Interfaith Encounters
We have turned humanity into an object of Christian faith, and social behaviors into essential Christian practices. A couple of decades ago I sat visiting over lunch with my fellow students at the University of Malaya. The conversation turned to our professors. A young woman with her hair wrapped tightly beneath her headscarf and wearing [Read More...]
Should private companies be able to establish the religious beliefs of their owners as the norm for their employees? We need an ongoing, public, exploration of our differing religious ethics. We need inter religious dialogue so that we begin to understand what is really at stake when we talk about the establishment of religion, or [Read More...]
You aren’t a leader if you can’t lead across cultures in a complex religious environment. . . . I continue to muse on a read through three years of the HBR. In the last blog I suggested that the classical liberal arts university and its dedication to leadership got distorted by the demands for technical [Read More...]
You aren’t a leader if you can’t lead across cultures in a complex religious environment. . . . This past week, in a study of a really different culture, I read through three years of the Harvard Business Review. Quite fascinating. I had expected some pretty dry reading about statistics, supply chain flows, automation of [Read More...]
Recently my friend Mike Ghouse wrote an article promoting a kind of interfaith Christmas. (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mike-ghouse/interfaith-christmas-making-god-boundless_b_2347856.ht) Well intentioned, but also deeply problematic. Mike wants to reinforce Christmas as a civil religious holiday for a religiously plural society. I think we’d all be better off if it returned to being the cult celebration exclusively for Christians. I [Read More...]
The Arab Spring is already becoming a bloodbath in Egypt because the Muslim Brotherhood cannot see that its political vision of an Islamic state was a failure from the beginning. And finally major US Muslim organizations seem to get it. The Cpuncil on American Islamic Relations, CAIR, has urged the Egyptian government to not uphold [Read More...]
Do Jews, Christians, and Muslims Worship the Same God? Abingdon Press, 2012 (with Baruch Levine, Bruce Chilton, Vincent Cornell, and Martin Marty) This book poses a question that each of the four main authors is obliged to immediately deconstruct and examine. The reason for this examination of the question is aptly introduced in the second [Read More...]
A victory has been won in Santa Monica by those seeking freedom from religion in public. (http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/judge-denies-bid-park-nativity-displays-17762364#.ULIajIX5gnY.) While it is perfectly understandable that some (Christian and atheist) may prefer the considerable beauty of the Palisades Park to be unmarred by any type of display, this may by a pyrrhic victory for atheism. For about 60 [Read More...]
The Qur’an, in Chapter 2, verse 256, states “There is no compulsion in religion” or in some translations “Let there be no compulsion in religion.” This is very different from the Western concept of freedom of religion. The verse from the Qur’an, often cited, raises several questions. First – to whom does it apply? Classically [Read More...]
My last blog got a lot of response from atheists who felt I had misunderstood them, and misunderstood the law. Four things seemed to emerge in their responses (although not all responded in the same way.) I’ll list them and you can check my accuracy: 1. atheism is not a religion. It is the denial [Read More...]
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