Quotes to ponder
PeterBerger article, via GetReligion Blog:
Secularist bias can produce blinders. Evangelical Protestantism is the most explosively growing religion worldwide. Media coverage is generally very poor, subsuming it under a vague category of “fundamentalism”, with peaceful missionaries being put in the same box with suicide bombers. Much academic treatment is equally prejudiced. The media coverage of the sexual abuse crisis in the Roman Catholic church very often has an undertone of gleeful Schadenfreude, with little skepticism about events going back thirty years, alleged by individuals with hard vested interests in their version of the events. Academics and journalists have every right to be secularists, but they should bracket their personal beliefs when they try to understand reality — as should “Godders” like me.
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David Warren's column:
Given the contrast between the modest demeanour of many young immigrant Muslim women, with their heads covered and their strollers full of babies -- and that of so many "native" young western women, childless but provocatively half-naked under the summer sun -- I have sometimes myself wondered which side I am on.
Any new Muslim reader should be told that I am among the West's more backward souls. The Roman Catholic religion to which I subscribe also requires modesty in female dress, though I've never heard a priest specify a dress code. It also requires chastity, and constant acknowledgement of God.
Had we world enough and time, I might try to range over the many centuries when the social customs of Europe were far closer to those of the Islamic heartland, than to what we see in Europe today -- right down to public recognition of the hours of prayer, and an awareness of the danger of heresy.
That Christians and Muslims have been at each other's throats, as often as not through the centuries, along the frontiers between their respective civilizations, will go without saying to anyone who has read some history. There were, and there remain, profound theological differences between them, and in consequence, profoundly different conceptions of social order. And yet on basic questions of moral deportment -- of what constitutes decent and honourable behaviour -- much less to choose.
The point here is that freedom has undergone redefinition, since the so-called "Enlightenment" in the West, and has been confused with licence in our post-modern era.
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NPR notices that 30 percent of Chinese call themselves "Religious".
Louisa Lim/NPR
Clergy from the government-sanctioned Catholic church hold a procession up to the Sheshan basilica, on the outskirts of Shanghai. Chinese Catholics, long divided between those who recognize the authority of the Vatican and those who belong to the government-sanctioned church, are beginning the slow process of reconciliation.
the article claims that most belong to Buddhism or traditional religion (2/3)...
But in other surveys, 30 percent of the total population claimed to be Buddhist/traditional, and ten percent Christian, so the NPR estimate might be low.
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Secularist bias can produce blinders. Evangelical Protestantism is the most explosively growing religion worldwide. Media coverage is generally very poor, subsuming it under a vague category of “fundamentalism”, with peaceful missionaries being put in the same box with suicide bombers. Much academic treatment is equally prejudiced. The media coverage of the sexual abuse crisis in the Roman Catholic church very often has an undertone of gleeful Schadenfreude, with little skepticism about events going back thirty years, alleged by individuals with hard vested interests in their version of the events. Academics and journalists have every right to be secularists, but they should bracket their personal beliefs when they try to understand reality — as should “Godders” like me.
-------------
David Warren's column:
Given the contrast between the modest demeanour of many young immigrant Muslim women, with their heads covered and their strollers full of babies -- and that of so many "native" young western women, childless but provocatively half-naked under the summer sun -- I have sometimes myself wondered which side I am on.
Any new Muslim reader should be told that I am among the West's more backward souls. The Roman Catholic religion to which I subscribe also requires modesty in female dress, though I've never heard a priest specify a dress code. It also requires chastity, and constant acknowledgement of God.
Had we world enough and time, I might try to range over the many centuries when the social customs of Europe were far closer to those of the Islamic heartland, than to what we see in Europe today -- right down to public recognition of the hours of prayer, and an awareness of the danger of heresy.
That Christians and Muslims have been at each other's throats, as often as not through the centuries, along the frontiers between their respective civilizations, will go without saying to anyone who has read some history. There were, and there remain, profound theological differences between them, and in consequence, profoundly different conceptions of social order. And yet on basic questions of moral deportment -- of what constitutes decent and honourable behaviour -- much less to choose.
The point here is that freedom has undergone redefinition, since the so-called "Enlightenment" in the West, and has been confused with licence in our post-modern era.
------------------
NPR notices that 30 percent of Chinese call themselves "Religious".
Louisa Lim/NPR
Clergy from the government-sanctioned Catholic church hold a procession up to the Sheshan basilica, on the outskirts of Shanghai. Chinese Catholics, long divided between those who recognize the authority of the Vatican and those who belong to the government-sanctioned church, are beginning the slow process of reconciliation.
the article claims that most belong to Buddhism or traditional religion (2/3)...
But in other surveys, 30 percent of the total population claimed to be Buddhist/traditional, and ten percent Christian, so the NPR estimate might be low.
------------------
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posted by Nancy Reyes at
6:51 AM
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