Feb 20, 2017 03:29 AM
When Will The Church Stop Deceiving Children?
https://swarajyamag.com/ideas/when-will-...g-children
EXCERPT: Several news outlets recently published a report that said many four- to five-year-old “tiny tots” had written a “letter” to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, requesting him to secure the release of an evangelist Jesuit from the clutches of terror group Islamic State (IS). Let’s leave aside the pertinent question of how four- to five-year-olds came to ask for the release of a Jesuit missionary from the custody of IS. Let’s also leave aside the equally pertinent question of how these kids managed to write a coherent letter (even as they were helped by their parents and the church). Instead, what this article will focus on is the “ends justify the means” mentality of the church. Here are some points to consider.
[...] Having said this, here is my advice. Do write to the Prime Minister asking for his help in freeing the abducted pastor, who happens to be an Indian citizen. But, also, some day, write to the church demanding that it should not put Indian lives at risk to further their religious goals. It should not put adherence to the church ahead of their loyalty to the Indian Constitution. More importantly, it should not use children without a voice for pursuing their religio-political goals. Yes, the truth may hurt now. But it also liberates. Our wish for you is that this truth sets you free....
Understanding other religions is fundamental to citizenship
https://aeon.co/ideas/understanding-othe...itizenship
EXCERPT: By walking down the street of any major city, you are likely to see more diversity than an 18th-century explorer did in a lifetime. People with very different ideas of how society should function must live together, and there is no idea more divisive than that of religion. Many of the most important moral disagreements break out along religious lines. Indeed, differing religious views on freedom, sexuality and justice threaten social cohesion. That must not be allowed to happen.
One crucial way that people can best learn to live with one another is by increasing their religious literacy. In 1945, the British author C S Lewis said that one will gain greater insight into other belief systems by stepping inside and looking ‘along’ them, rather than looking ‘at’ them from the outside. He explained this by analogy. Think of the difference in the experience of looking at a beam of light through a window, in comparison with the experience of looking along it. It is from within that we can test a system’s internal consistency and its ability to form and inform the believer. The idea is to see religion not merely as a set of propositions held in the head, but, in the words of the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, as a ‘lived experience’. The key to this kind of understanding is dialogue....
[...]
In educational theory, religious literacy could be considered a ‘threshold concept’ for 21st-century citizenship. The word threshold comes from the word threshing: to separate the wheat from the chaff, filtering out what does not nourish in order to be left with what does. A concept that establishes a threshold is one that disabuses us of superficial understandings, and creates something more profound, complex and paradigmatic. For example, a threshold concept in physics would be understanding ‘temperature gradient’, or in literature it could be learning to deconstruct text for analysis. They are a boundary through which one must pass in order to advance in the understanding of a subject, allowing one a fuller grasp of a discipline. Similarly, in the study of religion, and indeed global citizenship, religious literacy should also be deemed a threshold concept, as it moves towards a perspectival understanding of religion rather than a reductionist one. Religion moves from being a set of propositions and practices, to an animating force behind human behaviour – something that needs to be heard in its own key. Teaching religious literacy requires a focus on process rather than content....
If Aquinas is a philosopher then so are the Islamic theologians
https://aeon.co/ideas/if-aquinas-is-a-ph...heologians
EXCERPT: Maybe I’m just an optimist, but I think people today mostly acknowledge the importance and originality of philosophy in the Islamic world. Would any scholar now say in print, as Bertrand Russell notoriously did in his History of Western Philosophy (written in 1945), that ‘Arabic philosophy is not important as original thought. Men like Avicenna and Averroes are essentially commentators’? I certainly hope not. But even if we now see more clearly, we still have blindspots. The thinkers taken seriously as ‘philosophers’ are typically the authors Russell dismissed as mere commentators, men such as al-Kindī, al-Fārābī, Avicenna, and Averroes. Though they were far from unoriginal, they were indeed enthusiasts for Aristotle and other Greek authors. Yet these were not the only intellectuals and rationalists of their time, nor did rationalism and philosophical reflection die with Averroes at the end of the 12th century, as is still often believed. Throughout Islamic history, many of the figures of interest and relevance to the historian of philosophy were not Aristotelians, but practitioners of kalām, which is usually translated as ‘theology’....
https://swarajyamag.com/ideas/when-will-...g-children
EXCERPT: Several news outlets recently published a report that said many four- to five-year-old “tiny tots” had written a “letter” to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, requesting him to secure the release of an evangelist Jesuit from the clutches of terror group Islamic State (IS). Let’s leave aside the pertinent question of how four- to five-year-olds came to ask for the release of a Jesuit missionary from the custody of IS. Let’s also leave aside the equally pertinent question of how these kids managed to write a coherent letter (even as they were helped by their parents and the church). Instead, what this article will focus on is the “ends justify the means” mentality of the church. Here are some points to consider.
[...] Having said this, here is my advice. Do write to the Prime Minister asking for his help in freeing the abducted pastor, who happens to be an Indian citizen. But, also, some day, write to the church demanding that it should not put Indian lives at risk to further their religious goals. It should not put adherence to the church ahead of their loyalty to the Indian Constitution. More importantly, it should not use children without a voice for pursuing their religio-political goals. Yes, the truth may hurt now. But it also liberates. Our wish for you is that this truth sets you free....
Understanding other religions is fundamental to citizenship
https://aeon.co/ideas/understanding-othe...itizenship
EXCERPT: By walking down the street of any major city, you are likely to see more diversity than an 18th-century explorer did in a lifetime. People with very different ideas of how society should function must live together, and there is no idea more divisive than that of religion. Many of the most important moral disagreements break out along religious lines. Indeed, differing religious views on freedom, sexuality and justice threaten social cohesion. That must not be allowed to happen.
One crucial way that people can best learn to live with one another is by increasing their religious literacy. In 1945, the British author C S Lewis said that one will gain greater insight into other belief systems by stepping inside and looking ‘along’ them, rather than looking ‘at’ them from the outside. He explained this by analogy. Think of the difference in the experience of looking at a beam of light through a window, in comparison with the experience of looking along it. It is from within that we can test a system’s internal consistency and its ability to form and inform the believer. The idea is to see religion not merely as a set of propositions held in the head, but, in the words of the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, as a ‘lived experience’. The key to this kind of understanding is dialogue....
[...]
In educational theory, religious literacy could be considered a ‘threshold concept’ for 21st-century citizenship. The word threshold comes from the word threshing: to separate the wheat from the chaff, filtering out what does not nourish in order to be left with what does. A concept that establishes a threshold is one that disabuses us of superficial understandings, and creates something more profound, complex and paradigmatic. For example, a threshold concept in physics would be understanding ‘temperature gradient’, or in literature it could be learning to deconstruct text for analysis. They are a boundary through which one must pass in order to advance in the understanding of a subject, allowing one a fuller grasp of a discipline. Similarly, in the study of religion, and indeed global citizenship, religious literacy should also be deemed a threshold concept, as it moves towards a perspectival understanding of religion rather than a reductionist one. Religion moves from being a set of propositions and practices, to an animating force behind human behaviour – something that needs to be heard in its own key. Teaching religious literacy requires a focus on process rather than content....
If Aquinas is a philosopher then so are the Islamic theologians
https://aeon.co/ideas/if-aquinas-is-a-ph...heologians
EXCERPT: Maybe I’m just an optimist, but I think people today mostly acknowledge the importance and originality of philosophy in the Islamic world. Would any scholar now say in print, as Bertrand Russell notoriously did in his History of Western Philosophy (written in 1945), that ‘Arabic philosophy is not important as original thought. Men like Avicenna and Averroes are essentially commentators’? I certainly hope not. But even if we now see more clearly, we still have blindspots. The thinkers taken seriously as ‘philosophers’ are typically the authors Russell dismissed as mere commentators, men such as al-Kindī, al-Fārābī, Avicenna, and Averroes. Though they were far from unoriginal, they were indeed enthusiasts for Aristotle and other Greek authors. Yet these were not the only intellectuals and rationalists of their time, nor did rationalism and philosophical reflection die with Averroes at the end of the 12th century, as is still often believed. Throughout Islamic history, many of the figures of interest and relevance to the historian of philosophy were not Aristotelians, but practitioners of kalām, which is usually translated as ‘theology’....