Immigration Issues Touch Many Denominations
By Bob Smietana via USA TODAY The Bible tells its readers to obey the law, but it also tells them to welcome strangers and foreigners. That has left some Christians divided over the issue of immigration reform. Members of Clergy for Tolerance, based here, say new immigration laws have to mix justice with compassion. But supporters of measures such as Alabama’s say the Bible teaches that the government’s job is to enforce the law, and those who break it should be punished. The American Center for Law and Justice, a Christian legal group, filed a brief in federal court supporting the Alabama law. That measure, which the Obama administration is challenging, prohibits undocumented immigrants from entering into “business transactions” with the state, requires police to check immigration status during traffic stops and makes it a crime for U.S. citizens to knowingly assist undocumented immigrants. “The whole heart of the Gospel is in Matthew 25, where Jesus said, ‘I was a stranger and you welcomed me,’ ” said Randy Hoover-Dempsey, pastor of All Saints Episcopal Church in Smyrna, Tenn., whose congregation includes about 200 Burmese immigrants. More… | | There is No Such Thing as a Monoculture
By Justin Neuman via SSRC “We develop in multi-cultural and multi-religious societies. To say this is to state the obvious. There is no religiously homogeneous society.” Akeel Bilgrami has invited commentary on his recent working paper about the nature and relevance of secularism in which he advances a central thesis that begins with the conditional phrase, “Should we be living in a religiously plural society.” In this post, I offer a response to his thesis convinced, like Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran, author of the quotation with which I began, that there is no such thing as a modern religious monoculture. As president of the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue, the apparatus of the Catholic Church established after Vatican II to serve as the site of engagement with the followers of other religious traditions, Jean-Louis Tauran has something of a professional commitment to pluralism as an ontological category. Tauran gave his 2008 speech on the necessity of cultivating channels of interreligious dialogue at a time when the stock of interreligious dialogue was clearly on the rise. More… | | Religion and Social Media
By Kim Lawton via PBS KIM LAWTON, correspondent: On any given weekend, some 15,000 people worship with the evangelical Northland Church, but about a third of them never set foot in the building here in Longwood, Florida. They’re worshiping online via the Web and Facebook and Smartphones. MARTY TAYLOR (Northland Church, Director of Media Design): We call ourselves a church distributed because we don’t want to be confined to this space. We want to be everywhere, every day, and technology is a great tool for us to be able to do that. LAWTON: On site, worship leaders always welcome the online participants. On this Sunday that includes a small gathering at a nearby prison and people from as far away as Japan. As the main service progresses, online minister Nathan Clark connects with his virtual flock. NATHAN CLARK (Northland Church, Online Minister): I provide pastoral care. I provide direction and really help them connect to other people around them as well, ultimately to connect them to God while they are in the worship environment. More… | | How Can Skeptics Make Convincing Religious Art?
Rarely have I seen a spectacle so disheartening as the cheerless, trash-strewn one-room flat that serves as the set for the Roundabout Theatre Company’s off-Broadway revival of John Osborne’s “Look Back in Anger.” In this production, reviewed elsewhere in today’s Journal, the only hint of beauty comes from the radio on which the play’s unhappy characters listen to Ralph Vaughan Williams’s radiant Fifth Symphony. Small wonder that it should offer them a glimpse of comfort and joy in the midst of their emotional turmoil. Like so much of Vaughan Williams’s music, the Fifth Symphony, which was composed during World War II, is deeply spiritual in tone, and it’s no surprise to learn that it was based on themes from his operatic version of “The Pilgrim’s Progress.” Here’s the surprise: Vaughan Williams was a lifelong agnostic. Now that the boutique atheism of such aggressive secularists as Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens has become chic, you might well ask yourself why any unbelieving artist would bother to turn his hand to the making of religious art. Indeed, most of the modern novelists who have placed matters of faith at the center of their work have been, like Graham Greene, C.S. Lewis, François Mauriac and Flannery O’Connor, believers of one sort or another. But in every other branch of art, great works of devotional art have been created by skeptics, not a few of whom were fire-breathingly militant about their doubt. More… | |
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