July, 2001 (Vol. 16, No. 9)

After years of ignoring or downplaying the effect of AIDS in Africa, missionary organizations and churches are joining forces in the prevention and treatment of the fast-spreading disease.

Charisma News Service, (June 27) reports that those attending the United Nations General Assembly’s special session on AIDS in New York in June found many representatives from worldwide Christian organizations and churches at the summit. Realizing that “It’s not just a disease of homosexuals,” said Jalipa, who works with World Vision in Nairobi, Kenya.

Across Africa, more than 8,000 daily die of AIDS. “It’s a disease that affects everybody — children, men and women . . . The church has the basic mandate to spread the word and the social responsibility to be compassionate.”

A special session gathered together different denominations and faith-based groups working on the issue. “It looks to me that AIDS is drawing the church — from the radical left to the conservatives — together because we have a common enemy. It’s a very positive movement,” Jalipa said. Although more than half of 1,500 multidenominational churches that partner with World Vision in Africa are “preaching AIDS from the pulpit,” Jalipa said some congregations are still judgmental and resistant to the crisis.

“A majority has really opened their eyes, arms and funding to AIDS,” he concludes.

Militant Jews and Hindus living in New York are forming a new alliance, based largely on their common antagonism toward Muslims, reports the New York Times (June 2).

The unusual bond was seen recently when a Web site run by militant Hindus in the New York City borough of Queens was shut down by its service provider for its violent rhetoric against Muslims only to be rescued by a group of radical Jews in Brooklyn. So tight are these groups’ anti-Muslim bonds  that “some of the Hindus marched alongside the Jews in the annual Salute to Israel Parade on [New York’s] Fifth Avenue . . . [more recently,] several of the Jews joined a protest outside of the United Nations against the treatment of Hindus in Afghanistan by the Taliban regime,” reports Dean E. Murphy.

The Hindus are associated with the militant nationalist movement in India known as Bajrang Dai, which has frequently clashed with Muslims over the supremacy of Hinduism. The Jews are associated with the Kahane movement, whose teachings advocate the expulsion of Arabs from Israel. Both groups include participants who view their stay in the U.S. as temporary and plan to return to their home country to wage battle for their respective religions.

The New Age movement has found a solid foothold in the South and is also finding a new tolerance for its unorthodox spiritual practices, reports New Age magazine (July/August).

The Asheville, North Carolina area hosts up to 50 retreat centers, and the city has more massage therapists per quarter block than most other places, writes Lauren Winner. The economy of the city has long been fueled by tourism, and now Asheville is attracting a growing number of spiritual pilgrims, gaining the title of the “Sedona of the east,” referring to New Mexico New Age hot spot. The still-predominant Methodist and Baptists  are reported to be more accepting and open-minded than expected, as evidenced by the waiting lists for courses on Eastern spirituality.

Another emerging hotspot of alternative spirituality is the Catskill Mountains in upstate New York. The once popular resort area has become a center of Buddhist teaching and practice, reports the New York Times (June 18). Major Buddhist centers — said to number up to 25 — have spread throughout the Catskill region and academics and others say the Buddhist presence is growing not only in number but in its unique variety of traditions from China, Tibet, Korea and Japan.

“If the world survives another 500 years, the Catskills will be a pilgrimage place for the United States and Europe,” says C.W. Huntington Jr. of Hartwick College. Already there are people from Asia and Australia attending retreats in the Catskills at Zen Mountain Monastery and the International Dai Bosatsu Zendo.

(New Age, 42 Pleasant St., Watertown, MA 02472)

The Unitarian-Universalists are undergoing new divisions about the church’s pluralistic and non-dogmatic teachings, but it appears that politics is also playing a large role in the conflict.

A small group of dissidents who recently planned to start a rival Unitarian-Universalist society in order to restore a more central place for God in the religion received wide media coverage. The effort of David Burton to form the American Unitarian Association also ignited a legal battle when the  Unitarian-Universalist Association sought to sue the upstarts for stealing their name.

The Washington Times (June 18) reports that when Burton converted to the church he found that liberal politics mattered more than faith and spirituality in its pulpits and sought to start a parallel organization (rather than a new denomination) in Virginia.

For their part, Unitarian leaders argue that politics is driving Burton’s campaign. He belongs to a Unitarian-Universalists conservative forum and has been a Republican activist. [Burton’s claim that spirituality is neglected in UU churches may have been true 20 years ago, but there has since been a growing trend toward spiritual practices and even “God talk” in the denomination. The new spiritual thrust is often linked to liberal political views and is eclectic, embracing Christian as well as Neopagan caucuses, but atheism seems to be passé among most UU churches.]

Americans interested in Buddhism are being fed the more esoteric, high level teachings while missing  the basics, often under the instruction of visiting lamas and other spiritual teachers, reports the Buddhist magazine Tricycle (Summer).

In an interview, Buddhist scholar B. Alan Wallace says that the dilemma is most evident in Tibetan Buddhism, where Tibetan lamas visiting the U.S. alter teachings to fit into the format of retreats, weekend workshops and one night lectures. Lamas find little interest among American participants in such Buddhist basic teachings as renunciation, ethical discipline and the cultivation of compassion, and in a “supply and demand” situation will highlight what people want to hear — newer advanced teachings, such as attaining one’s inner Buddhist nature.

Even if they have wealthy benefactors that take care of them, lamas still rely on retreat and conference participants for their travel costs and operating expenses and have to cater to their hosts interests (even if they try to convey that basic and advanced teachings are important). For all the interest in advanced, esoteric teachings, Wallace finds little if any evidence that American practitioners are achieving Buddhist holiness and enlightenment, which is marked by the state of meditative concentration, contemplative insights and paranormal abilities.

He concludes that with the lack of contemplative rigor as well as the effect of commercialization, “Tibetan Buddhism runs the danger of losing its integrity in the West and being totally assimilated into an amorphous New Age culture.”

(Tricycle, 92 Vandam St., New York, NY 10013)

The campaign for faith-based social services is “opening up a new front” as religious and political leaders press businesses to drop their common practice of restricting donations to religious groups.

The evangelical newsweekly World (June 16) reports that six of the 10 largest corporate givers in the U.S. explicitly rule out or restrict donations to faith-based groups. President George W. Bush recently took up the cause, arguing that the federal government is “no longer discriminating against faith-based organizations, and neither should corporate America.”

The figures on corporate restrictions come from a study by the Capital Research Center, a conservative think tank on charity and public policy. In researching corporations’ web sites, there were often disclaimers on religious giving, such as General Motors (number one in corporate giving) declaring that religious organizations are “generally not” targeted for contributions.

While AT&T will only fund groups that are “nonsectarian and nondenominational,” others permitted some funding to religious groups.  Wal-Mart (the number two corporate benefactor) clearly ran against the current, with about “every other grant” going to a faith-based charity, according to the study. World notes that the effort to extend corporate giving to faith-based groups is about to get a major shot in the arm with the founding of two new nonprofit groups that will work at the “crossroads of business, politics, and faith-based initiatives.”

Michael Joyce, the former head of the influential Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation (which seeded and sustained many conservative causes in the U.S.) will head a Washington-based  lobbying group for members of Congress and others about Bush’s faith-based policies. He is starting another organization to be based in Phoenix, Ariz., that will seek to educate the public and private donors  “for the long haul” on the same concerns.

(World, P.O. Box 20002, Asheville, NC 28802-8202)

There is a new interest among scholars in the relationship between the brain and spirituality, and it appears such scholarship is appealing to a popular readership.

Publisher Weekly’s Bookline newsletter (June 12) reports a “bumper crop” of new books finding that people may be “wired for God,” as spiritual impulses are being gauged and studied in laboratories around the world. During the past few months, there has been wide coverage of recent brain-spirituality books and scholarship, with news stories reporting on recent attempts to map spirituality in the brain (most often citing experiments of brain scans to detect the effect of meditation and prayer).

Lauren Winner reports that several of these books have been surprise successes: Ballantine’s “Why God Won’t Go Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief” by Andrew Newberg, Eugene G. D’Aquili and Vince Rause, published April 3, has 25,000 copies in print after three trips to press.

Matthew Alper self-published “The ‘God’ Part of the Brain” (Rogue Press) in October 1997. Since then, the book, now  in its fifth edition, has sold more than 12,000 copies. Authors and editors say that this recent research is bound to reshape how we think about spirituality. “With neurological explanations coming to account for an increasing number of phenomena, it is natural that there should be a focus of interest on the relationship between religion and the mind,” says Kevin Taylor of Cambridge University Press.

Some of these books seek to affirm or reaffirm faith, seeing the new science as a way to discover more about spirituality rather than explain it away. Others are more reductionistic, seeing faith and spirituality as mainly biological functions with no supernatural component.  Matthew Alper said the new knowledge about the cognitive underpinnings of spirituality could — and should — reshape organized religion as we know it.

“If spirituality is an instinct, we should look at it as such, and see that we temper the extremities of the instinct.” Believers who read his book,  said Alper, should not necessarily give up going to mosque or temple altogether, but “they should at least embrace a more tolerant, less discriminating spirituality.”

Festivals are an increasingly prominent venue for spirituality and worship among Christians, but are they becoming a substitute for church involvement?

In the U.S., Christian rock concerts have become  religious festivals, filled with pageantry, camaraderie, teaching, worship, not to mention music. The evangelical magazine Prism (May/June) reports on the mushrooming variety of Christian music festivals that bloom every summer. The premier event is the Cornerstone festival, launched 17 years ago by the Chicago-based community Jesus People USA.

Last summer the festival gathered the largest crowd in history, as 25,000 crammed onto an Illinois farm to listen to over 200 bands. Cornerstone blurs the lines between secular and Christian artists, as well as hosts an array of seminars (on everything from cults to popular culture), a film festival, art gallery, opportunities for social action, and debates about art and politics.

A new national event, called One Fest (http://www.onefest.org), is seeking to parallel Cornerstone, with a bent toward creating community and deeper faith among participants. John J. Thompson writes that these festivals’ “blend of seminars, impromptu experiences, main stages and body painting can suck even the most unfamiliar into the slipstream of joyful, culturally relevant fellowship. They can reinvigorate the faith and action of a long-time believer while providing unbelievers with an intimate glimpse into the true body of Christ.”

There does not seem to be much of a connection between the large crowds at these events and church attendance and membership, at least in Europe. For instance, Germany’s widely popular Kirchentag  draws mostly the unchurched, judging by the low church attendance rates in Germany. The large numbers that attend church festivals and conferences in Britain over the summer likewise give the impression of religious vitality.

Religion Today.com (June 5) reports that last year’s festival-goers could not help but notice the discrepancy between prospering festivals and sharply falling attendance in many churches. British church attendance  has fallen from just over 19 percent in 1975 to less than 8 percent today. “The festivals prosper, while the church is bleeding,” according to the original article in the Guardian.

The report says that the real beneficiaries of these gatherings are the growing number of para-church organizations and Christian companies. The involvement of parachurches may be why these successful events have failed to make an impact on the church. The existence of so many  parachurch organizations, “going where the church is not  going, doing what the church is not doing, only reinforces the notion that the church is irrelevant, out-of-date.” The “festival circuit” provides excitement and may well be in danger of becoming an escape from the realities of local church life, adds the Guardian.

The year 2000 has come and gone, but the religious based social justice movement known as “Jubilee 2000” that was inaugurated at the turn of the millennium may be getting its second wind.

The Jubilee 2000 movement was based on the single issue of debt relief for the poorest countries, drawing inspiration from the Hebrew Scriptures’ injunctions to forgive debtors during certain periods. In the Jesuit magazine America (June 18), William Bole writes that the movement has succeeded, with victories in Congress for debt relief and with the World Bank and International Monetary Fund making at least some debt cancellations (the movement caught on the strongest in “largely de-Christianized” England, he notes).

Now there is talk of prolonging the energies of the movement to tackle further debt cancellation as well as a possible program called Jubilee Plus, which would target the “root causes” of Third World debt. In any event, the movement is viewed as a model of social action because it is “issue-focused, non-ideological and faith-based,” writes Bole. Just how Jubilee 2000  is being reinterpreted and extended into a permanent movement and even a theology can be seen in an article by Palestinian Lutheran Bishop Munib A. Younan in Theology, News and Notes, (Spring) a magazine of Fuller Seminary.

Younan writes that the Jubilee is an “all-encompassing vision of social and ecological justice, which calls for release from bondage, redistribution of land and wealth, and renewal of the earth.” Just as the original Jubilee called for land reform, Younan writes that the Jubilee theology should lead to the restoration of land to the Palestinians. A two-states solution and a shared Jerusalem is a practical outworking of such a theology, according to Younan.

Meanwhile, the magazine Religion in the News (Spring), a publication of the Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life, finds that “for the most part, the U.S. news media passed on the story” of Jubilee 2000. While the European media gave the movement significant coverage, viewing it as a significant religion inspired phenomenon, American journalists either failed to notice it at all or ignored its religious participation and inspiration. Even when the media covered the pope’s declarations of 2000 as a jubilee year, they neglected to cite John Paul’s central issue of debt relief.

Writer Dennis Hoover concludes that the high profile entertainers involved in Jubilee 2000 events, such as musician Bono, may have stolen the show from its grassroots activists.

(America, 106 W. 56th St., New York, NY 10019; Religion in the News, Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life, Trinity College, 300 Summit St., Hartford, CT 06106; Theology, News and Notes, 135 North Oakland Ave., Pasadena, CA 91182)