Current Events
July 2nd, 2020
I have stumbled across an article entitled “Churches Join In Effort to Halt Racial Injustices In Religion.” It was written on July 7th, 1962 by Louis Cassels, in the Tri-State Defender newspaper. The article has essentially two (possible three) separate stories within it. The most pertinent of them that I am highlighting is the interfaith attempt to fight racial injustice from within the institution of the church. The interlinked story is the retaliatory pressures from Southern Baptists that “liberal theology has reared its head in some southern Baptist seminaries (Tri-State Defender, 1962).”
In the early 1960s, perhaps with the incoming pressures of the Civil Rights Movement in the United States, a number of religious organizations began working together on a multilateral campaign to fight racial injustice in the United States and abroad. The organizations working together met in Chicago in 1962, and represented the Jewish, Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant faiths. In doing this, the many denominations of the Judeo-Christian faith had a goal of morphing the institutions that they had previously worked within in order to promote civil liberties regarding race.
The reasoning for the interfaith meeting in Chicago was stated to “’bring the joint moral forces of the churches and synagogues to bear on the problem of racial segregation’ and to highlight ‘the distinctive role that religious institutions have to play’ in removing racial barriers from American life (Tri-State Defender, 1962).”
The story underlying this article, one that we see throughout history, is that institutions are always subject to change; there is often a parallel force that acts in opposition to the same change within an institution. We see this in the Tri-State Defender article, where the conglomerate of faith attempted to restructure their respective religious institutions. Concurrently, the Southern Baptists were recommitting themselves to their “fundamental” values.
July 16th, 2020
For our analysis of (relatively) Current Events this week, I stumbled upon an article relating to Pope Francis and his views on various modern political issues; mainly in the ways that he has shifted from his predecessors. The article I have found was written in the Wall Street Journal and is entitled “The Politics of Pope Francis; Perhaps America and the pope can learn from eachother.” In the article, the author argues that the popularity of the pope in American progressive circles has risen due to Pope Francis’s more progressive economic philosophy, even though the Catholic Church is still very much socially conservative. The author makes the point that by “bear-hugging” a certain political agenda, “[the Pope] will come to be seen as a seeker of political popularity more than a speaker of hard and eternal truths (WSJ, 2015).” Irrespective of social issues, as one purpose of religion is to instill a social code, I might argue that the political positions of Catholic leadership might differ so drastically (as Pope Francis does with his predecessor) due to the societies they lived in and were elected from. That is to say that the ideologies of Catholicism are not set in stone, but rather differ drastically from within the regions that they are established.
July 30th, 2020
This week in our Current Events series, I have chosen an article written by Yaakov Kornreich in the New York Jewish Week in August, 1984. In the article, Kornreich writes about the dispute within various sects of the Jewish community over a conversion program in Denver, CO. The Orthodox community had qualms with the Rerom movement in Judaism and objected to the Denver conversion program upheld by the Reformists. This topic falls within the Course Themes of Conversion and Resistance. The article suggests that while the program would eventually dissolve due to internal disputes, it gave hope that perhaps interdenominational disagreements could be solved together without the further polarization of religious and national communities.
In essence, The Reformists seemed to have more relaxed standards that the Orthodox community was comfortable with in relation to conversion of non-Jewish people, one Orthodox rabbi was noted as stating he was “’uncomfortable signing a (conversion) certificate for people with whom [he] did not have a personal relationship (Kornreich, 1984).’” In this joint, interdenominational program, many leaders of the Orthodox community felt that the rules of convergence were too relaxed, while many leaders of the Reform movement felt that the rules were too strict. What I find most interesting about this article is that in this instance, the goal in dealing with this interdenominational schism was to unite and compromise, as opposed to breaking off from one another even further.
August 13th, 2020
This week we are diving into Armenian affairs. I chose an article in the Armenian Reporter International entitled “Abp. Vatche Hovsepian, Primate of Western Diocese, Discusses the Issue of Church Unity.” In this article, the leader of the Western Diocese speaks about the unity of the Armenian church, and speaks to a problem that arose at the time that was in “contravention to Canon law.” The dispute in question in question was in regard to an administrative transfer of the Patriachate of Jerusalem to the Sea of Cilicia, to which a new seat had been added. Regarding the law however, there was contention regarding the power the actions of the See of Cilicia had over other Diocese within the region.
Hovsepian first declared that he was not the cause of the division, also stating that he actively attempted to avoid a inter-factional disputes. Hovsepian believed that the problem did not arise from an overabundance of jurisdiction from the See of Cilicia, but rather the intricate relationship between the Tashnag party in both the See of Cilicia and the Prelacy of the Western Diocese.
This article has proven interesting to me because it shows that these situations of dissent in religious administration still have occurred in recent history, and in reading about the schism of the Catholic Church, the theme of interdenominational dissent can be seen repeated (to a lesser extent) from the 11th century throughout the 20th.
August 27th, 2020
In searching for our final installment of the Current Events series, I came across an article written in the Oakland Post in 1979, entitled “Southern Baptist Identity Crisis.” In the article, the author points out that the Southern Baptist Convention was looking for a president of the church that was “committed to Biblical inerrancy and willing to ferret out alleged liberals from the denomination’s seminaries.” This effort by the churches more conservative members, has led the more moderate and liberal members to feel uneasy as they feel the theological credentialism that the conservative flank pushes threatens “traditional Baptist policy – church government structure – of autonomous but cooperating congregations…” and essentially blurs the line between various Southern Baptist Churches and local communities.
I find this situation very interesting because in essence the liberal and conservative factions of the Southern Baptist church are arguing over different visions of the fundamental principles of the Church as an organization. The conservatives were of the belief that the importance of the church organization was to preserve traditional values and a historically traditional morality; the liberals were most interested in conserving the administrative and structural integrity of the church. Both factions seemed to be okay with the deterioration of their counterparts and the integrity of their own preferences.
I think this article ties in well with the theme of religious malleability and within the United States. As professor Scott Ables has stated, “resilience of Christianity in always adapting, always reforming, has allowed it to both influence and be influenced by whatever culture it finds itself, no less in Europe and the Americas.” You can see this I think within the example provided, as the Southern Baptist Convention in 1979 struggled to find its way in a shifting American culture.
