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kmaherali
Posts: 25106
Joined: Thu Mar 27, 2003 3:01 pm

Post by kmaherali »

Choose Your Own Jesus

Here’s a striking passage — an aside, really — from Adam Gopnik’s New Yorker essay on the continuing (and continuing, and continuing) quest for the historical Jesus:

James Tabor, a professor of religious studies, in his 2006 book “The Jesus Dynasty,” takes surprisingly seriously the old Jewish idea that Jesus was known as the illegitimate son of a Roman soldier named Pantera—as well attested a tradition as any [emphasis mine — RD], occurring in Jewish texts of the second century, in which a Jesus ben Pantera makes several appearances, and the name is merely descriptive, not derogatory.

The whole problem with two centuries worth of historical Jesus scholarship is summed up in those seven words: “As well attested a tradition as any.” Because obviously if you don’t mind a little supernaturalism with your history, a story about Jesus being a Roman soldier’s bastard that dates from the second century — and late in the second century, at that — is dramatically less “well attested” than the well-known tradition (perhaps you’ve heard of it) that Jesus was born of a virgin married to Joseph the carpenter, which dates from the 70s or 80s A.D. at the latest, when the Gospels of Luke and Matthew were composed. Bracket the question of miracles, and there’s really no comparison: Giving the Roman soldier story equal weight with the accounts in Matthew and Luke is like saying that a tale about Abraham Lincoln that first surfaced in the 1970s has just as much credibility as a story that dates to the 1890s (and is associated with eyewitnesses to Lincoln’s life).

Now of course what Gopnik means by “well attested” is “well attested and non-miraculous,” which is fair enough so far as it goes. But this no-miracles criterion is why the historical Jesus project is such a spectacular dead end — because what would ordinarily be the most historically-credible sources for the life and times of Jesus Christ are absolutely soaked in supernaturalism, and if you throw them out you’re left with essentially idle speculations about Jesus ben Pantera and other phantoms that have no real historical grounding whatsoever.

Think about it this way: If the letters of Saint Paul (the earliest surviving Christian texts, by general consensus) and the synoptic gospels (the second-earliest) didn’t make such extraordinary claims about Jesus’s resurrection, his divinity, and so forth, no credible historian would waste much time parsing second-century apocrypha for clues about the “real” Jesus. They’d thank their lucky stars that the first-century Christians were such talented narrative writers, and spend most of their time trying to reconcile the discrepancies and resolve the contradictions in Matthew, Mark and Luke, while arguing amongst themselves about how much historical weight to give to the events and sayings recorded in John’s gospel. The gospel of Thomas would attract some modest attention; the later “lost gospels,” very little, save as evidence of how intra-Christian debates developed long after Jesus’s death. For the most part, the argument over how the Nazarene lived and died would revolve around competing interpretations of the existing Christian canon, and the rough accuracy of the synoptic narrative would be accepted by the vast majority of scholars.

In the event, the synoptic gospels and Saint Paul’s epistles do make absolutely extraordinary claims, and so modern scholars have every right to read them with a skeptical eye, and question their factual reliability. But if you downgrade the earliest Christian documents or try to bracket them entirely, the documentary evidence that’s left is so intensely unreliable (dated, fragmentary, obviously mythological, etc.) that scholars can scavenge through it to build whatever Jesus they prefer — and then say, with Gopnik, that their interpretation of the life of Christ is “as well attested” as any other. Was Jesus a wandering sage? Maybe so. A failed revolutionary? Sure, why not. A lunatic who fancied himself divine? Perhaps. An apocalyptic prophet? There’s an app for that …

But this isn’t history: It’s “choose your own Jesus,” and it’s become an enormous waste of time. Again, there’s nothing wrong with saying that the supernaturalism of the Christian canon makes it an unreliable guide to who Jesus really was. But if we’re honest with ourselves, then we need to acknowledge what this means: Not the beginning of a fruitful quest for the Jesus of history, but the end of it.

http://douthat.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/0 ... n&emc=tyb1
From_Alamut
Posts: 666
Joined: Tue Jan 22, 2008 8:22 am

Post by From_Alamut »

Church plans Quran-burning event
By Lauren Russell, CNN
July 31, 2010 12:50 a.m. EDT


http://www.cnn.com/2010/US/07/29/florid ... index.html
agakhani
Posts: 2059
Joined: Wed May 07, 2008 8:49 am
Location: TEXAS. U.S.A.

Hope this event does not happen.

Post by agakhani »

If the Quran- burning event take place in Florida, then Muslims will not tolerate it and become silent, they will also burn Bible that is for sure and thus.......? I do not know what will be happen afterward and when will be it stop being an Ismaili I do not like this happen but we never know that makes me worry.
From_Alamut
Posts: 666
Joined: Tue Jan 22, 2008 8:22 am

Re: Hope this event does not happen.

Post by From_Alamut »

Sermon from Sunday, August 29; 11 am service
Preaching: Rev. Deborah C. Lindsay on Islamophobia

Across America today, we are seeing an increase in fear and suspicion of people of Muslim faith. Rev. Deborah Lindsay reflects on the urgent need for understanding and peace-making, and she says a true Christian message is one of respect and understanding for all people of all faiths and traditions. After all, we are ALL created in the image of God.


Click the player below to start the stream and view this sermon.

http://www.fcchurch.com/worship/broadca ... rder-video
kmaherali
Posts: 25106
Joined: Thu Mar 27, 2003 3:01 pm

Post by kmaherali »

A bishop, a nun, a hospital and a holy war.

January 26, 2011
Tussling Over Jesus
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

The National Catholic Reporter newspaper put it best: “Just days before Christians celebrated Christmas, Jesus got evicted.”

Yet the person giving Jesus the heave-ho in this case was not a Bethlehem innkeeper. Nor was it an overzealous mayor angering conservatives by pulling down Christmas decorations. Rather, it was a prominent bishop, Thomas Olmsted, stripping St. Joseph’s Hospital and Medical Center in Phoenix of its affiliation with the Roman Catholic diocese.

The hospital’s offense? It had terminated a pregnancy to save the life of the mother. The hospital says the 27-year-old woman, a mother of four children, would almost certainly have died otherwise.

Bishop Olmsted initially excommunicated a nun, Sister Margaret McBride, who had been on the hospital’s ethics committee and had approved of the decision. That seems to have been a failed attempt to bully the hospital into submission, but it refused to cave and continues to employ Sister Margaret. Now the bishop, in effect, is excommunicating the entire hospital — all because it saved a woman’s life.

Make no mistake: This clash of values is a bellwether of a profound disagreement that is playing out at many Catholic hospitals around the country. These hospitals are part of the backbone of American health care, amounting to 15 percent of hospital beds.

Already in Bend, Ore., last year, a bishop ended the church’s official relationship with St. Charles Medical Center for making tubal ligation sterilizations available to women who requested them. And two Catholic hospitals in Texas halted tubal ligations at the insistence of the local bishop in Tyler.

The National Women’s Law Center has just issued a report quoting doctors at Catholic-affiliated hospitals as saying that sometimes they are forced by church doctrine to provide substandard care to women with miscarriages or ectopic pregnancies in ways that can leave the women infertile or even endanger their lives. More clashes are likely as the church hierarchy grows more conservative, and as hospitals and laity grow more impatient with bishops who seem increasingly out of touch.

Catholic hospitals like St. Joseph’s that are evicted by the church continue to operate largely as before. The main consequence is that Mass can no longer be said in the hospital chapel. Thomas C. Fox, the editor of National Catholic Reporter, noted regretfully that a hospital with deep Catholic roots like St. Joseph’s now cannot celebrate Mass, while airport chapels can. Mr. Fox added: “Olmsted’s moral certitude is lifeless, leaving no place for compassionate Christianity.”

To me, this battle illuminates two rival religious approaches, within the Catholic church and any spiritual tradition. One approach focuses upon dogma, sanctity, rules and the punishment of sinners. The other exalts compassion for the needy and mercy for sinners — and, perhaps, above all, inclusiveness.

The thought that keeps nagging at me is this: If you look at Bishop Olmsted and Sister Margaret as the protagonists in this battle, one of them truly seems to me to have emulated the life of Jesus. And it’s not the bishop, who has spent much of his adult life as a Vatican bureaucrat climbing the career ladder. It’s Sister Margaret, who like so many nuns has toiled for decades on behalf of the neediest and sickest among us.

Then along comes Bishop Olmsted to excommunicate the Christ-like figure in our story. If Jesus were around today, he might sue the bishop for defamation.

Yet in this battle, it’s fascinating how much support St. Joseph’s Hospital has had and how firmly it has pushed back — in effect, pounding 95 theses on the bishop’s door. The hospital backed up Sister Margaret, and it rejected the bishop’s demand that it never again terminate a pregnancy to save the life of a mother.

“St. Joseph’s will continue through our words and deeds to carry out the healing ministry of Jesus,” said Linda Hunt, the hospital president. “Our operations, policies, and procedures will not change.” The Catholic Health Association of the United States, a network of Catholic hospitals around the country, stood squarely behind St. Joseph’s.

Anne Rice, the author and a commentator on Catholicism, sees a potential turning point. “St. Joseph’s refusal to knuckle under to the bishop is huge,” she told me, adding: “Maybe rank-and-file Catholics are finally talking back to a hierarchy that long ago deserted them.”

With the Vatican seemingly as deaf and remote as it was in 1517, some Catholics at the grass roots are pushing to recover their faith. Jamie L. Manson, the same columnist for National Catholic Reporter who proclaimed that Jesus had been “evicted,” also argued powerfully that many ordinary Catholics have reached a breaking point and that St. Joseph’s heralds a new vision of Catholicism: “Though they will be denied the opportunity to celebrate the Eucharist, the Eucharist will rise out of St. Joseph’s every time the sick are healed, the frightened are comforted, the lonely are visited, the weak are fed, and vigil is kept over the dying.”

Hallelujah.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/27/opini ... emc=tha212
kmaherali
Posts: 25106
Joined: Thu Mar 27, 2003 3:01 pm

Post by kmaherali »

"They Killed Him Not": The Crucifixion in Shi'a Isma'ili Islam

By: Khalil Andani

Complete article (PDF) has been posted at Ismailimail.

http://ismailimail.wordpress.com/2011/0 ... ili-islam/
shiraz.virani
Posts: 1256
Joined: Thu May 28, 2009 2:52 pm

Post by shiraz.virani »

"They Killed Him Not": The Crucifixion in Shi'a Isma'ili Islam

By: Khalil Andani

Complete article (PDF) has been posted at Ismailimail.

http://ismailimail.wordpress.com/2011/0 ... ili-islam/
Again the above interpretation might be true or false depending on how you interpret the verse....but certainly khalil andani missed a very vital point and that is taking the whole verse and not just the portion of it .....heres the whole aayat , let the viewers decide for themselves :)

4:156-157

And because of their saying: We slew the Messiah, Jesus son of Mary, Allah's messenger - they slew him not nor crucified him, but it appeared so unto them; and lo! those who disagree concerning it are in doubt thereof; they have no knowledge thereof save pursuit of a conjecture; they slew him not for certain. But Allah took him up unto Himself. Allah was ever Mighty, Wise


It is either that

1] nobody was crucified
2] H.Isa[as] was crucified but because of god's decree
3] Another person was crucified instead of H.Isa[as]
4] H.Isa[as] was crucified but did not die
5] H.Isa[as] was not crucified and therefore not killed
6] It was not clear whether he died or not [as quran says "they did not kill him with certainty"]
7] Also the bible does not support the crucifixion [remember when H.Isa[as] shouted "my god, my god why have you forsaken me" which shows that he was crucified against his will and not voluntarily as many christians believe !!!]


Hermann Stieglecker summarizes:

“The idea of the Christians, that God could have humiliated himself to such a degree, that his enemies, the vulgarest mob, could mock, deride and illtreat him like an idiot or a fool and that he eventually suffered the most shameful and painful death like a criminal between two real criminals, that is an outrageous disgrace ...”
kmaherali
Posts: 25106
Joined: Thu Mar 27, 2003 3:01 pm

Post by kmaherali »

October 17, 2011
The Evangelical Rejection of Reason
By KARL W. GIBERSON and RANDALL J. STEPHENS

Evangelical Christianity need not be defined by the simplistic theology, cultural isolationism and stubborn anti-intellectualism that most of the Republican candidates have embraced.

Quincy, Mass.

THE Republican presidential field has become a showcase of evangelical anti-intellectualism. Herman Cain, Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann deny that climate change is real and caused by humans. Mr. Perry and Mrs. Bachmann dismiss evolution as an unproven theory. The two candidates who espouse the greatest support for science, Mitt Romney and Jon M. Huntsman Jr., happen to be Mormons, a faith regarded with mistrust by many Christians.

The rejection of science seems to be part of a politically monolithic red-state fundamentalism, textbook evidence of an unyielding ignorance on the part of the religious. As one fundamentalist slogan puts it, “The Bible says it, I believe it, that settles it.” But evangelical Christianity need not be defined by the simplistic theology, cultural isolationism and stubborn anti-intellectualism that most of the Republican candidates have embraced.

Like other evangelicals, we accept the centrality of faith in Jesus Christ and look to the Bible as our sacred book, though we find it hard to recognize our religious tradition in the mainstream evangelical conversation. Evangelicalism at its best seeks a biblically grounded expression of Christianity that is intellectually engaged, humble and forward-looking. In contrast, fundamentalism is literalistic, overconfident and reactionary.

Fundamentalism appeals to evangelicals who have become convinced that their country has been overrun by a vast secular conspiracy; denial is the simplest and most attractive response to change. They have been scarred by the elimination of prayer in schools; the removal of nativity scenes from public places; the increasing legitimacy of abortion and homosexuality; the persistence of pornography and drug abuse; and acceptance of other religions and of atheism.

In response, many evangelicals created what amounts to a “parallel culture,” nurtured by church, Sunday school, summer camps and colleges, as well as publishing houses, broadcasting networks, music festivals and counseling groups. Among evangelical leaders, Ken Ham, David Barton and James C. Dobson have been particularly effective orchestrators — and beneficiaries — of this subculture.

Mr. Ham built his organization, Answers in Genesis, on the premise that biblical truth trumps all other knowledge. His Creation Museum, in Petersburg, Ky., contrasts “God’s Word,” timeless and eternal, with the fleeting notions of “human reason.” This is how he knows that the earth is 10,000 years old, that humans and dinosaurs lived together, and that women are subordinate to men. Evangelicals who disagree, like Francis S. Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health, are excoriated on the group’s Web site. (In a recent blog post, Mr. Ham called us “wolves” in sheep’s clothing, masquerading as Christians while secretly trying to destroy faith in the Bible.)

Mr. Barton heads an organization called WallBuilders, dedicated to the proposition that the founders were evangelicals who intended America to be a Christian nation. He has emerged as a highly influential Republican leader, a favorite of Mr. Perry, Mrs. Bachmann and members of the Tea Party. Though his education consists of a B.A. in religious education from Oral Roberts University and his scholarly blunders have drawn criticism from evangelical historians like John Fea, Mr. Barton has seen his version of history reflected in everything from the Republican Party platform to the social science curriculum in Texas.

Mr. Dobson, through his group Focus on the Family, has insisted for decades that homosexuality is a choice and that gay people could “pray away” their unnatural and sinful orientation. A defender of spanking children and of traditional roles for the sexes, he has accused the American Psychological Association, which in 2000 disavowed reparative therapy to “cure” homosexuality, of caving in to gay pressure.

Charismatic leaders like these project a winsome personal testimony as brothers in Christ. Their audiences number in the tens of millions. They pepper their presentations with so many Bible verses that their messages appear to be straight out of Scripture; to many, they seem like prophets, anointed by God.

But in fact their rejection of knowledge amounts to what the evangelical historian Mark A. Noll, in his 1994 book, “The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind,” described as an “intellectual disaster.” He called on evangelicals to repent for their neglect of the mind, decrying the abandonment of the intellectual heritage of the Protestant Reformation. “The scandal of the evangelical mind,” he wrote, “is that there is not much of an evangelical mind.”

There are signs of change. Within the evangelical world, tensions have emerged between those who deny secular knowledge, and those who have kept up with it and integrated it with their faith. Almost all evangelical colleges employ faculty members with degrees from major research universities — a conduit for knowledge from the larger world. We find students arriving on campus tired of the culture-war approach to faith in which they were raised, and more interested in promoting social justice than opposing gay marriage.

Scholars like Dr. Collins and Mr. Noll, and publications like Books & Culture, Sojourners and The Christian Century, offer an alternative to the self-anointed leaders. They recognize that the Bible does not condemn evolution and says next to nothing about gay marriage. They understand that Christian theology can incorporate Darwin’s insights and flourish in a pluralistic society.

Americans have always trusted in God, and even today atheism is little more than a quiet voice on the margins. Faith, working calmly in the lives of Americans from George Washington to Barack Obama, has motivated some of America’s finest moments. But when the faith of so many Americans becomes an occasion to embrace discredited, ridiculous and even dangerous ideas, we must not be afraid to speak out, even if it means criticizing fellow Christians.

Karl W. Giberson is a former professor of physics, and Randall J. Stephens is an associate professor of history, both at Eastern Nazarene College. They are the authors of “The Anointed: Evangelical Truth in a Secular Age.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/18/opini ... emc=tha212
kmaherali
Posts: 25106
Joined: Thu Mar 27, 2003 3:01 pm

Post by kmaherali »

Secret £14million Bible in which 'Jesus predicts coming of Prophet Muhammad' unearthed in Turkey

Vatican 'wants to see' 1,500-year-old ancient script
Has been hidden by Turkish state for 12 years
Handwritten in gold-lettered Aramaic


http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... urkey.html
ShamsB
Posts: 1117
Joined: Wed Aug 04, 2004 5:20 pm

Post by ShamsB »

shiraz.virani wrote:
"They Killed Him Not": The Crucifixion in Shi'a Isma'ili Islam

By: Khalil Andani

Complete article (PDF) has been posted at Ismailimail.

http://ismailimail.wordpress.com/2011/0 ... ili-islam/
Again the above interpretation might be true or false depending on how you interpret the verse....but certainly khalil andani missed a very vital point and that is taking the whole verse and not just the portion of it .....heres the whole aayat , let the viewers decide for themselves :)

4:156-157

And because of their saying: We slew the Messiah, Jesus son of Mary, Allah's messenger - they slew him not nor crucified him, but it appeared so unto them; and lo! those who disagree concerning it are in doubt thereof; they have no knowledge thereof save pursuit of a conjecture; they slew him not for certain. But Allah took him up unto Himself. Allah was ever Mighty, Wise


It is either that

1] nobody was crucified
2] H.Isa[as] was crucified but because of god's decree
3] Another person was crucified instead of H.Isa[as]
4] H.Isa[as] was crucified but did not die
5] H.Isa[as] was not crucified and therefore not killed
6] It was not clear whether he died or not [as quran says "they did not kill him with certainty"]
7] Also the bible does not support the crucifixion [remember when H.Isa[as] shouted "my god, my god why have you forsaken me" which shows that he was crucified against his will and not voluntarily as many christians believe !!!]


Hermann Stieglecker summarizes:

“The idea of the Christians, that God could have humiliated himself to such a degree, that his enemies, the vulgarest mob, could mock, deride and illtreat him like an idiot or a fool and that he eventually suffered the most shameful and painful death like a criminal between two real criminals, that is an outrageous disgrace ...”
I agree with Shiraz - I believe (and I could be wrong) that there is a KIM farman of Imam Sultan Mohammed Shah that talks about Issa - and how he was not crucified. Whilst I think Khalil overall does good stuff - this is a stretch even for him, esp since it contradicts a farman.

Shams
kmaherali
Posts: 25106
Joined: Thu Mar 27, 2003 3:01 pm

Post by kmaherali »

The Nuns and the God Within
By ROSS DOUTHAT
What the controversy over the Vatican and American nuns says about the state of American religion.

Along with the death of Charles Colson, the other significant religion story to break during the time I took off for book promotion was the controversy over the Vatican’s investigation into the theological drift of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, a group that includes the leadership of the majority of America’s orders of nuns. The controversy has mostly been framed in the press as the latest round in a debate running back to the Second Vatican Council – yet another clash between “Spirit of Vatican II” American Catholics and a more conservative hierarchy in Rome, with familiar flashpoints, a familiar cast of characters, and the same basic political and theological issues at stake. And it is that, in part: If you read the Vatican “doctrinal assessment” of the LCWR, you’ll find echoes of the debates that have divided American Catholicism since the 1960s — women’s ordination, human sexuality, how great a stress to place on Catholic social teaching versus the dogmatic aspects of the faith, and the broader question of where authority ultimately resides within the church.

But you’ll also find something else as well, which I think is important to understanding our current religious moment. The main thing that the Vatican assessment is concerned with — the first “area of concern” cited, and the issue that the document returns to later on — is the LCWR’s potential drift not just away from Rome’s views of doctrine and authority, but from historic Christianity itself. What does this mean in practice? Well, the Vatican references “addresses given during LCWR annual assemblies,” taking particular note of a talk given by Sister Laurie Brink which described “moving beyond the Church, even beyond Jesus” toward a religious model that “in most respects is Post-Christian” as one of the options being explored by female religious communities facing decline or extinction. Brink’s talk, as its defenders have pointed out, was more descriptive than prescriptive, but a variant on the phenomenon she was describing finds pretty obvious expression in, say, the keynote speaker at this year’s LCWR conference, Barbara Marx Hubbard, whose theology emphasizes the idea that human beings are about to take a quantum leap in spiritual evolution from “homo sapiens” to “homo universalis,” a leap in which the powers available to Jesus of Nazareth after his resurrection become available to everyone else as well. Here are some quotations from Hubbard’s description of how her own religious perspective relates to a more traditional Christianity:

Jesus said, “These and even greater works shall you do.” We may actually be on the threshold of those abilities that Christ was able to do and that He foresaw as possibilities for us all. Specifically, the ability to use conscious intent, perhaps in conjunction with scientific and technological capacities, will allow us to create bodies sensitive to thought. We may find ourselves transforming the human body from its physical, animal, degenerating phase to a regenerating and evolving phase.

… Although we may never know what really happened, we do know that the story told in the Gospels is that Jesus’ resurrection was a first demonstration of what I call the post-human universal person. We are told that he did not die. He made his transition, released his animal body, and reappeared in a new body at the next level of physicality to tell all of us that we would do what he did. The new person that he became had continuity of consciousness with his life as Jesus of Nazareth, an earthly life in which he had become fully human and fully divine. Jesus’ life stands as a model of the transition from Homo sapiens to Homo universalis …

… Now millions of earthly humans from every spiritual tradition, from many social movements and scientific lineages of human inquiry, are evolving to the stage at which they recognize their soul, their higher self. They are becoming willing, even passionately desire, to be one with that Self. And as a critical mass of humans evolving toward their new capacities arise, humanity will undergo an unprecedented shifting in our entire way of being on this planet.

To return to Sr. Brink’s framework, I’m not sure I would actually describe this kind of theology as having moved entirely “beyond Jesus,” since Hubbard seems very interested in casting the post-resurrection Jesus of Nazareth as an ideal type for her vision of humanity’s spiritual evolution. She has this interest in common with many of the popular contemporary spiritual writers, from James Redfield to Deepak Chopra to Eckhart Tolle to Paulo Coelho, who focus on what my book calls the quest for “the God Within”; indeed, the way that these figures almost always try to appropriate the life and message of Jesus rather than rejecting it outright is one reason why I find it more useful to describe the current American religious landscape as “heretical” than “post-Christian.”

But whatever else it is, Hubbard’s message is clearly post-Catholic, in a way that’s qualitatively different from a liberal Catholicism that wants the Church to ordain women and focus more on social justice but accepts the basic story of the gospels and the basic parameters of the Nicene Creed. And while the liberal Catholic/conservative Catholic divide will no doubt remain important, I suspect that the religious trends that a figure like Hubbard embodies — which lead further away from core Christian ideas without shaking off the Christian influence entirely — may be more important to the future of American religion than the more familiar post-1960s story that the press has been telling about the nuns and the Vatican these last few weeks.

http://douthat.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/0 ... y_20120508
kmaherali
Posts: 25106
Joined: Thu Mar 27, 2003 3:01 pm

Post by kmaherali »

The tension between nuns and the Catholic Church's male hierarchy has roots in the 19th century.

May 15, 2012

Nuns on the Frontier

By ANNE M. BUTLER

Fernandina Beach, Fla.

THE recent Vatican edict that reproached American nuns for their liberal views on social and political issues has put a spotlight on the practices of these Roman Catholic sisters. While the current debate has focused on the nuns’ progressive stances on birth control, abortion, homosexuality, the all-male priesthood and economic injustice, tension between American nuns and the church’s male hierarchy reaches much further back.

In the 19th century, Catholic nuns literally built the church in the American West, braving hardship and grueling circumstances to establish missions, set up classrooms and lead lives of calm in a chaotic world marked by corruption, criminality and illness. Their determination in the face of a male hierarchy that, then as now, frequently exploited and disdained them was a demonstration of their resilient faith in a church struggling to adapt itself to change.

Like other settlers in the West, Catholic nuns were mostly migrants from Europe or the American East; the church had turned to them to create a Catholic presence across a seemingly limitless frontier. The region’s rocky mining camps, grassy plains and arid deserts did not appeal to many ordained men. As one disenchanted European priest, lamenting the lack of a good cook and the discomfort of frontier travel, grumbled, “I hate the long, dreary winters of Iowa.”

Bishops relentlessly recruited sisters for Western missions, enticing them with images of Christian conversions, helpful local clergymen and charming convent cottages. If the sisters hesitated, the bishops mocked their timidity, scorned their selfishness and threatened heavenly retribution.

The sisters proved them wrong. By steamboat, train, stagecoach and canoe, on foot and on horseback, the nuns answered the call. In the 1840s, a half-dozen sisters from Notre Dame de Namur, a Belgian order, braved stormy seas and dense fog to reach Oregon. In 1852, seven Daughters of Charity struggled on the backs of donkeys across the rain-soaked Isthmus of Panama toward California. In 1884, six Ursuline nuns stepped from a train in Montana, only to be left by the bishop at a raucous public rooming house, its unheated loft furnished only with wind and drifting snow.

These nuns lived in filthy dugouts, barns and stables, hoped for donations of furniture, and survived on a daily ration of one slice of bread or a bowl of onion soup along with a cup of tea. They made their own way, worked endless hours, often walked miles to a Catholic chapel for services, and endured daunting privations in housing and nutrition.

There appeared to be no end to what was expected of the sisters. In 1874, two Sisters of the Holy Cross, at the direction of Edward Sorin, the founder of the University of Notre Dame, opened a Texas school and orphanage in a two-room shack with a leaky dormitory garret that the nuns affectionately labeled “The Ark.” The brother who managed the congregation’s large farm informed the sisters, who were barely able to feed and clothe the 80 boarders, that he could not give the school free produce — though they could buy it at a discount. The sisters also did 18 years of unpaid housekeeping work on a farm run by the men.

Sisters adapted to these physical, spiritual and fiscal exploitations with amazingly good humor. Still, they chafed against their male superiors’ unreasonable restrictions and harsh dictates. When they directly questioned policy, bishops and priests moved to silence them. A single protest could draw draconian reprisals on an entire congregation.

In 1886, four Texas priests demanded that Bishop John C. Néraz replace a superior, Mother St. Andrew Feltin, saying that she had “spread gossip” and warned her sisters “to beware of priests.”

Bishop Néraz threatened the sisterhood with disbandment and removed Mother St. Andrew from office. He hounded her for years, disciplined other nuns she had befriended, suspended her right to the sacraments, warned other bishops not to grant her sanctuary, undercut her efforts to enter a California convent and even urged her deportation to Europe. Finally, Mother St. Andrew laid aside her religious clothing, returned to secular dress and cared for her widowed brother’s children.

Six years after Bishop Néraz died, Mother St. Andrew petitioned her congregation for readmission. Donning her habit, she renewed her vows amid a warm welcome from sisters who understood too well what she had suffered.

Then as now, not all priests and bishops treated sisters badly, though the priests who reached out to nuns in a spirit of appreciation, friendship and equality could not alter the church’s institutional commitment to gender discrimination. And, as now, some bishops, dismissive of the laity, underestimated the loyalty secular Catholics felt for their nuns.

In the case of Mother St. Andrew, tenacity and spirituality triumphed over arrogance and misogyny. The Vatican would do well to bear this history in mind as it thinks through the consequences of its unjust attack on American sisters.

Anne M. Butler, a professor emerita of history at Utah State University, is the author of the forthcoming book “Across God’s Frontiers: Catholic Sisters in the American West, 1850-1920.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/16/opini ... h_20120516
shiraz.virani
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Post by shiraz.virani »

kmaherali
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Joined: Thu Mar 27, 2003 3:01 pm

Post by kmaherali »

September 18, 2012
A Faded Piece of Papyrus Refers to Jesus’ Wife

By LAURIE GOODSTEIN
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — A historian of early Christianity at Harvard Divinity School has identified a scrap of papyrus that she says was written in Coptic in the fourth century and contains a phrase never seen in any piece of Scripture: “Jesus said to them, ‘My wife ...’ ”

The faded papyrus fragment is smaller than a business card, with eight lines on one side, in black ink legible under a magnifying glass. Just below the line about Jesus having a wife, the papyrus includes a second provocative clause that purportedly says, “she will be able to be my disciple.”

The finding was made public in Rome on Tuesday at the International Congress of Coptic Studies by Karen L. King, a historian who has published several books about new Gospel discoveries and is the first woman to hold the nation’s oldest endowed chair, the Hollis professor of divinity.

The provenance of the papyrus fragment is a mystery, and its owner has asked to remain anonymous. Until Tuesday, Dr. King had shown the fragment to only a small circle of experts in papyrology and Coptic linguistics, who concluded that it is most likely not a forgery. But she and her collaborators say they are eager for more scholars to weigh in and perhaps upend their conclusions.

Even with many questions unsettled, the discovery could reignite the debate over whether Jesus was married, whether Mary Magdalene was his wife and whether he had a female disciple. These debates date to the early centuries of Christianity, scholars say. But they are relevant today, when global Christianity is roiling over the place of women in ministry and the boundaries of marriage.

The discussion is particularly animated in the Roman Catholic Church, where despite calls for change, the Vatican has reiterated the teaching that the priesthood cannot be opened to women and married men because of the model set by Jesus.

Dr. King gave an interview and showed the papyrus fragment, encased in glass, to reporters from The New York Times, The Boston Globe and Harvard Magazine in her garret office in the tower at Harvard Divinity School last Thursday.

She repeatedly cautioned that this fragment should not be taken as proof that Jesus, the historical person, was actually married. The text was probably written centuries after Jesus lived, and all other early, historically reliable Christian literature is silent on the question, she said.

But the discovery is exciting, Dr. King said, because it is the first known statement from antiquity that refers to Jesus speaking of a wife. It provides further evidence that there was an active discussion among early Christians about whether Jesus was celibate or married, and which path his followers should choose.

“This fragment suggests that some early Christians had a tradition that Jesus was married,” she said. “There was, we already know, a controversy in the second century over whether Jesus was married, caught up with a debate about whether Christians should marry and have sex.”

Dr. King first learned about what she calls “The Gospel of Jesus’s Wife” when she received an e-mail in 2010 from a private collector who asked her to translate it. Dr. King, 58, specializes in Coptic literature, and has written books on the Gospel of Judas, the Gospel of Mary of Magdala, Gnosticism and women in antiquity.

The owner, who has a collection of Greek, Coptic and Arabic papyri, is not willing to be identified by name, nationality or location, because, Dr. King said, “He doesn’t want to be hounded by people who want to buy this.”

When, where or how the fragment was discovered is unknown. The collector acquired it in a batch of papyri in 1997 from the previous owner, a German. It came with a handwritten note in German that names a professor of Egyptology in Berlin, now deceased, and cited him calling the fragment “the sole example” of a text in which Jesus claims a wife.

The owner took the fragment to the Divinity School in December 2011 and left it with Dr. King. In March, she carried the fragment in her red handbag to New York to show it to two papyrologists: Roger Bagnall, director of the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, at New York University, and AnneMarie Luijendijk, an associate professor of religion at Princeton University.

They examined the scrap under sharp magnification. It was very small — only 4 by 8 centimeters. The lettering was splotchy and uneven, the hand of an amateur, but not unusual for the time period, when many Christians were poor and persecuted.

It was written in Coptic, an Egyptian language that uses Greek characters — and more precisely, in Sahidic Coptic, a dialect from southern Egypt, Dr. Luijendijk said in an interview.

What convinced them it was probably genuine was the fading of the ink on the papyrus fibers, and traces of ink adhered to the bent fibers at the torn edges. The back side is so faint that only five words are visible, one only partly: “my moth[er],” “three,” “forth which.”

“It would be impossible to forge,” said Dr. Luijendijk, who contributed to Dr. King’s paper.

Dr. Bagnall reasoned that a forger would have had to be expert in Coptic grammar, handwriting and ideas. Most forgeries he has seen were nothing more than gibberish. And if it were a forgery intended to cause a sensation or make someone rich, why would it have lain in obscurity for so many years?

“It’s hard to construct a scenario that is at all plausible in which somebody fakes something like this. The world is not really crawling with crooked papyrologists,” Dr. Bagnall said.

The piece is torn into a rough rectangle, so that the document is missing its adjoining text on the left, right, top and bottom — most likely the work of a dealer who divided up a larger piece to maximize his profit, Dr. Bagnall said.

Much of the context, therefore, is missing. But Dr. King was struck by phrases in the fragment like “My mother gave to me life,” and “Mary is worthy of it,” which resemble snippets from the Gospels of Thomas and Mary. Experts believe those were written in the late second century and translated into Coptic. She surmises that this fragment is also copied from a second-century Greek text.

The meaning of the words, “my wife,” is beyond question, Dr. King said. “These words can mean nothing else.” The text beyond “my wife” is cut off.

Dr. King did not have the ink dated using carbon testing. She said it would require scraping off too much, destroying the relic. She still plans to have the ink tested by spectroscopy, which could roughly determine its age by its chemical composition.

Dr. King submitted her paper to The Harvard Theological Review, which asked three scholars to review it. Two questioned its authenticity, but they had seen only low-resolution photographs of the fragment and were unaware that expert papyrologists had seen the actual item and judged it to be genuine, Dr. King said. One of the two questioned the grammar, translation and interpretation.

Ariel Shisha-Halevy, an eminent Coptic linguist at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, was consulted, and said in an e-mail in September, “I believe — on the basis of language and grammar — the text is authentic.”

Major doubts allayed, The Review plans to publish Dr. King’s article in its January issue.

Dr. King said she would push the owner to come forward, in part to avoid stoking conspiracy theories.

The notion that Jesus had a wife was the central conceit of the best seller and movie “The Da Vinci Code.” But Dr. King said she wants nothing to do with the code or its author: “At least, don’t say this proves Dan Brown was right.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/19/us/hi ... d=tw-share
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September 19, 2012
Mr. and Mrs. Jesus Christ?
By JAMES MARTIN

AT an academic conference in Rome on Tuesday, Karen L. King, a church historian at Harvard Divinity School, presented a finding that, according to some reports, threatened to overturn what we know about Jesus, as well as the tradition of priestly celibacy. She identified a small fragment of fourth-century papyrus that includes the words, “Jesus said to them, ‘My wife...’ ” Another clause appears to say, “she will be able to be my disciple.” Some experts have concluded that the manuscript, written in Coptic, is authentic.

But does this mean that Jesus was married? Probably not. And will this fascinating new discovery make this Jesuit priest want to rush out and get married? No.

It is more likely that Jesus was celibate. Remember that Dr. King’s papyrus dates from the fourth century — roughly 350 years after Jesus’s life and death. The four familiar Gospels, on the other hand, were written much closer to the time of Jesus, only a few decades away from the events in question. They have a greater claim to accuracy — even if the new manuscript is, as has been surmised, a copy of an earlier, second-century text. The Gospel of Mark, for example, was written around A.D. 70, only about 40 years after the crucifixion.

And what do the Gospels say? For one thing, the Gospel of Mark describes Jesus, who had settled in the town of Capernaum, on the Sea of Galilee, as receiving a surprise visit from his family, who had come from his hometown, Nazareth. “A crowd was sitting around him; and they said to him, ‘Your mother and your brothers and sisters are outside, asking for you.’ ” Why no mention of a wife?

The Gospel of Matthew, written only 15 or 20 years after Mark, recounts how the people of Nazareth were shocked by Jesus’ preaching. “Is not this the carpenter’s son?” they asked about their former neighbor. “Is not his mother called Mary? And are not his brothers James and Joseph and Simon and Judas? And are not all his sisters with us?” At this time, Jesus is presumably around 30 years old. Again, in this long catalog of his relatives, why no mention of a wife?

And why, with so many women present at the crucifixion (various Gospels include Jesus’ mother, Mary Magdalene, another woman named Mary, Salome and “the women who followed him from Galilee”), is Jesus’ wife omitted?

The silence in the Gospels about a wife (and children) in this context most likely indicates that Jesus did not have a wife and children during his public ministry, or in his past life in Nazareth.

What about the most popular candidate for the role: Mary Magdalene? Could she have been Jesus’ wife, as supposed by Dan Brown’s novel “The Da Vinci Code”? (By the way, I’m not equating Dr. King’s careful scholarship with the novels of Mr. Brown, though the conclusions some might draw are similar.) Mr. Brown’s hypothesis fails by another criterion: Mary would have been referred to, like every other married woman in the Gospels, by her husband’s name. She would have been identified not as “Mary Magdalene” but almost certainly as “Mary, the wife of Jesus.”

Why might Jesus have remained unmarried? Jesus, who knew the fate of other prophets, may have intuited that his public life would prove dangerous and end violently, a burden for a wife. He may have foreseen the difficulty of caring for a family while being an itinerant preacher. Or perhaps he was trying to demonstrate a kind of single-hearted commitment to God.

The Rev. John P. Meier, a professor of theology at the University of Notre Dame who is widely considered the dean of historical studies of Jesus, favors that last explanation in “A Marginal Jew,” his monumental study. “The position that Jesus remained celibate on religious grounds,” he concluded after sifting through the evidence, is “the more probable hypothesis.”

Dr. King herself cautioned that the papyrus fragment did not constitute proof of Jesus’ marital status. But it may represent evidence of a debate among the early Christian community (say, from the second to fourth centuries) over whether Jesus was married.

What if corroborating evidence of marriage is found from an earlier date? What if scholars unearth a first-century papyrus with additional lines from, say, the Gospel of Mark, which states unequivocally that Jesus was married? Would I stop believing in Jesus, or abandon my vows of chastity?

No and no.

It wouldn’t upset me if it turned out that Jesus was married. His life, death and, most important, resurrection would still be valid. Nor would I abandon my life of chastity, which is the way I’ve found to love many people freely and deeply. If I make it to heaven and Jesus introduces me to his wife, I’ll be happy for him (and her). But then I’ll track down Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, who wrote so soon after the time of Jesus, and ask them why they left out something so important.

The Rev. James Martin, a Jesuit priest, is a contributing editor to the Catholic magazine America and the author of “Between Heaven and Mirth: Why Joy, Humor, and Laughter Are at the Heart of the Spiritual Life.”



http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/20/opini ... y_20120920
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Lent: It’s Not Just for Catholics

ARE you a conformist or an individualist? Most Americans believe they are the latter — to be exact, 64 percent of us in 2011, according to the World Values Survey. Perhaps you’re a cage-busting entrepreneur, or a transgressive artist. Or maybe you’re just a freethinking outlier at your Thanksgiving table. My own nonconformity in early adulthood took the form of religious conversion from Protestant to Catholic, bailing out of college to play avant-garde music, and — most schismatic of all to family and friends — voting Republican.

In 1998, I came across a 16-question survey of individualism in the academic journal Cross-Cultural Research. I took the survey, and learned that my score reflected “high individualism” and “low collectivism.” As my late, long-suffering mother would have said, “Duh.”

But all the boundaries listed above are merely social and external, involving the discomfort of others. True nonconformists explore the internal boundaries against their own suffering.

These internal boundaries are immense, as most people spend their lives trying to avoid physical and psychological suffering. That is how we are wired. Indeed, the psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky famously showed in their research that people much prefer to avoid a loss than to acquire a gain of equal value. Further, fear — arguably, the most unpleasant emotion — is learned as a way to avoid all types of pain. Charles Darwin even noted that animals “learn caution by seeing their brethren caught or poisoned.”

We don’t want to suffer — we hate it, in fact. Yet it is suffering that often brings personal improvement. Not all pain is beneficial, obviously. But researchers have consistently found that most survivors of illness and loss experience “post-traumatic growth.” Not only do many people find a greater emotional maturity after suffering; they are even better prepared to help others deal with their pain. That is why after a loss we turn for comfort to those who have endured a similar loss.

Sages throughout history have relished the enigma that pleasure is undefined without suffering. In the words of Carl Jung: “There are as many nights as days, and the one is just as long as the other in the year’s course. Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word ‘happy’ would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness.” The Tao Te Ching extends the metaphor: “Difficult and easy accomplish each other, long and short form each other, high and low distinguish each other.”

At the extreme, it is the fearsome specter of death that helps us understand life. A dear friend of mine was told he would not survive more than a year after a late-stage cancer diagnosis. This was a fairly morose guy by nature, and this prognosis might logically have sunk him further into his natural melancholia. Instead, he vowed to remember that every day might be his last, and live whatever life he had left to the fullest. By some miracle, he survived a year, then another, and then 18 more. His doctor still says the cancer will ultimately be back at some point — the wolf is always at the door — but he is happy and grateful for waking up when he did, and living for decades as if he was enjoying his last few months.

My friend achieved greater consciousness by staring down his death. He did so by necessity, however, and not by choice. Indeed, most people who find the benefits of fear and pain do so against their will. In contrast, a true individualist — a nonconformist to his or her own natural impulses — consciously accepts suffering for the benefit it brings. How?

I have met Buddhist monks in Thailand who purposely confront the fear of their inevitable deaths through daily contemplation of photos of corpses in various stages of decay. Some young Mormon men and women voluntarily suffer through separation from their beloved families for up to two years during their missions to test their own mettle and cement their commitment to God. And in this season of Lent, hundreds of millions of Catholics are pondering their own inadequacies and inviting discomfort through abstinence and fasting. In a postmodern era, where death is taboo, pain is pointless, and sin is a cultural anachronism, what could be more rebellious?

But the spirit of these practices is open to everyone, religious or not. Think of it as a personal declaration of independence. The objective is not to cause yourself damage, but to accept the pain and fear that are a natural part of life, and to embrace them as a valuable source of lessons to learn and tests to pass.

So to all the nonconformists in business, politics and art: more power to you. But that’s child’s play. To say, “I am dust, and to dust I shall return”: Now that’s rebellion for grown-ups.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/12/opini ... pe=article
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Reflections about Christianity in America

The Next Culture War

Christianity is in decline in the United States. The share of Americans who describe themselves as Christians and attend church is dropping. Evangelical voters make up a smaller share of the electorate. Members of the millennial generation are detaching themselves from religious institutions in droves.

Christianity’s gravest setbacks are in the realm of values. American culture is shifting away from orthodox Christian positions on homosexuality, premarital sex, contraception, out-of-wedlock childbearing, divorce and a range of other social issues. More and more Christians feel estranged from mainstream culture. They fear they will soon be treated as social pariahs, the moral equivalent of segregationists because of their adherence to scriptural teaching on gay marriage. They fear their colleges will be decertified, their religious institutions will lose their tax-exempt status, their religious liberty will come under greater assault.

The Supreme Court’s gay marriage decision landed like some sort of culminating body blow onto this beleaguered climate. Rod Dreher, author of the truly outstanding book “How Dante Can Save Your Life,” wrote an essay in Time in which he argued that it was time for Christians to strategically retreat into their own communities, where they could keep “the light of faith burning through the surrounding cultural darkness.”

He continued: “We have to accept that we really are living in a culturally post-Christian nation. The fundamental norms Christians have long been able to depend on no longer exist.”

More....
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/30/opini ... 05309&_r=1
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8 Ways Pope Francis Is Changing the Direction of the Catholic Church

By THE NEW YORK TIMES JULY 6, 2015

The first Jesuit pope and the first non-European pope in more than 1,200 years, Francis has differed significantly from his predecessors with his outspoken style and his approach to leading the church. His comments on poverty, church reform, climate change and divorce have made headlines around the world. Here is a look at some of them.

The first Jesuit pope and the first non-European pope in more than 1,200 years, Francis has differed significantly from his predecessors with his outspoken style and his approach to leading the church. His comments on poverty, church reform, climate change and divorce have made headlines around the world. Here is a look at some of them.

More....

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015 ... pe=article
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Pope Francis and the Not-Quite-Secular West

About five years ago, after Pope Benedict XVI paid a surprisingly successful visit to not-famously-Catholic England, I wrote a column on the phenomenon of papal visits and why, even in a secularized and dissenting Western atmosphere, they tend to turn out well:

… the crowds came out, as they always do for papal visits — 85,000 for a prayer vigil in London, 125,000 lining Edinburgh’s streets, 50,000 in Birmingham to see Benedict beatify John Henry Newman, the famous Victorian convert from Anglicanism. Even at a time of Catholic scandal, even amid a pontificate that’s stumbled from one public-relations debacle to another, Benedict still managed to draw a warm and enthusiastic audience.

No doubt most of Britain’s five million Catholics do not believe exactly what Benedict believes and teaches. No doubt most of them are appalled at the Catholic hierarchy’s record on priestly child abuse, and disappointed that many of the scandal’s enablers still hold high office in the church. But in turning out for their beleaguered pope, Britain’s Catholics acknowledged something essential about their faith that many of the Vatican’s critics, secular and religious alike, persistently fail to understand. They weren’t there to voice agreement with Benedict, necessarily. They were there to show their respect — for the pontiff, for his office, and for the role it has played in sustaining Catholicism for 2,000 years.

I won’t need to write similar words about Pope Francis, and indeed they wouldn’t make any sense, because the success of his ongoing visit to the United States – the crowds, the enthusiasm, the saturation media coverage – was essentially foreordained; nobody is surprised by what’s happening, nobody is looking for an explanation for the cheering throngs or the favorable press. But there is a common thread that binds Benedict’s success despite low expectations and often-savage coverage and Francis’s success amid high enthusiasm and generally-fawning coverage: Secularism is weaker than many people think.

We have read a lot about the advance of secularization lately, and for good reason. Institutional religion has fallen on hard times in the United States, younger Americans are far more likely than any previous generation to lack any religious affiliation, and American society has made a fairly sudden swing toward social liberalism that’s exacerbating tensions between the current cultural consensus and the historic teachings of Western monotheism. Twenty years ago the U.S. looked like a clear religious exception to a modernity-equals-secularization trend, but since then we’ve been converging, at least to a modest extent, with the nations of Western Europe; that reality, at least, is hard to deny.

But how powerful, how thick really, is this secularizing trend? Is it thick enough, for instance, to speak of American society as post-Christian or effectively pagan, as some religious conservatives sometimes do? Does it have enough momentum that we can expect it to continue apace well into the future, until Christianity in the U.S. looks as weak as Christianity in America’s mother country does today?

I’m skeptical on both counts, and I think the Pope Francis phenomenon is particularly suggestive of the limits of secularism’s hold. The former Jorge Bergoglio has captured the imagination of the Western media in two major ways: First, through a series of public gestures (embracing the disfigured, washing the feet of prisoners, mourning migrants lost at sea, etc.) that offer a kind of living Christian iconography, an imitatio Christi in the flesh, and second, through a rhetoric of mercy and welcome that has made some Americans, at least, feel that Catholicism is more open to their experiences and concerns.

Set aside for a moment the difficult question of where that rhetoric, and the accompanying doctrinal debates, are taking Catholicism in the long run. Just consider these questions: In a truly post-Christian society, would so many people find an imitatio Christi thrilling and fascinating and inspiring? Would so many people be moved, on a deep level, by an image like this one? (Wouldn’t a truly post-Christian society, of the sort that certain 20th century totalitarians aspired to build, be repulsed instead by images of weakness and deformity?) And then further, in a fully secularized society, would so many people who have drifted from the practice of religion – I have many of my fellow journalists particularly in mind – care so much whether an antique religious organization and its aged, celibate leader are in touch with their experiences? Would you really have the palpable excitement at his mere presence that has coursed through most of the coverage the last two days?

A cynical religious conservative might respond that the secular media only cares, only feels the pulse of excitement, because this pontificate has given them the sense that the Catholic church might be changing to fit their pre-existing prejudices, that the Whig vision of history that substitutes for its Christian antecedent might be being vindicated in the Vatican of all places. And this is surely part of it, which is one reason among many why Christian leaders should be wary of mistaking an enthusiastic reaction for a sign of evangelistic success or incipient conversion; sometimes the enthusiasm is just a sign that the world thinks that it’s about to succeed in converting you.

But mixed in with this Whiggish, raze-the-last-bastions spirit is something else: Probably not the sudden, “Francis Effect” openness to #fullChristianity that some of the pope’s admirers see him winning, but at the very least a much stronger desire to feel in harmony with the leader of the West’s historic faith than you might expect from a society allegedly leaving that faith far behind.

I think that desire is real because I see it in secular (or are they?) people that I know; I think it’s real because, as I said at the outset, you could in at work on Benedict’s pilgrimages as well, in more difficult times and more secularized contexts and without the “great reformer” patina that Francis brings with him on his journeys.

Whether there’s a bridge from that desire to a revitalized Catholicism or Christianity I don’t know, and I have all sorts of doubts about whether Francis’s model of outreach is that bridge. But it still says something important about the complex nature of our religious moment that parts of our society that can seem so secular and scoffing can also seem terribly eager, when the opportunity presents itself, for a blessing from the heir to the apostles.

http://douthat.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/0 ... ef=opinion
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A More Conservative Catholic Church Awaits Pope Francis in Africa

NAIROBI, Kenya — Headlines here call him the “Pope of Hope.” Because of him, Kenyans say they are more enthusiastic about going to church, praying regularly and treating others kindly. They want him to preach about corruption, living in peace and governing fairly.

But as Pope Francis begins his first trip to Africa on Wednesday, he will also face a powerful and assertive Roman Catholic Church in Africa that is wary of calls to make the institution more welcoming to people who are divorced, gay or cohabiting without being married.

“Yes, we are more conservative,” said Bishop Renatus Leonard Nkwande, of the Tanzanian diocese of Bunda. The African bloc’s role, he said, is “to defend the teaching of the church, the teaching of the book.”

Both Africa and Francis himself, the first pope from Latin America, symbolize the importance of the southern hemisphere to the future of the Catholic Church worldwide.

The church in Africa is booming in numbers, strength and influence, and the Roman Catholic Church globally is sitting up and taking notice. Africans now account for 14 percent of the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics, but by 2050 they will be 25 to 30 percent, according to Philip Jenkins, a professor at Baylor University who studies global Christianity.

Yet Francis faces some stiff resistance on the continent to his calls for a more tolerant church. When bishops met last month at the Vatican for a pivotal international meeting, or synod, on the family, the African bishops gained attention for the assertive role they played in pushing the church to stand firm against any acceptance of divorce and homosexuality.

The African prelates see eye-to-eye with Francis on several of his signature themes — poverty, the environment and social injustice — that he is likely to evoke during his trip to Kenya, Uganda and the war-torn Central African Republic this week.

But African bishops are also seen as an increasingly powerful counterweight to bishops in Western Europe and the Americas backing Francis’s call to make the church more open to unconventional families.

The Rev. Boniface Mwangi, a director for Caritas in central Kenya, an association of Catholic charities, said he expected the Pope to steer away from the contentious topics gripping some Catholics in the West, like whether to allow divorced and remarried Catholics to receive communion, or what to do about gay parishioners. As many as 36 African countries have laws against homosexuality, including the three Francis is set to visit.

“I expect him to focus on social issues of the common people, like why we have some pockets with people who have huge resources and so many other people live in slums,” Father Mwangi said.

Catholics in Africa are eager to welcome the pontiff and share the spotlight he will bring to their faith and their struggles.

In Kenya and Uganda, those challenges include vicious attacks from radical Islamist extremists who have killed hundreds of civilians at an upscale shopping mall, a public university and in villages along the coast, often separating Christians from Muslims and slaughtering the Christians.

The Central African Republic, an impoverished country in the middle of the continent, has been roiled for years by a war between Muslims and Christians that has killed thousands and chased nearly a million from their homes. Pope Francis said in a video released last weekend that he planned to deliver in Africa a message of “reconciliation, forgiveness and peace.”

Security for the trip is an urgent concern. Catholic observers say the visit to the Central African Republic ranks among the most dangerous trips a pope has ever undertaken.

“The pope wants to go to the Central African Republic,” a Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, said in a media briefing last week. “And, like any wise person would do, we are monitoring the situation.”

Kenyans are yearning to hear Pope Francis address “peaceful coexistence” and denounce corruption by their political leaders, according to a new poll there. Corruption is the top public issue in Kenya right now, with new scandals erupting almost daily — from allegations of Kenyan generals making millions of dollars smuggling sugar to accusations that officials in one government ministry bought ballpoint pens for $85 apiece.

What could make it awkward for Pope Francis is that the corruption plaguing Kenya has been carried out, according to numerous claims, by members of the same government that is placing the red carpet under his feet.

The pope’s first scheduled activity will be a “welcoming ceremony” with Kenya’s president, Uhuru Kenyatta. Father Mwangi said the pope should wrap his anticorruption message in what the Bible says about integrity.

“It doesn’t have to be political,” he said. “Good governance is about integrity.”

Despite, or perhaps because of, these social conditions, the church in Africa is thriving.

“They’re moving the church in a conservative direction on moral and social issues, but a liberal direction on economic issues and social justice,” Professor Jenkins said.

This change is reflected not just in the Roman Catholic Church, but also in the Anglican Communion, the world’s third-largest body of churches. Powerful Anglican bishops in Africa joined forces with theological conservatives in the United States and England to oppose decisions by Anglican provinces in the United States, Canada and elsewhere to ordain openly gay bishops and bless same-sex marriages.

Recognizing that the communion is on the verge of fracture, the archbishop of Canterbury has called a meeting for January to discuss its future.

The United Methodist Church, a predominantly American church with a growing branch in Africa, is also deeply divided on gay issues. At the church’s conferences, the voting bloc of African delegates, which grows larger with each successive conference, has united with American conservatives to defeat the proposals by liberal Methodists to ordain gay ministers and bless same-sex marriages.

Homosexuality has proved to be an “explosive issue” for churches in Africa, said Professor Jenkins, in part because “Christianity faces such competition from Islam in Africa.”

“If Christianity ever became more liberal on gay issues, Catholic leaders say they would just seem to be selling out to the West, betraying African values and just giving the whole thing to Islam,” he added.

In the Catholic, Anglican and Methodist churches, African leaders have argued that initiatives to force them to accept gay relationships are a form of neocolonialism imposed by Europeans and Americans. They argue that the reason their churches are growing, compared to the declines they see in their churches in Europe and the United States, is that the African churches have upheld traditional doctrines on sexuality.

At the synod last month, Cardinal Robert Sarah of Guinea grabbed headlines with a speech that equated gay rights with terrorism. He said both were “apocalyptic beasts” with a “demonic origin.”

“What Nazi-fascism and communism were in the 20th century, Western homosexual and abortion ideologies and Islamic fanaticism are today,” said Cardinal Sarah, who has served in the Vatican for years and was named to the top liturgical post there by Francis in 2014.

Another African cardinal, Wilfrid Fox Napier, of South Africa, was among what were reported to be about a dozen bishops who signed a private letter to Francis objecting to the committee the pope had appointed to draft the synod’s final document. The signers suggested that the committee was stacked with prelates who would favor reforming the church’s practice of refusing communion to those who have divorced and remarried without an annulment.

In one indication of their continuing influence, both Cardinals Sarah and Napier were among the 12 elected by the bishops at the end of the synod to serve on the committee to plan the next global synod, expected in 2018.

Catholics are now awaiting Francis’s formal response to the synod, which he is expected to issue next year. He has not spoken directly on the hot-button issues the synod left unsettled, but Francis has repeatedly called for a more open and merciful church, doing so again last week during his weekly audience in St. Peter’s Square.

“The house of God is a refuge, not a prison!” he said in an impassioned, off-the-cuff address. “And if the door is closed, we say: ‘Lord, open the door!’ ”

He has made “mercy” the leitmotif of his papacy, declaring a yearlong “Jubilee of Mercy” that he plans to start off in Bangui, the Central African Republic capital, by ceremonially opening the holy door of the cathedral there.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/25/world ... rld/africa
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I found the following article about the principles of Christianity very close to what our tariqah of Islam represents - strength in pluralism.

The Christmas Revolution

BECAUSE the Christmas story has been told so often for so long, it’s easy even for Christians to forget how revolutionary Jesus’ birth was. The idea that God would become human and dwell among us, in circumstances both humble and humiliating, shattered previous assumptions. It was through this story of divine enfleshment that much of our humanistic tradition was born.

For most Christians, the incarnation — the belief that God, in the person of Jesus, walked in our midst — is history’s hinge point. The incarnation’s most common theological take-away relates to the doctrine of redemption: the belief that salvation is made possible by the sinless life and atoning death of Jesus. But there are other, less familiar aspects of Jesus’ earthly pilgrimage that are profoundly important.

One of them was rejecting the Platonic belief that the material world was evil. In Plato’s dualism, there was a dramatic disjuncture between ideal forms and actual bodies, between the physical and the spiritual worlds. According to Plato, what we perceive with our senses is illusory, a distorted shadow of reality. Hence philosophy’s most famous imagery — Plato’s shadow on the cave — where those in the cave mistook the shadows for real people and named them.

This Platonic view had considerable influence in the early church, but that influence faded because it was in tension with Christianity’s deepest teachings. In the Hebrew Bible, for example, God declares creation to be good — and Jesus, having entered the world, ratified that judgment. The incarnation attests to the existence of the physical, material world. Our life experiences are real, not shadows. The incarnation affirms the delight we take in earthly beauty and our obligation to care for God’s creation. This was a dramatic overturning of ancient thought.

The incarnation also reveals that the divine principle governing the universe is a radical commitment to the dignity and worth of every person, since we are created in the divine image.

But just as basic is the notion that we have value because God values us. Steve Hayner, a theologian who died earlier this year, illustrated this point to me when he observed that gold is valuable not because there is something about gold that is intrinsically of great worth but because someone values it. Similarly, human beings have worth because we are valued by God, who took on flesh, entered our world, and shared our experiences — love, joy, compassion and intimate friendships; anger, sorrow, suffering and tears. For Christians, God is not distant or detached; he is a God of wounds. All of this elevated the human experience and laid the groundwork for the ideas of individual dignity and inalienable rights.

In his book “A Brief History of Thought,” the secular humanist and French philosopher Luc Ferry writes that in contrast with the Greek understanding of humanity, “Christianity was to introduce the notion that humanity was fundamentally identical, that men were equal in dignity — an unprecedented idea at the time, and one to which our world owes its entire democratic inheritance.”

Indeed, Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount (blessed are the poor in spirit and the pure in heart, the meek and the merciful), his touching of lepers, and his association with outcasts and sinners were fundamentally at odds with the way the Greek and Roman worlds viewed life, where social status was everything.

“Christianity placed charity at the center of its spiritual life as no pagan cult ever had,” according to the theologian David Bentley Hart, “and raised the care of widows, orphans, the sick, the imprisoned, and the poor to the level of the highest of religious obligations.” Christianity played a key role in ending slavery and segregation. Today Christians are taking the lead against human trafficking and on behalf of unborn life. They maintain countless hospitals, hospices and orphanages around the world.

We moderns assume that compassion for the poor and marginalized is natural and universal. But actually we think in this humanistic manner in large measure because of Christianity. What Christianity did, my friend the Rev. Karel Coppock once told me, is to “transform our way of thinking about the poor and sick and create an entirely different cultural given.”

One other effect of the incarnation: It helps those of us of the Christian faith to avoid turning God into an abstract set of principles. Accounts of how Jesus interacted in this messy, complicated, broken world, through actions that stunned the people of his time, allow us to learn compassion in ways that being handed a moral rule book never could.

For one thing, rule books can’t shed tears or express love; human beings do. Seeing how Jesus dealt with the religious authorities of his day (often harshly) and the sinners and outcasts of his day (often tenderly and respectfully) adds texture and subtlety to human relationships that we could never gain otherwise.

Christians have often fallen short of what followers of Jesus are called to be. We have seen this in the Crusades, religious wars and bigotry; in opposition to science, in the way critical thought is discouraged and in harsh judgmentalism. To this day, many professing Christians embody the antithesis of grace.

We Christians would do well to remind ourselves of the true meaning of the incarnation. We are part of a great drama that God has chosen to be a participant in, not in the role of a conquering king but as a suffering servant, not with the intention to condemn the world but to redeem it. He saw the inestimable worth of human life, regardless of social status, wealth and worldly achievements, intelligence or national origin. So should we.

Peter Wehner, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, served in the last three Republican administrations and is a contributing opinion writer.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/25/opini ... d=71987722
kmaherali
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Post by kmaherali »

The following message of the Pope looks like a translation of a Ginan minus the signature of the Pir. Prince Aly Khan made the following statement:

"Given a right understanding of the foundations of Islam and Christianity, and the spiritual values which they have proclaimed, it should not prove very difficult to build a bridge of mutual respect and co-operation between the two great religions. Unfortunately, it is a fact that the close similarity between the two remains largely unknown to the West."

http://ismaili.net/timeline/1958/19580527ic.html

When Pope Francis met before Christmas with Vatican employees, mostly lay people with families, he asked them to do 10 things.

The list sounded remarkably like suggestions for New Year’s resolutions:

— “Take care of your spiritual life, your relationship with God, because this is the backbone of everything we do and everything we are.”

— “Take care of your family life, giving your children and loved ones not just money, but most of all your time, attention and love.”

— “Take care of your relationships with others, transforming your faith into life and your words into good works, especially on behalf of the needy.”

— “Be careful how you speak, purify your tongue of offensive words, vulgarity and worldly decadence.”

— “Heal wounds of the heart with the oil of forgiveness, forgiving those who have hurt us and medicating the wounds we have caused others.”

— “Look after your work, doing it with enthusiasm, humility, competence, passion and with a spirit that knows how to thank the Lord.”

— “Be careful of envy, lust, hatred and negative feelings that devour our interior peace and transform us into destroyed and destructive people.”

— “Watch out for anger that can lead to vengeance; for laziness that leads to existential euthanasia; for pointing the finger at others, which leads to pride; and for complaining continually, which leads to desperation.”

— “Take care of brothers and sisters who are weaker … the elderly, the sick, the hungry, the homeless and strangers, because we will be judged on this.”
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Post by Admin »

Specially the last sentence seems like a copy paste of a recent Farman... The Gnan per excellence!

There is no doubt the ideas put forth by our Imam always permeates those of the Intelligentsia of this world. I reminds me of Trudeau speaking about diversity, multiculturalism, pluralism and... cosmopolitan Ethics! Yes, "Cosmopolitan Ethics"... just days after Hazar Imam's Speech at Harvard last year on the same subject.
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Post by Admin »

kmaherali wrote: — “Take care of brothers and sisters who are weaker … the elderly, the sick, the hungry, the homeless and strangers, because we will be judged on this.”
Above, quote from the Pope.

Below, quoted from Hazar Imam

"keep to the ethic of our faith, of our unity, of our humility, of our desire to serve, of our care for the poor, care for the weak, care for the old, care for the sick."

Hazar Imam, Bandra, Mumbay, India 23 November 1992
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Post by nuseri »

Ya Ali Madad:
Very nice posting indeed.When I read the Pope's message in news paper I wanted to post itcwas like most important summary of MHI farman in last 20 years.
Well ALI is also the spiritual father to more than 2 billion christians.
It is a same Noor which spoke out a noble, humble and pious person an entity that is the Pope.
Close ones eye and listen to the message,it sounds like an absolute not akin to farmans translated in Italian language.
I feel that Christians are the most blessed by ALI after Ismailis as they adhere to the saying of their prophet,they are born in heavenly areas blessed by nature.Shariati just comes after
7 other religions as they disregard the true sayings of their entity.
I feel Christian are more likely to accept the name of ALI/Eli as Spiritual Father as Ismailis
open up with Sufi tariqa.
It may take some time for Shia's to accept the formula 1+0=1, as it fully affirms with the cardinal farman if Hz Ali and Imam Jaffer Sadiq and qasida of Rumi n likes.
They will inshallah embrace it and broadcast it day in day out to shiver out the Shariatis
Who will be down hill mode in future not very far.
This Pope seems to be spiritually blessed.
Has MHI and present Pope met anywhere?
It would be worthwhile to see that meeting photographs.
NOORE NOOR JA MILYA,NOORE THA NOOR SAMAYA.
If we Ismailis know the value of our as said in ratio said by Imam SMS,
we can RULE THE WORLD with true faith n cosmopolitan ethics and unity.
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Post by kmaherali »

Pope and Russian Orthodox Leader Meet in Historic Step

HAVANA — Pope Francis on Friday became the first pontiff to ever meet a patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church, as the two Christian leaders set aside centuries of division in a historic encounter that was held in an unlikely setting: a room at the Havana airport.

Having announced the meeting only a week ago, Francis landed in Havana about 2 p.m. for a stopover that lasted a few hours, before he continued to Mexico City for his six-day visit to Mexico. Awaiting him in Havana was Patriarch Kirill, who was making an official visit to Cuba at the invitation of President Raúl Castro.

As he approached the Russian patriarch amid the clicking of news cameras, Francis was overheard to say, “Brother.” A moment later, he added, “Finally.”

The two men embraced, kissing each other twice on the cheeks and clasping hands before taking seats. “Now things are easier,” Kirill said. Francis responded, “It is clear now that this is the will of God.”

The meeting was richly symbolic: Francis, 79, leader of the world’s 1.2 billion Roman Catholics, stood with Kirill, 69, leader of the largest church in the Eastern Orthodox world, with an estimated 150 million followers. But it was also about geopolitics, rivalries among Orthodox leaders and, analysts say, the maneuverings of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia — who is closely aligned with the conservative Russian church.

More...
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/13/world ... d=45305309
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Post by kmaherali »

Francis Admonishes Bishops in Mexico to ‘Begin Anew’

MEXICO CITY — In a stinging rebuke to Mexico‘s church hierarchy, Pope Francis on Saturday told bishops that they had lost their way in “gossip” and “intrigue,” and challenged them to “begin anew” and tend to the church’s worshipers.

Speaking before rows of solemn bishops in this city’s majestic Metropolitan Cathedral, Francis spared no words as he painted an almost biblical picture of a church seduced by power and money.

“Be vigilant so that your vision will not be darkened by the gloomy mist of worldliness; do not allow yourselves to be corrupted by trivial materialism or by the seductive illusion of underhanded agreements; do not place your faith in the ‘chariots and horses’ of today’s pharaohs,” he said.

Francis’s sharp criticism came on a morning filled with symbols of temporal and ecclesiastical power, marking a discordant note on the first full day of a trip to Mexico designed to demonstrate his devotion to the powerless.

The morning began at the National Palace on the colonial Zócalo, the central square where President Enrique Peña Nieto and other dignitaries greeted Francis with full honors. But the pomp, laid on by politicians jostling for some reflected glory of the pope’s popularity, seemed at odds with a trip that Francis had described as a pilgrimage.

Indeed, the pope made his own pilgrimage on Saturday afternoon to the Basilica of the Virgin of Guadalupe, Mexico’s patron saint, to celebrate Mass before tens of thousands of worshipers. Then, as dusk fell over the giant city, Francis entered the shrine’s inner sanctuary and sat contemplating the Virgin’s olive-skinned image, a symbol of the fusion of Latin America’s disparate peoples under a nurturing maternal image of the divine.

For Mexicans, it was the sort of gesture that would long resonate.

“Is he revolutionary?” asked Maria Otilia Flores Cerón, 50, watching the Mass on a giant screen outside the basilica. “Yes. He is unifying everybody.”

Although many Mexicans had expected Francis to address the country’s corruption and bloodshed when he spoke to political leaders, it was religious authorities who received the full force of his anger.

“Do not lose time or energy in secondary things, in gossip or intrigue, in conceited schemes of careerism, in empty plans for superiority, in unproductive groups that seek benefits or common interests,” he said. “Do not allow yourselves to be dragged into gossip and slander.”

He even departed from his prepared text for the sharp-tongued scolding: “If you want to fight, do it, but as men do. Say it to each other’s faces and after that, like men of God, pray together.” He added, “If you went too far, ask for forgiveness.”

The strength of the pope’s denunciation came as a surprise even to those who had followed his earlier warnings to church leaders.

“I have never seen a scolding so severe, so drastic, so brutal to any bishops’ group,” said Roberto Blancarte, a scholar of the Mexican church at the Colegio de México. “The bishops will have to examine their consciences.”

The pope’s words will invigorate groups in the Mexican church who have long been critical of the distance that bishops keep from the faithful, living in luxury and socializing with politicians and wealthy businessmen, Mr. Blancarte said. In a speech that laid out many of the themes the pope is expected to address as he travels the length of Mexico, Francis, a Jesuit, warned that the church had become complacent in facing the dangers of drug trafficking and urged the Mexican church to “embrace the fringes of human existence in the ravaged areas of our cities” to help “people escape the raging waters that drown so many.”

More...
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/14/world ... d=71987722
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Post by kmaherali »

Francis’ Message Calls on Church to Be Inclusive

ROME — In a broad proclamation on family life, Pope Francis on Friday called for the Roman Catholic Church to be more welcoming and less judgmental, and he seemingly signaled a pastoral path for divorced and remarried Catholics to receive holy communion.

The 256-page document — known as an apostolic exhortation and titled “Amoris Laetitia,” Latin for “The Joy of Love” — calls for priests to welcome single parents, gay people and unmarried straight couples who are living together.

“A pastor cannot feel that it is enough to simply apply moral laws to those living in ‘irregular’ situations, as if they were stones to throw at people’s lives,” he wrote.

But Francis once again closed the door on same-sex marriage, saying it cannot be seen as the equivalent of heterosexual unions.

The document offers no new rules or marching orders, and from the outset Francis makes plain that no top-down edicts are coming.

Alluding to the diversity and complexity of a global church, Francis effectively pushes decision making downward to bishops and priests, stating that a different country or region “can seek solutions better suited to its culture and sensitive to its traditions and local needs.”

But Francis also makes clear the vision he wants local bishops and priests to follow: as a church that greets families with empathy and comfort rather than with unbending rules and rigid codes of conduct.

More...
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/09/world ... 05309&_r=0
kmaherali
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Post by kmaherali »

There is a beautiful song sung by Jim Reeves - I'D RATHER HAVE JESUS with LYRICS

at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cgwGiF0-mlE

If one were to change the word 'Jesus' to Mowla/Imam/ShahPir, then it would sound like a Ginan.

There is much in common between Christianity and Ismailism!
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Post by shivaathervedi »

An excerpt from an article from Washington Post, dated June 22,2016 under captioned ' work begins to try to save Christianity's holiest shrine; Jesus Christ'.


Today, the site thrums with piety, but history knows it is soaked in blood. There have been at least four Christian chapels erected over the site. The first was by Emperor Constantine in the 4th century, who swept aside a pagan temple Hadrian built to the goddess Aphrodite — perhaps a move by Rome to deny early Christians a place of pilgrimage. The Holy Sepulchre was saved by the Muslim conqueror Omar in 638; destroyed by the Egyptian 'Caliph al-Hakim, in 1009; rebuilt by the Crusaders who themselves slaughtered half the city; protected again by the Muslim conqueror Saladin and laid waste again by the fearsome Khwarezmian Turks, whose horsemen rode into the church and lopped off the heads of praying monks.
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