Getting Religion Right After 9/11
Ten years ago, Islamic terrorists murdered thousands of Americans in a Pearl Harbor-like attack undertaken in the name of Islam. Over the past decade, there has been much discussion and debate over the role of Islam in contemporary terrorism. More broadly, scholars, religious leaders and others have thought about how Muslims, Jews, and Christians can work for peace among themselves, and use resources within their own traditions to marginalize radicals of all faiths who advocate for interreligious conflict.
Where does interfaith peacemaking stand today? Just days before the 10th anniversary of 9/11, activists from all three Abrahamic traditions gathered at Georgetown University's Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs for a three-day conference titled "Liberty and Tolerance in an Age of Religious Conflict." Calvin College's Nagel Institute for the Study of World Christianity co-sponsored the event, which was funded by a grant from the John Templeton Foundation.
Kelly Clark, a Calvin College philosophy professor and the conference organizer, said that 9/11 made it more difficult for Jews, Christians, and Muslims to speak to each other across religious boundaries—but also demonstrated why it's necessary.
"We wanted to call attention to the fact that Muslims, Christians, and Jews can work together for peace," he said. "9/11 was polarizing. It forces us to listen to one another, which we don't do often, but it also shows us why that's crucial."
Yale University philosopher emeritus Nicholas Wolterstorff, a Christian, began the conference with a September 8 keynote address arguing that because human beings are "icons" of God, to be religiously intolerant is to affront God.
"No matter how much one may dislike the religion of the other person, she nonetheless bears the image of God and is on that account beloved of God," Wolterstorff contended. "To treat her with intolerance is to wrong her. To wrong her is to wrong God. If we believed this, and believed it firmly, we would be much more reluctant than we are to treat someone with intolerance."
The next day, international lawyer and Muslim activist Hedieh Mirahmadi drew on the Qur'an and other historical Islamic sources to make a case that Islam is far more open and tolerant than contemporary Muslim fundamentalists claim.
|
|
|
| Photo by WILLIAM ARCHIE/Detroit Free Press |
|
| Interfaith leaders join hands in unity |
|
"The hard-line Islamists today are making up a different faith," she said, adding later her frustration that "many moderate Muslims are afraid to challenge the extremists."
Aziz Abu Sarah, a Jerusalem-born Palestinian who now works at George Mason University to improve cross-cultural relations, told conferees that too often, interfaith gatherings involve participants tiptoeing delicately around each other's sensibilities, trying to avoid offense.
"We have to be honest and we have to be open" if we want to make real progress, he said. For this reason, he said, everyone has to be willing to allow their opponents to ask questions that could seem offensive or insensitive.
The willingness of all sides to engage in self-criticism is also a key to peace, said Orthodox Jewish activist Leah Shakdiel. "If it is evil, we have to spell it out," she said. "This is a very Jewish principle."
Rabbi Arik Ascherman warned against taking false comfort in the belief that those who argue that preaching intolerance in the name of one's religion amounts to a theological hijacking. As much as he would like to believe that Jewish extremists get their theology wrong, the rabbi said, those people "can also quote chapter and verse to show that they also have authentic sources."
It's easy for those working on the front lines of interreligious conflict to focus on what the other side is not doing to address its culpability for violence and hatred. "We are so concerned with our victimhood that we get furious when anyone says we are a victimizer," he said. In truth, everyone can be both.
Along those lines, Ascherman said, if we want to encourage good people among our opponents to stand up to hateful elements within their own community, we should set an example by holding our own co-religionists to account. According to the rabbi, only Jewish peacemakers can empower Palestinian peacemakers—and vice versa.
To humble oneself enough to listen to and respect others is a vital element in spiritual progress, Sir John Templeton believed. Though himself a professing Christian, Sir John held that humility was not only a moral virtue, but an epistemological strategy. Writing about the need to be open to other religious perspectives, Sir John opined, "If you are not egotistical, you will welcome the opportunity to learn more."
And, as conference organizer Kelly Clark said, not simply learning more, but acting on that new knowledge. After 9/11, Clark felt a personal urgency to take interreligious dialogue and the quest for peace out of the university and into the real world. "It couldn't be something I could just sit around thinking about," he said. "It was something I had to do."
Ten Things Everyone Should Know About Time
|
|
|
Darren Tunnicliff/Flickr Images |
In late summer, Caltech physicist Sean Carroll participated in an all-star multidisciplinary conference on the nature of time. Sponsored by the Templeton-funded Foundational Questions Institute the "Setting Time Aright" conference brought top scientists and researchers from around the world to Scandinavia for an event Carroll described as "amazingly intense and rewarding." On his Discover magazine blog, Carroll posted "Ten Things Everyone Should Know About Time," a list he compiled after hearing conference lectures. Carroll's post became a smash viral hit on the Internet. Among his observations:
The past and future are equally real. This isn't completely accepted, but it should be. Intuitively we think that the "now" is real, while the past is fixed and in the books, and the future hasn't yet occurred. But physics teaches us something remarkable: every event in the past and future is implicit in the current moment. This is hard to see in our everyday lives, since we're nowhere close to knowing everything about the universe at any moment, nor will we ever be—but the equations don't lie. As Einstein put it, "It appears therefore more natural to think of physical reality as a four dimensional existence, instead of, as hitherto, the evolution of a three dimensional existence."
Polkinghorne's Quantum Leap
Retired Cambridge University particle physicist Sir John Polkinghorne is one of the best-known and most beloved participants in the global dialogue between science and religion. The 2002 Templeton Prize winner and former Master of Queens College brings his expertise as one of the world's leading scientists to the discussion, as well as his insight as an ordained Anglican priest. In the just-published Quantum Leap: How John Polkinghorne Found God in Science and Religion (Monarch), biographers Dean Nelson and Karl Giberson explore the big questions that have animated Polkinghorne's intellectual and spiritual quest.
"How do we know what 'Truth' is? How does a leading scientist think about the more mysterious aspects of faith—prayer, miracles, life after death, resurrection? How should people of faith approach science, especially when new scientific discoveries appear to contradict their religious beliefs?" Nelson and Giberson write. "It is in telling the story of John Polkinghorne that we manage to grapple with these questions."
In a recent Huffington Post essay on Polkinghorne, Giberson touched upon the priest-physicist's appreciation of subjective aspects of objective facts:
As a mathematical physicist, he appreciated the deep mystery of a world that could be described by equations. But he also understood that the full grandeur of that world was not captured by its equations—that every insight was something of over-simplification. "Facts always come with interpretation," he says. He notes that astronomers at the time of Galileo all had the same facts, and yet only some of them were convinced that the earth moved. Scientific conclusions are not simple summaries of our observations.
Polkinghorne himself is a prolific author and speaker on these topics. The Cambridge-based Faraday Institute for Science and Religion hosts an online archive of free video lectures by Polkinghorne on topics in science and religion. Both the writing of Quantum Leap and the work of the Faraday Institute are supported by grants from the John Templeton Foundation.
