Keystone Brass will perform at Wyomissing church on Mother’s Day [Religion Digest]

Bausman United Church of Christ, 1064 Penn Ave., Wyomissing, will have a performance by the Keystone Brass at its Mother’s Day worship service on May 9 beginning at 9:15 a.m. Seating is limited. Reserve a seat by calling the church office at 610-375- …

Shakespeare’s musings on religion require deep listening to be heard

Religious Alloys by Charles Franklin

An alloy is a mixture of elements, usually designed to create something better than its individual parts. Steel, for example is an alloy of iron and carbon that is harder and stronger than iron. But some alloys – with the addition of base elements – create a weaker mixture. Like sin and religion. When a respected religious leader, for example, embezzles money from his congregation or engages in an affair, and the faithful fall away.

Some alloys cause controversy and division. In 2015 the Boy Scouts voted to lift the ban on openly gay and transgender scouts and scout leaders, and began including girls, and in 2018, As a result, Latter-day Saints severed ties with the Scouts. “The reality there is we didn’t really leave them; they kind of left us,” said M. Russell Ballard, a member the Latter-day Saints’ Quorum of the Twelve Apostles. “The direction they were going was not consistent to what we feel our youth need to have.”

And the United Methodist Church has split over LGBTQ issues. While liberal congregations have embraced gay marriage and ministry, conservative Methodists do not, and will form a new denomination, the Global Methodist Church.

Meanwhile, perhaps the latest “alloy initiative” is to add religion to drug legalization efforts. “A psychedelic trip can be among the most sacred experiences of a person’s life,” begins a Rolling Stone article, “and yet, that impulse to take a psychedelic for a spiritual reason is often overlooked as a reason to lift prohibition for psychedelic substances.”

One might posit that the idea is less about religion and more about getting high. “If a Catholic physician can refuse to perform an abortion because of religious reasons,” this illogic goes, “I should be able to use psychedelics because of religious reasons.”

If you’ve been following World Religion News for the past year, you’ve seen case after legal case challenging the First Amendment. Challenging the right to free exercise of one’s religious beliefs because religion is deemed “non-essential,” by politicians during COVID, because education must have no religious content, because gay rights trump religious rights, because religious organizations should not be allowed to decide who they hire or fire or place foster children with.

All these are attempts to force religions to alloy with other ideas, ideologies and principles, whether they are contrary to the religion’s ideas or not. The United Methodist Church is carefully sorting through what they accept and what they don’t, what alloy is acceptable and what isn’t. The United States Supreme Court is sorting through the legality of some of these issues, but in the weeks and months to come – as society barges ahead with radical new trends fads and social programs – churches, mosques, synagogues and temples will be faced with deciding what to do.

Questions such as “What do the scriptures of my faith actually say?” will become more relevant than ever. As well as “Just how inclusive should we be?” Or “what would Jesus do?” And the answers? They alone will determine whether the alloy will be stronger and better, or will crumble from the addition of base elements.

Religion Professor Accused of Anti-Semitic, Anti-Baha’i Sentiment

Last October, an Oberlin faculty member denied allegations that he helped cover up Iran’s mass killing of political prisoners in 1988 when he served as Iran’s ambassador to the U.N. In the months since, Professor of Religion and Nancy Schrom Dye Chair in Middle East and North African Studies Mohammad Jafar Mahallati has been further accused of making anti-Semitic and anti-Baha’i comments in the 1980s. 

The Baha’i community is the largest minority religion in Iran, although the Iranian regime does not officially recognize the Baha’i Faith. In 1983, 22 Baha’is were given the death sentence for practicing their faith. These sentences and the continuing persecution of the Baha’is in Iran were discussed at the 1983 U.N. Commission on Human Rights, at which Mahallati was the Iranian representative. According to the U.N. report on the 1983 commission, while representatives from various nations and human rights organizations discussed the gravity of the situation, Mahallati denied the allegations and accused the Baha’is of terrorism in Iran.

“As his country had already had the opportunity of explaining, reports of arbitrary executions in Iran were complete fabrications and had been submitted to the United Nations by those very organizations which instigated terrorism in his country,” the report states.

According to the report, Mahallati also compared the activities of the Baha’is to acts of immorality, sexual abuse, and murder; then he questioned why, in Europe and the U.S., such acts were punishable by execution, while Iran was held to different standards regarding the Baha’is.

“It would also be interesting to know why the European Parliament had the right to restrain the activities of the followers of certain sects and, for example, to prevent sexual abuses committed by those sects whereas his country was required to tolerate all immoral behaviour or sexual abuse, sometimes advisable according to groups such as the Baha’is, why some countries such as the United States had the right to execute murderers, while his country could not punish terrorists who burned schoolchildren and, finally, what was the definition of religion and in what way a religion differed from a sect,” the report read. 

At a different meeting during the same commission, Mahallati claimed that the Baha’is’ allegations of human rights abuses against the Iranian regime were the community’s attempt to “wage a propaganda campaign” against Iran. 

Since October, Mahallati has also been accused of anti-Semitism in Fox News and The Jerusalem Post for his statements in support of Palestine during his time as ambassador. 

“Palestine is an Islamic territory, and Islamic heritage, and it remains an Islamic point of identity,” Mahallati said in a statement to the UN on Feb. 14, 1989. “The land of Palestine is the platform of the ascension of the Prophet Mohammad; its significance is that it contains the first Qibla direction — towards which Muslims prayed. Its occupation by Zionist usurpers is a transgression against all Muslims of the world and its liberation is therefore a great religious obligation and commitment.”

The College is aware of the allegations and is taking steps to address them, according to Chief of Staff David Hertz. 

“We’ve been in touch with Professor Mahallati,” Hertz said. “We’re concerned whenever anyone raises allegations of this nature about a member of faculty. We want to support our faculty, but we also want to consider the allegations themselves. That is the basis on which we’ve been in touch with Professor Mahallati. We are looking forward to his addressing these issues. He’s taking steps to defend his reputation.” 

Hertz affirmed that protecting the campus community from anti-Semitism is very important to the College.

“23 percent of our students identify as being Jewish,” Hertz said. “Jewish life is important to Oberlin, and we’re proud of the quality of Jewish life on campus. When you get allegations such as this, we take it seriously.”

Hertz said he has reached out to representatives of the Jewish community on campus about the allegations. However, no one from the College has reached out to the Baha’i students or faculty on campus to provide support.

“I’ve personally been in touch with Professor Chapman, the head of the Jewish Studies department,” Hertz said. “I’ve been in touch with Rabbi Megan and also with Rabbi Shlomo to tell them that we’re looking into this, that we take this seriously. … These are allegations based upon statements that were made 30 years ago, and so there’s an awful lot to consider in that regard, but we’re looking into it. I asked Professor Chapman and Rabbi Megan and Rabbi Shlomo if they had heard from students who were concerned or upset about this. They said there may be concern, but it did not appear to be widespread. So there may be, but I’m not aware of students who have approached anyone to say that this has been a source of stress.”

Lawdan Bazargan, an activist whose brother was killed in the 1988 massacre, wrote to President Carmen Twillie Ambar last October calling for the College to fire Mahallati. She accused Mahallati of lying to the U.N. about the ongoing human rights violations in Iran, preventing the international community from responding and thereby enabling the country to continue committing atrocities.

According to Bazargan, the College has yet to respond to messages from her and from other activists and organizations about Mahallati’s past. 

“They are refusing to answer us,” Bazargan said. “They’re keeping it under wraps — and they blocked us on Twitter. President Ambar blocked us, which is very shameful, and she even blocked all kinds of human rights lawyers and everybody who was mentioning Oberlin.”

Bazargan believes that the 30 years of history between Mahallati’s comments and today don’t signify a change in character or belief.

“My answer to you is people don’t change — he’s an ideologue,” Bazargan said. “He still travels through Iran, he’s connected to all kinds of people in the highest part of the regime. As the report of Amnesty International said, people who actively contribute to the situation of secrecy, and not talk about the truth — because as you know, they never gave us the bodies of our loved ones, they … put them into the mass graves and never said where they are — so the people that hide all of these facts, … they are considered criminal and as the words from Amnesty International report says, ‘they have blood on their hands.’”

In an Aug. 20, 2018 interview on Dialogue Podcast, Mahallati discussed his time as the U.N. representative and the work he did to defend the Iranian regime against the accusations of human rights violations brought forth against it in the 1980s. 

“This is the meaning of diplomacy,” Mahallati said of his efforts to defend Iran. “In fact, diplomacy is about looking for solutions that help a country achieve its goals at the lowest cost; otherwise, one can always chant slogans and impose tremendous costs on a country.”

Last fall, Mahallati denied that he had any knowledge of Iran’s human rights abuses during his time as ambassador.

“I categorically deny any knowledge and therefore responsibility regarding mass executions in Iran when I was serving at the United Nations,” he wrote in an Oct. 9 statement to the Review. “I was in New York the entire summer of 1988, focusing on peacemaking between Iran and Iraq, and I did not receive any briefing regarding executions.”

Mahallati also wrote about his efforts to end the Iran-Iraq war during the 1980s.

“My accusers overlook these well-documented peacemaking efforts and the fact that I risked my ambassadorial position for that purpose,” Mahallati wrote. “For more than three decades since, I have dedicated my life to researching, teaching, and writing about peace and friendship. All my scholarly and artistic works in English, Persian, and Arabic focus on international and interpersonal peace and friendship.”

At the College, Mahallati is known for his community-building efforts and his focus on friendship and amity. To Bazargan, whose brother was killed by the Iranian regime for being a political dissident, these activities are in direct contrast with Mahallati’s silence and alleged complicity in the Iranian regime’s mass murder of political prisoners.

“He doesn’t have to actually keep his noose on the neck of my brother to be actively involved,” she said. “Just the fact that for the past 30 years, he never spoke about this atrocity, he never gave us what he knows about it makes him an accomplice, on top of the fact that for the past 20 years, his argument in the United States and in all his lectures, all the books he published is about peace and friendship. If you have to do all of that while you were quiet for 30 years about this atrocity, why [now are you] hiding yourself from us, you don’t interact with us and enter into a conversation?”

Mahallati did not respond to a request for comment. He is currently on a sabbatical unrelated to the allegations against him.

On Religion: The year when clergy stress zoomed to a new high

When training pastors and chaplains, educators frequently stress the need for boundaries between work and home.

Clergy need — somehow — to find “personal” time, along with face-to-face contact with loved ones. That challenge became more difficult in the age of smartphones, texting and emails, noted Marlon C. Robinson, pastoral care director at AdventHealth in Manchester, Kentucky, and a specialist in marriage and family therapy.

Then came the COVID-19 lockdowns, and the pressures on clergy zoomed to a whole new level.

“Everything came home, all at once,” said Robinson, reached by telephone. “Pastors were spending more and more time with their families — jammed into one space. But this wasn’t quality time. Everyone was at home, but they were staring at their own phones and computer screens. There was no intimacy, and all the pressures of ministry grew even more intense.”

To make matters worse, the usual struggles with church leadership and finances were complicated by political warfare and conspiracy theories that literally began to shape how congregations handled worship, pastoral care, education and even efforts to keep sanctuaries clean and safe.

Instead of arguing — to cite church cliches — about carpet color or outdated hymnals, the faithful were fighting about whether masks were necessary to save lives or merely “politically correct” virtue signals.

Meanwhile, many people were sick, and many died, with their pastors and families on the other side of locked hospital or nursing home doors. And it was illegal to have funerals? Attendance dropped, along with offerings. More than a few members vanished.
Ministers “are inundated with phone calls, emails, texts, WhatsApp messages, and communications through a host of other platforms,” wrote Robinson in Ministry Magazine.

While it’s impossible to know how many will flee the ministry, early research indicates pastors are “experiencing intensified stress levels that … put them at increased risk for developing a mental illness,” Robinson wrote. “The current crisis makes pastors even more vulnerable to illness on account of traumatic events arising from within their personal and family situations. Clergy members are also at increased risk because of their repeated exposure to the traumatic information shared by their parishioners.”

The bottom line: Pastors are “not superhumans,” noted Thom Rainer, former leader of LifeWay Christian Resources for the Southern Baptist Convention. “They miss their routines. They miss seeing people as they used to do. They would like the world to return to normal, but they realize the old normal will not return.”

Some pastors have decided that, while they don’t want to leave ministry altogether, the “current state of negativity and apathy in many local churches” has created a poisoned work environment. “So, they are leaving or getting ready to leave,” noted Rainer at his Church Answers blog.

“Criticisms against pastors have increased significantly,” wrote Rainer. “One pastor recently shared with me the number of criticisms he receives are five times greater than the pre-pandemic era. Church members are worried. Church members are weary. And the most convenient target for their angst is their pastor.”

Workloads have increased and changed during this time, he added. Clergy are trying to serve the “way they have in the past, but now they have the added responsibilities that have come with the digital world. … Can the church continue to support the ministries they need to do? Will the church need to eliminate positions? These issues weigh heavily on pastors.”

There are no easy solutions, stressed Robinson. It’s clear that denominational leaders must seek improved pastoral care — for their clergy. Pastors need to find “ministry buddies” with whom they can privately share advice, feedback and peer-to-peer support. Also, studies indicate that exercising three times a week can lessen the risk of emotional exhaustion for clergy. It wouldn’t hurt for them to take long, smartphone-free walks with their spouses.
This isn’t a matter of being selfish, stressed Robinson.

“If I don’t take care of me, then I’ll have none of me left when I try to take care of other people,” he said. “Self-care is super, super, super important for clergy — whether they’re working in churches, hospitals, the military or anywhere else. … It’s about taking care of yourself. You have to build that into your life, so that you can do the work that God has called you to do.”

Terry Mattingly leads GetReligion.org and lives in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. He is a senior fellow at the Overby Center at the University of Mississippi.

Police blame Ministry of Religion

The Prospects of American Religion Have Never Been Higher

A recent Gallup poll included some grim news: Less than 50% of Americans belong to a religious community such as a church or a synagogue, the lowest since the organization began asking the question in 1937. As an Orthodox rabbi, I might feel gloomy about the future of my profession. But the prospects of American religion have never been brighter.
This isn’t solely a testament of faith. When the Pew Research Center asked Americans in 2012 to describe their feelings about spirituality, only 19% said they felt any spiritual stirrings. Five years later, that number rose to 27%—even as the number of Americans who defined themselves as neither spiritual nor religious remained largely unchanged. While more Americans yearn for more spiritual connections, fewer feel comfortable finding them in traditional settings.
This isn’t news for those of us who have dedicated our lives to the rabbinate or priesthood. The reasons for the decline in synagogue and church attendance range from the changing nature of cities to competition with digital communication. Congregating with others in a physical space is a cornerstone of most faiths—I happily do it three times daily—but there’s much more to religion than sitting quietly on a wooden bench and listening to a sermon.
Seen this way, the new Gallup survey should be read not as an obituary but an opportunity. Religion is ripe for disruption, to borrow a term from Silicon Valley: Plenty of Americans still love the product—just not its current platform. Nimble individuals and organizations have a chance to create communities of faith every bit as vibrant and meaningful as those that once huddled in brick-and-mortar buildings. How this is to be done is perhaps the most important question for American civic life in the coming decades.
People attend religious services because they want a spot of religion. Yet worshipers hear too much about climate change, systemic racism and transgender rights and not enough about Abraham, Sarah and Isaac or Luke, Matthew and John. Treating religion like the Academy Awards or the National Basketball Association—which also don’t draw the same attention they used to—has left Americans suspicious about traditional faith. This can be rectified by focusing on what business-school types call the core offering.

Read more:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-prospects-of-american-religion-have-never-been-higher-11619735652?mod=flipboard

Is Convicted Cop Derek Chauvin a Scapegoat for America’s Racist “Religion of Whiteness?”

Photo: YouTube

In the following piece, award-winning journalist Robert C. Koehler says convicted murderer Derek Chauvin is no different from other killer-cops–except for the fact that his crime against George Floyd was recorded in such graphic detail that the legal system was forced to sacrifice him.

Basically, Derek Chauvin was convicted of enforcing the status quo. Because his behavior was caught on video — his knee on George Floyd’s neck, oh my God, choking him to death — and looked so disturbing to most of the public, official American “justice” had to take some sort of action.

He became a scapegoat.

I’m not saying Chauvin was innocent. What he did was horrific: racism plus murder.

What happened had to be addressed, because we’re not the country we were, oh, 60, 70 or a hundred years ago, when killing a Black human being — lynching him or her — was not only no big deal, it was often a cause of celebration. Morally, we’ve moved forward half an inch since then. The police killing of an unarmed Black person, if it’s caught on video, sometimes leads to the officer’s dismissal, if not an actual arrest and trial.

What a caring, fair and morally scrupulous country this is. But what if . . . what if . . . the words I just wrote were actually true?

I refuse to believe this is an impossible fantasy, though undoing the effects of American white supremacy — what Robert Baird, writing recently in The Guardian, called “the religion of whiteness” — is an undertaking almost too large to fathom. It involves digging well past the hypocrisy of the nation’s founding fathers, back to the roots of, that is to say, the justification for, African slavery: the reduction of a segment of humanity to nothing more than chattel. “Whiteness” was invented by Europeans in the Age of Discovery as a way of justifying their belief that they owned the planet.

The effects of this belief encompass and deeply warp everything that has happened since, from privileged individual cruelty to — far more significantly — the building of the modern world. I believe we actually are in the process of undoing this world, even if we don’t know it.

Racism most obviously manifests as individual behavior, often triggered by fear — the fear of non-white people crossing a particular border. In the Jim Crow era, those borders were everywhere, from drinking fountains and bathrooms to the communities in which we lived. The borders may shift and wobble, but the idea of the border itself, whatever it is, remains sacrosanct. Stay on your own side!

For instance, when George Floyd was killed, he happened to be at a significant intersection in Minneapolis, which separated a white community from a black one. “Police departments don’t exist as independent governmental agencies, but are extensions of the will of the communities and cities that they serve,” Mark Karlin writes at BuzzFlash. That is to say, police departments were established to protect, not humanity in general, but white people in particular. They act as an occupying army. And armies have no purpose whatsoever unless there’s an enemy — that is to say, a dehumanized segment of humanity.

I became familiar with life inside police world early in my career as a journalist, when my reporting duties included writing three police blotters a week, requiring that I visit and look through the crime reports at three different Chicago police stations. I got to know lots of officers, became friends with a number of them, but . . . when Harold Washington ran for mayor of Chicago, in 1983, the racism in the stations was visceral. It became uncontained. The officers, all white in those days, couldn’t stop talking about how much they hated (and feared) him.

One unforgettable memory: A female neighborhood relations officer — she was a nice person, we got along wonderfully — asked me, out of the blue: “What do you call 20,000 dead (n-words) at the bottom of Lake Michigan?” I stared at her in jaw-dropping silence. She said: “A start.”

The “joke” was uttered in a context of collective certainty. Everyone there knew who the enemy was. Not surprisingly, another agency created to protect white borders — a.k.a. ICE — has generated plenty of headlines in recent years about its treatment of asylum-seekers and their children at the Southern border, not to mention ICE officers’ secret Facebook pages, where they post comments such as “It’s a good day for a choke hold” and make fun of the deaths of migrants.

These are official government programs. It’s not that they’re populated with bad people. It’s that they’re populated with “white people” — a made-up concept that is likely to bring out the worst in anyone who identifies as such. We’ve tried to turn the concept into something neutral — a color or ethnicity you check on a questionnaire — but the entire concept is a lie with roots that go back to the dawn of African slavery and other forms of European genocide against “nonwhites.”

And not all manifestations of racism are punch-in-the-eye obvious. Consider something as seemingly neutral and beneficial as building highways and other national infrastructure. Turns out, for instance, the interstate highway program, begun during the Eisenhower administration, was driven by racism, often slicing through, and destroying, vibrant communities of color even as it avoided doing harm to white communities.

Urban historian Eric Avila, quoted recently in the New York Times, noted: “These highways were essentially built as conduits for wealth. Primarily white wealth, jobs, people, markets. The highways were built to promote the connectivity between suburbs and cities. The people that were left out were urban minorities. African-Americans, immigrants, Latinos.”

Fascinatingly, the Times article points out that President Biden’s $2 trillion infrastructure proposal includes allocating money to repair, to whatever extent possible, the racism-based damage of that old program. Exactly what will be done isn’t clear, nor is it certain the infrastructure plan itself will survive Congress, but even still, it opens up a stunning question: Is the Biden administration under the influence of more than the interests of whiteness?

And the question beyond that one is: Are we really changing? Are we transcending the religion that gave us slavery?

Robert Koehler (koehlercw@gmail.com), syndicated by PeaceVoice, is a Chicago award-winning journalist and editor. He is the author of Courage Grows Strong at the Wound.

Religion Both Helped and Hurt during the Pandemic

                <div class="mura-region-local"><p>People turn to religion for comfort and hope in times of crisis and uncertainty, and March 2020 was one of those times. Americans experienced a spike in distress during this tumultuous period, but is it possible that religion could have spared some Americans from that distress?</p>&#13;

To measure the impact of religion during the early days of the COVID pandemic in the United States, I analyzed data from about 12,000 Americans surveyed March 19–24, shortly after the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a global health pandemic.

I found that, paradoxically, religion protected mental health but endangered physical health. This pattern was present across groups but was most pronounced among evangelical Christians. It’s important to note that while religions globally encompass an enormous number of faiths, in these data, as in the United States generally, most religious people are Christian.

In a study published in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, I show that the spike in distress most Americans experienced in March 2020 was less pronounced among the most religious Americans and especially evangelicals. Religion did in fact protect mental health in the face of crisis.

But this mental health boost came at the cost of less concern about and support for addressing an important real-world problem: curbing the spread of a highly contagious virus and saving lives during a pandemic. The same people who experienced less distress were also less likely to see the pandemic as something to be concerned about, less likely to support public health measures to contain it and less likely to practice social distancing or isolation to protect themselves and those around them from a highly contagious virus.

The entanglement of religion and politics in the United States can help explain why religion was helpful for mental health but arguably harmful for physical health. It wasn’t just religious people who experienced less distress, less concern about the virus and less commitment to social distancing. Republicans and conservatives as a whole did not experience the same spike in distress that Democrats and liberals experienced at the beginning of the pandemic—largely because Republicans and conservatives, following the lead of figures like President Trump, didn’t think we needed to worry or disrupt our lives to avoid COVID-19.

Highly religious Americans and especially evangelicals are much more likely to be Republican and conservative than Democratic and liberal. In fact, white evangelicals consistently vote for the Republican presidential candidates at a clip of about four times in five, a pattern that did not change with Trump. Most evangelicals supported Trump, Trump said the pandemic wasn’t something to worry about, and so most evangelicals weren’t worried. Therefore, politics as much if not more than religion itself can help explain why evangelicals experienced less distress.

Religion did matter more directly as well, however. The United States is exceptionally religious when compared to similar countries, and the pandemic and responses to it were frequently framed in a religious light for many Americans. In fact, my study shows that a majority of Americans, about three in five of them, had already sought to use prayer to end the pandemic by March 2020. And while subsequent rates of spread in the U.S. in relation to comparable secular countries that socially distanced more consistently challenge any notion that prayer was a particularly effective way to end the pandemic, it was helpful for the mental health of those who prayed, lowering the rates of distress of Americans who used prayer as a response to it.

As we enter the second year of this global pandemic, our mental health is suffering. We are disconnected from one another, our routines have been disrupted, and life as we know it has changed. On first glance, we might wonder if religion is a silver bullet that could solve our problems and alleviate suffering. While religion’s protective benefits to mental health are promising, if those benefits come from ignoring real problems it may not be an effective long-term solution. Rather than a clear and obvious benefit, religion’s mental health benefits appear to be more of a trade-off, where mental health is gained at the risk of physical health and comfort is privileged over effective solutions to real problems.

Insofar as religion protects mental health by making people less concerned by and less committed to solving real threats, it could ultimately undermine well-being by perpetuating the very causes of suffering with which it helps people cope.

This is an opinion and analysis article.