Topic: Religious Leaders
“Religion and science are two quite different things and we need them both. Science takes things apart to see how they work. Religion puts things together to see what they mean.” More
People from many faiths gathered in Washington for the 63rd annual National Prayer Breakfast, including the Dalai Lama. One major theme this year was fighting religious extremism, which President Obama said “is not unique to one group or one religion.” More
According to Father Michael Doyle, crime and poverty in Camden, New Jersey are worse today than when he first arrived there 39 years ago. But through his church’s ministry of feeding, housing, and educating the poor, Father Doyle sees hope for what the FBI considers the most dangerous city in America. “We’re working against the odds, but I think God is on our side,” he says. More
“East and West are not contradictory to each other. They are part of the same body,” says Metropolitan Elpidophoros, a bishop in the Greek Orthodox Church in Istanbul. “And in the last years, thank God, we have extremely good relations.” More
When there was violent unrest in Boston, members of the clergy learned to work both with the police and with potentially violent youth. They achieved much-publicized changes, but they also may have claimed success too soon. More
“He was a master teacher,” says Rabbi Chaim Schochet, recalling the Rebbe—Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson—who led the Hasidic Chabad-Lubavitch movement until his death 20 years ago. Rabbi Schochet directs Jewish Summer Fellowship, a program of intensive training in sacred texts and mystical teachings for Jewish college students. More
“The Rebbe was as profoundly a religious and spiritual figure as you can imagine. He was of course scrupulous in his observance of Jewish law. He prayed with a sense of tremendous profundity, and you actually felt, when you were dealing with him, that you were with a person who was suffused with a God-consciousness.” More
Best-selling writer and journalist Sara Davidson felt completely unprepared for the reality of dying. Then she met Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, founder of the Jewish Renewal movement. Their weekly conversations about mortality led to their book “The December Project.” “When you feel you’re coming to the end of your tour of duty, what is the spiritual work of that time,” asked Reb Zalman, “and how do we prepare for the mystery?” More
Pope Francis visited sacred sites recognized by Muslims, Christians, and Jews, including the Western Wall. He met with Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew and a range of other religious leaders, made unexpected stops at a terror memorial and at the separation wall that surrounds the West Bank city of Bethlehem, and he inserted himself into the peace process with a surprise invitation to a prayer summit at the Vatican. More
The pope’s pilgrimage is intended on one level to commemorate the 1964 meeting between Pope Paul VI and Patriarch Athenagoras that ended a thousand years of estrangement between Eastern and Western Christianity. But there are other agendas as well: interfaith dialogue, the Middle East peace process, the diminishing Christian presence in the Holy Land, encounters with Jewish and Palestinian religious and political leaders. More
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