CATEGORIES: BOOKS BUSINESS CULTURE FAITH ISSUES LIFE MOVIES POLITICS SCIENCE/TECH SPIRITUALITY TV WORLD

RELATED LINKS

Catherine of Siena Institute The Catherine of Siena Institute is a program of the Western Dominican Province dedicated to equipping parishes for the formation of lay Catholics for their mission in the world.

Archbishop’s Lecture - Civil and Religious Law in England: a Religious Perspective The lecture around which the controversy over Sharia Law has swirled.

Church-Islam dialogue: the path starts from Regensburg’s Pope "Benedict XVI’s speech at Regensburg received a lot of criticism but it in fact launched an effective model for Islamo-Christian dialogue: refusal of violence, love of truth, interpretation, mission. The only way to go beyond the trivially tolerant appearance of dialogue promoted by many Muslims and by a good part of the Catholic Church...Benedict XVI seems to suggest to Muslims: we must read the text in its context; and this is fundamental for beginning an Islamo-Christian dialogue. We must reread the sacred texts to see "the circumstances of revelation" In this, the Pope is resuming the healthy tradition of interpretation which was alive in the 9th century. Unfortunately, this no longer occurs in contemporary Islam."
Asia News

BBC Interview with the Archbishop Responding to the Sharia Flap "...a lot of what's been written whether it was about the Catholic church adoptions agencies last year, sometimes what's written about Jewish or Muslim communities; a lot of what's written suggests that the ideal situation is one in which there is one law and only one law for everybody; now that principle that there's one law for everybody is an important pillar of our social identity as a Western liberal democracy, but I think it's a misunderstanding to suppose that that means people don't have other affiliations, other loyalties which shape and dictate how they behave in society and the law needs to take some account of that..."

More by this author

On The Road Through Nothingness

Anglican bishops decry the 'new creed' of extreme capitalism

Holy See Denounces Misuse of Protection Principle

Behind AIG's Fall, Blind Eye to a Web of Risk

Libertarian Heresy

The Editors | 02.12.08

What lies beyond Lambeth’s Sharia humiliation?

Simon Barrow, Ekklesia [Read the Article]

What is happening here, it seems to me, is that the dilemmas of a withering and shrinking (if not dying) institution, the established Church of England, are being awkwardly welded onto the insecurities and threats experienced by other minority communities in order to produce a case for the preservation of one in conjunction with the granting of new influence to the other. This is misguided for all kinds of reasons. From a Christian point of view, the church should be [a church] … willing to take risks more than it craved safeguards. One committed to the ethos of peacemaking rather than the ethos of armed defence. One willing to move away from internal squabbling, resist tempting absorption into the government’s contract culture, and abandon rearguard actions against the demise of the old Christendom era where its allegiance rested on the status quo much more than on the subversive company of Jesus. These are the challenging yet exciting issues one would hope an archbishop of a resourceful church in England, rather than a fading Church of England, might be willing to tackle. It would take imagination, bravery, intelligence and prayerfulness. But he has those in spades.”

Not Rated Yet