Today I Read, The Dilemma of Diversity

"Parents worry that their kids' beliefs will be influenced by exposure to other faiths. They needn't be." Sacred Ground by Eboo Patel

Today I read something really remarkable, an essay written by Eboo Patel, educated at the University of Illinois and Oxford, England, whose book is Sacred Ground: Pluralism, Prejudice and the Promise of America. In his essay he describes an American scene: A woman goes into an American hospital to deliver a baby. She enters an institution founded by Jewish philanthropy, with a Muslim physician attending her, while a Hindu physician administers anesthesia, and a Catholic Christian woman is assigned her nurse. Think about that a moment.

What joins all these persons together is their commitment to care, to care for persons who have  medical, physical needs, and possibly to attend to other emotional or spiritual needs as well. In America this scene is real and many of us have already experienced such compassionate care by those persons of faith who minister as doctors and other medical professionals. Because America is a Pluralistic nation as founded and announced by our Constitution and Bill of Rights. We may really be more defined by Pluralism than by Democracy.

In his book, Sacred Ground: Pluralism, Prejudice and the Promise of America, Patel poses a simple question, "am I just preaching to the choir?" While he initially interpreted this as some sort of rebuke, further reflection has led him to a different thought. Embodying the Social Change Theory, he writes that the issue is: less defining the problem and more identifying those who hold solutions, and assisting them in promoting those methods and ideas for social change.

He continues his thoughts by relating his impressions of a visit to Chicago by the 14th Dalai Lama. He was definitely "preaching to the choir. The Dalai Lama can obviously assemble a pretty large choir, but still he was strategic about how he went about it." He assembled a group of interfaith leaders in Chicago for a panel discussion; in other words "he had created a religiously diverse choir." The Dalai Lama, as some may know, has become active in the teaching of interfaith literacy. His recent book is titled, Towards a True Kinship of Faith: How the World's Religions Can Come Together. He emphasizes the ability of building relationships across differences. He inspires others to do the same.

Patel also tells a bit of the history of Cordoba, Spain during the Early-Medieval period of the Moorish Invasion, a time when Muslim people of North Africa came onto the Iberian Continent and successfully colonized it. In the ultimately peacefully co-existence of people of different faiths, Spain carved out regions where Moors predominated and intermarried with the native population, thus a peace established itself. Today the Moors are recognized for their genius and inspiration that energized Spanish society at large.
It was this attitude, Patel writes, which transplanted easily to the American shores, brought first by the Conquistadors and their colonies along the Gulf of Mexico, from Florida to California. He writes how he realized that because of active cooperation these communities did thrive, rather than a modern attitude of oh, so politically correct 'co-existence of lukewarm tolerance.' Finally he concludes that Cordoba predicted America.

So it is indeed Pluralism, the active cooperation and participation in the affairs of American society which defines this nation, concludes Patel. Reading his book in its entirety sets one to thinking about  just how.

Asking Questions, Tillich and the Existentialists

"I start with man asking questions about the ultimate meaning of life. People who listen to me are those who declare they don’t understand the Christian symbols that are given by the church and need them translated into modern language." --Paul Tillich

Paul Tillich emerged out of the Nazi regime and the era of Fascism to a world in wonder. The explosive force of the Atom bomb and the Hydrogen bomb left the known universe ajar. The pre-war answers to life's questions no longer filled a world searching for meaning at the world wars' end. While the First World War had been known as The Great War, its combatants, referred to as the Lost Generation. The Second World War gave way to the Beat generation, the Existentialists,  and authors such as Vicktor Frankl, a concentration camp survivor, who wrote titles such as Man's Search For Meaning.
Theologian Paul Tillich wrote about living in a Christian way within the revised world order of the mid 20th century.
Authors such as Jean Paul Sartre wrote books like Camus and La Peste also exploring the topic of Being and Nothingness, what has now become called Existentialism.

Existentialism is a view that was popularized, carried over into the arts-culture and into general society. While existentialism is sometimes called "the philosophy of the absurd," most existentialist thinkers would likely define themselves by a sense of free choice and lack of sense for past or future, only a present.
The one first identified as an existentialist was Soren Kierkegaard who wrote that this sense of self and time leads into humanism, a state where man in his own experiences, maintains the center the universe.
Paul Tillich wrote, "being religious means asking passionately the question of our existence and being willing to receive answers, even if the answers hurt."
Such an idea of religion makes religion universally human, but it certainly differs from what is usually called religion. It is here that Tillich makes his contribution to the understanding of the modern, technological world.