The Atheist "Crusade"

I have been hearing from colleagues that their congregants are reading Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens--the writers I think of as "evangelical" atheists. Dawkins and Dennet are scientists, Harris is a "graduate student in neuroscience" but his book takes on history, and Hitchens is a journalist. For these writers, whose books are selling apace, religion is a wholly negative force.
We progressive types are tempted to respond to their critiques by saying that the God they don’t believe in, we don’t believe in either. Their argument with religion holds for traditional religion but not for progressive religion like our own. In other words, our version of religion is "Dawkins-proof."
Unfortunately, I don't think it is quite that simple. All four seem to be saying the religion is unsafe at any speed. Those of us who keep the enterprise going through our updating and reinterpreting are just perpetuating a bad idea along with some bad institutions. So, what do we have to say in response to that?
I plan to write a long entry on this question in response to the arguments from science.I leave it to others to take on the historical arguments. In the meantime, the reviews of Dawkin's, God Delusion , in Harpers, New York Times, and London Review of Books are a good place to begin.

Harpers:

http://darwiniana.com/2006/10/23/marilynne-robinson-on-dawkins/


New York Times:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/22/books/review/Holt.t.html?ex=1319169600&en=d9a0ba69b41f32df&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

London Review of Books:

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n20/print/eagl01_.html

Explaining Jewish Spirituality to Christians

A former student came to me with the following issue. She is involved in planning an interfaith event on the topic of "Spirituality and Disabilities." As a rabbi and a parent of a disabled adult, she has shared her spirituality with her Christian co- planners. With all due respect, the Christians in the group are asking her to explain why she calls what she believes and does "spiritual." Since there is no mention of a personal God, they hear what she is sharing as psychological but not spiritual.

Does anyone have some suggestions for this rabbi?

Muslim Girl

I have not found this magazine at my local newstand yet, but I am intrigued by the mention of interreligious dialogue on the cover(see the upper right corner), the non-hijabi cover model and just about everything else about the existence of this magazine.

A Daily Review of Religion and the Press

I highly recommend that you check frequently www.therevealer.org
or subscribe for a free daily email. This is an amazing resource that comes out of New York University. The editors of the website track a huge array of periodicals to keep track of writing about religion. But more than simply reproducing the article and the link, this website provides original commentary that is often more illuminating than the original article.
Here is how they describe what they do:
The Revealer is a daily review of religion in the news and the news about religion. We're not so much nonpartisan as polypartisan -- interested in all sides, disdainful of dualistic arguments, and enamored of free speech as a first principle. We publish and link to work by people of all persuasions, religious, political, sexual, and critical. We begin with three basic premises:
1. Belief matters, whether or not you believe. Politics, pop culture, high art, NASCAR -- everything in this world is infused with concerns about the next. As journalists, as scholars, and as ordinary folks, we cannot afford to ignore the role of religious belief in shaping our lives.
2. The press all too frequently fails to acknowledge religion, categorizing it as either innocuous spirituality or dangerous fanaticism, when more often it's both and inbetween and just plain other.
3. We deserve and need better coverage of religion: sharper thinking; deeper history; thicker description; basic theology; real storytelling.

A New Breed of Evangelicals?

This New York Times article surveys the landscape. But then check out The Revealer for a different perspective.

May 21, 2007
Emphasis Shifts for New Breed of Evangelicals
By MICHAEL LUO and LAURIE GOODSTEIN
The evangelical Christian movement, which has been pivotal in reshaping the country’s political landscape since the 1980s, has shifted in potentially momentous ways in recent years, broadening its agenda and exposing new fissures.

The death of the Rev. Jerry Falwell last week highlighted the fact that many of the movement’s fiery old guard who helped lead conservative Christians into the embrace of the Republican Party are aging and slowly receding from the scene. In their stead, a new generation of leaders who have mostly avoided the openly partisan and confrontational approach of their forebears have become increasingly influential.

Typified by megachurch pastors like the Rev. Rick Warren of Saddleback Church in Orange County, Calif., and the Rev. Bill Hybels of Willow Creek Community Church outside Chicago, the new breed of evangelical leaders — often to the dismay of those who came before them — are more likely to speak out about more liberal causes like AIDS, Darfur, poverty and global warming than controversial social issues like abortion and same-sex marriage.

But the conservative legacy of the religious right persists, and abortion continues to be a defining issue, even a litmus test, for most evangelicals, including younger ones, according to interviews and survey data.

“The abortion issue is going to continue to be a unifying factor among evangelicals and Catholics,” said the Rev. Leith Anderson, president of the National Association of Evangelicals, who is often held up as an example of the new model of conservative Christian leaders. “That’s not going to go away.”

The persistence of abortion as a core concern for evangelical voters, who continue to represent a broad swath of the Republican base, could complicate efforts by Rudolph W. Giuliani, who has been leading the Republican presidential field in nationwide polls, to get primary voters to move past the issue and accept his support for abortion rights. The broader impact that the changing evangelical leadership may have on politics appears to be just beginning. Many evangelicals remain uneasy about the other leading Republican contenders, Mitt Romney, because of his Mormon faith and his past support for abortion rights, and Senator John McCain of Arizona, who has long had a tenuous relationship with conservative Christians.

The evangelical movement, however, is clearly evolving. Members of the baby boomer generation are taking over the reins, said D. G. Hart, a historian of religion. The boomers, he said, are markedly different in style and temperament from their predecessors and much more animated by social justice and humanitarianism. Most of them are pastors, as opposed to the heads of advocacy groups, making them more reluctant to plunge into politics to avoid alienating diverse congregations.

“I just don’t see in the next generation of so-called evangelical leaders anyone as politically activist-minded” as Mr. Falwell, the Rev. Pat Robertson or James C. Dobson, he said.

Mr. Warren, 53, who wrote the spiritual best seller “The Purpose-Driven Life,” has dedicated much of the past few years to mobilizing evangelicals to eradicate AIDS in Africa. Even so, he remains theologically and socially quite conservative. He tempers the sharper edges of his beliefs with a laid-back style (his usual Sunday best is a Hawaiian shirt). Although he does not speak from the pulpit about politics, he sent a letter before the 2004 presidential election to pastors in a vast network who draw advice from him, urging them to weigh heavily “nonnegotiable” issues like abortion, stem cell research and same-sex marriage from a biblical perspective.

Mr. Warren, along with Mr. Hybels, 55, and several dozen other evangelical leaders, signed a call to action last year on climate change. The initiative brought together more mainstream conservative Christian leaders with prominent liberal evangelicals, such as the Rev. Jim Wallis of Sojourners and the Rev. Ronald J. Sider of Evangelicals for Social Action, who have long championed progressive causes. Notably absent from the list of signatories were several old lions of the Christian right, some of whom were openly critical of the effort: Mr. Falwell; Mr. Robertson, 77; and Mr. Dobson, 71, founder of Focus on the Family.

Another evangelical standard-bearer who did not sign the statement was Charles W. Colson, 75, founder of Prison Fellowship Ministries, who said in an interview that there were many environmental groups behind the statement that were hostile to evangelical causes. Nevertheless, he said he appreciated the direction that younger evangelical leaders are taking the movement.

“What’s happening today is the evangelical movement is growing up,” he said. “The evangelical political conscience today is much more sophisticated than it was in the early ’80s.”

The Rev. Joel C. Hunter, 59, a Florida megachurch pastor who signed the climate change statement, stepped down last year as the president-elect of the Christian Coalition over what he said was resistance among members of the organization’s board to expanding its concerns beyond the usual social issues. He has been active in encouraging evangelicals to speak out on issues like global poverty, and signed on this month to an evangelical declaration on immigration reform that called for a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants. He is critical of the tactics and rhetoric employed by the old religious right.

Despite the changes in the movement, Mr. Hunter predicted that Mr. Giuliani would not garner much of the evangelical vote because of his liberal views on social issues.

“There always will be in the evangelical movement a strong identification with what we call the traditional moral issues — abortion, marriage between a man and a woman, addiction to pornography,” he said.

A poll conducted this year by the Pew Research Center showed that white evangelical Protestants have similar concerns to other Americans, including the war in Iraq, education and the economy, but a far greater percentage continue to cite tackling the “moral breakdown” in society as a key priority. They remain solidly Republican.

“While I think a lot of their leaders have begun to talk about other things, like Darfur and the environment, this remains a pretty social conservative group in some respects,” said Andrew Kohut, president of the Pew Research Center. “There doesn’t seem to me to be any sign of a sea change.”

Indeed, the survey showed that fewer evangelicals assigned top priority to protecting the environment than did the overall population, and that roughly the same number of evangelicals identified alleviating poverty as a top priority as did the general population. Meanwhile, evangelicals identified reducing illegal immigration as a priority at a much greater percentage than the population as a whole.

In a separate survey in 2004, John C. Green, a senior fellow at the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, however, placed evangelicals into three camps — traditionalist, centrist and modernist — based on the how rigidly they adhered to their beliefs and their willingness to adapt them to a changing world. The traditionalists are evangelicals who are usually labeled as the Christian right, while the centrists might be represented by the newer breed of evangelical leaders, who remain socially and theologically quite conservative but have mostly sought to avoid politics. The two camps are roughly the same size, each representing 40 to 50 percent of the total.

Experts agree, though, that the centrist camp is growing. Estimates of the number of evangelicals nationwide vary, depending on how they are counted and how the term is defined, but Mr. Green put it at 26.3 percent of Americans.

The full electoral implications of the shift that is occurring in the movement will likely unfold over the next decade or more, several religious experts and activists said, as opposed to in this next presidential election cycle.

“I think we’re talking about a 20-year effect,” said Andy Crouch, an editor at Christianity Today.

The tremors of change are, nevertheless, detectable, especially among younger evangelicals. Many are intrigued by Senator Barack Obama, Democrat of Illinois, who has demonstrated the ability to speak convincingly about his faith on the campaign trail, as a presidential candidate.

“The person I just hear about all the time is Obama because he is seen as spiritually serious, even if people know he’s really kind of a liberal Christian,” Mr. Crouch said.

Gabe Lyons, 32, is emblematic of the transformation among many younger evangelicals. He grew up in Lynchburg, Va., attending Mr. Falwell’s church. But he has shied away from politics. Instead, he heads the Fermi Project, a loose “collective” dedicated to teaching evangelicals to shape culture through other means, including media and the arts.

“I believe politics just isn’t as important to younger evangelicals as it has been for the older generations because we recognize from experience that politics does not shape the morality of a culture,” he said. “It simply reflects what the larger culture wants.”

There are other signs of attitude changes among younger evangelicals. Recent surveys conducted by the Barna Group show that younger “born again” Christians are more accepting of homosexuality than older ones and are less resistant to affording gays equal rights. But on abortion, they remain almost as conservative as their parents — more fodder for both political parties to weigh as they consider the future.

Aliens in America: A New Sitcom this Fall

Here is something to keep your eye on! Canadian Broadcasting Company has had a comedy running this year, Little Mosque on the Prairie, with great success. Let's see what American T.V. has come up with and how Americans react.


July 1, 2007
Television
Did You Order a Muslim? (Yuk Yuk)
By EDWARD WYATT
THE NEW YORK TIMES

THERE are countless ways for a new television comedy to fail: The pilot bombs with focus groups, the series is shoved into an undesirable time slot, an actor begs off at the last minute. “Aliens in America,” a new sitcom scheduled to have its premiere on the CW network in the fall, has dodged most of these bullets.

The series, about an all-American family in Wisconsin that takes in a foreign exchange student as a way to bolster their geeky son’s popularity, has gone through two networks, two production studios and a pilot episode that sat on the shelf for a year.

Now it is one of the more anticipated new shows of the coming season. During the networks’ recent presentations to advertisers of the new fall line-ups, a promotional clip of “Aliens in America” received a better reception than nearly all of the comedies screened by NBC, ABC, CBS and Fox.

While the show could still fail, that it is around at all can be credited to the persistence of its creators, David Guarascio and Moses Port, and the faith of Dawn Ostroff, the president for entertainment at the CW.

“We needed people who totally believed in it to give it a chance,” Mr. Guarascio said recently. “When you shoot a show that you really love, and it comes out the way you wanted it to, and a network wants to put it on the air, to have it put on the shelf for a year can lead to an existential crisis.”

The story began in fall 2005 when Mr. Guarascio and Mr. Port first pitched the idea to NBC. The premise certainly had comic potential and was topical: The family, the Tolchuks, are surprised to find their exchange student arriving from London is Raja, a Pakistani Muslim who changed planes in Britain. On his first day at school the teacher asks the class how many of them are mad at Raja because, as one student puts it, “his people flew the planes into the buildings in New York.”...

The new series has not met with universal acclaim. The previews being shown on the CW Web site, cwtv.com, have drawn criticism on the Internet saying the program perpetuates negative stereotypes of Muslims — not to mention of the clueless American Midwesterners — and that it conflates numerous, distinct Middle Eastern and South Asian cultures. But its creators say the subjects touched on by “Aliens in America” are ones that are familiar to the CW’s target audience.

“So often people feel alienated in their own community, in their school, or in their family or culture,” he said. “But we wanted to show something positive about that, where if you can just push past the differences on the surface of two people, you can find that there is so much that is similar going on with you.”

The Pope, Richard Dawkins, and More

Today's Boston Globe has a piece by James Carroll in which he critiques the pope , along with Dawkins,Harris, et al as sharing the same fallacies in their thinking about religion.


Pope Benedict's mistake
By James Carroll | July 16, 2007
The Boston Globe

WHEN THE likes of Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, or Christopher Hitchens, citing insights of science or the rise of sectarian violence, denounce the very idea of God, fundamentalists strike back by attacking pillars on which such modern criticism stands. In this mode, Pope Benedict XVI last week issued two unexpected decrees, restoring the atavistic Mass of the Council of Trent and resuscitating an outmoded Catholic exclusivism -- the notion of a pope-centered Catholicism as the only authentic way to God.

In these reactionary initiatives, Pope Benedict inadvertently shows that he shares a basic conviction with Dawkins et al. -- that religion is a primitive impulse, unable to withstand the challenge of contemporary thought.

Yet, instead of feeling intimidated by secular or "scientific" criticisms of religion, a believer can insist that faith in God is a fulfillment of all that fully modern people affirm when they assent to science -- or object to violence. At the same time, a believer can advance the Dawkins-Harris-Hitchens critique to say that most articulations of traditional religion of all stripes fall far short of doing "God" justice.

The God whom atheists aggressively deny (the all-powerful, all-knowing, unmoved Mover; the God of damnation, supernatural intervention, salvation-through-appeasement, patriarchy, puritanism, war, etc.) is indeed the God enshrined in propositions of the Council of Trent, and in its liturgy. But this God is also one whom more and more believers, including Catholics, simply do not recognize as the God we worship.

Such people regard the fact that God is unknowable as the most important thing to know about God. Traditional propositions of the creed, therefore, must be affirmed neither rigidly nor as if they are meaningless, but with thoughtful modesty about all religious language, allowing for doubt, as well as respect for different creeds -- and for no creed.

This is not an entirely new way of being religious. One sees hints of it in the wisdom of many thinkers, from Augustine in ancient times to Nicholas of Cusa in the Renaissance to Kierkegaard in the modern era. But, in fact, the contemporary religious imagination has been transformed by understanding born of science. Once a believer has learned to think historically and critically, it is impossible any longer to think mythically.

Pope Benedict, in last week's denigration of Christian traditions that lack the unbroken "apostolic succession" of Catholicism, for example, was seeking to protect the "deposit of faith," those core beliefs that were established by the Apostles themselves. But such literalist reading of apostolic succession goes out the window when one learns that none of the actual Apostles thought that they themselves were establishing a "church" in our sense, independent of Judaism. Similarly, the New Testament is "inspired," but what does that mean for appeals to "apostolic" authority when one learns that its 27 books were not "canonized" until three centuries after Jesus?

Once we realize that doctrines of orthodoxy evolved over time, we stop treating them as timeless. Indeed, once we understand ourselves as belonging to one religious tradition among many, we lose the innocent ability to regard it as absolute. Once our internal geography recognizes that, however much we are a center, we are not the only one, we have no choice but to affirm the positions of others not as "marginal to our centers," in a phrase of theologian David Tracy, "but as centers of their own."

Faced with such difficult recognitions, religious people can retreat into fundamentalism or throw out religious faith altogether. Or we can quite deliberately embrace what the philosopher Paul Ricoeur called a "second naiveté." This implies a movement through criticism to a renewed appetite for the sacred tradition out of which we come, even while implying that we are alive to its meaning in a radically different way. Pope Benedict is attempting to restore, by fiat, the first naiveté of "one true church." In an age of global pluralism, this is simply not tenable.

The Council of Trent, whose Mass and theology (including its anti-Judaism) Benedict wants to re establish, was summoned about the time Copernicus published his "On the Revolutions of Heavenly Bodies" -- the beginning of the scientific age. The Roman Catholic Church made a terrible mistake in rejecting Copernicus, one from which it has only lately been recovering. Pope Benedict is repeating that mistake, as Dawkins and company think religious people are bound to do. But believers need not follow. Indeed, many of us, including Catholics, have moved on from such thinking, if you can call it thinking.

James Carroll's column appears regularly in the Globe.


© Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

A Video of the Philadelphia Interfaith Peace Walk

YouTube - Broadcast Yourself.

Some Good News from Britain

The Jewish school where half the pupils are Muslim

The Independent

http://education.independent.co.uk/schools/article2201860.ece

King David, in Birmingham, is a state primary where the children learn Hebrew, recite Jewish prayers, eat kosher food and wave Israeli flags. So how come the majority of pupils are followers of Islam? Jonathan Margolis investigates
Published: 01 February 2007
The Jewish school where half the pupils are Muslim
It's infant prize day at King David School, a state primary in Moseley, Birmingham. The children sit cross-legged on the floor, their parents fiddling with their video cameras. The head, Steve Langford, is wearing a Sesame Street tie.
A typical end-of-term school event, then. But at King David there's a twist that gives it a claim to be one of the most extraordinary schools in the country: King David is a strictly Jewish school. Judaism is the only religion taught. There's a synagogue on site. The children learn modern Hebrew - Ivrit - the language of Israel. And they celebrate Israeli independence day.
But half the 247 pupils at the 40-year-old local authority-supported school are Muslim, and apparently the Muslim parents go through all sorts of hoops, including moving into the school's catchment area, to get their children into King David to learn Hebrew, wave Israeli flags on independence day and hang out with the people some would have us believe that they hate more than anyone in the world.
The Muslim parents, mostly devout and many of the women wearing the hijab, say they love the ethos of the school, and even the kosher school lunches, which are suitable because halal and kosher dietary rules are virtually identical. The school is also respectful to Islam, setting aside a prayer room for the children and supplying Muslim teachers during Ramadan. At Eid, the Muslim children are wished Eid Mubarak in assembly, and all year round, if they wish, can wear a kufi (hat). Amazingly, dozens of the Muslim children choose instead to wear the Jewish kipah.
At the prize morning Carol Cooper, the RE teacher, says: "Boker tov," (Ivrit for "Good morning").
"Good morning Mrs Cooper," the children chant in reply. The entire school, Muslims, Jews, plus the handful of Christians and Sikhs then say the Shema, the holiest Jewish prayer, all together.
The Year Four violin club (five Muslims, two Jews) play "Little Bird, I Have Heard". Just as many prizes are being distributed to Hussains and Hassans and Shabinas as there are to Sauls and Rebeccas and Ruths. In fact, if anything, the Muslim children have beaten the Jewish ones. Thus does the Elsie Davis Prize for Progress go to a beaming little lad called Walid, the religious studies prize to a boy called Imran wearing a kipah and the progress prizes for Hebrew, to a boy called Habib and a girl called Alia.
Times being as they are, King David doesn't advertise its presence in a city where its pioneering multiculturalism could raise all kinds of unwelcome attention. There's a discreet signboard outside that reveals little about the school's unique nature. There are watchful video cameras high up on the walls, plus two electronic gates to pass through. Sadly, it is, to a significant extent, says Laurence Sharman, the (Christian) chairman of the PTA, "an undercover school".
The Muslim parents, however, are only too keen to talk in the playground about what might be seen by some in their communities as a controversial schooling decision.
"We actually bought a flat in the catchment area for the children to come here," says Nahid Shafiq, the mother of Zainah, four, and Hamza, nine, and wife of Mohammed, a taxi driver. "We were attracted by the high moral values of the school, and that's what we wanted our kids to have. None of us has any problem with it being a Jewish school. Why on earth should we? Our similarities as religions and cultures are far greater and more important than our differences. It's not even an issue.
"At the mosque, occasionally, people ask why we send the children here, but there is no antagonism whatsoever, and neither is there from anyone in our family. In fact, it was a big family decision to try and get them into King David. This is the real world. This is the way real people do things in the real world. All the violence and prejudice and problems - that's not real, that's just what you see on the news."
Fawzia Ismail (the mother of Aly-Raza, nine, and Aliah, six) is equally positive. "My nephew came here and my brother showed me the school, so it's a bit of a family tradition now. We're very, very pleased with the school. It's so friendly. All the kids mix and go to one another's parties and are in and out of each other's houses. They teach a bit about Israel, but we don't have any problem with that. There are such similarities between our people and our societies."
Irum Rashid (mother of Hanan, nine, and Maryam, four) says that a lot of people in Small Heath are considering moving to Moseley because of King David. "It's a very happy school, the behaviour is fantastic, the food is great - because it's kosher - and so are the SATs results."
But what about learning Hebrew and the Jewish prayers? "I think it's great. The more knowledge, the more understanding," says one of the mothers. "They learn all they need about Islam at mosque school. Actually, the kids often sing Hebrew songs in the bath, which is a bit confusing because we speak Gujarati at home, but I think it's great."
The Jewish parents and teachers I speak to are just as enthusiastic. "You know, in these difficult times in the world, I think we show how things should be done. It's really a bit of a beacon," says one teacher, whose three children all went to King David and ended up at Oxford University.
Parent Trevor Aremband is from South Africa. "In Johannesburg, we have Jewish schools, but they're 100 per cent Jewish, so we were a bit shocked when we first came here. But the integration works so well. It's clearly the way to go in today's world. My son is eight and has loads of Muslim friends."
The most important thing, I am told repeatedly, is that the cross-cultural friendships forged at King David last a lifetime. I hear a conversation about how a Rebecca is going to fly over from the States for a Fatima's wedding. I am told about a pair of lads, one Jewish, one Muslim, who became friends the day they started in the nursery, went to senior school together as well as to university and are now living close to one another with their wives and families and are currently on holiday together.
King David was not designed to be such a beacon of inter-faith cooperation and friendship. Founded in 1865 as The Hebrew School, it was 100 per cent Jewish until the late 1950s.
Then two things began to happen: there was a growth in the Muslim population in middle-income areas such as Moseley, and a shrinking of Britain's Jewish community, especially outside the main centres of London and Manchester. Muslim children started coming to the school in the early 1960s, but the current position, in which they are in the majority (Jewish children comprise 35 per cent, Muslims 50 per cent, Christians, Sikhs and other, 15 per cent) is very new.
"One of the things that surprises people about this school," says Langford, "is that it's not an especially privileged intake. Half of our kids have English as an additional language. But the amazing thing is how well it all works. We have a new little boy here from China, whose only English a few weeks ago was to ask for the toilet. He now speaks English - and can say the Shema perfectly.
"If you gauge success, for instance, by racial incidents, which schools always have to report to the LEA, we have at the most one a term. And that can just mean some harsh words with a racial slant used in the playground. At multicultural inner city schools where I've taught, there will be far, far more than that, possibly one or more a week."
In terms of SATs and Ofsted inspections, King David has also shone. It is rated as good - the second highest possible ranking - in all areas, and Ofsted made a special mention at the last inspection of the integration between children of different faiths and races. In the recent SATs results, the school also came in well above the national average in all subjects.
Steve Langford, a Warwick University economics graduate, is himself a bit of a paradox. He is Church of England on both parental sides and only became interested in Judaism when he worked in a Jewish summer camp in Massachusetts in his gap year. His interest paid off when he got a teaching job a King David. Now he is learning Ivrit at evening classes and goes to Israel for holidays.
The Rabbi of Birmingham's Singers Hill Synagogue, one of the financial backers of King David, is proud of Steve Langford and of the school's extraordinary interfaith record.
"King David School is amazing," says Rabbi Tann. "The reason I think it works well is that racism is engendered entirely by adults. Children don't have it within themselves. Their natural mode is to play happily with everyone. It's only when adults say, 'Don't play with him, he's black, or don't have anything to do with him, he's Muslim, that troubles begin.'
"We never have any racial or inter-faith problems at all. Not ever. In 20 years here, it's simply never happened in any significant way. We teach that if you don't like someone, you avoid them. Don't play with them. Go to the other side of the playground. I believe that if more people followed the lead of King David School, we'd have a much more peaceful world."

Philadelphia Interfaith Group and New Orleans Church

Here is one of those inspiring stories that keep us going when things are looking dark.

Back to New Orleans for a Restored Gabriel
From: The Philadelphia Inquirer Date: 5/20/2007

May 20--Strangest of all was the silence.
"No people. No dogs. Not even birds," the Rev. Doug Doussan recalled the other day. "Just gray mud, everywhere."
The floods of Hurricane Katrina had destroyed the interior of his New Orleans church, buried his parishioners' homes under water, and claimed little Gabriel, their angelic trumpet player.
Doussan, a Catholic priest, found Gabriel facedown in the sanctuary, swollen and discolored after weeks floating in the floodwater.
But thanks to the members of a Manayunk synagogue and their friends who took him under their wing -- and then lost his wings -- Gabriel is on his feet again.
Trumpet in hands, new wings in place, he's cleaned up and heading home to New Orleans.
"This statue was a treasure to us," said Doussan, pastor of St. Gabriel the Archangel parish in that city's devastated Ninth Ward.
Today, Doussan is due to step before Congregation Mishkan Shalom at 4101 Freeland St. to see for the first time what his Philadelphia friends have wrought on his young trumpeter, the herald of good news.
"The statue coming back to us restored is like the parish being restored, like the homes and the lives of our people being restored," Doussan said.
"That's the good news."
Today's 1 p.m. event is open to the public and will solicit funds for home repairs in and around St. Gabriel's parish. Doussan will also deliver today's homily at St. Vincent's 9 a.m. Mass.
Gabriel's improbable journey began last summer, a few weeks after 27 volunteers from Philadelphia's Interfaith Community Building Group headed south to clean out the rot and mold left by Katrina (no saint, she) and hang doors and install drywall in New Orleans' middle-class, African American neighborhood of Gentilly.
A volunteer force formed in 1996 to rebuild arson-damaged churches in Mississippi, ICBG's members hail largely from Mishkan Shalom and St. Vincent's R.C. parish in Germantown. They have been doing summer construction projects for worthy causes ever since.
On arriving in Gentilly in July, some congregants began cleaning and restoring houses. Others turned their attention to St. Gabriel's church, and by week's end had restored much of its sanctuary walls.
That should have been the end of it: a farewell supper, hugs and handshakes, and home to Philadelphia.
But no.
"Do you think you could fix Gabriel?" asked Doussan.
Carved 40 years ago in Ortesi, Italy, Gabriel's serene, adolescent face and slender torso showed half-inch splits along multiple joints. His hands were separated from his wrists. His trumpet was broken and copper-green. Paint was faded and flaked across the front.
It was a sorry state for the divine messenger, who in Jewish tradition told Daniel of a coming messiah, in Christian lore told Mary she was pregnant with Jesus, and in Islamic tradition dictated the Koran to Muhammad.
"We had no idea what it would take," recalled furniture-maker Peter Handler, a member of Mishkan Shalom and builder of the synagogue's Torah ark. "But we said, 'If you can get him up to us, we'll restore it.' "
Hugs and handshakes followed, the ICBG people headed home, and a month later the parish handed five-foot Gabriel over to a moving truck bound, they thought, for Philadelphia.
But the truck turned west, stopping many times before lumbering into Dallas. Then, Handler got "the call."
"It was the trucking company, very embarrassed, saying they had lost the wings," he recalled last week.
Arched dramatically above the shoulders and flaring out at the waist, each wing was removable and had been packed separately from the torso.
Handler, who had recommended the movers, was aghast, but told them to ship the statue to Philadelphia anyway. After the insurance claim settled in December, he called on Leon Zakurdayev, a Russian-born (and Russian Orthodox) sculptor and antiques restorer in the Northeast, to return their saint to glory.
Zakurdayev showed Handler and Brenman how to fill Gabriel's cracks with basswood strips and sawdust glue, and then turned to making new wings.
It would take two months.
"Each wing has to have its own personality," he explained last week. "If you make them mirrorlike, it would appear like machine work."
Working with color photos and an angel statuette, he and his wife, Svetlana, modeled the new wings on the originals while adding much more detail, carving hundreds of individual feathers and making the effect "more feminine," like the long-haired archangel.
After Haddonfield woodworker Philip Hauser made them a new trumpet, Handler and Brenman reattached the hands, and on April 20 turned young Gabriel over to Chestnut Hill artist Kathy Winter for painting.
"He looked like he had scars on him" from the filled-in cracks, Winter said last week, as she stepped into her studio on West Meade Lane. There, on a cream-colored cloud, stood the chestnut-haired angel, gazing Earthward, horn to lips, wings flared.
Winter chose a reddish ochre for the wings "for a stained-wood look," she said, and olive-gold for the robe "to harmonize with the horn."
Her husband, Joseph Winter, a retired sculptor-engraver for the U.S. Mint, had leafed the new trumpet in 24-karat gold.
"It's going to be hard to give him back," said Handler, who retrieved Gabriel from the Winters' studio Thursday.
"But we have a shared community now, relationships that will endure" across the 1,200 miles separating Manayunk from Chantilly.
"We're even thinking of asking Father Doug," he joked, "to be our rabbi."

Books to Get Started

People often ask me for good basic texts to begin to understand the field of interfaith education. I suggest Judith A. Berling, Understanding Other World Religions(Orbis, 2004)and Sandmel, Catalano and Leighton, Irreconcilable Differences?(Westview,2001). Going a bit further, one might want to check out David Coppola, What do we Want the Other to Teach about Us?(Sacred Heart, 2006)

A multifaith calendar

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/religion/Multifaith_Calendar2007.html#July-2007