Religion Dispatches
“The central problem interfaith work seeks to solve is this: how are all of us, with our deep differences, to share a nation and a world together? In my view, that is primarily a question of civic space, not political ideology.”
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“We made it exceedingly easy for the Governor’s staff to find us and include us, but they chose not to do so. The exclusion of non-theists today no doubt deepened the hurt the people in the non-theist community are feeling. What principle was served by our exclusion, I don’t begin to understand.”
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This month at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, a select group of students will show their humanitarian spirit by participating in the Bleedin’ Heathens Blood Drive. Later in the month, they will eat cake to celebrate Darwin Day, and earlier this year, they performed “de-baptism” ceremonies to celebrate Blasphemy Day, attended a War on Christmas Party, and set up Hug An Atheist and Ask An Atheist booths in the campus quad.
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Dialogue between atheists and the religious is an absolute minefield. I can promise you there are no kumbaya drum circles in this book—if that’s your thing, great, but it isn’t mine, and it doesn’t have to be your thing to get involved in efforts that promote religious pluralism.
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There’s been a lot of talk in the American atheist movement about social justice, but why doesn’t it include justice for religious minorities like Muslims and Sikhs?
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We may never know what triggered Wade Michael Page’s rage on that Sunday morning at the Sikh gurdwara in Oak Creek, Wisconsin. What we do know is that Sikhism can be a profound source of human healing in the wake of tragedy.
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It its efforts to support the Palestinian cause, the Kairos USA statement cherrypicks from the Bible and winds up in some old and discomfiting territory.
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John Hick, a celebrated theologian and philosopher who died earlier this year, was drawn to issues that transcend any particular tradition—the question of evil, the meaning of suffering, life after death, and religious diversity.
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A new book shows how a cohort of Protestants, Catholics, and Jews altered the nation; from the Social Gospel movement through anti-Communism, Civil Rights and even into the rise of the religious right.
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The atheist and the interfaith movements actually share a common point of origin: they both started, in part, as a reaction to religious extremism. Much like the atheist movement, the interfaith movement seeks to build inter-group understanding, encourage critical thinking, and end religiously-based sociological and political exclusivism. The fundamental misunderstanding that many atheists have is that they imagine the interfaith movement as disinterested in combating religious totalitarianism and solely existing to maintain religious privilege—as an excuse to show that religion, in its many diverse forms, has a monopoly on morality—but that couldn’t be further from the truth.
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