Warmest Greetings
I am very tired and yet inspired to make the time before this day is done to do a post that reflects my deep and heartfelt value and appreciation of diversity - ethnic, religious, gender, cultural, age, race, sexual orientation, and all the many forms that our inherent differences can take. This post is inspired by one of the significant themes which I noticed running through this day. As I grow older, it becomes increasingly important to take notice of that which is trying to get my attention. And so it is that this morning began with something I read that was reflective of the ignorance, intolerance, and the insensitivity that it takes for any one of us to perceive and make another human being into an Other. I say this with the humility I have discovered as I have personally sought for several years now to look in the mirror and embrace and heal my own bigotry, prejudices, judgments, and lack of understanding of those who are different from myself. The message I read this morning conveyed an attitude of prejudice toward Muslims in particular. That initial experience was immediately followed by a piece on KPOJ, an interview with an author on the progressive radio station I listen to in the mornings, on how there are strong positive threads of Arab and Muslim influences in American culture which many Americans are unaware of, and several examples were given. As synchronicity wove it's mysterious ways through my day, that was followed by a training at my work on diversity and exploring our attitudes, beliefs, and life experiences related to the many forms that we are different in this country and beyond. It was during this training that a book was recommended - A New Religious America: How a "Christian Country" Has Become the World's Most Religiously Diverse Nation... May we all face and heal the prejudices which we all have been taught to carry. May we all grow in our love, understanding, compassion, and felt experience of connection and caring within ourselves and toward all others.
Namaste ~ Molly
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A New Religious America
Diana L. Eck
Diana Eck’s book, A New Religious America: How a “Christian Country” Has Become the World’s Most Religiously Diverse Nation was published in 1997. In 2002, the paperback edition was released, with the preface “A New Religious America – After September 11.”
In A New Religious America, Diana Eck describes the transformation of America’s religious landscape, and explores the implications of this new religious reality. For excerpts, please see: “A Mosque in Massachusetts” and “Next Door Neighbors: Muslims and Methodists.”
From the publisher, HarperSanFrancisco: “The United States is the most religiously diverse nation in the world,” leading religious scholar Diana Eck writes in this eye-opening guide to the religious realities of America today. The Immigration Act of 1965 eliminated the quotas linking immigration to national origins. Since then, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Sikhs, Jains, Zoroastrians, and new varieties of Jews and Catholics have arrived from every part of the globe, radically altering the religious landscape of the United States. Members of the world's religions live not just on the other side of the world but in our neighborhoods; Hindu children go to school with Jewish children; Muslims, Buddhists, and Sikhs work side-by-side with Protestants and Catholics.
This new religious diversity is now a Main Street phenomenon, yet many Americans remain unaware of the profound change taking place at every level of our society, from local school boards to Congress, and in small-town Nebraska as well as New York City. Islamic centers and mosques, Hindu and Buddhist temples, and meditation centers can be found in virtually every major American metropolitan area. There are Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists in Salt Lake City, Utah; Toledo, Ohio; and Jackson, Mississippi. Buddhism has become an American religion, as communities widely separated in Asia are now neighbors in Los Angeles, Seattle, and Chicago. Eck describes Muslims worshipping in a U-Haul dealership in Pawtucket, Rhode Island; a gymnasium in Oklahoma City; and a former mattress showroom in Northridge, California. Hindu temples are housed in a warehouse in Queens, a former YMCA in New Jersey, and a former Methodist church in Minneapolis.
How Americans of all faiths and beliefs can engage with one another to shape a positive pluralism is one of the essential questions -- perhaps the most important question -- facing American society.... More: http://www.pluralism.org/publications/new_religious_america/index.php
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The plurality of religious traditions and cultures has come to characterize every part of the world today. But what is pluralism? Here are four points to begin our thinking:
- First, pluralism is not diversity alone, but the energetic engagement with diversity. Diversity can and has meant the creation of religious ghettos with little traffic between or among them. Today, religious diversity is a given, but pluralism is not a given; it is an achievement. Mere diversity without real encounter and relationship will yield increasing tensions in our societies.
- Second, pluralism is not just tolerance, but the active seeking of understanding across lines of difference. Tolerance is a necessary public virtue, but it does not require Christians and Muslims, Hindus, Jews, and ardent secularists to know anything about one another. Tolerance is too thin a foundation for a world of religious difference and proximity. It does nothing to remove our ignorance of one another, and leaves in place the stereotype, the half-truth, the fears that underlie old patterns of division and violence. In the world in which we live today, our ignorance of one another will be increasingly costly.
- Third, pluralism is not relativism, but the encounter of commitments. The new paradigm of pluralism does not require us to leave our identities and our commitments behind, for pluralism is the encounter of commitments. It means holding our deepest differences, even our religious differences, not in isolation, but in relationship to one another.
- Fourth, pluralism is based on dialogue. The language of pluralism is that of dialogue and encounter, give and take, criticism and self-criticism. Dialogue means both speaking and listening, and that process reveals both common understandings and real differences. Dialogue does not mean everyone at the “table” will agree with one another. Pluralism involves the commitment to being at the table -- with one’s commitments.
—Diana L. Eck
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People often say that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” and I say that the most liberating thing about beauty is realizing that you are the beholder. This empowers us to find beauty in places where others have not dared to look, including inside ourselves. - Salma Hayek
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