Update: Iraqi Elections
Super good news re Iraqi March election: Sunni leader *will* participate. NY Times: http://nyti.ms/cC43bE
Neda, dictatorship and Iran
Today a student objected to my calling Iran a dictatorship. “It is a democracy,” he said. He did have a point. There are plenty of other places worse than Iran. Travel plans? Nope. I’ll stay right here in greatly flawed California, in the equally “challenged” US of A. There doesn’t seem to be any question that the government of Iran is repressive. Gmail has just been outlawed. The press is hampered. So much for freedom of assembly and free speech.
I do count your blessings and I do remember Neda Agha Soltan. PBS aired a documentary about her and the struggle of the opposition movement in Iran.
SF response to Westboro Church
Someone told me that they were in town. They were protesting at the Twitter HQ. Glad to see the Bay Area respond with an “in kind” protest. Apparently they were going to protest in front of the theater where Fiddler on the Roof was being performed. Sometimes I wish I could get inside their twisted theology, but I’d rather not go there. Laughing Squid posted the details:
Westboro Baptist Church showed up to protest in front of Twitter’s San Francisco office on Thursday, but found themselves severely outnumbered by a crowd of absurdist pranksters, including guest blogger EDW Lynch above.
Al Sharpton and Archbishop Williams
In case you need to see it with your own eyes. I probably should spend a moment figuring out why this surprised me. I’d feel the same way if I saw Sharpton and the Pope.
There is more to Sharpton that his political showboating and hyberbole. Sharpton has used his position as a religious leader to worthy ends. It may be the lack of action on social justice issues, or at least the perceived lack of action, on the part of these particular heads of Christendom, that is somehow unsettling.
I met Archbishop Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, at one of the annual religion conferences held at the Claremont Graduate University through the School of Religion. I believe it was DZ Phillips‘ first or second year holding the Danforth Chair of Religion. Haven’t met the Pope. Yet.
Where’s religion at the Prop. 8 trial?
Over at Religion Dispatches, there’s an assessment of the current trial and the absence of “religion” by Candace Chellew-Hodge
Thompson is challenging one of Cott’s ideas that modern marriage laws are shaped now by civil law and social developments; the defense attorney is pushing hard on the anti-gay marriage thesis that heterosexual marriage is tied to history and religion restricting unions to men and women. He repeatedly suggested in his questions that marriage laws are tied to Christianity. At one point, asking Cott about monogamy being the result of the teachings of Jesus and his apostles, the professor got a little impatient. “I know very little about Jesus Christ and his apostles,” Cott shot back at Thompson.
Megachurches and racial division
Martin Luther King once said “11 o’clock Sunday morning is the most segregated hour of the week … And the Sunday school is still the most segregated school.” Here’s a article from Time magainze that looks at how megachurches may be reversing the status quo.
But in some churches, the racial divide is beginning to erode, and it is fading fastest in one of American religion’s most conservative precincts: Evangelical Christianity. According to Michael Emerson, a specialist on race and faith at Rice University, the proportion of American churches with 20% or more minority participation has languished at about 7.5% for the past nine years. But among Evangelical churches with attendance of 1,000 people or more, the slice has more than quadrupled, from 6% in 1998 to 25% in 2007.
Not just for the Taliban
This news item from the Guardian:
Secular campaigners in the Irish Republic defied a strict new blasphemy law which came into force today by publishing a series of anti-religious quotations online and promising to fight the legislation in court.
The fine for blasphemy? About $31,500.
Minarets of Marseille
This in contrast to the recent Swiss ban on building any new minarets:
The minaret of the new Grand Mosque of Marseille, whose cornerstone will be laid here in April, will be silent — no muezzin, live or recorded, will disturb the neighborhood with the call to prayer. Instead, the minaret will flash a beam of light for a couple of minutes, five times a day.
Normally, the light would be green, for the color of Islam. But Marseille is a port, and green is reserved for signals to ships at sea. Red? No, the firefighters have reserved red.
Instead, said Noureddine Cheikh, the head of the Marseille Mosque Association, the light will almost surely be purple — a rather nightclubby look for such an elegant building.
…Youcef Mammeri, a writer on Islam in France and member of the Joint Council of Muslims of Marseille, says that the debates over minarets, burqas and national identity have angered many French-born Muslims and brought them together in a defensive circle.
This is a tough call. On the one hand, I’m all for religious tolerance. But on the other hand it seems that historical tradition should be respected, too. But then that also cuts both ways. Take Spain and its transformation from Islamic to Catholic rule. If we just go by “who was there first”, this would often thwart the natural flow of history, whether that “flow” came at the end of a sword or not. If Maryland had been settled by Muslims but over the past 50 years a vibrant Christian minority had flourished, should church towers and bells be banned in deference to the over 200 year history of a predominantly Muslim populace? Or if Maryland had been predominantly Catholic (which it was) but now Orthodox Jews were in the ascendancy, should synagogues and payos be banned?
The sad truth is that tensions between different cultures (even those that share the same religion) is practically inevitable especially when there’s a lack of sensitivity and understanding on both sides.
Homeless spend Christmas at Temple
From the NY Times:
Newly homeless families will bunk here for two weeks before moving to another house of worship — and then another and another….
In the Oneg Shabbat room at Temple Isaiah in Lafayette, children hooked angels on a tall Christmas tree.
I participated once with a team of churches that alternated providing a dinner and shelter once a week, as I recall. So often homeless people are invisible. These rotating shelters help parishoners gain a short glimpse of homelessness. Sadly, nearly every semester I have at least once student explain to me that they are either homeless or “housing challenged”. I wonder how many of their peers realize they have homeless students in their midst.
Jack Bauer interrogates Santa Claus
I’ve never watched the TV show 24. I’ve only heard about how the show is popular with the “torture is OK if it helps you get crucial information” crowd, amongst others. Here’s a mashup of the lead character grilling Santa.