An excerpt from the article:
"Though religion and politics mixes during election season, people who study the intersection of religion and civil society say there's not a strong religious voice at Los Angeles City Hall in day-to-day politics. Local churches, mosques and synagogues, tend to operate in their own silos. But experts and community leaders say more could be done to improve the city if religious groups could consistently come together to address local issues.]]>
Richard Flory, director of research at USC's Center for Religion & Civic Culture, said the size and diversity in Los Angeles makes it difficult for groups of any kind to work together.'It's only been in a big crises, like the riots, that people can come together,' he said.
In the local mayoral race, many local churches and temples have hosted candidate forums or welcomed candidates to speak from the pulpit. Some church leaders tread in gray area and endorse candidates despite federal prohibitions on such endorsements.
Rev. Mark Whitlock, a pastor in Irvine who serves as the executive director of the USC Cecil Murray Center for Community Engagement, has endorsed Greuel partially because he would like to see the city have its first female mayor.
Whitlock said endorsements are important because church leaders have a stake in making sure that elected officials are capable of ruling effectively.
'Religious leaders can't be so spiritually bound that they have no earthly good,' he said."
An excerpt from the article:
"The current push to find a negotiated solution to interreligious violence originated with the Sultan of Sokoto, the traditional leader of Nigeria’s 80 million Muslims. In a recent interview, the Sultan — who heads Jama'atu Nasril Islam, the Muslim counterpart to CAN — said that in the absence of creative initiatives from Christian officials in Jos and the rest of Plateau State, getting at the root causes of the country’s regional violence must become a priority for national political figures.]]>
'When you are holding public office you should then be a leader,' he said. 'But the Plateau government profits from the status quo. Big politicians there are hiding behind religion.'Though there is no shortage of rancor on either side of Nigeria’s religious divide, the Sultan said that promoting tolerance and stable economic development is in the interest of all Nigerians, who are consistently ranked as some of the most ardently religious people in the world."
The report was written by students in the USC Annenberg Knight Program on Media and Religion, headed by Annenberg Professor Diane Winston.
An excerpt from the article:
"Many non-Catholic and non-religious milliennials are now observing Lent — the traditional season of sacrifice in many Christian denominations, leading up to Easter — as a way to give up something inhibiting their greater good. In this, the young people may be trying to reconnect with their inner spirituality outside of the confines of traditional religion.]]>
'There is something about trying to create a space for yourself to pursue some sort of broadly construed spirituality that helps keep you grounded,' Flory says. 'A lot of what we hear from post-baby-boomers is about authenticity and about being who you are. This is a way to link back into parts of their identity without buying into the larger institution.' ”
The Pentecostal and Charismatic Research Initiative award grants to those conducting research projects that engage topics of interest not only to Pentecostal and charismatic specialists, but to a broader group of scholars interested in the dynamics of social change and the role of religion in the expansion of these movements.
Street has produced several reports that detail aspects of the Charismatic Catholic movement in Latin America. Watch the reports on YouTube.
]]>Briggs, writer for the Association of Religion Data Archives, describes how the selection of Pope Francis could impact the Catholic church and also the Pentecostal movement.
]]>But what may matter more than the new pope's nationality, according to some scholars, is his commitment to allowing the growth of lay leadership and culturally sensitive worship that is at the heart of the success of the Pentecostal movement.
"A new pope would do well to officially sanction some of this, rather than resist it," said Donald Miller, the series editor of "Global Pentecostalism and Charismatic Christianity" and the executive director of the Center for Religion and Civic Culture at the University of Southern California.
Begun in Texas by then Governor George Bush, the faith-based initiative like other originally conservative policy ideas such as drone warfare, warrantless wiretapping, and mandated private health insurance, has become deeply entrenched in many aspects of our government. There are faith-based offices operating in over 30 states, every major city, many branches of federal government (even Homeland Security), and there is still a White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Partnerships. Much like normalization of other public policies such as school vouchers, the policies created under the faith-based initiative have created an unprecedented level of religious entanglement within the government. These various initiatives to increase the presence of religion within government would have been unthinkable 20 years ago.
In fact, much to the outrage of church/state separation advocates, the initiative has actually expanded in some ways under President Obama — from 13 to 15 federal agencies and the from 30 to 45 White House Faith-based Office employees. And President Obama has still not set aside the rule allowing religious groups to hire whomever they want even if they take government money to do it. Yes, that’s right, religious organizations receiving government grants are free to discriminate when they hire new employees.
In his farewell to the office, Dubois wrote an article on CNN. He argued that he and the other faith leaders “care first about God, and second about their neighbors.” This type of statement reinforces what many Americans feared about the entanglement of religion into government by the faith-based initiative, that it would make religion first, and creating a better social service system second. It is also most likely at least part of the reason why many Americans have lost their faith in religion. For the progressive religious leaders I have been speaking with over the last four years on my new project examining the religious left, this vision is not one that they agree with and not one that is likely bring back to the fold the ever growing population of religious “nones.”
What President Obama will do next is anyone’s guess. With his “Pastor in Chief” gone, he has a real opportunity to make the successor less known for his daily prayer tweets, and more known for encouraging and creating social policies that help the least, last and lost. With his second term and second director, Obama can move beyond changing the name of his faith-based office, to changing the way people perceive the role of religion and government in the United States, one that puts people first, regardless of their relationship with, or without, God.
]]>In their 2005 study “Cultural Events and Jewish Identities: Young Adult Jews in New York,” Steven M. Cohen and Ari Y. Kelman identified “the value of Jewish culture as an instrument of reaching the unengaged.” They found that “engaged, but unaffiliated” Jews are “drawn to events that promise to cross boundaries between Jews and non-Jews, Jews and Jews, Jewish space and non-Jewish space, and distinctively Jewish culture with putatively non-Jewish culture, effecting a ‘cultural hybridity.’” That study has since been used to garner support for the creation of a myriad of programs that use arts and culture to engage unaffiliated Jews. For example, the Six Points Fellowship (founded in 2006) supports emerging Jewish artists in the creation of affective artistic and cultural programming that appeals to Jewish young adults by providing artists with financial, professional, and artistic support over the course of two-years. Culture Lab: Encounters With Jewish Culture, a new program of the Silverlake Independent Jewish Community Center on Los Angeles’ east side, was designed to nurture the development of diverse and innovative arenas for engagement by curating creative collaborations among artists, culture makers, and scholars.
Alongside the wellspring of support for such endeavors exists a longstanding ambivalence about the ultimate value of engaging Jews through the arts. In fact, the nature of exclusively culture-based Jewish identification in general has long been a point of contention. For decades, Jewish leaders have reflected on and debated the value and legitimacy of the ever-growing population of Jews in the U.S. who consider themselves secular, cultural, and/or “spiritual but not religious.” The Berman Jewish Policy Archive — an online collection of policy-relevant research and analysis on Jewish life — has catalogued the more than a hundred articles, conference proceedings, and speeches on the topic since the 1960s.
Most recently, the Huffington Post ran an opinion piece, “The Self-Delusions of Secular Jews,” by Rabbi Eric H. Yoffie, president emeritus of the Union for Reform Judaism. Two weeks later, Leonard Fein and Steven M. Cohen responded with the article: “Let Secular Jews Be Secular Jews.” Like so many discussions before this, Yoffie expresses anxiety about the prospect of Jewish continuity in the face of the waning of the majority’s identification with Jewish religiosity. While acknowledging the declining non-Orthodox population, Fein and Cohen counter with an appeal for recognition of the diversity of Jewish expression. They punctuate the importance of openness to complex and varied modes of identification by noting that large numbers of Jews are entirely comfortable with Jewish expression that is “more cultural than religious” in nature: a national survey recently found that 36 percent identify as cultural Jews and another 16 percent called themselves secular Jews.
These shifts are fundamentally changing what it means to be Jewish in this country. An undeniable aspect of contemporary life is the fact that large numbers those who identify as Jews also count non-Jews among their immediate and extended family members. This fact punctuates the salience of Cohen and Kelman’s finding about the allure of art-based engagement. By championing the development and consumption of culture within a Jewish context, organizations are providing accessible avenues through which Jews and non-Jews can collectively experience and construct new meanings of Jewishness. Creative endeavors have the power to transcend the boundaries of religion, race, class and gender, making space to explore diverse Jewish narratives and empower cultural/secular Jews to contribute to a conversation in which they might not otherwise take part. Of course, we cannot know what the investment in creativity means for the future of American Jews, but it will without a doubt broaden our understanding of how people experience Jewishness.
Art by Will Deutsch, www.notesfromthetribe.com
]]>An excerpt from the piece:
"Reverend Cecil Murray is nationally known for picking up the pieces after the 1992 L.A. riots.
In his 27-years as pastor of First African Methodist Episcopal Church of Los Angeles, this history major expanded the church’s membership from 250 to more than 19,000. This former Air Force officer and his congregation created 40 task forces to address the issues of health, homelessness and substance abuse among other projects."
Watch the video here.
]]>An excerpt from the article:
"On a brilliantly sunny Monday morning at the start of the rainy season, a couple of dozen young men gathered for a game of soccer in Jos, capital of the state that encompasses the temperate volcanic plateau in central Nigeria. At first glance the event seemed unremarkable -- laughter, friendly taunts and a fairly casual level of competition were the order of the day.
But the armed guard who kept vigil by the gate at the Hillcrest School was the first indication that more serious matters were at stake. Jos is an uneasy place -- nearly 4,000 people have died in violent conflict over the past decade -- and the young Christians and Muslims on the field had converged from parts of an increasingly segregated city where goodwill between Christians and Muslims is often hard to find."
Read the rest of the article here.
]]>An excerpt from the article:
"How many Jews are there in Los Angeles? Hard to say, really: It’s been 17 years since anyone counted. That’s seven years longer than in Boston, New York, Seattle or Chicago, where the local Jewish Federations (umbrella groups for some 450 Jewish communities across North America) dutifully conduct a population survey every decade. But the last count in Los Angeles was taken in 1997, and there has never been a Jewish survey of Orange County.But without a current population survey, it’s guesswork.
Impatient for new data, Phillips teamed with USC researchers Diane Winston and Richard Flory to study the Jewish population of Southern California by other means. The scholars requested raw results from the 2007 Pew Religious Landscape Survey, a national poll of 35,000 Americans, and painstakingly teased out California-specific statistics.
While the sample is small, it hinted at a community 'in the midst of a sea change' Phillips recently wrote on “Demographic Duo,” his blog at the Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles."
According to the article, the team of researchers will present their their findings at the next meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion.
Read the entire article here.
An excerpt from the article:
"Black is consciousness and more than a skin color. Becoming black was identifying with heroes who suffered to make America great. February is the month many people celebrate Black History.
Black History Month originally started as Negro History Week in 1926, by Harvard educated historian and author Dr. Carter G. Woodson. It created a new consciousness for celebrating men and women who were unashamedly black.When some people think of Black History, their minds create images of black slavery, human suffering, segregated public facilities and civil rights marches. In reality, Dr. Woodson's goal was to teach uninformed whites the achievements and contributions of black Americans."
Read the rest of the article at the Orange County Register website.
]]>An excerpt from his article:
"I recently traveled to the crescent city, New Orleans -- affectionately known as NOLA -- for a conference. Besides the lively music, cultural hybridity, and unforgettable food, what soulfully grasped me was the civic spirit of its resilient residents and newcomers, who all seem to have metaphorically boarded the streetcar named 'rebuild NOLA', in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina that devastated the city in August of 2005.
Away from the surreal madness of Bourbon Street, one of the rebuilding projects is the proposed Lafitte Corridor Greenway. Jason Neville, NOLA native and former Los Angeles city urban planner, says that the project is "one example of the wide variety of grassroots recovery projects" that have taken hold of the city."
Read the rest of the article at KCET.org.
Thomas Garrison, USC's own "Indiana Jones" and IRG fellow, has also been recognized by the Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences for his archaeological work. An anthropological archaeologist, Garrison is currently heading an international team to excavate two unique Mayan temples in the jungles of Guatemala.
An excerpt from the article:
"A dark tide of bats flows out of a large cave in the nearby mountainside as the last rays of the setting sun illuminate a dramatic series of giant blood-red masks decorating an ancient temple set atop the Diablo Pyramid. Beneath the 40-foot high pyramid lies a burial tomb containing the remains of a Maya king, found with a sacrificial blade lying where his right hand would have been.
Pure Indiana Jones, the scene has attracted widespread international attention as armchair archaeologists the world over follow the latest discoveries at the recently excavated Temple of the Night Sun at El Zotz, headed by Thomas Garrison of the USC Dornsife Department of Anthropology.The Maya, an advanced Mesoamerican civilization, lived in what is now Guatemala, southern Mexico and Belize, in a series of city-states of varying size and power. While El Zotz was one of the smaller kingdoms, it appears to have more than made up for its size with a keen sense of its own identity and creativity."
Read the rest of article here.
The CRCC Interdisciplinary Research Group is chaired by Lisa Bitel and a committee of scholars from diverse academic disciplines who work to advance the investigation of religions and religion-related topics at USC. IRG supports scholarship related to religions with annual Fellowships of up to $10,000 for USC faculty and up to $5,000 for advanced doctoral candidates.
For information on the awards, follow this link.
]]>But I also cry for those priests that were not helped to understand their own sinfulness and kept away from children. Some might have been able to find places of service if they were not allowed to be in places where they could harm the young. Now they are now all broken men who have done great damage to their victims and have given the Church they served a bad name.
My pain extends to Cardinal Mahony. I was one of many who saw him do numerous good things. I marched with him on the streets of Los Angeles calling for immigration reform. I also had the privilege of being on the same platform with him at Fuller Seminary as we addressed this important issue. He had a strong commitment to the rights of the “foreigner” and took the bold stance of stating that the priests in his diocese would not obey HR 4437, the law proposed by Rep. James Sensenbrenner that would have made it a felony to walk alongside the undocumented. He also did a lot of work on behalf of farmworkers and others who were suffering at the hands of the rich and powerful. The Cardinal did more on behalf of immigrant and farmworker Latinos/a Catholics than most of the politicians that claim to be working on their behalf. Many Catholics in southern California will also remember his work on behalf of the Catholic school system and the new cathedral.
Nonetheless, most people will not remember the cardinal for the good he did, but for his cover-ups of abuse. Even those who dislike churches and religious institutions hold religious leaders to a higher standard. They are human, but we rightfully expect them to take their vocation vows seriously. Anyone who claims to serve in God´s name carries a higher responsibility and faces deeper consequences before God and humanity.
My crying continues because of the hubris represented in the Cardinal Mahony’s actions. Hubris is one of the great temptations for those in power, be it in religious, political, social or economic realms. It becomes easy to justify our actions and to assume that we can maintain control over situations. Instead of acting in humility and looking for accountability, leaders conclude that they can solve any situation and, as necessary, cover up any wrongdoing, “for the greater good.” And so innocent children are abused and their abusers are protected.
Our society rightly condemns the evil done by the abusing priests, but it must also face the fact that many others are not held accountable for their actions. Thousands of innocent people have been killed in the name of our national security; the rich and powerful spent years protecting a famous television personality who actually sexually abused many people. The world´s economic system was almost destroyed by the powerful few who refused to have any accountability for their actions. All of these leaders were acting from the same hubris that assumes that because one has power one can avoid public scrutiny and, if necessary, one can continue to “spin” the problem until it goes away or people focus on something else.
At the end of the day, I cry for the human condition. Cardinal Mahony reminds us that we all have feet of clay. But none of us wants to admit that we might have done the same thing under similar circumstances. And so it is that most of us will not remember that Cardinal Mahony worked alongside César Chávez on behalf of farmworkers who are abused by an economy that idealizes the farmer (e.g. the Super Bowl advertisement about farmers), but does not want to recognize that we eat cheap food because of the hard work of real farmworkers. Nor will we remember that he was a valiant voice on behalf of the immigrants who have been abused by all of us who benefit from the U.S. economy. Cardinal Mahony was a champion with clay feet.
]]>
An excerpt from the article:
"In an interview with Esquire that is generating a surprising amount of buzz—and not just because she appears on the magazine's cover in her underwear—TV and film star Megan Fox talks about her Pentecostal upbringing and her experience of "getting the Holy Ghost." Ms. Fox's account of speaking in tongues is proving particularly buzz-worthy, prompting comment in Christian media as well as mainstream news outlets in the U.S. and abroad.
Why the kerfuffle? Didn't we get our fill of this a couple of years ago with similar descriptions by the Pentecostally raised singer Katy Perry? And what does it mean to speak in tongues?Most of the contemporary expressions of the Pentecostal movement trace their roots, in one way or another, to a religious revival that began in Los Angeles well before it became the world's entertainment capital. The L.A. of 1906 was very different from the relatively stable, suburbanized metropolis of today."
Read the rest of the article at Wall Street Journal Online.
]]>America, a nation of immigrants, is the most religiously diverse country in the world.It is multi-religious, multi-cultural, and multi-linguistic. Since the Immigration Act of 1965 which eliminated the quotas linked to national origin, Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs and believers of virtually all the world’s religions have arrived here,altering the ever evolving religious landscape of America. Members of the world's religions live not just on the other side of the world but in our neighborhoods.
In times of crisis and disaster this diversity requires emergency management, and mental and behavior health professionals, to implement plans and protocols that ensure that the whole community receives services that reflect a working knowledge of the religious and cultural background and beliefs of those in need. This is as crucial for all responders as it is for survivors impacted by the disaster.
Emergency managers and their mental health and behavioral health partners are increasingly involved in providing crisis response within multicultural, multi-religious, multi-linguistic communities, emphasizing the importance of response plans that are religiously literate and competent. Thus, those who are committed to enhancing their religious literacy and competency skills are more likely to be effective caregivers to the whole community.
Recent disasters and public health emergencies including Hurricanes Katrina, Rita, and Ike, the 2009 H1N1 pandemic, the Joplin Tornado, wildfires in numerous states, and the recent shooting at a Sikh Gurdwara (temple) showcase the ability of communities to respond broadly to a disaster. These events even more visibly demonstrate the need for behavioral and mental health response plans that integrate a respect for, and understanding of, common standards of disaster spiritual care like those expressed in the National VOAD (Voluntary Organizations Active in Disaster) Disaster Spiritual Care Point of Consensus.
A recent survey of NCSP (Nationally Certified School Psychologist) practitioners found that there is limited awareness among school psychologists of how student diversity influences the provision of crisis intervention services. In actuality, culture and religion influence how a threat or disaster is perceived, how individuals interpret the meaning of crisis, and how individuals and communities express reactions to disaster.
Step one in developing effective religiously competent disaster mental health response training and plans required to meet the needs of our diverse cultural and religious landscape is to define the terms of the conversation. Religious Literacy is defined as a basic understanding of the history, sacred texts, beliefs, rituals, and current manifestations of multiple faith traditions, AND the ability to understand the intersection of religions and social/political/cultural life through multiple lenses.
Religious Competency is defined as knowing how to navigate and engage each faith community as a trusted, knowledgeable and effective partner.
One of the best resources for acquiring both religious literacy and competency is for those individuals charged with creating a competent disaster response plan to engage, and work with all faith communities within one’s jurisdiction. It goes without saying that, the best source of information on the cultural and religious needs of a community are the religious leaders that serve the jurisdiction’s congregations and faith communities.
Faith communities have proven their willingness and ability to serve the unmet needs of their own congregations as well as the general public in times of crisis. Their knowledge of the communities they serve, and the trust placed in them by the American public allows religious leaders to play a unique role in all phases of the disaster life cycle.
In addition, the National Disaster Interfaiths Network (NDIN) and the USC Center for Religion and Civic Culture (CRCC) have formed a unique partnership to study the strategies necessary for state and local government agencies, especially offices of emergency management and public health preparedness, to engage and build sustainable relationships with faith communities in order to meet the needs of the whole community. Together they have developed resources and trainings, an extensive library of best practices and other services designed to help emergency managers, public health preparedness managers, disaster mental health providers, and other caregivers to develop religiously literate and competent disaster response plans and training programs. In 2012, they published an extensive report, Faithful Action Working with Religious Groups in Disaster Planning, Response and Recovery, which details an enormous amounts of resources and strategies available for faith-based organizations to employ in the event of a disaster.
Beyond mere political correctness, developing this kind of capability ensures religiously competent disaster response plans, protocols and trainings along with the a process that builds the trust necessary to effectively meet the mental health needs of the whole community in times of disaster.
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