Islam-Muslims

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Local news? Tricycle's Western Buddhism essay shows how religions adapt to new environs

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Local news? Tricycle's Western Buddhism essay shows how religions adapt to new environs

Religions evolve and accommodate as they migrate around the globe. What works in one time and place may not in another for a host of cultural and political reasons, forcing adjustments that facilitate their establishment or survival.

Historical examples abound. Not the least of which are the monumental transformations that occurred within early Christianity as it migrated across the Roman world from the Levant, and within early Islam as it spread from the Arabian Peninsula west to the Atlantic coast and east across Asia.

Here are two more recent examples of religious accommodation.

The first occurred in the late 19th Century when the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints made a corporate decision to jettison its public practice of polygamous marriage to smooth the way for Utah’s full acceptance into the expanding United States. This despite plural marriage remaining part of the church’s scriptural doctrine to this day. The practice, though illegal under secular law, is still followed by some breakaway Mormon sects.

The second example was the melding of Roman Catholicism and West African tribal beliefs in the Caribbean and South America by Black slaves and their descendants. This gave rise to syncretic faiths such as Santeria and Voodoo. They persist today side by side with the church in ways that would scandalize the hierarchy, were it happening on a similar scale in the United States.

It’s not unusual for Mass-going Cuban, Haitian and Brazilian Catholics to also draw meaning from West African-derived rituals that to outsiders might appear hard to reconcile with core church beliefs.

A contemporary religious travel story is the Westernization of Asian Buddhism. Tricycle, a leading American Buddhist publication, deconstructed the phenomenon in its Spring 2021 issue.

The piece is well worth the time of journalists interested in moving beyond today’s often superficial religion headlines. To understand a group’s sociology is to better understand why members act as they do in the public square, journalism’s primary purview.

I suggest you view the Tricycle essay — which weighs in at more than 3,600 words — as a sort of crash course in the adaptation of religions to new circumstances. This will help reporters spot stories in the communities served by their newsrooms.


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Hey journalists: Can you name three or more Ramadan news angles linked to COVID-19 vaccines?

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Hey journalists: Can you name three or more Ramadan news angles linked to COVID-19 vaccines?

I don’t mind admitting it. I thought I had read just about every religion-angle COVID-19 vaccine story that there was to read (and I say that just before heading out the door to drive deep into the Cumberland Mountains to get shot No. 1 at a small-county health clinic).

The Detroit Free Press published a long, long story the other day that certainly proved me wrong on that. The headline: “Vaccine-mobile brings COVID-19 shots to Dearborn mosque, helping to convince the hesitant.”

The key to the story was mentioned in an email from the GetReligion reader who (thank you readers who take the time to do this kind of thing) sent us the URL for this story. Here is part of her note:

What I really liked about this article was the way it presented vaccine concerns of the Metro Detroit Muslim community in the context of how the mosque met those concerns. Some of the concerns are unique to the Muslim community (such as the relationship of vaccination to the Ramadan fast) and others are more broad, but the article shows how this religious community is addressing them. The article quotes a variety of actual community members, which I always appreciate.

The Ramadan angle?

That’s the connection that I admit had not occurred to me. The key is explaining the specific link between the strict rules of the Ramadan fast and the simple act of getting a shot of vaccine. We are not talking, at this point, about conspiracy theory talk about the vaccine formulas containing traces of pork.

Here is the crucial part of the story, quoting Mirvat Kadouh, vice chair of the Islamic Center of America's Board of Trustees.

"We are trying to vaccinate as many people as we can before Ramadan," Kadouh said early Monday morning, spreading a plastic tablecloth over a folding table in a large conference room, where the Islamic Center's first COVID-19 vaccine clinic was about to begin.


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Christians, Jews, Muslims and lobbyists left and right fret over SCOTUS 'donor privacy' case  

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Christians, Jews, Muslims and lobbyists left and right fret over SCOTUS 'donor privacy' case  

What cause could ever possibly unite Christian Right activists, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the Zionist Organization, "pro-family," "pro-life," "pro-choice" and gun-rights lobbies, Mitch McConnell, the American Civil Liberties Union, Chamber of Commerce, Judicial Watch, NAACP, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, Planned Parenthood, Southern Poverty Law Center, Columbia University's First Amendment institute and religious-liberty advocates?

Answer: These and many more are allied in the Americans for Prosperity Foundation v. Becerra case (#19-251), which the U.S. Supreme Court put on its upcoming docket January 8.

Yes, that Becerra is Xavier, as in President Biden's controversial pick for secretary of Health and Human Services, acting in his previous role as California's attorney general. Moreover, this situation implicates the track record of his predecessor as A.G., Kamala Harris — now U.S. vice president and a major 2024 presidential prospect.

At issue is "donor privacy." Non-profit groups cannot operate or raise money in the state of California unless they give its attorney general the names and addresses of their major donors, the same list that's required as an appendix to their federal IRS returns. The non-profits argue that this violates their right to freedom of association under the Constitution's First Amendment.

Obviously this is something for alert media eyes, including pros on the religion beat.

Adding to news interest, this case displays contrasting beliefs of the U.S. Department of Justice in its Trump Administration brief filed last November (.pdf here) versus its revised stance under the new Biden Administration (.pdf here). The Trump brief strongly backs non-profit interest groups. The Biden brief dodges the question and asks the court to bounce the case for further investigation.

Religion specialists note: The Supreme Court consolidated the Americans for Prosperity case, raised by the libertarian political foundation established by the Koch brothers, with a second appeal from the Thomas More Law Center. This second agency provides free legal representation for "people of faith" to uphold "the religious freedom of Christians, time-honored family values and the sanctity of human life."


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Papal splash: Persecuted Iraqi Christians get long-awaited spotlight with Francis visit

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Papal splash: Persecuted Iraqi Christians get long-awaited spotlight with Francis visit

By the time this runs, the pope will have flown home from Iraq after a historic trip that apparently went without a hitch. Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI both wanted to go to Iraq; Francis actually went and did it.

There were so many reasons not to go: The pandemic, the security situation and the potential for misunderstanding or disaster. But Iraq put on an impressive show, keeping the pope safe, creating venues at which he spoke (the tableau in Mosul was particularly dramatic) and accommodating a press corps of several dozen reporters.

Which leads to mentioning how difficult covering a papal trip really is. I’ve covered two U.S. papal trips (John Paul II in 1987 and Benedict XVI in 2008); one papal election in Rome (Benedict, 2005) and spent plus two weeks in northern Iraq (July 2004), so I have a feel for the conditions. Covering a pope is a succession of 18-20-hour days spent getting checked over by security, traveling to the event, covering it and then filing your story and doing the research for the next day’s story.

Even the timing was tricky. The pope had to dodge major religious holidays along with national ones such as Nowruz, the Persian new year that’s also observed in Iraq and is on the first days of spring. He also had to avoid coming much past April as that part of the world is scorching for half of the year. (When I was there in July, it was 111 degrees).

Listen here to CNN’s Vatican correspondent Delia Gallagher as she talks about waiting in Rome for the papal plane with 75 other journalists, all of whom, she said, were vaccinated. Notice the band playing the hymn “Joyful, Joyful We Adore Thee” when the pontiff came down the stairs to the tarmac. I’m sure that tune was a new one for the Baghdad airport.

I also caught this NBC report about reporters taking an Iraqi military plane to get to Ur. I hope to hear more about what it was like to report from Iraq.

News outlets with Baghdad and Rome bureaus understandably had the best ringside seats to the visit and it was the foreign correspondents, not these outlets’ religion beat reporters, who got to cover the trip.

Even Religion News Service’s and the Associated Press’ Vatican reporters had to cover the event from Rome, so I am very curious as to who these 75 journalists were who actually got on the plane.

Putting on such a trip was quite the production, according to a detailed 25-minute special report by alJazeera, which informed us that Iraq employed 10,000 members of its security forces to make sure nothing went wrong.

I’ll open with the Washington Post’s account of the pope’s arrival.


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Yo, Nashville Tennessean: What does 'people of faith' mean in a political argument?

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Yo, Nashville Tennessean: What does 'people of faith' mean in a political argument?

When I arrived at the Rocky Mountain News (RIP) long ago — think early ‘80s — I quickly learned that the city-desk team had an informal way of checking the Colorado pulse on religious issues.

Basically, they were interviewing clergy at the churches in downtown Denver. That was pretty much it. They would also call the Denver Catholic archdiocese (rather progressive at that time) and the “local seminary,” as in the already “woke” Iliff School of Theology, nationally known as an edgy United Methodist campus. It appeared no one knew about the larger Denver Seminary (evangelical) only a few blocks from Iliff.

What kind of churches were downtown? Almost all of them were mainline Protestant congregations and very few of them were showing any sign of life, in terms of attendance and growth. But they were nearby and most were progressive, so that was that. Why talk to folks at the region’s growing megachurches?

Hang in there with me. I am working toward a recent Nashville Tennessean article that ran with this headline: “Hundreds of people of faith call on Tennessee's Republican congressional delegation to repudiate lies about election fraud.” The key question: Define “people of faith”?

Back to Denver, for one more comment. Early on, I attended a press conference linked to the Colorado Council of Churches. Here is how I described what happened in a post back in 2013:

The key was that the organization … was claiming that it spoke for the vast majority of the state's churches. The problem was that, by the 1980s, the conversion of the Colorado Front Range into an evangelical hotbed (including evangelicals in many oldline Protestant bodies) was well on its way. Also, a more doctrinally conservative Catholic archbishop had arrived in town, one anxious to advocate for Catholic teachings on public issues on both sides of the political spectrum. …

Still, it was an important press conference that helped document one side of a religious debate in the state.

Near the end of the session, I asked what I thought was a logical question: Other than the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Denver, did any of the CCC leaders present represent a church that had more members at that moment than during any of the previous two or three decades?

Well, hey, I thought it was a fair question.


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Once again, AP accuses big Catholic bosses of abusing government coronavirus relief efforts

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Once again, AP accuses big Catholic bosses of abusing government coronavirus relief efforts

There they go again.

In this case, “they” refers to whoever is in charge of religion-news coverage these days at the Associated Press. Someone there needs to take a remedial course in (a) church history, (b) church-state law in the United States or (c) both.

Let’s start by flashing back about six months, when the AP rolled out an investigation of what its editors clearly thought was a scandal of epic proportions. Does anyone remember this lede, and this GetReligion dissection (“AP explains why it was wrong for local-level Catholic employees to get coronavirus relief money“), of the expose)?

NEW YORK (AP) — The U.S. Roman Catholic Church used a special and unprecedented exemption from federal rules to amass at least $1.4 billion in taxpayer-backed coronavirus aid, with many millions going to dioceses that have paid huge settlements or sought bankruptcy protection because of clergy sexual abuse cover-ups.

That was a bizarre, but honest, opener. The entire story was built on the assumption that there is such a thing — corporately and legally speaking — as a “U.S. Roman Catholic Church.”

As I said at the time, this is “like saying that there is an ‘American Public School System,’ as opposed to complex networks of schools at the local, regional and state levels.” One could also note that there is a Planned Parenthood of America. However, government coronavirus aid in the paycheck-support program went to 37 regional and local Planned Parenthood groups.

The Associated Press has now produced a sequel, with this headline: “Sitting on billions, Catholic dioceses amassed taxpayer aid.” While the editors avoided the “U.S. Roman Catholic Church” label this time around, this lengthy story is built on a similar misunderstanding of what happened when Catholic parishes, schools, nonprofits and other ministries applied for coronavirus aid.

As readers can see in the headline, in the sequel AP leaders focused on finances at the diocesan level, as opposed to a mythical national Catholic structure. This is closer to the truth, but it still misses the mark. While many issues of church authority are linked to local bishops, in local dioceses, the crucial issue here was paycheck-relief money reaching staff members in individual parishes, schools and ministries that had been rocked by falling donations during the COVID-19 crisis. Let’s start with the overture:


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Israel issue complicates anti-Semitism definition. This could haunt Biden’s Middle East work

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Israel issue complicates anti-Semitism definition. This could haunt Biden’s Middle East work

A tired Jewish cliche states, “two Jews, three opinions.” As a member of the tribe for, well, my entire life, I have to agree that it has a clear ring of truth.

However, I’m inclined to say that it’s not just Jews who seem to disagree about almost everything, certainly these days, and perhaps never. To quote the Talking Heads (one of my favorite post-punk rock bands, “same as it ever was, same as it ever was…”

So, President Joseph R. Biden, unity will not be had just for the asking. But I digress.

Among the latest Jewish communal verbal slugfests is one an outsider might reasonably think Jews would likely agree upon — which is, how do you define anti-Semitism?

But we don’t, because nothing is simple in life (allow me to refer you back to the “two Jews, three opinions” cliche above) no matter what we’d like to think.

This is particularly so when you add Israel to the equation. Or, to be more precise, the question of what constitutes fair political criticism of Israel and what is unfair — or biased — criticism of Israel that bleeds into hateful anti-Semitism?

The top of this JTA (the international Jewish news agency) story from mid-January lays out the issue.

(JTA) — When is it anti-Semitic to criticize Israel?

Anti-Semitism signifies hatred of Jews and the ways that hatred is perpetuated through age-old conspiracy theories and their modern variants. But what about when that hatred is expressed through rhetoric about the Jewish state? Is anti-Zionism anti-Semitism?

Those questions have divided American Jews in recent years — and are doing so again.


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Should elite European officials outlaw Jewish and Muslim ritual slaughter for meat?

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Should elite European officials outlaw Jewish and Muslim ritual slaughter for meat?

THE QUESTION:

Should Europeans outlaw ritual slaughter for meat practiced by Judaism and Islam as cruelty to animals?

THE RELIGION GUY’S ANSWER:

With such unprecedented political mayhem, Americans can be forgiven for barely noticing important events overseas.

The Guy, who believes threats to religious freedom warrant especially close attention, highlights a Dec. 17 ruling by the Court of Justice, the highest tribunal in the European Union (which covers 27 member nations with the departure of Great Britain). Readers will want to check out this recent Ira Rifkin post on this topic: “EU hypocrisy? Foie gras and factory farming continue, but kosher and halal traditions nixed.”

The decision, on referral from Belgium’s Constitutional Court, approved a regional statute mandating that animals be stunned before they are slaughtered for meat. This requirement directly pits animal-welfare advocates against Judaism and Islam, in which long-standing tradition allows observant believers to eat only meat from ritual slaughter, which forbids such stunning. European Jews and Muslims plan to appeal the decision, which could influence policies in other nations.

The court acknowledged that religious liberty is important, but on balance stated that the crackdown in Belgium occurs in “an evolving societal and legislative context which is characterized by an increasing awareness of the issue of animal welfare.” Several European nations already require stunning before slaughtering. (In the United States, statutes require stunning but allow for religious exemptions.)

Adding to the emotions in Europe, this dispute brings to mind that in 1933 Germany’s new Nazi-influenced regime prohibited Jewish slaughter on grounds of the stunning problem. More recently, this argument has been employed by Islamophobes.

The Conference of European Rabbis, which represents believers in 40 nations, said such prohibitions “put Jewish life at risk.” Omer Yankelevitch, a member of Israel’s parliament and the government diaspora affairs minister, wrote similarly in the Jerusalem Post last week. He said the European Union is violating freedom of religion and “harms the viability of Jewish communities in Europe,” so intense diplomatic efforts will be undertaken to respect the age-old observance.

Those who enjoy eating meat may give barely a thought to the methods used to produce it, although perhaps some reflected on this reality when COVID outbreaks brought attention to slaughterhouse conditions.


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EU hypocrisy? Foie gras and factory farming continue, but kosher and halal traditions nixed

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EU hypocrisy? Foie gras and factory farming continue, but kosher and halal traditions nixed

My fantasy very best self adheres to a strictly vegan diet. That means consuming no foods from members of the animal kingdom.

No meat, no eggs, no fish, no dairy, and just for consistency’s sake, no honey or even vitamin supplements containing traces of animal products. My fantasy very best self believes a plant-based diet to be best for me based on ethical, environmental, and health considerations (I’ve had serious heart issues).

But as you’ve probably already deduced, my current best self falls way short of my fantasy best self. While I rarely eat red meat (a couple of times a year at most), I regularly eat poultry, fish, eggs and dairy. So I’m by no means there yet.

When I do eat animal flesh, however, I restrict myself to animals in accord with traditional Judaism’s dietary protocols. That means I won’t eat pork or shell fish and won’t mix meat with dairy at the same meal. My wife and I also restrict our consumption to organic, free-range animal products. It also means that the allowed meats I do eat must be slaughtered in accordance with kosher guidelines.

As a theologically liberal Jew, I do not do all this because I believe HaShem — God — has directly commanded me to do so. I do this as a way to sustain my Jewish identity and as a voluntary spiritual discipline.

Which is why recent news out of Europe concerning the outlawing of kosher slaughtering protocols caught my attention. Journalists should note that traditional Muslims, who adhere to a similar slaughtering protocol, are also impacted by the European Union court ruling.

Here’s the gist of the issue, courtesy of a December story from JTA, the international Jewish news service:

(JTA) – The European Union’s highest court has upheld Belgium’s bans on slaughtering animals without first stunning them, a ruling that confirms the prohibition on the production of kosher and halal meat in parts of Belgium and clears a path for additional bans across Europe.

Israel’s ambassador to Belgium called the ruling “a blow to Jewish life in Europe.”


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