Church remembers its model member

A church was planning a Sunday moment of silence for what the pastor called a model member of his congregation: a wild turkey.The turkey, which died last week after being hit by a car, regularly attended Sunday services and greeted people as they arrived, said the Rev. James Huff, pastor of Lambs United Methodist Church in St. Clair County."He would kind of wait for me to come in," Huff told the Times Herald of Port Huron. "He knew when I got there. Service was about to begin, and then he would sit on one lady's car until we were done."The animal had been hanging around since late last year and quickly became known for its fearless attitude. Some people said it showed up every morning at the community's bus stop and chased children. Others enjoyed watching the bird strut down the street, trying to impress female turkeys."We've got so many pictures of it," said Douglas Bishop, the church's music director. "It was like our mascot."

Women's roles in religion

Are interpretations of sexuality and gender differences creating a struggle for women's equality in religious roles?

"Women and Religion," part of the "Conversations and Controversy" series sponsored by the Catholic Newman Center, was held last Tuesday in room 313 of the Millennium Student Center at 1 p.m.

The event was a conversation with religious leaders from the Catholic, Lutheran and Muslim faiths during which the leaders discussed the role of women in their religion.

M. Waheed Rana, professor of the Center for Anatomical Science and Education at St. Louis University's School of Medicine, said Muslims follow the scripture of the Koran "without any question."

However, he said the equality of the genders in the Islamic religion is not represented properly by what is seen on television."Whatever they show you on TV is totally cultural," he said.

Rana said, according to the Koran, all mankind needs to equally be conscious of their "lord, be conscious of Allah," and demand their rights from one another. He said women who are seen being mistreated in the public eye are not aware of their rights.

"These people doing these things don't let the women know what their rights are," he said.

According to Rana, the treatment of women was that of equality when he was growing up in India.

"The women were all the same," he said, which came from local traditions. Although the Muslim cultures differ greatly in their followers' treatment of women, he said, "the people take these [traditions] very rigidly."

"The local traditions sometimes overshadow the religious factors," Rana said.

Local traditions and interpretations of scripture have also plagued the roles of women in the Catholic and Lutheran religions."It's not easy, God speaks through scriptures and also through community," said Rev. Karen Scherer of Unity Lutheran Church in Bel-Nor.

Scherer said interpretations can "all get mixed up" and from a Lutheran perspective, the scriptures of the Bible are not taken literally.

"We do not interpret it literally. We interpret it culturally," she said.

Teresa Roberson-Mullins, Chaplain of Pastoral Care for SSM DePaul Heath Center in Bridgeton, said the Catholic theory of "in persona Christi" which teaches "that Christ is the groom and the church is his bride" is a stumbling block for women's roles in her religion.

"This is where the church struggles. Do we take this literally or figuratively?" Roberson-Mullins said. "If we do [take it literally], does that mean the congregation should be all women?"

Roberson-Mullins said new Catholic teachings on the theology of the body will help followers understand how to interpret the scriptures through discussion of gender differences and sexuality.

"We've got to come out of the closet and admit that we are sexual beings," she said.

"Dealing with sexuality, we don't know what to do with that," Scherer said. When men and women are around each other, she said, "there is that desire to touch one another," it can take the focus off prayer.

Desire and loss of focus on prayer accounts for the only time a woman cannot perform a religious rite in Islam. Rana said when men are present during a prayer, a woman should not lead it.

"When [a man is] standing in the front, the woman would bend over and this will distract [him]," he said.

Aside from this one condition, Rana said "women can excel anywhere they want" in Islamic religious responsibilities, careers and life in general.

Roberson-Mullins said women's roles in religions can become "unstuck" if we simply learn from each other's religions and cultures.

Where politics and dogma meet

Remember when we thought religion was done for? That the philosophical and scientific revolutions of the Enlightenment couldn't help but replace the folly of faith with the fact of freedom? Mindless dogma was on the way out, rationality was the way forward. The program was progress, and you could no more not get with it than you could stop breathing. If only. As Michael Burleigh's previous book, "Earthly Powers" -- a history of Europe from the French Revolution to the First World War -- showed, the Age of Reason was as much about idolatry as it was ideology. In his latest work, "Sacred Causes," he brings the story up to date, demonstrating that the past century has been no less steeped in the fantastical.

"Sacred Causes" begins in Germany after its defeat in World War I. Struck dumb by self-pity, the country is ready to be lectured -- and there is no shortage of charlatans and ranters ready to slice the baloney good and thick. Chief among them is Adolf Hitler, a soi-disant superman promising everyone that they, too, can don cape and tights. Riding shotgun was Joseph Goebbels, a man so bowled over by his boss' orations that he claimed to see "a white cloud [take] on the form of a swastika" during them. Afterward, "there was a flickering light in the sky, which could not be a star. -- A sign of destiny." Still, inflamed with passion though he might have been, Goebbels was coolheaded enough to know that not everyone would be won over by Hitler's invective. The boss needed an aura -- and there was no better place to steal one from than the church. So were born the rituals of Nazism -- the cathedral of Nuremberg, the processions of jackbooted storm troopers -- and its sacred text: "Mein Kampf."

So far, so liturgical. Burleigh is hardly the first person to notice Hitler's messianic thrust. He is on more contentious ground when he defends the Catholic Church's dealings with the Führer. For the past six decades or so, Pope Pius XII has been hauled over the coals for his lenient relations with the Nazis. Burleigh, though, has no time at all for what he sees as this calumny. While acknowledging that the Catholic Church did sign a concordat with the Nazis in the 1930s, he points out that the then-Cardinal Pacelli (later Pius XII) denounced Hitler's "vulgar and brutal campaign" against both Jews and Catholics. And anyway, he states, had the church not signed that agreement, it would simply have been unable to function. That it did go on functioning meant it could help out in the war effort, lending covert support to Allied action against Hitler's regime. And in 1943, after Mussolini's fall, Jewish refugees were welcomed into Italy with open arms by the pope, who even went so far as to turn his summer palace at Castel Gandolfo over to them. Amen to that, though it is hard to ignore the feeling that for all Burleigh's plaudits, the pope's war effort was as much pragmatic as committed. Nor does it help that Burleigh seems blind to Christianity's own long tradition of anti-Semitism.

But Burleigh is too busy coming down hard on secular humanists, calling them a "liberal elite" and pointing out that their litany of buzzwords -- diversity, human rights, tolerance -- are less the product of enlightenment than of a "deeper Christian culture based on ideas and structures that are so deeply entrenched that most of us are hardly aware of them." Well, maybe. But just because some of your beliefs were originally expressions of a Christian culture, it doesn't follow that you have to sign up to that culture's every belief. Pace Chesterton, at least one of Christianity's beliefs is open only to those capable of believing anything. Nor do you have to know the history of an argument in order to know on which side of it you stand. You and I aren't against anti-Semitism because we've read up on the history of anti-Semitism. We're against anti-Semitism because we're pro-human. Not many people are anti-human, of course, but the bulk of those who are tend also to be pro-God. Just ask Osama bin Laden.

No one deplores the decadent wasteland of our spirituality-free world more than I, but that doesn't mean I have any idea what I would rather have in its place. Burleigh does -- an insight that comforts him no end while invalidating all the good work he has done in this book and its predecessor. Which isn't to say that "Sacred Causes" is less than required reading. Any historian who can refer to Sinn Fein's Martin McGuinness as having "got his legal training while packing bacon in James Doherty's butchers shop," who can call Bob Geldof a "mouthy sloven" and who deplores a culture in which " 'wisdom' [is] represented by the lyrics of John Lennon" is worth reading. And if not everything he says is true, well, that only makes him resemble all the more the Christianity on which he places so much hope.

How Americans View Mormon Religion

As students at a Christian university debate the invitation of a presidential hopeful Mitt Romney, a Mormon, to speak at their upcoming commencement ceremony, a new Gallup poll found that Americans' favorable and unfavorable views of the Mormon religion are almost evenly split.

According to poll results, 46 percent of Americans say they have an unfavorable opinion of the Mormon religion in general while 42 percent have a favorable opinion.

Americans who are more religious, based on church attendance, have highly negative views of the religion. People who attend church on a weekly basis are more likely to have an unfavorable than favorable view of the religion (55 to 34 percent). For those who attend on a nearly weekly to monthly basis, poll results were 47 to 41 percent in unfavorable to favorable views. And among Americans who seldom or never attend church, they are more likely to have a favorable than unfavorable view of the Mormon religion (49 to 39 percent).

Religious groups also showed varying opinions of the religion. According to the poll, 52 percent of Protestants have an unfavorable view and 36 percent have a favorable one. Catholics are the most positive group where 31 percent have an unfavorable opinion and 56 percent have a favorable opinion. Meanwhile, 46 percent of non-Christians have an unfavorable view and 39 percent have a favorable one.

Divided by ideology, liberals are more likely to have an unfavorable view (61 percent) than a favorable one (28 percent) while 45 percent of conservatives showed negative views of the religion compared to 44 percent who showed positive views.

When asked what comes to mind first when they think about the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, also known as the Mormon church, the most listed term was "polygamy" among both parties who have favorable and unfavorable opinions. Those holding favorable views of the Mormon religion also listed "good people/kind/caring/strong morals" while those with unfavorable views listed "dislike their beliefs/don't agree with their doctrine/false teachings."

The Gallup results, based on a national sample of 1,018 adults, come after Regent University, an evangelical Christian institution, announced Romney as the school's commencement speaker for May. The announcement drew debates on campus with some students saying a Mormon speaker would "confuse young Christians who are not so firmly grounded in Christian doctrine."

Regent founder Pat Robertson has not endorsed Romney. Still, Christians outside the Regent campus have also raised concern, arguing that Romney's religious beliefs are contradictory to the basic doctrines of orthodox Christianity. Robertson had also posted on his Christian Broadcasting Network website that the Mormons, although prosperous, are "far from the truth" when it comes to spiritual matters.

Romney joins a diverse line-up of past speakers on the Regent campus including Al Gore, Bob Dole, Wesley Clark, Alan Dershowitz, and others, according to Regent's press release.

The commencement address on May 5 is to take place in front of nearly 900 graduates.