I grew up rural. That’s the important part of this story. I lived in a farming community about two hours west of Chicago. I was a Catholic; Catholicism was my received faith. Some of my friends were Catholics. The rest were from various Christian denominations. We didn’t talk about religion.

When I went to college in the suburbs, I fell away from the faith (I imagine that this happens to LOTS of college students) and continued on my way. Since I was finally in a place with a diversity of religious expression, I quickly realized that my views of other religions (especially Islam) were informed largely by my friends’ parents and their favored false information outlet: FOX News. The realization of my own ignorance pushed me to do some learning on my own…

Did you ever want to wish your neighbor happy holidays, but weren’t sure when his or her religion has holidays or what to say? Have you ever blanked on the Hebrew word for charity? Are you planning a luncheon and need to know when Ramadan ends so you can feed your Muslim guests? Multifaith News and Events has all that and more.

It’s not simply a calendar of holy days, or a dictionary of important religious terms. This app comes with over 200 interesting facts – some trivial, some wildly important – about the five major world religions represented by ING’s Interfaith Speakers Bureau: Islam, Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, and Buddhism.

The general concept for this app is to allow users to easily acquire daily news and information surrounding religion and interreligious issues.

These include:

• Daily aggregation of news articles on religious pluralism from several different news publications. Topics include religion in the workplace, religion and civil rights, 1st Amendment (freedom of religion) issues, etc.
• Multifaith calendar highlighting religious days of observance. Holidays will contain brief descriptions as well as links for more information.
• List of religious events and conferences around the country.
• Basic and often surprising facts about the world’s five major religions: Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Judaism and Islam. For added interest, related facts will link to each other; for instance you can easily see how fasting works in both Judaism and Islam.
• Information about Islamic Networks Group and its educational programs.

Designed and developed by Magnicode, Multifaith News and Events is the go-to app for interreligious information, events and more.

I found the profile for the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster (Pastafarians) Kiva Lending Team while doing some related research on religious lending. Any guesses as to how many dollars in loans they’ve pushed out?

The answer: $328,000+

Yes, that’s like a third-of-a-million bucks for those of you keeping count. The team’s 1716 Pastafarians have provided over 10,000 loans thus far.

Is this proof that the Church of FSM is bankrolling various business and social ventures around the world? Yes. Keep it up, my brothers and sisters in noodles.

My dear friend Chris Stedman over at the Nonprophet Status blog (Respecting Religion, Staying Secular) invited me to write a guest post for him. So I did. It’s called “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Atheists“, and I’ve included a short excerpt – the real meat of the piece can be found by following the link out. Enjoy, and visit Nonprophet Status OFTEN.

I was having a chat with Ahab one night a long time ago back at Aurora University. It was snowing outside, as if that was important to the story. I asked him, “So you admit that for a god to exist it would have to be an infinite being?” His reply was a strong affirmative. “But you still don’t believe that god does, in fact, exist?” Again, he answered yes.

AHA! I knew I had him this time! I was finally going to score a point against his godless ass! “Well then, my dear friend, you have failed! In acknowledging the necessarily infinite existence of a creator god that you don’t believe in, you have turned your disbelief into the flipside, anti-infinite version of the non-affirmation of said creator god. Therefore, even by saying that god doesn’t exist, you admit by extension that god does exist as a universal MUST! It’s all about ones and zeros! I’ve got you, you fisher king rat bastard!”

Ahab blinked, took a drag from his cigarette (typical atheist maneuver), and said, “Whatever, dude.”

Continue reading “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Atheists” at Nonprophet Status.

*** This post is part of the “Blog Every Day Challenge“, which I have undertaken in homage to John Haydon, a captain of social media and inbound marketing for non-profits. A few months back he did the same thing. Granted, all of his posts imparted some kind of value to his readers (and he has many). I’m blogging about the same old stuff. Don’t call it “general interest”, because I think that it goes without saying that humans should generally be interested in what I’m doing. :) ***

We spent three jam-packed days at the offices of the Interfaith Youth Core, talking over the last eight months. Each pair of Fellows gave a short presentation – basically a highlight reel – of their work, and we talked very candidly about successes and failures. As a whole, the Fellowship raised around USD $140,000, which former Prime Minister Tony Blair will personally match. The money is going to Project Muso, Spread the Net, and Malaria No More US and UK. We had around 10,000 people come to our events and reached out to around 40,000 in total. We had 350 media pieces and trained dozens of new interfaith leaders.

Tony Blair himself interrupted a series of toasts we were giving each other to say how proud and excited he felt about us. We are his Fellows, really, and he’s always very eager to talk us up. He told us that what we did was new and trend-setting and most of all important.

It was a bittersweet three days in Chicago, though. The US Fellows are spread all over this huge country of ours, to say nothing of the distance to the UK. The Canadians are also widely dispersed.  I might not see some of these people for a very long time, or ever again.

One of the unexpected byproducts of the last ten months of training and action has been the “gelling” of the Fellowship into more than a group of people brought together for a common purpose. We’ve shared trials, tribulations, and laughter, collaborated on national and international initiatives, and changed the map of interfaith work in just a few short months. These activists are my dear friends and allies.

Someday years from now, I will be asked to assemble a Dream Team of world-savers. The alumni of the Faiths Act Fellowship will be first on my phone tree. Thank you all for everything.

Hafsa wasn’t so easily tricked. “Did you just make the sign of the cross?” she asked. I was caught! I’m not sure when the habit arose, but for years I’ve crossed myself when passing traffic accidents or seeing an ambulance with its lights flashing. It’s easy as a Catholic; I cross myself about one thousand times during a regular Mass. I sheepishly replied, “Yeah. I guess you saw that, huh?” I expected her to ask me all sorts of questions about why I would do such a thing, but that didn’t happen.

Instead, she said, “Right as I noticed you crossing yourself, I was saying ‘Bismillah ar rahman ar rahim (in the name of God, the Beneficent, the Merciful)’ under my breath!”

Well how about that? Even though she and I come from different religions, we still share some traditions. Saying a quick prayer for the health and well-being of others is one of them.

How’s that for a headline? Let’s go with our gut reaction – it was a Muslim, wasn’t it?

Wrong.

Those lines are lifted from the news story. What kind of a person wraps straps around his head to pray? Jews, that’s who. Observe:

Yeah. A plane was diverted because the flight crew was concerned that a passenger was praying. As it turns out, Orthodox Jews wrap their arm with a black strap and tie a small box to their heads. The accoutrement is called tefillin, and it’s actually pretty cool. The box contains scripture verses, and the arrangement of the straps on the fingers actually looks like Hebrew letters.

Two important take-aways:

1. I’m sure that the young Jewish man’s response to the flight attendant was “I’m praying.” The tone was probably the same as it would be if I was asked why I was breathing air: “I need oxygen to live.” Such responses should be the end of conversations. Why on earth anybody would be worried about a 17-year-old boy wrapping a leather strap around his head is beyond me. Are we really that scared of the unknown?

2. The more important issue here is something that we refer to in the interfaith education sphere as religious literacy. Stephen Prothero addresses our shortcomings in his book by the same name (Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know – And Doesn’t). Americans are woefully ignorant of traditions not their own. An incident like the aforementioned “prayer alert” is evidence of this. Also germane to our social, theological, ecological, and political processes, we are woefully ignorant of our own traditions.

Religious literacy looks like a hot-button issue from the air. We are concerned about schooling people, especially young people, about religion in general because it rubs against our wall of separation between church and state. Maybe some of that friction is good – we’d stop having silly incidents like these.

Prayers have power, but they’re not a security issue. We should learn this.

NB: If you really want to read the news coverage of this non-event-event, the BBC and NYTimes both have it.

]]> http://timbrauhn.com/2010/01/23/religious-literacy/feed/ 5 http://timbrauhn.com/2009/11/09/stanford-university-day-of-interfaith-youth-service/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=stanford-university-day-of-interfaith-youth-service http://timbrauhn.com/2009/11/09/stanford-university-day-of-interfaith-youth-service/#comments Mon, 09 Nov 2009 22:55:02 +0000 timbrauhn http://timbrauhn.com/?p=589

Stanford University FAITH

Stanford University has a brand new and highly-motivated interfaith group. It’s called Faiths Acting In Togetherness and Hope, otherwise known by its acronym FAITH. On Saturday, November 7, the group organized its first Day of Interfaith Youth Service (DIYS). The Chicago-based Interfaith Youth Core (led by Obama advisor and well-recognized American leader Eboo Patel) has been helping people of faith organize these service projects for a handful of years now. The organization (which happens to be my employer) trains leaders who then head out to put the projects together.

A Day of Interfaith Youth Service is exactly what it sounds like – young people from different religious traditions coming together to help their communities and then dialoguing about the experience from a place of faith. It’s a great way to help out and a great way to come to a deeper understanding of one’s faith.

Twelve of FAITH’s members met at Sacred Heart Community Services in San Jose to work a shift during one of the busiest days of the year, when Sacred Heart enrolls people from the community in its Thanksgiving and Christmas food program and Christmas toy program. I was on the outside line helping to ensure that visitors had all their documents in order. It was fast-paced and interesting work. I got to use my Spanish “skills” and chatted with loads of interesting people.

After our shift, we headed back to Stanford University’s Taube Hillel House (graciously hosted by Stanford’s Jewish community) to discuss what service to others meant to us in terms of our faith traditions. Christians, Hindus, Muslims, Jews, and others sat down to eat sugar cookies and learn from each other.

It was a great day, a big success of a kick-off event for FAITH, and a super example of the power of faith to inspire good work. My favorite quotation from the day:

“Helping out the community, helping others; it’s just what we do.”