (La Stampa, Italy)

Confession road to the White House (El Periódico de Catalunya, Spain)

There seems to have been a silver lining to the Dutch anti-Islam film “Fitna” that far-right PVV party leader Geert Wilders released in late March. We noted already the strife that many people feared didn’t materialise. Now the country’s National Coordinator for Counterterrorism says the long debate about the film actually brought Christian and Muslim groups closer together.

It said in the English translation of its latest report:

“The commotion surrounding the Fitna film appears to have resulted in overtures* between Christian and Islamic organisations. Several organisations with a Christian foundation have strongly criticised standpoints of the PVV parliamentary party chairman with respect to Islam and, together with Muslim organisations, are taking initiatives to reduce the social tensions in the Netherlands and abroad. Remarkable in this context is a collaboration between the World Council of Churches and the Protestant Church in the Netherlands (Protestanse Kerk in Nederland, PKN) on the one hand and the Muslims and the Government Liaison Committee (Contactorgaan Moslims en Overheid, CMO) and the Islam Contact Group (Contact Groep Islam, CGI) on the other hand. In March 2008 these organisations conducted a ‘reconciliation mission’ to Muslim organisations in Egypt to neutralise any detrimental effects of the film.”

*The Dutch original is actually a bit stronger. It says there has been a “toenadering” (rapprochement) between Christian and Muslim groups. “Overtures” implies an initiative towards cooperation without making clear that something happened, whereas rapprochement does. And, as the report made clear, something did happen.

“Do Catholic countries have better football players?”

I was surprised to see this headline on the Austrian Catholic website kath.net today… and even more surprised to see they seemed to mean it seriously.

“A look at the participants in the final round of the European football championship in Switzerland and Austria suggests this,” kath.net writes in a report from Vienna. “In seven of the 16 participating countries, Catholics are clearly in the majority: Poland (95 percent of the population), Spain (92 percent), Italy (90 percent), Portugal (90 percent), Croatia (77 percent), Austria (69 percent ) and France (51 percent). Only one Protestant stronghold confronts them, Sweden. Of the 8.8 million inhabitants of the northern European country, 80 percent are Lutherans.”

There’s no hint of analysis of why this should be relevant, or mention of the personal faith — or lack thereof — of the players on these national teams. This purely statistical view (sports fans love stats, don’t they?) goes on to point out which participating countries have large numbers of both Catholics and Protestants (Germany, Switzerland and Netherlands).

The article notes that only 32 percent of all Czechs call themselves Christians, making the Czech Republic the most “de-churched” participating country, i.e. the country where religion has retreated the most. Even there, though, the Catholics make up the largest group among the believers (26.5 percent of the population). So maybe they still have a chance after all.

No religion story in Europe is complete without a mention of Islam, so the Vienna-datelined article ended up with a comment about Turkey. The Turkish team, by the way, beat Austria’s co-hosts Switzerland 2-1 on Wednesday in Basel and face the “de-churched” Czechs on Sunday in Geneva, aka “the Protestant Rome”.

“The only Muslim-dominated country in the European Championship is Turkey, where 98 percent of the 72 million inhabitants are Muslims. The 120,000 Christians there have a hard time because of much discrimination,” it wrote. “In Europe there are 224.5 million Catholics, 57.8 million Protestants, 39 million Orthodox, 15.7 million Muslims and 1.6 million Jews.”

These statistics appear to be completely irrelevant to Euro 2008. In fact, with the large Catholic majority in Europe that kath.net mentions at the end, it’s almost inevitable that many countries with a Catholic majority will end up in the final rounds every time the championships are held. Can any football fan tell me if there’s something this religion editor is missing?