Watching the Democratic debate last night, the separation between church and state was not brought up once. Church and State magazine recently published 10 questions people should be asking the presidential candidates.

Questions include:

“Do you think houses of worship should be allowed to endorse political candidates and retain their tax-exempt status?”
and
“Do you think my pharmacist should be allowed to deny me doctor-prescribed medications based on his or her religious beliefs?”

—Bennett Gordon

Virtually all spiritual traditions give some attention to silence. The spring issue of Parabola, a provocative and beautifully designed quarterly magazine on religion and culture, is devoted to the subject. (The magazine’s website includes a table of contents but not the articles themselves.)

In his opening editor’s note, Jeff Zaleski mentions the idea of a silence-themed issue consisting of 128 blank pages. But people don’t pick up Parabola, an eight-time Utne Independent Press Award nominee, for this kind of stunt. Instead, the issue features essays on worship, meditation, and myth; evocative poems and quotations; and Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist, Quaker, Taoist, Native American, and Catholic perspectives.

I would have enjoyed seeing a Protestant voice or two, as well; for all its dogma and bluster, even this oh-so-Western tradition has its corners of mysticism and quiet. Of course, its adherents learned these things largely from others—an experience no doubt familiar to many Parabola readers.

Thankfully, the editors forego any sort of predictable interfaith manifesto in favor of simply presenting a diversity of voices. They honor the issue’s theme by showing us, rather than telling us, what we all have in common.

For more on silence, read this Utne Reader cover section from 2006.

—Steve Thorngate

Muslim mom and blogger who writes anonymously under the name Muslim Hedonist left behind her hijab and her polygamous husband, but not her faith. On her blog, she contemplates what it means to become a self-seeking Muslim:

To be sure, identity questions are probably best dealt with way before anyone has kids–say, in first year university, with a group of equally wide-eyed first-year students over pizza and beer.

But for those of who went straight from high school into conservative Islam, first year university didn’t offer us a chance to explore such questions.

Recently she mulled over a conversation with her pre-teen daughter about female genital mutilation, sparked by a Somali contestant on America’s Next Top Model. She wondered what to call the practice, how to explain its purpose, and how girls living in a sex-saturated world could still find the clitoris a mystery.

How do I explain this so that she can understand?

I’m not going to repeat any sanitized Muslim excuses–that it’s sunna (the practice of the Prophet), or that it’s supposedly cleaner, or that it’s just a cultural thing that some people happen to do, or that some people think that it will keep girls from having sex before they get married.

“They cut off the clitoris so that a woman won’t enjoy sex,” I answer.

“Eww,” my pre-teen daughter responds, and goes off to watch TV with her sister.

(Thanks, Feministing.)

—Lisa Gulya

The United States and the Catholic church have both been criticized for their cautious responses to the early years of the holocaust. Focusing on the ultimate shortcomings, however, paints an incomplete picture. Historical documentation recently emerged of a full-throated opposition to Hitler existing in the U.S. Catholic church.

A recording of a radio broadcast from November 16, 1938—a week after Kristallnacht—was discovered in the Catholic University of America archives. In the broadcast, several prominent U.S. clergy, along with former New York governor and presidential candidate Al Smith, condemned the Nazis’ actions and expressed support for Germany’s Jews. The university’s magazine describes how the broadcast featured the archbishop of San Francisco declaring unequivocal solidarity with the Jewish people—a rare interfaith gesture in the world of the church prior to the Vatican II reforms of the 1960s. A transcript and audio clip of the broadcast are available on CUA’s website.

Obviously, this sort of documentary evidence doesn’t overturn the overall historical verdict—the church could have done more. It does, however, shed light on the complexity of a tense and tragic period of history.

(Thanks, dotCommonweal.)

—Steve Thorngate

Some religious institutions have been known to take a holier-than-thou attitude toward sex workers. Not Sister Mary Soledad Perpinan, profiled by Sara Friedman in the online magazine Religion Dispatches. Known as Sister Sol, the 70-year-old nun displays a “undeviating long-term commitment to prostitutes, mail-order brides, incest survivors, dancers, bar girls and other exploited women,” writes Friedman. The writer wonders how this radical has managed to escape the ire of the church, but Sister Sol explains it saying, “The key is that they see I am doing what Christ would be doing.”

—Bennett Gordon

In recent decades, the labor movement has declined in both membership and influence. Some don’t see this as a problem. Among those who do, proposed solutions vary. Here’s an idea of how to save the unions that you may not have heard: Labor needs to get in touch with its religious, and specifically Catholic, roots.

Thomas C. Kohler, who teaches labor and employment law at Boston College Law School, makes this case in the Fall 2007 issue of Boston College Magazine. Kohler traces the close relationship between the church and the labor movement through history, arguing that the overlap was no mere coincidence of location and status—the two institutions in fact share several core values related to the dignity of people, the power of community, and the nature of work. Kohler calls for “a new conversation between the law and religion about the character of work and its impact on the individual who performs it.”

—Steve Thorngate 

Colleges and universities are often thought of as godless institutions of secular thought and anti-religious sympathies, where Nietzsche, Darwin, and Marx are taught and religious thinkers are ignored. That may have been true for the past 50 years, but higher education is changing, and may be accepting religion and spirituality as integral parts of learning.

“Marginalized for the better part of a century, the study of religion is making a comeback in American higher education,” John Schmalzbauer and Kathleen A. Mahoney write for Contexts (excerpt only available online). Prominent thinkers including Cornel West, Harold Bloom, Toni Morrison, and Stanley Fish have all explored the idea of the sacred in their academic careers.

Some scholars have begun to incorporate religious thinking into their study, others are taking a “spiritual-but-not-religious” approach to learning, and still others are studying religion from an objective, non-theological perspective. All of these modes of thought, Schmalzbauer and Mahoney content, are aspects of the same multifaceted movement giving religion greater representation in the realm of academia.

—Bennett Gordon

Photo by Tom Godber, licensed under Creative Commons.

Many people of faith are baffled by the opposition to the study of evolution. They trust scientific explanations of the origins of life, they believe that God was somehow behind it all, and they don’t lose a lot of sleep over the whole thing.

A recent exhibit on Darwin at Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History highlighted the voices of people who find no conflict between belief and science. The problem is that many of the exhibit’s visitors were wholly unimpressed, Jason Byassee reports on Theolog, the blog of mainline Protestant magazine the Christian Century. Byassee makes some good observations about what more thoughtful religious engagement with Darwinism might look like:

All Christians are challenged to articulate how the sheer unlikeliness of our existence here—amidst countless species who did not survive natural selection—is a witness to the goodness of a creator God. That’s tough to do. But it’s easier to take on this challenge than to ignore the bones that Darwin dug up.

—Steve Thorngate

For many Christians, Ash Wednesday on February 6 commenced forty days of fasting and prayer. Some people try to give up sweets, snacks, or meat on Fridays. Two Church of England Bishops are encouraging people to reduce their carbon footprint this Lent in an effort they’ve dubbed the “Carbon Fast.” The British Bishops teamed up with Tearfund, an organization that works with local churches to reduce poverty, to push people to turn down their heat, shop locally, and unplug electronics among other energy-saving actions (pdf).

The fast may sound like a good idea to call attention to climate change, but some people are skeptical. Michael Cook writes for Spiked that the Carbon Fast isn’t asking enough from participants, arguing that it signifies “the slow extinction of Christianity in England.”

—Sarah Pumroy

Jewish women looking for long-term relationships online using dating sites like JDate and Match.com could actually be hurting their dating lifes. An article by Susan Schnur in Lilith (pdf) makes the argument that online dating websites are bad for Jewish women. “For a good number of Jewish wom­en — mostly those in their late thirties and up who have never married — In­ternet dating has proved an embittering experience, making them feel isolated and at fault,” Schnur writes. The sites encourage men and women to be overly picky, to the detriment of long-term relationships. Schnur observes that “Some women become so demoral­ized by their online experiences that they drop out of dating altogether.”

Many of these women should stop holding out for romantic love, settle down, and marry the next guy who’s good enough, according to Lori Gottlieb at the Atlantic. To single women over thirty, Gottlieb writes “If you say you’re not worried, either you’re in denial or you’re lying.” Peppering her argument with pop-culture references, Gotleib contends that women should settle down sooner, even if that means marrying someone they’re not head-over-heels in love with. Gotlieb writes: “My advice is this: Settle! That’s right, Don’t worry about passion or intense connection.” Of course, there are plenty of writers on the internet who take issue with such advice.

—Bennett Gordon

Buddhists intent on reincarnation had better fill out the appropriate forms. An article from the China Post has announced that reincarnation by senior Tibetan Buddhist monks, also known as “living Buddhas” is now regulated by the government of China. It’s thought that the regulation is an effort to crack down on the Dalai Lama and his supporters. Although officially an atheistic entity, the Chinese government has decreed, “The reincarnation of living Buddhas must undergo application and approval procedures.”

—Bennett Gordon

(Thanks, Tricycle.)

A common criticism levied at the US educational system is that there isn’t enough time devoted to arts and crafts. “Our society devalues such handiwork,” Rabbi Danny Nevins writes for the Jewish website jspot.org, “but the Torah finds sanctity in sweat.” Students would do well to learn that “there are different types of wisdom,” according to Rabbi Nevins, and book learning is only one of them.

A similar point was made by Matthew B. Crawford in the New Atlantis, and written about in 2006 on Utne.com. Crawford writes that American society must reconsider its connection to manual labor. Learning and mastering a craft fosters self reliance and challenges consumer dependency, but too many people still value “knowledge work” over shop class.

—Bennett Gordon

People have been eating mindfully since religions started dietary restrictions. Katherine Pioli, writing for Catalyst, figured out that eating with chopsticks helped her achieve a higher level of mindful eating. For almost a year Pioli ate every meal using chopsticks, an exercise that forced her to slow down and think about every bite. “Sometimes I would focus my thoughts on where the food on my plate had come from, the soil and the rain that had fed it,” Pioli writes. “At other times, I kept my awareness on my chewing, my breath and the movement of my hands transferring the food from plate to mouth.”

—Bennett Gordon

Photo by MR+G, licensed under Creative Commons.

The World Rabbinical Council announced last week that Jews can now indulge in bacon, ham, and other porcine delights, the Onion Radio News reports. The organization also began a new holiday: Hamover.

—Bennett Gordon

Image by NancyKay Shapiro.

“Resentment is like a glass of poison that you drink; then you sit down and wait for your enemy to die.” It’s a well-known saying, its truth self-evident. But forgiveness is difficult, and understanding its importance doesn’t necessarily make it any easier.

Twenty years after her mother’s murder, Stephanie Cassatly wasn’t particularly interested in forgiving the man responsible, as she recounts in the Fall 2007 issue of the nonfiction journal Fourth Genre (essay not available online). She writes that “I had no interest in having a positive impact on a cold-blooded murderer. In fact, I strongly supported the death penalty, silently bitter that my mother’s killer had only received a life sentence.”

Cassatly harbored that resentment until a chance encounter provoked her to start thinking about the man who killed her mother. She spent a year obsessively learning more about him, until she finally called the chaplain’s office at his penitentiary. The chaplain asks is she wants him to serve as a mediator. Here’s what follows:

“Yes, I think I would,” I said, surprisingly sure of myself. I stood up and began pacing.

“And how shall we do this?” he asked more pointedly. “Would you like me to deliver a letter for you?” I felt my stomach tighten at the though of something so tangible between us, as if her killer could touch me through a piece of paper. Father Damereaux interpreted my silence. “Or perhaps you can simple tell me what to say, and I’ll personally deliver the message to him.” My stomach relaxed slightly.

“Yes. Maybe that would be better,” I agreed.

“I think it would be best if you were very specific as to what I should say. For instance--”

But I interrupted him with a burst of unexpected clarity. “How about if you say, ‘The daughter of the woman you killed in 1980 wishes to forgive you. Do you have anything you want to say in return?’” It sounded so simple and to the point. He repeated it back to me. “That’s it,” I said.

—Steve Thorngate

The word “sanctuary” is a common epithet thrown around Republican circles in the presidential primaries. The idea of harboring undocumented immigrants in “sanctuary cities” was fodder for attack in many Republican debates. The New Sanctuary Movement is turning the idea of sanctuary around, defying current immigration laws, and using churches throughout the United States to offer refuge to undocumented immigrants. According to its website, the organization offers protection to immigrants facing deportation “whose legal cases clearly reveal the contradictions and moral injustice of our current immigration system while working to support legislation that would change their situation.”

Although the churches are unable to offer legal protection to undocumented immigrants, Sasha Abramsky of the Nation writes, “the cloak of religious authority, the aura of sacred space, does seem to provide a moral protection, making government agencies that much more reluctant to go after people facing deportation.” Abramsky reports that faith-based groups in California, New York, Illinois, Arizona, and Washington are joining the movement and working to interject a human-rights angle into the often callous debate.

The goals of the New Sanctuary Movement may be laudable, but some progressives take issue with the organization’s methods. Muzaffar Chishti, director of the Migration Policy Institute at New York University's School of Law is quoted in the piece saying that the effect of the New Sanctuary Movement is “more symbolic than meaningful” adding that the churches may violate the separation between church and state.

—Bennett Gordon

Image by Fred, licensed under Creative Commons.

Recently, an ultra-Orthodox woman from Israel’s Jerusalem District so perplexed the local religious authorities that they ordered her and her husband to divorce. Her offense? Insisting on wearing a burka.

The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reports that a group of ultra-Orthodox women in the city of Ramat Beit Shemesh have started wearing burkas, the enveloping outer garment often associated with Islam, whenever they leave home. (A summary and excerpt of the article are available in English at The Muqata blog.) No known rabbi has advocated the practice.

One of the women is quoted in the article saying: “I don't want men to look at me. I'm happy being modest. In the past, I felt uncomfortable to walk around [sans-burka], in such a wanton fashion.”

—Steve Thorngate

(Thanks, Lilith blog.)