“One of the things that I was trying to do is to show that you can disagree without demonizing each other. These guys went an hour each without out ever dissing the opposition. I believe we’ve lost the civility in our civilization. We’ve got to stop being so rude with each other, that we can disagree without being disagreeable.”
— Rick Warren on Larry King Live tonight
Add comment August 18th, 2008
“We believe in the separation of church and state. We do not believe in the separation of faith and & politics because faith is just a worldview and everybody had a worldview and it is important to know what they are…
Now in America, we’ve got to learn to disagree without demonizing each other. We need to restore civility in our civil discourse and that’s the goal of the Saddleback Civil Forum.”
– Rick Warren, Forum on the Presidency from Saddleback Church
1 comment August 17th, 2008
Given this year’s Dinner at the Square topic, this series is required viewing. It’s currently being re-aired on CNN. There’s one hour on God’s Muslim Warriors, one on God’s Jewish Warriors and one on God’s Christian Warriors.
Here’s your tickler:
They say that modern society has lost its way. They say God is the answer. But their battle to save the world has caused anger, division and fear.
Add comment August 10th, 2008
Well, maybe not quite.
But you might need to rub your eyes just a bit when you read that King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia - which has as its official state religion the anti-western Wahhabi form of Islam - is currently holding an interfaith conference in Madrid.
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on the conference:
There have been few periods in history when the need for dialogue among world religions has been greater. At a time of increasing divisions along cultural and confessional lines, faith communities have a crucial role to play in fostering mutual understanding and in promoting consensus on common values and aspirations.
Apparently the Saudis aren’t exactly experts in such things, so there is understandably some skepticism:
“If this is a public relations stunt,” said [Rabbi Marc] Schneier [of the Foundation for Ethnic Understanding and the World Jewish Congress], “we’re back in the same place, nothing gained and nothing lost. But if there’s a way to help Muslims strengthen the voices of moderation, we need to be joining this fight.”
Clearly worth watching.
Also of interest, watch for this:
Schneier is also at the conference to announce new Jewish-Muslim initiatives to take place later in the year, including a series of television commercials in time for Ramadan and Rosh Hashana in which rabbis and imams are shown together calling for tolerance, and an effort in November to pair synagogues and mosques for dialogue at the grassroots level.
Add comment July 17th, 2008
Bill Moyers commentary on the week of political goings-on with the Reverend Wright media blitz contained in it both a finger-wag at politics as usual (hard not to love that) and the daggone best quote I’ve ever heard. Moyers:
Politics often exposes us to the corroding acid of the politics of personal destruction, but I’ve never seen anything like this - this wrenching break between pastor and parishioner. Both men, no doubt, will carry the grief to their graves. All the rest of us should hang our heads in shame for letting it come to this in America, where the gluttony of the non-stop media grinder consumes us all and prevents an honest conversation on race. It is the price we’re paying for failing to heed the great historian Jacob Burkhardt who said: “Beware the terrible simplifiers.”
Add comment May 2nd, 2008
If you like The Village Square, you’ll love the new movie Purple State of Mind. The website is worth checking out and you can buy the DVD online as well.
Hat tip to Lea, who has her finger on the pulse of - well - everything.
4 comments March 19th, 2008
Your bipartisan jokes of the day, courtesy of Jim Wallis, author of The Great Awakening: Reviving Faith & Politics in a Post-Religious Right America (…the first as told to Jim Wallis by The Southern Baptist Convention’s Richard Land):
Two senators - one a Republican and the other a Democrat - were eating together in the Senate Dining Room. The Republican senator said, “You Democrats know nothing about religion!” “That’s not I true,” insisted the Democratic senator. “We know a lot about religion.” So the Republican issued a challenge, ”I’ll bet twenty bucks you can’t ¬cite the Lord’s Prayer!” The Democrat said that was easy, and began, “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep.” The Republican then reached for his wallet and replied, “Darn, I didn’t think you could do it!”
A man was drowning in the Potomac River, about one hundred feet offshore. The Republicans ran down to the river, saw his predicament, threw him fifty feet of rope, and yelled out to him, “The rest is up to you.” The Democrats then heard about the drowning man and the Republicans’ failure to rescue him. When they reached the riverbank, they saw that the poor guy was about to go under, still about a hundred feet offshore. So the Democrats threw him two hundred feet of rope-and let go of their end.
Add comment March 11th, 2008
I nearly fainted when this number from UK’s Daily Mail arrived in my inbox yesterday morning, sent by a friend who probably also nearly fainted.
The Pope condemns the climate change prophets of doom
Pope Benedict XVI has launched a surprise attack on climate change prophets of doom, warning them that any solutions to global warming must be based on firm evidence and not on dubious ideology.
The leader of more than a billion Roman Catholics suggested that fears over man-made emissions melting the ice caps and causing a wave of unprecedented disasters were nothing more than scare-mongering. . .
Right after my urge to quickly find a new planet to inhabit given that the primo Man of God on the planet we’re occupying would be that intemperate, I . . . uh . . . looked at what the Pope actually said (you see, he’s got his own website in all sorts of languages, very handy when one is actually trying to understand what the Pope says).
In the interest of refusing to cherry-pick, please just read the entire items under #7 and #8. It will take you 5 minutes max and you’ll be oh-so-much-more-informed than everyone else. The Pope offered up a fair caution to avoid hasty action based on ideology rather than fact, while still urging that we act. Suffice it to say that the Pope clearly strived for an intelligent, balanced assessment of the situation, sort of like what you’d like to hear from - er - a world religious leader.
Ah, but not so with the press. (And I believe in this case I am applying the term “press” loosely.) UK’s Daily Mail and “journalist” Simon Caldwell might want to keep an eye cast heavenward for bolts of lightening with their name on it. Not far behind them is Fox News who proclaims that “Global Warming Skeptics Have Friend in the Vatican” and proceeds to pick out only the parts of the Pope’s address that support their pre-existing opinion before they read his address, and by “reading” it I mean not reading it.
Then there’s the blogosphere. Conservative site “The Free Republic” posted the Daily Mail screed, to which readers made the predictable “you’ll never read this in the mainstream media” comments. Nor, I believe, will you find the big news that Elvis is actually living on a previously undiscovered Samoan island romping with primordial sea creatures and practicing his lounge act for Komodo dragons to prep for his big plans to re-debut on “American Idol” next season. Or did The Enquirer do that one already?
And the big Village Square civility thumbs-down goes to a blog on the left, Wonkette, for this beauty (cover the children’s eyes):
The Pope Sucks
Pope Benedict XVI has decided to stick his little Nazi head directly up Al Gore’s peaceful a** by calling global warming fears nothing but “scare-mongering.” He will make these completely unnecessary and regressive remarks, coincidentally, for World Peace Day on Jan. 1. That’s the same day when we’ll be wishing the Pope a jolly f***-you. [*My edits, they didn’t bother.]
Let’s just say that today I’m not so worried that The Village Square will run out of work.
7 comments December 13th, 2007
This weekend I heard Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa repeat a prayer that seemed particularly appropriate to the work ahead of us at the Village Square.
Oh Lord, where I am wrong, make me willing to change, and where I am right, make me easier to live with.
1 comment February 26th, 2007
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