Thirty thousand people die in a cyclone, messaged my friend, and you're off to a happiness conference? You can see his point, though there's no real connection. But the thronging happiness delegates in Sydney last week would probably answer thus: you help the world best by first being happy yourself. Like the bit in the flight blurb that says, "Mothers of small children should don their own oxygen mask first, before assisting the child."
But how selfish is happiness, actually? And is it, as most conference speakers insisted, not just a basic human right but almost a duty?
For the Austrian psychoanalyst Viktor Frankl, happiness was only ever a by-product. "Don't aim at success," he advised, "… for success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue … as the unintended side effect of one's personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself … Happiness must happen … You have to let it happen by not caring about it." Frankl spoke from experience. A four-year Auschwitz survivor, he noted that, even there, the most enduring were those most able to help others.
But for last week's conference, happiness was no byproduct, no don't-look-now kind of accident. Happiness was it; not just a product but the product. Everything else, it was argued, from love to wealth to brilliant career, we desire for the happiness so promised. Happiness alone do we desire in and of itself.
There's a sophistry here, of course, since it means even melancholics are really seeking the happiness sadness brings. It also makes happiness, as product, the ultimate easy sell, the one thing we all reliably want.
But a conference? Can a conference deliver happiness? Or was the Reverend Bill Crews right when declaring from the stage: "Don't worry about happiness. You lot should throw away your notes and just go out and do it."
Crews - notwithstanding the happy-clappy, back-slappy feel to the, uh, congregation -was the conference's token Christian. Most speakers were either Buddhists (like Tenzin Palmo, an East-Ender who spent 12 years in a high-altitude Himalayan cave and still craved more) or high-profile circuit-psychologists such as Martin Seligman, Stephen Post, Richard Davidson and Daniel Gilbert. Some, like B. Alan Wallace, were both.
All fastidiously avoided mentioning God, morality or the afterlife carrot. There was no trace of a suggestion you should act thus because it's right, or written, or expected and no sense of authority - except, of course, science.
It's as though some marketing genius somewhere has decided that this well-off secular-humanist baby-boomer audience - the market, if you will, for happiness - having been cured of all pressing fears except the fear of death, will comfortably swallow Eastern religion and Western science but never, never Western religion.
Yet the wildly dominant take-home message, from all persuasions and professions, was, if you'll pardon the term, Christian; that to be happy is to be good, and to be good is to be compassionate, loving and altruistic.
The difference is in the packaging. Where once the message could be forced home, now it has to be packaged to appeal to self. So speaker after speaker detailed the personal benefits of happiness: better health, longevity, acuity, earning-power and career, each effect repeatedly demonstrated by science.
Plus all the old Thatcherite shibboleths about hard-wiring for selfishness and genetic destiny are once again up for query. The implication, it will not have escaped your notice, is that happiness is something we can choose.
The Pennsylvania academic Dr Martin "I'm a pessimist and a depressive" Seligman is revered as the father of positive psychology. He scientised morality further still, postulating three categories of happiness: the Pleasant Life, the Engaged Life and the Meaningful Life.
The Pleasant Life runs on emotional pleasure, what Seligman calls "happyology". The Engaged Life means entangling your finest self with the world, what he calls "being one with the music". And the Meaningful Life means dedicating these same strengths to some greater cause.
Each happiness-type, he says, is measurable and buildable, but while there are "pleasure shortcuts" to happyology, there are no shortcuts to the Engaged or Meaningful Life. Which is a shame, because these kinds of happiness are not only more reliable and redemptive, but also lend meaning to ordinary base-level pleasure.
Seligman's Engaged and Meaningful Lives closely parallel theology's traditional distinction between the immanent and transcendent view of god; the god of good works and the god of mystic communion. But drop even a hint, a whiff of old school theology at such a conference and the best-willed happiness-seeker will stop clapping, hold her nose and run.
The market demands wisdom, to salve its remaining fear, but such wisdom must be either control-tested, dot-pointed and peer-reviewed, or couched in lyrical cave and water metaphors. It must also demonstrably benefit the self.
So, full-circle: if happiness requires altruism but is motivated by self-benefit, is it, or isn't it, selfish? TS Eliot's Thomas Beckett describes this as "the greatest treason, to do the right deed for the wrong reason." But the happiness push has a market to consider. Fine, it answers. Forget it. For each year of proven happiness your health premium will halve. That'll make ya happy.
In the long interview he gave the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano yesterday, Father José Gabriel Funes, a Jesuit priest from Argentina, called the existence of extraterrestrials a real possibility. “Astronomers contend that the universe is made up of a hundred billion galaxies, each of which is composed of hundreds of billions of stars,” he correctly noted. (The interview was headlined The Extra-terrestrial Is My Brother.) “Many of these, or almost all of them, could have planets. [So] how can you exclude that life has developed somewhere else?”
For all the attention they got, however, Funes’ comments do not exactly break new ground, as my colleague Edward Pentin, who covers the Vatican for Newsweek, points out. In 2005 Vatican astronomer Guy Consolmagno wrote a 50-page booklet, Intelligent Life in the Universe, published by the Catholic Truth Society, in which he makes the standard astronomical points—lots of galaxies, lots of stars, some with planets, some of which may have conditions conducive to life. (Theological question: can God create life only in places with the right conditions? Or could He create life where there is, for instance, no water, or where the temperatures are too hot or too cold? If not, why not?).
But the Vatican has never denied the findings of contemporary astronomy, which is now up to 288 “extrasolar” planets (that is, those that orbit a star beyond our own solar system), including one whose atmosphere contains organic molecules, the ingredients of life, as I blogged in March. As Consolmagno put it, “There is nothing in Holy Scripture that could confirm, or contradict, the possibility of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe,” which means that telescopes and not the bible will be the only reliable guide to the question.
In asking whether little green men might be guilty of original sin, we are obviously in the realm of “how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.” But the theologian astronomers don’t blink. Fr. Funes said he was sure that, if aliens needed redemption, they “in some way, would have the chance to enjoy God’s mercy.” Consolmagno was more explicit: there’s no problem in getting the Son of God to every planet with ETs because, as Christians accept every Sunday during the Holy Eucharist, “Christ is truly, physically present in a million places, and sacrificed a million times, every day at every sacrifice of the Mass.”
So if the Catholic Church has accepted the possibility of aliens for a while now, why the high-profile interview in the Vatican newspaper? Applying the techniques of Kremlinology to St. Peter’s, Edward Pentin’s sources tell him it might be part of a push to demonstrate the Vatican’s embrace of science (in 1992 it apologized for that whole unfortunate Galileo mess, after all). Toward the end of the interview, Fr. Funes called science and religion “two allies which elevate the human spirit. There can be tensions or conflicts, but we mustn’t be afraid. The Church mustn’t fear science and its discoveries.”
Interestingly, the Vatican has plans to host a conference in Rome next spring to mark the 150th anniversary of the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin’s seminal work on the theory of evolution. Conference organizers say it will look beyond entrenched ideological positions—including misconstrued creationism. The Vatican says it wants to reconsider the problem of evolution “with a broader perspective” and says an “appropriate consideration is needed more than ever before.”
Contrary to much conventional wisdom, the Church has often been in science’s corner. The telescopes of the Vatican Observatory are perched on the roof of the Pope’s summer home in Caste1 Gandolfo, and Jesuits were for centuries Europe’s leading astronomers. “Seventeenth-century Jesuits invented the reflecting telescope and the wave theory of light,” Consolmagno pointed out. “In the 18th century they ran a quarter of all the astronomical observatories in Europe.” And it was Georges Lemaitre, a priest, who in 1927 deduced from Einstein’s equations of general relativity that the universe is expanding—and that it therefore began in a Big Bang. It will be fascinating to see if the Vatican is now enlisting in the battle to defend science from its growing legions of attackers.
In his column yesterday, The New York Times’s David Brooks, lately on a neuroanthropological kick, tackles the religious implications of modern neuroscience, saying its research portends disaster for orthodox believers—Christians, Jews, Muslims—although perhaps accommodating a generalized belief in some non-God supreme being.
“This new wave of research will not seep into the public realm in the form of militant atheism,” he writes. “Instead it will lead to what you might call neural Buddhism.” According to Brooks, neuroscience is moving the atheism-theism debate from culturally entrenched—thanks to the tireless militancy (and bestselling polemics) of antitheists like Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins and the other Four Horsemen—to irrelevant.
Because neuroscientific advances take what Christians call religious experiences and demystify them physiologically into, say, an increase in blood flow and synaptic activity in one’s prefrontal and parietal cortices, a worldview informed by modern neuroscience doesn’t have to be averse to God per se—just to a personal, miracle-working God like Christianity’s.
These recalibrated emphases on neuroscientific studies could shift the atheism-theism debate from believer and nonbeliever to Bible (or Quran) believer and Buddhist (or Wiccan, or Scientology) believer. That is, writes Mary Martin at Animal Person, cognitive scientists are “merely explaining that the feelings associated with god might not come from outside us,” and, in turn, helping to validate nontheistic religions.
Brooks maintains that, right now, “[i]n their arguments with Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, the faithful have been defending the existence of God.” But that “was the easy debate”: He predicts the real challenge will come “from people who feel the existence of the sacred”—i.e., again, like Buddhist nontheists—“but who think that particular religions are just cultural artifacts built on top of universal human traits.”
Though Jewish, Brooks demurs from joining the hand-wringing, saying he’s “not qualified to take sides” even though he is watching the neuroscience science community “joining hands” with mysticism “in unexpected ways”—by which he presumably means “any at all.” The result, he argues, is a new science-based movement that emphasizes “self-transcendence” over “divine law or revelation.”
Orthodoxy will be under attack more than ever, as a defense is laid for neural Buddhism. “Orthodox believers,” he says, are going to have to defend particular doctrines and particular biblical teachings. They’re going to have to defend the idea of a personal God, and explain why specific theologies are true guides for behavior day to day. . . . We’re in the middle of a scientific revolution. It’s going to have big cultural effects.”
As proof of where this path leads, Brooks cites a prescient Tom Wolfe essay from Forbes in 1996, written well ahead of the curve, lamenting neuroscience’s Nietzschean move to bury God and make science soulless, sending “modern man plunging headlong back into the primordial ooze”—the very move cheered by Hitchens and the anti-Expelled crowd, particularly Dawkins, who appears in the film.
ELDR Magazine's "Right To Die" National Survey: Should Your Doctor Help You Die?
ELDR magazine and ELDR.com today released the results of a national survey on the "right to die" issue or what some call "physician-assisted suicide." It reveals that over 80% of adults say the right to die is a personal decision, not that of government or religion; that two-thirds want physician-assisted right to die legal, as in Oregon; that half of U.S adults could eventually face a right to die caretaker role for a loved one; and that only half of adults over 60 have a living will or health care directive.
San Francisco, CA (PRWEB) May 15, 2008 --
The survey is in conjunction with ELDR's Summer issue cover article, "Perfect Ending," which tells the story and reflections of a physician who had clandestinely given patients, who were terminally ill and in great physical pain, the means to end their lives. The physician profiled is not identified.
"A painful or prolonged death is something everyone worries about," said Dave Bunnell, editor-in-chief of ELDR. "Yet too few of us plan ahead to be prepared for this possibility. Our survey is telling people if they act now, they can be in charge. You don't have to leave this entirely to fate."
The ELDR survey comes as Washington state proponents gather signatures for a voter initiative which, if successful, would make that state the second after Oregon to legalize physician-assisted "death with dignity." 225,000 valid voter signatures need to be presented to Washington state officials by July 3 for the I-1000 initiative to appear on the November 2008 ballot.
Other results from the ELDR Magazine "Right To Die" National Survey include:
Half of American adults (49.1 percent) have parents, close relatives or friends in their senior years for whom they might eventually be considered a guardian caretaker or legal trustee.
82 percent want the option, if they were suffering at end-of-life, of being sedated into unconsciousness, even though this might hasten their death.
93.6 percent want artificial life support stopped if they were in a persistent vegetative state, where mental functioning had ceased and it was highly unlikely they would regain consciousness.
Fewer than 25 percent have a living will or advance health care directive which states their wishes if they were incapacitated or in persistent vegetative state. Only half of those over 60 do.
Complete survey results can be found at http://www.eldr.com.
Survey Methodology: This survey of 1,070 U.S. adults was conducted for ELDR by Knowledge Networks and is statistically projectable to the U.S. population. The survey was conducted between March 13 and March 25, 2008 using Knowledge Network's statistically valid, random probability online consumer panel. The sampling margin of error is ± 4.7 percent for all respondents; ± 5.9 percent for the 20-59 age bracket and ± 5.0 percent for the 60-plus age bracket.
About ELDR Media: ELDR is a media company which seeks to inspire the affluent elder to live a more meaningful life, to celebrate the joys and to navigate the challenges of aging. ELDR is the first media company targeting the 60-plus active and affluent demographic. ELDR was founded by senior housing innovator Chad Lewis and pioneering magazine editor and entrepreneur David Bunnell. ELDR Media LLC is headquartered in Berkeley, California. Visit ELDR online at http://www.eldr.com.
Over the past few weeks, a national polling firm for LifeWay Research and the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission conducted a survey asking Americans to respond to this statement: “I am concerned that at times Christians are too involved in politics.”
The results were quite informative. The majority of Americans (52%) either “strongly disagree” (32%) or “somewhat disagree” (20%) with the statement. Even larger majorities of faith-affiliated Americans disagreed with the statement. When researchers asked Americans who attended religious services of any faith at least once a week, disagreement with the statement was even higher, with 65% indicating they were comfortable with Christians being involved in politics, and only 21% expressing varying discomfort with Christians’ political activity.
Those who self-identify themselves as “born-again,” “evangelical,” or “fundamentalist” expressed the highest level of disagreement (72%) with the assertion that “at times Christians are too involved in politics” with only 27% telling pollsters they agreed (“strongly” or “somewhat”) with the statement.
These results do not surprise me at all. They underscore and reinforce the feedback I receive on a consistent basis from grassroots Christians of all perspectives, particularly conservative Christians – Catholic and Protestant.
These polling results suggest that those pundits, analysts, and religious leaders that tell us that people of faith are disillusioned with politics and public policy need to get out more and talk with the people who actually go to churches, mosques, synagogues, and temples. If they did, they would find that the people who most often attended religious services disagree with their assessment by an almost two to one margin, 65 percent to 31 percent. On a more personal note, among Southern Baptist pastors who were asked the question of whether “at times, Christians are too involved in politics”, two thirds of them either “strongly disagreed” (41%) or “somewhat disagreed” (26%).
When people of faith enter the political process they should always understand that their ultimate allegiance is to the Almighty, not any ideology or party. People of faith have an obligation to be involved as “salt” and “light” in the world, and that includes “politics.” They should be voting their values, beliefs, and convictions, based on their understanding of the imperatives of their faith.
This column originally published at Casting Stones, a blog hosted by Beliefnet.com.
In all the hustle and bustle of daily life it is vital that we find sources to nourish and feed our souls as well as our physical bodies. No one can do this for us; we have to find ourselves that which supplies us with food for our mind and spirit.
Have a vision of how you would like to enhance your life spiritually. Find a quiet place to sit with your journal and reflect on the following questions.
. What does my ideal spiritual life look like? . What qualities do I want to bring into my life - forgiveness, gratitude, hope, compassion, etc.? . Where do I turn for help -books, organisations, people? . What do I value, how do I live these values everyday and how can I enhance them? . Who and what am I grateful for? . How can I move forward on my path of spiritual living?
Take time to think before you answer these questions so you can allow your vision to expand and grow. Consider what qualities you want to develop in yourself and what you would like to engage in on a regular basis. You could develop a meditation practice, attend regular church services, take calm walks in nature, work in your garden or listen to inspirational music. Read spiritual poetry and writing regularly. Think about developing a specific value or emotion like - joy, peace, love, patience, understanding, forgiveness or faith.
Keep a separate 'gratitude' journal where you write everyday all the things you are thankful for, you will be surprised at how many things you can be grateful for daily. Now explore the things that might prevent you from achieving these goals.
How do I sabotage myself from living my true spiritual self? What can I change in my environment that can help me? Who or what can help me grow?
How can I be more creative to improve my spiritual life? Being part of a spiritual group can be a big advantage. Having considered the roadblocks to truly nurturing and finding you mind and spirit, ask yourself the following questions:
. Who are my role models? . Are they the right role models to guide me on this journey? . What are my sources of music, reading and inspiration? . Are they truly inspiring me to growth? . Even though I'm apart of a spiritual group, how can my contribution help the group improve?
If you're not currently in a group, you may consider starting your own group with like-minded people, where you pray together, sing together, read poetry or inspirational materials together. Maybe you want to write your own poetry or spiritual writings where you express your gratitude, values, love and belief.
We often believe that we are unable to change the path of our lives however, by defining our spiritual values, our source of nourishment and how these are manifested in our lives, can only serve to enhance the quality of our journey through life. In this way we can shift our lives in a positive direction and serve to be an inspiration to others.
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I'm coming up on 40 years of slogging through life without any religious affiliation, and for the most part, I have no regrets. Last Sunday, though, I was standing before a couple hundred members of All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena and found myself envious.
I had been asked to talk about my three-year friendship with a musician who slept on the streets of skid row when we first met.
Life with Mr. Nathaniel Ayers is opera, with great soaring arias and sudden crashes, I told the parishioners. I feel good about having found ways to help this man whose promising career ended with a breakdown 35 years ago. But at times, I worry that my good intentions have brought him more attention than he might have wished.
In describing the journey, the soul-searching and the rewards of giving, I used the words "spirituality" and "grace." As I did, I saw people nodding as if I belonged in that room with them.
But wait. I'm an agnostic, and quite content.
So why did I feel such a connection? Could my stubborn resistance to faith be slipping?
No way, I told myself after leaving the church. Religious fervor has done an awful lot of harm in the world, dividing people, sparking wars, producing an endless parade of charlatans and hustlers.
And just look at how religion is playing out in the presidential campaign, with the running battle over which candidate is linked to the worst and most hypocritical human being who claims to speak for God.
Is it Sen. John McCain, who sought the support of televangelist John Hagee? Hagee, you'll recall, referred to the Catholic Church as "the whore of Babylon" and said God whipped up Hurricane Katrina to punish New Orleans for sins that included "a homosexual parade."
Or is it Barack Obama, who recently had to distance himself from his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr.? Rev. Wright suggested in a sermon that the phrase "God bless America" should really be "God damn America."
He also offered congregants his theory that the government created the HIV virus to kill off blacks, and recently said that the Rev. Louis Farrakhan, who is seen by many as an anti-Semite, is one of recent history's leading voices.
I spoke about all of this with my wife, whose beliefs and non-beliefs are similar to mine. She mentioned that our daughter, just shy of 5, had asked a couple of questions lately about people who practice different faiths and what it all means.
I've always felt that what we believe in and how we live are the only forms of spiritual guidance we need to give our daughter. But maybe that's the lazy man talking -- the one who used to skip Catholic church on Sunday and watch ballgames on TV instead.
Maybe it wouldn't hurt, my wife and I agreed, if we were to show our daughter that our values are important enough to us to clear time and to celebrate and honor them in a ritualistic way.
I don't know that either of us is ready to make a decision about all of this, but I did go back to All Saints a few days after my appearance at the Rector's Forum to mull things over with the Rev. J. Edwin Bacon Jr.
I felt a bit of a tug, I confessed to Bacon, while speaking to his parishioners. Bacon, who missed my presentation but later watched it on video, said he sensed there was "a moment" in the room in which we all connected. I was speaking about giving, he said, which releases the divine in all of us.
"Martin Luther King is my north star," said Bacon, who grew up in Georgia. As a young man, he met King, whose work he calls a "prophetic vision, a blend of spirituality and justice, spirituality and peace."
In this week's Sunday sermon, he said, he would talk about how the Rev. Wright comes out of that same tradition of identifying injustice and demanding change.
"The role of the church is not to be the servant of the state but to be critical of the state, and that's where Jeremiah gets it right," Bacon said. "The role is to stand with those who have been marginalized and say to the state, 'You can do better.' "
But Wright went off course with some of his comments, and his ego didn't serve him well, Bacon said. It's one thing to question connections between U.S. foreign policy and the rise in terrorism, Bacon said, but another thing entirely to suggest that God should damn America.
Participants agreed that to develop critical thinking skills, students must know about religions in a balanced way, neither emphasizing negative features nor promoting the religion in a devotional style more appropriate to a mosque or church setting.
Saturday, May 10, 2008 By Spero News
The Mid-Atlantic Muslim Catholic Dialogue met on April 23-24 in Washington DC and looked at inter-religious education in the United States.
The meeting, which was convened by the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA) and Catholic representatives of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops’ (USCCB) Committee on Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs, explored teaching about different religions in private and public institutions. Discussion was guided by the experiences of the Institute on Religion and Civic Values, represented by Shabbir Mansuri and Munir Shaikh.
The discussion follows upon a meeting in 2007 where Safaa Zarzour described the development of a Muslim-Catholic educational exchange by the Council of Islamic Societies of Greater Chicago and the Archdiocese of Chicago. Zarzour chaired a panel of Muslim representatives at the April 23-24 meeting.
Mansuri, Shaikh and Zarzour noted there already is consensus on the need to educate about world religions in public schools, thanks to the work of the First Amendment Center in Washington DC. Discussion at the April meeting focused on the many audiences for inter-religious education: seminarians, university students, school teachers, public and religious school children.
Sandra Keating PhD related the discussion to theological and pedagogical principles. From a pedagogical perspective participants looked at effective ways to educate about other religions, and said the most effective approach should not only provide basic information but also draw attention to the spiritual values of a religion. They said maintaining a positive tone in curriculum content can help correct a bias against religion that exists in some educational and political environments.
Participants also agreed that to develop critical thinking skills students need to know the story of religions in a balanced way, neither emphasizing negative features nor promoting the religion in a devotional style more appropriate to a mosque or church setting. Participants also noted that sensitivity in how one communicates and works with other traditions should be part of any program and stressed particular attention to the training of religious leaders and school teachers for all school systems.
Rev. Gregory Fairbanks presented a curriculum for ecumenical and inter-religious training required by Catholic seminaries and recommended for clergy and lay leaders. He cited documents of the Second Vatican Council and other more recent church documents. He highlighted U.S. pastoral concerns, including inter-religious marriages, social justice cooperation or tensions, and educating non-Catholic children in parochial schools.
Imam Ahmed Nezar Kobeisy offered reflections on the training of imams for U.S. mosques. He highlighted efforts, such as psychological and marriage counseling, that would not be so urgently required of imams in majority-Muslim countries.
In other remarks, Bishop Dennis Madden, co-chair, recalled the recent visit of Pope Benedict XVI. He reminded participants of the pope’s call to achieve what the pope called the "truth of peace" while maintaining "a clear exposition of our respective religious tenets."
The next meeting of this round will be in May, 2009, and focus on “Developing a Strategic Plan on Interreligious Education.” In the coming months, a survey on inter-religious education will be sent to Muslim and Catholic educators.
Keeping the faith? More people look inward to find peace
By Amie Jo Schaenzer The Reporter ajschaenzer@fdlreporter.com
People, apparently, are pretty wishy-washy when it comes to religion.
A recent study conducted by the Pew Forum -- one of the largest and most extensive of its kind -- shows Americans are switching religions and choosing to be "unaffiliated" more than ever before, said Brian H. Smith, chairman for the department of religion at Ripon College.
Organized religion throughout the nation, as well as locally, is on the decline, with nearly 16 percent of all men and women today not belonging to any particular affiliation.
The extensive survey released in February shows more than one-quarter of American adults, 28 percent, have either left the church they were raised in or have chosen no religion at all, according to the PewUnited States Religious Landscape Survey.
Smith said the sharp increase locally in contemporary, non-denominational Christian churches shows residents are opting for the more "upbeat services" over the traditional types of worship offered by mainstay Catholic and Protestant churches.
Ken Nabi heads one of the largest evangelical churches in Fond du Lac, Community Church, and says his congregation has seen steady growth over the past 28 years, with a current weekend attendance of 850 to 900 members.
He said many choose Community Church, N6717 Streblow Drive, because the message offered is more in-tune as to what people today want to hear.
Why?
Today, more than in years past, people are looking inward to find peace and longstanding types of worship do not offer the type of spiritual escape they want, Smith said.
"Today, people want an emphasis on the goodness of a person and not so much that they've sinned and they're bad," Smith said. "Traditional services do not nourish their spirit."
Likewise, the Pew research shows the makeup of some of the more traditional types of religion is changing: While 51.3 percent of Americans today claim to be Protestants, the group is fading, according to the survey.
Meanwhile, the Catholic Church experienced one of the greatest net losses because of affiliation changes, according to the survey, with one in three Americans being raised Catholic and only 1 in four sticking with Catholicism today.
Despite the changes, the vast majority is still affiliated to a Christian religion. According to Pew research, 78.4 percent of Americans are Christians, while 4.7 percent belong to other religions, including 1.7 percent who are Jewish and 0.7 percent who are Muslim.
In Fond du Lac, changes in religious affiliation have proven gradual, said Michael Ketterhagen, associate professor of theology at Marian University.
Traditions among young people
One in four Americans ages 18 to 29 say they are not affiliated with a religion, according to the survey. Many in this age group —whom Smith teaches at Ripon College — he refers to as "nightstand Buddhists." They keep a Buddhist statue on their nightstand, he said, read Buddhist text because they like the message, but do not practice the religion.
This translates into cherry-picking highly individualized ways to be spiritual and seek faith, Ketterhagen said.
"They pray at night and they get involved in organized religion less," he said. "They still have a strong commitment to connect with God or their own personal spirituality that they call all different types of names. It's more personal and they will pray at night, meditate or go out in the woods to be closer to nature."
In the past, young people have left the church during their high school and college years only to return when they got married and settled down. The Pew survey suggests that is less likely to happen with today's youth.
Smith thinks this demographic niche will continue to mix and match religions to fit their needs, instead of returning to their childhood church. He envisions a type of spiritual smorgasbord — drawing upon Buddhism, for meditation; Judaism, for ethics; and the Lutheran religion for its Christmas and Easter services.
Speaker Recommends Spiritual Connections For Elderly
REBECCA RAKOCZY, Special To The Bulletin Published: May 8, 2008
ATLANTA—A person’s faith and religious life may change as he or she enters into old age, but that doesn’t diminish the need for spiritual connections to nourish mental health.
Finding out how to spark those connections in elderly populations was the topic of the second annual Spirituality in Aging Partnership series, a half-day conference sponsored by Catholic Charities Atlanta.
With keynote speaker Nancy Kriseman, who is a licensed clinical social worker in gerontology and author of “The Caring Spirit,” more than 100 people—comprised of pastoral care staff, personal caregivers and health ministry nurses—were given advice on how to connect to their clients in a more holistic and spiritual way. The gathering took place at Lutheran Church of the Redeemer in midtown Atlanta.
Kriseman asked audience members about their own definitions of spirituality and spoke about her experiences with her aging parents, while also encouraging the audience to share their experiences. Her mother suffered from Alzheimer’s disease, and died recently; her father had pulmonary lung disease and dementia and passed away several years ago.
“A lot of times we think if an older person was not a spiritual or religious person, they don’t need spiritual care,” Kriseman said. “But the majority of people in the world are spiritual in some way.
“For caregivers it is important to ask the question,” she said. For example, “How do you know the spiritual state of the person who has dementia? If you don’t know, ask their family members, ‘how has their faith carried them through life?’”
Even if the person did not have a strong faith foundation or did not demonstrate that faith to the outside world, spiritual connections can be made through music, like singing a familiar hymn or song, in ritual or prayers, or in comforting scents, like baking bread or cookies, she said. “It can mean asking ‘what does faith mean to you,’ or ‘what does grace mean to you,’” she said. It’s also important that you encourage a spiritual connection by asking questions about pictures of people and things that matter to them, she added. “We need to help our elders find their jingle,” she said.
Connecting with an elder’s spiritual side to “find that jingle” doesn’t have to be reserved for pastors, she said, although she acknowledged circumstances when pastoral intervention was needed.
“The work of the spirit is not just for pastoral folks,” Kriseman said. For caregivers—including those taking care of parents—it’s important to refresh their own spiritual life and not become “dispirited,” especially in the knowledge of an incurable condition, like Alzheimer’s disease, she said.
“People do need the space to grieve every time (their loved one) changes,” she said. “But if you’re caring for a parent, it’s important to remember this is a role change, not a role reversal—your mother will always be your mother.”
Kriseman also encouraged those in attendance to give permission to embrace their own spirituality, even as they care for someone who is not their relative. “Very rarely do caregivers get to talk about their own spiritual care,” she said.
“It’s a blessing to work with older people—you’re helping them finish well,” she said.
Patti Miller, coordinator of family faith formation at St. John Neumann Church in Lilburn, was listening to Kriseman’s words carefully. Miller came to the conference not only to learn more about spirituality and aging to pass on to her congregation, but also because she has three family members who are elderly.
“This is at the forefront for me,” she said. She came with fellow parishioner Sherry Johnson, who has worked with adult faith formation and RCIA at their church and has been a trauma care nurse for years. “This (spiritual side of care) was not always at the forefront, but it’s becoming more a part of nursing,” Johnson said.
As their parish ages, said Miller, “a lot of families are asking these same questions (that Kriseman brought up.) We wanted to find out what’s new out there from a Christian and Catholic perspective.”
Said Krygiel of Catholic Charities, “ It’s our responsibility to take care of our senior population.” He cited the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops 1999 statement, “The Blessings of Age.”
All parishes and churches are called to respond to this,” he said. “We cannot sit idle.”
The coauthor of a new Gallup analysis of public opinion in the Muslim world said that based on its findings, conflict between Muslims and the West is not inevitable.
"Most Muslims like and admire much about the West, from our democracy to our technology," said Dalia Mogahed, executive director of the Gallup Center for Muslim Studies and coauthor of a new Gallup book, "Who Speaks for Islam? What a Billion Muslims Really Think."
The book, which Mogahed wrote with John L. Esposito, professor of religion and Islamic studies at Georgetown University, is based on 50,000 interviews by Gallup in 40 countries with predominantly Muslim populations or significant Muslim minorities. The interviews were conducted between 2001 and 2007, and the book was published this spring.
Among the findings:
Muslims around the world do not view the West as monolithic.
Muslims are as likely as Americans to reject attacks on civilians as morally unjustified.
Muslims say the West can best improve relations with the Muslim world by respecting Islam.
Group of evangelical Christians writes manifesto urging separation of religious beliefs and politics
By politicizing faith, Christians become 'useful idiots' for one party or another, the group warns
By Rebecca Trounson, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer May 10, 2008
A group of prominent U.S. evangelical Christians is urging other evangelicals to step back from partisan politics and avoid becoming "useful idiots" for any political party.
In an often strongly worded statement released this week, more than 70 pastors, scholars and business leaders said faith and politics have become too closely intertwined and that evangelicals err when they use their religious beliefs for political purposes.
Three years in the making, the manifesto was signed by many high-profile, mostly centrist evangelicals, including Leith Anderson, president of the National Assn. of Evangelicals; Jim Wallis, founder of Sojourners magazine; and Frank Wright, president of National Religious Broadcasters.
Many of the most prominent conservative evangelicals did not sign. A spokesman for James Dobson, the founder of Focus on the Family, said Dobson had concerns about the document and decided not to add his name.
One of the statement's drafters said one purpose was to reclaim the word "evangelical" from its political association.
"This is not primarily a political movement," said the Rev. John Huffman Jr., senior pastor of St. Andrew's Presbyterian Church in Newport Beach and board chairman of the evangelical magazine Christianity Today. "Evangelicalism is a theological understanding that we are called to be followers of Jesus Christ, and that's not captive to a culture, society or nation."
Analyst Michael Cromartie, vice president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C., said he expected the statement to have limited political impact.
"It's mainly a warning to people not to confuse their personal faith with political convictions," he said.
Is there a specific part of the brain for feelings of spirituality? Many lines of evidence suggests it is the temporal lobes. Dr. David Comings, a renown human geneticist, neuroscientist and physician proposes that spirituality is genetically hardwired into a specific part of the brain, is pleasurable, is critical to the evolution and survival of man, and will never go away. Understanding the biology of the spiritual brain can help us to develop a rational spirituality where are rational brain and spiritual brain can live in peace.
ROCHESTER, MINN. — The press that followed a recent visit by the Dalai Lama to the Mayo Clinic focused primarily on the spiritual leader's comments about the Chinese crackdown on protest in Tibet. It isn't hard to imagine why. The meeting's contentious international backdrop — a conflict underscored by the sidewalk appearance of a strangely polished crew of 50 or so pro-Chinese demonstrators mounting a lonely crusade to tarnish the cause of Tibetan autonomy — was an easier tale to tell than the less easily digested topic of the daylong event itself.
The oversight was unfortunate, because the case being made during the April 16 colloquium titled "Investigating the Mind-Body Connection: The Science and Clinical Applications of Meditation," seems far more destabilizing than the political movement in Tibet.
It's one thing to ponder the irony of a professional-seeming protest in defense of a government that does not allow protest. It's quite another thing to witness the brain trust behind the brand more associated with Western medicine than any other giving forum to the emerging science of mindfulness training, acceptance, positive thinking and compassion. The first cause is about political change. The second is cosmological.
The Buddhist meditative tradition
The Dalai Lama's prescription is that of the Buddhist meditative tradition: selecting and focusing on positive mental states such as compassion, gratitude and joy, while challenging negative mental states such as anger, jealousy, anxiety and a distracted state of being. In practice this means daily meditative practice intent on clearing mental clutter and developing more clarity of attention and moment-by-moment awareness.
The Dalai Lama has long believed that so-called mindfulness meditation has beneficial effects on human health and well-being, and thanks to research conducted by Davidson and others, we now know that the brain and body do indeed change for the better as a result of such practice, and through measurable physiological pathways more complex than had previously been imagined.
Researchers have known for years, for example, that a bilateral brain region known as the prefrontal cortex, or PFC, is involved in developing responses to emotionally laden thoughts, and that the way we respond to the events and thoughts in our lives is often determined by whether the brain draws on the rights side of our PFC or its left. Operating below the level of awareness, the right side of the prefrontal cortex responds to problems with an eye toward punishments and avenues of withdrawal, while the left side processes thoughts which are generally positive and tuned to rewards. Damage the left prefrontal cortex and depression increases; those who tend to preferentially use the left side of their prefrontal cortex tend to get over problems faster than do those who process emotion-laden thoughts from the right. Significant for the discussion of physical health, those who preferentially use the left prefrontal cortex show lower baseline levels of the stress hormone cortisol.
The dangers of chronic frustration
A separate area of research has linked chronic frustration with disruption of your heart-rate variability, which, sustained over time, the body begins to recognize as its baseline state, bringing about an inhibition of the vital bodily calming mechanism that is your parasympathetic nervous system. Feel frustrated long enough and your body ceases to calm itself.
By wiring EEG sensors to the heads of Buddhist monks and those attempting to meditate for the first time, then examining brain activity as expressed on functional MRI images, Davidson and Kabat-Zinn have learned that meditation employs the left prefrontal cortex — some monks he has studied have greater left prefrontal orientation than ever previously observed — and that over time, meditative practice can change the orientation from the right to the left of those who take up the activity. Brain circuitry is not fixed, in other words. To the contrary, said Davidson during a research-based session at Mayo, "the brain is the organ that is built to change in response to training. Happiness, compassion, and clarity of attention are the product of skills, and these skills can be enhanced through mental training."
After hearing the case that meditative mental training can help people stay healthier and recover more quickly from illness, the Mayo audience of 350 or so faculty and staff entered more culturally problematic territory — subject matter that seemed to be talked around as much as it was examined. In short, while medicine is beginning to take seriously the notion that the cultivation of compassion and mindfulness is beneficial for physical health, medicine as practiced today is often antithetical to the very mindfulness and spiritual "present-ness" sought after in meditative practice.
An East-West paradox?
The clinic may have established a "mind-body" Department of Integrative Medicine and gathered with earnest enthusiasm to hear from the top names in mind-body research, but Mayo is nothing if not the face of Western medicine in all its dichotomous cleaving of the spirit from the biology, both in culture and practice. The medical embrace of meditative compassion would seem to face a paradox: The grueling rise to the highest levels of medical specialization does not appear conducive to regular breaks for contemplative meditative practice, nor does the culture of omnipotence, authority and spirit of conquest within medical training seem a smooth fit for the sense of acceptance embodied in Buddhism.
The bad news came in large part from Roshi Joan Halifax, a Zen priest and medical anthropologist whose remarks suggested that embracing the Buddhist prescription will likely require more than stocking the patient information center with brochures on the value of meditation. For example, the Dalai Lama's thoughts on death are clear: "I think the most important thing," according to a Web collection of his sayings, "is to try and do our best to ensure that dying person may depart quietly, with serenity and in a peace." Caregivers of those at the end of life experience high rates of burnout, said Halifax, due to the "moral stress" brought on by the damage done to this peace by conflicting agendas of medicine in the face of death.
"A lot of clinicians feel reluctant to speak openly about the trajectory of an illness," she said, "with death being the end of the road." Halifax described the multipronged source of the physician's moral stress that leads him or her to avoid the dying: interventions which cause pain and suffering, lack of communication about the goals of care, and "the prolonging of dying through technology." While she acknowledged their role in transitory illness, flashing a picture of an iconic string of ICU life preserving tubes and machinery, she said simply, "This is our nightmare, to be put on a respirator."
Cultivating compassion, wisdom in the face of death
Halifax advocated helping physicians and caregivers in "cultivating compassion and wisdom in the presence of death." The ability to "presence pain and suffering without pitying, consoling or denying," said Halifax, requires "a quality of attention that is panoramic, perceptive and nonjudgmental." While meditative practice would seem to develop the skill in question, hanging over her argument was a question that went unasked: How likely are these skills to be developed in medical training, much less the culture and bureaucracy of large medical centers like Mayo? Research may support the benefits of meditative practice for patients, but if they are to care for the dying and gravely ill, physicians would appear to need an extra dose the same medicine. Is the Buddhist tradition even possible within the umbrella of Western medicine?
"Allow yourself to experience that futility," she said when a Mayo doctor from Brazil asked how he should handle his negative emotions that gave rise when watching patients in his homeland die unnecessarily due to a lack of resources. "To be with things as they are. There is still a resource that is there — your presence."
For the Mayo brothers, looking down from nearby oversize vintage photos upon the gathering, this could not have seemed a stranger request for the heirs to their legacy. Nor could the answer given to a similar question a few minutes later — and which had been put to Mattieu Ricard, a French-born monk from Katmandu and a subject of Davidson's EEG experiments on the brain activity of expert level meditation.
"Transform your attitude to the suffering person," said Ricard, who has spent more than 10,000 hours in contemplative meditation. "Let your heart become a mass of brilliant white light, and the suffering becomes dissolved in it."
The nature of compassion and suffering
After a lunch-hour break, the audience stood silently to greet the Dalai Lama, a sometimes impish figure who held forth bare-armed and robed from an armchair in the center of the stage. Answering questions put to him by Goleman and later the audience, the Dalai Lama alternated from English to long statements toward his interpreter, presumably in Tibetic, touching on the nature of compassion and suffering and its intersection with medical care. He rambled at times in a way that indicated no worries about social pressures like staying on message, making easily digestible bullet points, winning over his audience — and yet winning over his audience regardless.
He explained his position that the human dilemma is one whereby anger and attachment — while useful if a transitory emotion in species throughout the animal kingdom — are given undue extension by the human skill for imagination, with negative results.
"This is where the problems arise," he said. "Because of this, we need a special effort to increase our affection."
He called compassion "an immune system for the toxins of the mind." He also, early in his remarks, slipped in mention of the problem at hand, a statement that sparked no shortage of nervous laughter in the highly credentialed crowd.
"In Tibet we have a saying," he said. "The physician is a great scholar, but his medicine is not effective because his heart is not that good."
Paul Scott is a freelance writer based in Rochester.
More doctors recommending dose of God for their patients
Tribune staff report May 2, 2008
You might think a hospital sounds like an odd place to launch a spiritual quest. But for some patients, that's precisely where they find religion.
In fact, some doctors even rely on divine intervention to assist them in the healing process.
Tribune reporter Joel Hood's story this week about a continuous prayer week held in Adventist Bolingbrook Hospital illustrated how some hospitals recognize and embrace their role as a spiritual destination.
Dr. Yong Kim was one of the staff recruited to pray. An elder at his Korean Methodist church, Kim spent several hours praying for his patients' recovery. He told Joel that prayer is vital to a patient's recovery.
Kim is one of a burgeoning number of doctors who factor prayer into treatment, said Dr. Robert Klitzman, an assistant professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia University Medical Center in New York. In interviews with 50 doctors, Klitzman learned that many are oblivious to patients' spiritual needs until they become patients themselves.
Has the threat of a serious illness prompted you to reassess your relationship with God? Do your doctors tend to your spiritual well-being too?
Xerpi