Mainstream media

First, let me say that I think Pastor Terry Jones’s plans to burn Korans Saturday are odious. Yes, he has the First Amendment right to do so. But it’s hate speech of the darkest kind.

And from that darkness has sprung light.

His hatred and intolerance have not met with the public approval he sought. The news is not of other churches planning to follow his lead and burn the book he has called a

A new day dawns. NASA photo, November 1969.

work of evil.

Instead, news reports show people of faith  banding together to declare that every religion has a right to be respected in the United States. A group of Christians, Jews and Muslims met Tuesday in Washington, D.C. to voice opposition to anti-Islamic intolerance of all kinds, the Koran burning in particular.  The Vatican is now on record…

image courtesy yorkblog.com

I didn’t intend to write three posts on the emerging/emergent church movement, and I know the subject may be getting old for some readers.  But the topic isn’t dead for those of us in the church.  The general superintendents of my own denomination, the Church of the Nazarene, released a statement on the Emergent Church just last month – a well-balanced statement, I thought.  On a more local level, there are people who have expressed concern about the influence of the emergent church in our congregation.  I don’t know if they’ll read this post, but for them and for others I have a few last thoughts to share.

Listen to Dave Tomlinson’s description of the postmodern climate, taken from his book The Post-Evangelical:

The postmodern world is a world which understands itself through biological rather than mechanistic models; a world where

…

image courtesy firstthings.com

My recent post on the Emergent Church was deliberately personal in focus and did nothing to help define the movement.  I’d like to make an attempt at defining it in this post, with the understanding that I’m not an academic, not a church leader, not an “insider” in any way.  I’m just a Christian who finds that much about the Emergent Church makes sense to me.  There’s an understandable amount of confusion – and not only on the difference between Emerging and Emergent (more on that later).  Emergent is not a euphemism for liberal, not another name for Hipster Christians, the Organic Church or New Monasticism, though there is overlap between each of these categories.   Emerging is less a set of concrete practices and doctrines than it is a posture or mood, and defining a mood is no…

After 9/11 President Bush reminded Americans that the attack was the work of a few terrorists and not the Muslim people. "The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam," Bush said a few days after 9/11. President Obama reached out to Muslims worldwide in his 2009 Cairo speech, where he insisted that "America is not -- and never will be -- at war with Islam." Yet partly because of the furor over...Please click on the title to continue reading this entry. Elizabeth Tenety

After 9/11 President Bush reminded Americans that the attack was the work of a few terrorists and not the Muslim people. "The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam," Bush said a few days after 9/11. President Obama reached out to Muslims worldwide in his 2009 Cairo speech, where he insisted that "America is not -- and never will be -- at war with Islam." Yet partly because of the furor over...Please click on the title to continue reading this entry. Elizabeth Tenety

Before I start, let me get this off of my chest:

If you’re going to call your evangelical Christian church the Dove World Outreach Center, you should probably not espouse violent anti-Islam sentiment and commemorate 9/11 by burning copies of the Quran. Seriously, that’s wrong on so many levels…Christian outreach cannot be achieved through hateful rhetoric and actions designed to insight violence. And really, does it further the Christian church when its members do everything in their power to come across as ignorant bigots?

Dove World Outreach Center, Gainesville, Florida

End of rant.

And yet the Dove World Outreach Center, a self-proclaimed New Testament church in Gainesville, Florida, is selling Islam is of the Devil shirts and books and promoting September 11th as “International Burn a Koran” day. And General David Petraeus, the top U.S. Commander in Afghanistan, is urging them to…

Like many Americans, Texas Faith panelists took the Labor Day weekend off. Our discussion will return on Tuesday, September 14.

Gospel singer Bryan Wilson, who came to fame with the Mississippi Children's Choir and is now featured on Tme-Life's best-selling CD "Shoutin' Down the Aisles," performs Monday at KHVN's (Heaven 97 AM) and Cornerstone Baptist Church's Annual Day of Praise Celebration.

The gathering will be held at the corner of Martin Luther King Boulevard and Harwood Street in Dallas.

Wilson is best-known for his soulful rendition of "His Eye is on the Sparrow" with the Mississippi Children's Choir in 1994, when he was 12. The song sold more than 100,000 copies and led to Stellar and Dove Award nominations. And now Wilson is on the comeback trail.

After graduating from Claflin University and working towards a master's degree at Princeton University's Seminary, Wilson returned to music in 2008 with the critically-acclaimed CD, "A Second Coming," on his own Bryan's Songs/CE Music label. Wilson's new radio single "Everybody Clap Your Hands (The Moon Song)" just debuted in the BDS Top 100 Gospel Songs and is in rotation on KHVN.

 

BOB ABERNETHY, host: With President Obama’s formal announcement that combat operations in Iraq are over, two assessments of whether the war was the right thing to do. William Galston is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington. Michael Cromartie is vice president of the Ethics & Public Policy Center, also in Washington. Welcome to you both. Michael, was the Iraq war the right thing to do?

MICHAEL CROMARTIE: Well, Bob, you know the British prime minister, Tony Blair, has just come out with an autobiography, and he makes the point in there that the removal of Saddam Hussain from power was a great good. I agree with Tony Blair that the Iraq war is tragic. It has been, in the loss of life—that’s been sad. It was the right thing to do.

ABERNETHY: If you had known in 2003 what the costs would be, the costs in lives and money and everything, would you still have favored it?

CROMARTIE: Bob, the cost of lives and money and—every war is a miserable cost, painful cost, and I think looking back on any war you want to say is any war worth it after we see what the results are? That’s can’t be considered without considering what was going on before—what Saddam did to his own people, what he did to his neighbors, the threat that he posed to so many parts of the world.

ABERNETHY: Bill, was it worth it?

WILLIAM GALSTON: I don’t think so, and equally important, a large majority of the American people don’t think so either, and in a democracy that’s something that needs to be taken into account. It’s not dispositive, but it needs to be taken into account. And one of the principles of just war theory is the principle of proportionality—that even if it’s justified the good that is done has to exceed the harm. There’s also reason to believe that the war did not satisfy the requirements of just war theory. It was not a defensive war. It was not a preemptive war. It was a preventive war, which is very hard to justify, and the administration’s case for preventive war did not pass muster.

ABERNETHY: So primarily on the consequences you think it was not right to do.

GALSTON: No, there are two reasons. First of all the prudential reasons, that is, the good achieved, and there was some genuine good achieved, was outweighed by the harm done. But also on the moral and legal plane, if you take just war theory seriously and apply it to this case, I’m afraid it doesn’t pass.

CROMARTIE: But let’s look for a moment, Bob, at the good achieved, if I could in response to Bill.

ABERNETHY: We don’t know what the good was, do we, yet?

CROMARTIE: Well I can give you some right now. One of the goods is that we now have an ally that doesn’t support the war on terror but in fact supports us. We know have a country that’s not invading its neighbors. We now have a country that’s not brutalizing its own people. We have a country that has the potential of being something of a democracy in the region, so we now have an ally in the region that we didn’t have before. We’ve also removed a man who brutalized his own people and he brutalized his neighbors.

ABERNETHY: What do you think the lessons are to be drawn? Bill?

GALSTON: Well, one lesson is a lesson that General Petraeus has articulated recently, as have a number of people around him, including General Odierno, namely that we didn’t know what we were getting into and we had a duty to know more about the country, the society, the history, the complexities, the pitfalls, and General Petraeus has taken that lesson with him into Afghanistan, I hope, with better results. And another lesson I think we had better draw is the same one that the drafters of the Declaration of Independence understood full well, that is to say there is a decent respect owed to the opinions of mankind, and I’m afraid that we did not take that adequately seriously in the run-up to the war or the conduct of the war, and I think we’ve paid a huge price for that.

ABERNETHY: Michael, the lessons for you?

CROMARTIE: Well, one of the lessons is the mistakes that were made going in. Remember Secretary Rumsfeld said we needed to have a light footprint, and I don’t think even the surge would have been necessary if we had not done a better job of securing the country earlier. Rumsfeld’s view was that we would go in lightly and leave quickly. Of course, none of that’s happened and I think that was a big mistake.

ABERNETHY: Tell me what you think about the possibility of other situations where we think the head of a country is dangerous. Do we—

CROMARTIE: There’s still some of those around, by the way.

ABERNETHY: Do we still have the right to send in our troops, to invade, to kill the leader? Do we have that right?

CROMARTIE: No, of course not, of course not, and if you will remember, and as Bill of course recalls, the amount of times we went to the UN before we went into Iraq, and the amount of resolutions that were passed, and the amount of times that Saddam ignored all of them. No, I don’t think we have the right to just go and fly into a country without first going by every international—passing every international legal agreement that we can before we do so.

ABERNETHY: Bill?

GALSTON: Well—

ABERNETHY: Preventive war?

GALSTON: Preventive war. First of all, I think we have relearned what we should have known from the beginning, that is, a preventive war is the most difficult war to justify, and you’d better be darn sure of your facts and your grounds before entering into it. But the second lesson to be learned is that the argument that good will be done if we perform act “x” is an inadequate argument on its face for two reasons—first of all, because there’s also the other side of the balance to be taken into account. You need to do double-entry bookkeeping. And secondly because not everything that is productive of good is justified. There’s lots of good that we could do potentially that we are estopped from doing because there are norms that prevent us from doing it, and there’s a reason why those norms exist, and so arguments of the form “the world is a better place because of x” are not adequate.

ABERNETHY: Michael, quickly, you served for many years on the—

CROMARTIE: —the US Commission on International Religious Freedom

ABERNETHY: The US Commission on International Religious Freedom. What’s the state of religious freedom in Iraq now? What’s the state particularly for Christians?

CROMARTIE: It’s very bad in Iraq right now. Christians have fled Iraq. Sectarian violence toward Christians and toward churches is in a miserable state, and that’s one of the areas where the Iraqi government needs to do a better job of insuring protection of all religious minorities in Iraq, because it’s not a good situation.

Was it worth it? Was it just? Did the good exceed the harm? William Galston and Michael Cromartie discuss the costs and consequences of the Iraq war as the US ends its combat mssion. /wnet/religionandethics/files/2010/09/thumb02-iraqwar.jpg

 

BOB FAW, correspondent: Even today, nine years later, what happened at the Twin Towers horrifies, wounds, inflames.

SALLY REGENHARD: Our loved ones’ blood really consecrated that site forever and ever.

FAW: Sally Regenhard’s only son, 28-year-old firefighter Christian, a Marine, aspiring writer, and avid rock-climber, was killed on 9/11. No trace of him has ever been found.

REGENHARD: My son was a saint who was murdered by sinners.

FAW: Among the more than 2700 killed in Lower Manhattan that day was firefighter Bill Burke, who got his men safely out of the doomed towers before he perished.

MICHAEL BURKE: He got Engine 24 and the civilians they saved out. A fireman who worked for him said Bill Burke led the best of the best. He was better than all of us.

FAW: Nothing is more hallowed than Ground Zero for relatives like Regenhard and Burke.

BURKE: There’s just a sense of sanctity to the site that’s being offended here.

FAW: Ironically, Muslims proposing that 13-story cultural center on Park Place two blocks from Ground Zero insist they are trying to honor the site. Daisy Khan is director of the American Society of Muslim Advancement and wife of Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, organizers of the project.

DAISY KHAN: We’ve been in the neighborhood for 27 years. It’s our neighborhood that got attacked, and it’s our obligation and our responsibility and really even our honor to rebuild it.

FAW: Daisy Khan insists that the center, which will include an arts theater, a place for prayer, athletics, and education, will be a testimonial to healing and interfaith harmony.

KHAN: The extremists have defined the agenda for the global Muslim community, and we wanted to amplify the voices of the ordinary Muslims who are, you know, law-abiding citizens, and it was my way of, like, helping rebuild by building a center that would create a counter-momentum against extremism.

REGENHARD: I want to make it clear that I and my—members of my group do not have anger towards Muslims. But it’s too close, it’s too painful, it’s too soon. I’m still trying to find remains of my son.

BURKE: It amounts to an insult. It comes across as intentionally provocative.

FAW: Proponent Khan, though, has drawn a line in the sand, arguing that being forced to move the site elsewhere amounts to “surrender.”

KHAN: I think it would be un-American to ask anybody to leave the neighborhood. We’re part of the neighborhood. I don’t think anybody should be driven out of their neighborhood. It’s about acceptance. Muslims are not being accepted as equals in this country yet.

MOSQUE PROTESTER: No mosque, not here, not now, not ever.

FAW: Indeed, throughout the country there are recent signs of what some call Islamophobia. Nearby, on Staten Island, an abandoned Catholic convent was to be sold to Muslims to build a mosque. But after much protest the board of the church that owned the convent voted the sale down. In Columbia, Tennessee a mosque was fire bombed. In Murfreesboro, Tennessee, vandals targeted equipment being used to build an Islamic center. And in Temecula, California the site of a proposed mosque brought forth both sides of the debate.

MANGO BAKH: Islam is not a religion. Islam is a totalitarian, terrorist ideology.

JENNIFER EIS: There is nothing to fear from them. They are our neighbors, and they want to be able to worship freely, just as our ancestors did.

FAW: Against that backdrop is it any wonder that a prominent anthropologist who’s recently completed a landmark study of Muslims in America concludes the Muslim community feels “under siege”?

AKBAR AHMED (American University): Americans are really going through a time of uncertainty, of some fear and some anger, and they want to blame someone, and in times like this that’s why you’re sitting on a tinderbox. It’s very easy to then suddenly target or make a community a scapegoat, so even something as simple and ordinary as constructing a house of worship becomes an act of defiance, controversy, debate.

FAW: The debate over that proposed Muslim cultural center here, so close to Ground Zero, has been framed as a choice between religious tolerance and honoring the dead. But some would argue the real question is not the Constitution but sensitivity—that given what happened on 9/11, shouldn’t moral claims take precedence over legal rights?

THANE ROSENBAUM (Fordham University Law School): The legal issue’s clear. There is a right to free speech, and there’s a right to the exercise of one’s religion. We have that. Now what? What happens in situations where the exercise of that free religion, right, is going to trample upon the profound sensitivities of an already vulnerable, traumatized group?

FAW: Thane Rosenbaum, a professor at the Fordham University Law School, says the relevant precedent is 1984 when, 40 years after World War II, Holocaust survivors objected to a Carmelite convent proposed near Auschwitz and Pope John Paul intervened and moved the building elsewhere. That kind of compassion, says Rosenbaum, should prevail at Ground Zero.

ROSENBAUM: This isn’t about bigotry. This isn’t about religious persecution. This really is about sensitivity and a profound sense of loss. There’s something that just doesn’t feel right about the haste, the speed, the urgency with which their mosque must be there. I don’t see the tolerance in that. It seems to me the tolerance there is only one-way tolerance: religious liberty and freedom at all costs.

FAW: In the midst of all the turmoil, some relatives of 9/11 victims—it is difficult to say just how many—do support the cultural center near Ground Zero. On that terrible day nine years ago, Herb Ouida was working on the 77th floor of one of the towers, while his 25-year-old son, Todd, was on the 105th.

HERB OUIDA: I said, “Have a great day, sweetheart.” I tell you those words because those were my last words to my son.

FAW: A son, he remembers, who overcame a long battle with anxiety to go on and graduate from the University of Michigan and have a bright future in finance.

OUIDA: I think religious tolerance honors those that were lost. What we’re saying for the Muslim world is we don’t trust you, we don’t like you.

FAW: We don’t want you.

OUIDA: We don’t want you, and that’s exactly a victory for al-Qaeda. I don’t want to give them that victory. I don’t want to give them that victory. I’d rather say to them, “We stood by what we believe in, despite what you did to us.”

FAW: Daisy Khan says most 9/11 families agree with Herb Ouida and support the Islamic center. But for relatives like Sally Regenhard, the refusal of those backing the Islamic project to consider another site is just one more indignity.

REGENHARD: You can never change hearts and minds by shoving your culture or religion down the throats of others. I think they need to understand that.

FAW: With both sides so entrenched, the outcome is uncertain. What is clear, though, is that this dispute is about far more than location or real estate.

OUIDA: I’m just afraid that we—that there’s something we’re unleashing here, something that we won’t be able to control if we don’t stop it.

AHMED: I think there’s a bigger crisis taking place right now, and that is really the battle for American identity itself. What is the America that’s going to come out of this?

KHAN: Are we going to erode our ideals, or are we going to continue to live up to our ideals and let this moment be a passing moment, and let this be the test, the litmus test?

FAW: It is much more than a litmus test, though, for some whose wounds may never heal.

REGENHARD: Right now we’re asking for sensitivity, and maybe my son could have accepted what’s happening now, but we mere mortals—we cannot.

FAW: In the midst of enduring pain, shrill protests, and calls for compromise, then, a head-on collision between legal and moral rights in a debate which could determine in post-9/11 America whether tolerance is a two-way street.

For Religion and Ethics NewsWeekly this Bob Faw in New York.

/wnet/religionandethics/files/2010/09/thumb01-islamcenter.jpg “This isn’t about bigotry. This isn’t about religious persecution. This really is about sensitivity and a profound sense of loss,” says Fordham University Law School professor Thane Rosenbaum.

 

BOB ABERNETHY, host: The holiest time in the Jewish calendar begins next Wednesday evening (September 8) with Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, and ends with Yom Kippur ten days later. For Jews around the world, it’s a period of introspection and atonement. During both Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur services, congregants hear the sounding of the ram’s horn or shofar. Our producer, Noelle Seper, visited the Glickman family near Buffalo, New York, for whom sounding the Shofar has been a three-generation tradition.

NOELLE SERPER, producer: When the congregation gathers at Temple Beth Am to celebrate Rosh Hashanah, they will experience what Jews have for centuries—the blast of the shofar as a kind of wake-up call.

RABBI IRWIN TANENBAUM (Temple Beth Am, Williamsville, New York): Tekiah…

It’s a reminder. It sends a shiver, that we can be better than we are, and how do we approach God but with that strange cry in our ear, and perhaps on our lip, and we come before God and we say who are we? What are we? Remember what we could be, and help us along.

The Glickmans, for three generations, have been our shofar blowers here in this congregation.

SERPER: Marshall Glickman became Temple Beth Am’s Ba’al Tekiah, or the one who sounds the shofar, over 40 years ago.

MARLENE GLICKMAN (Widow of Marshall Glickman): They used to time him, because he could hold it so long, and they couldn’t believe it. He felt a commitment to his religion and a commitment to his God and to his congregation. He just felt like it was a gift that he was giving to the community and that he was the person through God giving that gift. At his funeral, there were over 800 people.

JOE GLICKMAN (Son of Marshall Glickman): When the funeral was over, when they put him in the ground, we blew the shofar, and it was quite nice. It was very lovely. The notes were great, and I don’t know that I’ve ever played the notes as well as we did at that point. But at that point I guess people said, “Wow, you should keep on playing,” and “Why don’t you and your son play in echo?”

RABBI TANENBAUM: Tekiah…

JOE GLICKMAN: It just gives the room a deeper vibrating, vibrational sound that echoes through one’s heart, one’s chest.

RABBI TANENBAUM: Shevarim Teruah…

JOE GLICKMAN: They listen to the shofar, and they can close their eyes and say, “This is the same sound I heard 10 years ago, 15 years ago, 20 years ago.” These are the same prayers, the same music, and they feel a oneness with times gone by.

STEVE GLICKMAN (Marshall Glickman’s grandson): Blowing the shofar is a family tradition that my grandfather started when he was 15, and I started when I was 14. It just makes me happy to continue that tradition.

The blast of the shofar during the High Holy Days, says Rabbi Irwin Tanenbaum, “sends a shiver” and reminds us “we can be better than we are.” /wnet/religionandethics/files/2010/09/thumb01-shofar.jpg

Listen to this episode now:

Download this episode as an MP3.
Files can be saved to your computer or opened online with your favorite MP3 player.

Listen to this week’s show. /wnet/religionandethics/files/2009/10/ListenNow.jpg

Glenn Beck’s Restoring Honor rally was a giant civil religious celebration of American exceptionalism.

Beck began his event by referring to America as a chosen nation. Pastor Paul Jehle, who offered the opening prayer, reinforced Beck’s sense of America’s divine purpose by drawing upon Puritan John Winthrop’s immortalized call for America to be a “city on a hill.”

Historians have very little use for the idea of American exceptionalism and its supporting religious rhetoric. The historical record points not to the exceptional experience of America but to its common history with other nations. America is, after all, a nation of immigrants, and it is one shaped by both transatlantic and transpacific exchanges. Apart from this historical challenge to American exceptionalism, insistence upon the nation’s unique greatness raises the specter of America’s exceptionally violent history and culture. Not only was America among the slowest of nations to abolish slavery, it is well known that America’s violent crime rate and prison population exceed that of any other industrialized country on the planet.

Yet these are not the only problems with the exceptionalism narrative. Exceptionalists like Beck claim that colonial America was a haven of religious practice and freedom that anticipated the founding of the United States on Christian principles and religious tolerance. While respected historians affirm the importance of Christianity in early America, they have also demonstrated that both colonists and the first citizens of the new United States subscribed to a variety of faiths—or none at all. They have shown that figures such as George Washington, John Adams, James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin may have been sympathetic to Christianity, but they were hardly orthodox Christians.

Colonial Americans, moreover, were not exceptionally tolerant of religious dissenters. Prior to the writing of the free exercise clause of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, Puritan and Anglican state churches dominated colonial religious life, and they actively limited the free expression of groups such as the Quakers and the Baptists. Even with the free exercise clause in place, Americans practiced toleration fitfully. This is why Catholics were considered by a substantial number of Americans to be un-Christian and un-American well into the 1960s and why the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is headquartered in Salt Lake City, Utah. The recent controversy about the proposed mosque near Ground Zero is simply the latest episode in America’s checkered history of religious freedom and “tolerance.”

These historical realities have no effect on Beck and other proponents of exceptionalism because their vision of America depends upon a combination of historical amnesia and revisionist history. For example, Beck repeatedly implored Americans to focus not on the “scars” of history but on the good America has done and will do. It was the height of irony for Beck to ask Americans to forget the scars of our past on the anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr’s “I Have a Dream” speech—and in the shadow of memorials to Abraham Lincoln, World War II, the Vietnam War, and the Korean War. Americans visit these sites precisely to remember, to grieve, and to honor the scars left by the horrors of assassination, slavery, and war.

There was one brief moment, however, when Beck’s comments matched the gravity of the American past. Midway through the program he noted: “America has been both terribly good and terribly bad.” He followed this comment with a vague admonition to learn from and repair the bad, only to quickly return to his message about American greatness. Had Beck sustained this theme of the ambiguity of American history he would have been more faithful to the spirit of Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr, the two figures who loomed largest over the proceedings. Lincoln’s and King’s rhetoric—especially the Second Inaugural and the “I Have a Dream” speech—were premised on a full acknowledgment of the good and bad of American experience. They understood that national “scars” represent both injury and healing, and they knew that to dismiss the injury precludes the healing.

Lincoln and King are exceptional historical figures. They had an exceptional grasp of the greatness and misery of the American past. They had an exceptional sense of caution when they spoke of God in relation to American destiny. They had an exceptional vision of American promise. More Americans should follow their exceptional example.

Andrew Finstuen is director of the Honors College and associate professor of history at Boise State University. He is the author of “Original Sin and Everyday Protestants: The Theology of Reinhold Niebuhr, Billy Graham, and Paul Tillich in an Age of Anxiety” (University of North Carolina Press, 2009).

/wnet/religionandethics/files/2010/09/thumb02-finstuen.jpg Martin Luther King Jr and Abraham Lincoln loomed large at Glenn Beck’s Restore Honor rally, but both of them had an exceptional sense of caution when they spoke of God in relation to American destiny.

Peace talks resumed this week in Washington between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. Several religious groups welcomed the return to direct negotiations. Jewish and Muslim organizations urged flexibility from both sides, and nearly 30 Christian leaders expressed their support for a two-state solution. In a letter to President Obama, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, the National Council of Churches, and others said that if an agreement is not reached within the coming year, it may not be reachable at all.

In his address from the Oval Office on Tuesday (August 31), President Obama officially announced the end of the combat mission in Iraq. The president said it was time for the country to turn the page, although he said the US commitment to Iraq will continue. Concerns remain about the state of that country, which has yet to form a new government and is facing renewed sectarian violence.

Watch our discussion this week assessing the Iraq war.

A chaplain killed in Afghanistan this week is believed to be the first Army chaplain to die in combat since the Vietnam War. Captain Dale Goetz was killed on Monday (August 30) by a homemade bomb. Before joining the chaplain corps, Goetz had served as a Baptist minister.

Many in the religious community say they are alarmed by what they see as growing Islamophobia in America following the heated debate over the proposed building of an Islamic center near Ground Zero. In Washington, a coalition of Muslim leaders and Jewish and Christian clergy denounced what they say is an increase in anti-Muslim rhetoric and religious prejudice. Meanwhile, a new public service announcement highlights the contributions of Muslim first responders on September 11. A New York Times poll this week found that two-thirds of the residents of New York City want the proposed Islamic cultural center moved to a less controversial site.

Watch our story this week on the Islamic center controversy.

Conservative Lutherans have formed a new denomination. The North American Lutheran Church was created as an alternative to the nation’s largest Lutheran body, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. The ELCA has more liberal stands on gay clergy and interpretation of Scripture. About 300 of the ELCA’s roughly 10,000 churches are planning to affiliate with the new denomination.

Religious leaders and human rights activists are condemning a crackdown in France against the Roma or Gypsy community. Since late July, French authorities have demolished hundreds of Roma camps and expelled the inhabitants to Romania and Bulgaria. The French government says the camps were against the law. The Catholic archbishop of Toulouse compared the situation to the expulsion of Jews during the Nazi occupation.

This weekend (September 4) Muslims celebrate Laylat al Qadr or the Night of Power, when it is believed the first verses of the Quran were revealed to the Prophet Muhammad. Later this coming week (September 10), Muslims will mark the end of Ramadan with the three-day festival of Eid al-Fitr, the feast of fast-breaking. The holiday is celebrated by special prayers and visits to friends.

The holiest time in the Jewish calendar begins next Wednesday evening (September 8) with Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, and ends with Yom Kippur ten days later. For Jews around the world, it is a period of introspection and atonement. During both Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur services, congregants hear the sounding of the ram’s horn or shofar.

Watch our story this week on sounding the shofar.