Eboo Patel
Interfaith Youth Core
AC360° Contributor

In Cairo, President Obama stated in no uncertain terms the importance he places on interfaith cooperation. He also stressed that interfaith work should take the form of concrete service projects:

"Indeed, faith should bring us together. That is why we are forging service projects in America that bring together Christians, Muslims, and Jews...Around the world, we can turn dialogue into Interfaith service, so bridges between peoples lead to action – whether it is combating malaria in Africa, or providing relief after a natural disaster."

For a long time, interfaith cooperation meant a group of senior theologians or religious leaders presenting a document about peace at a conference in a fancy hotel. That's all good stuff, but I remember going to some of those conferences in the late 1990s and having two questions – where are the young people, and where is the social action?

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Rev. Robert Barron
Special to CNN

The Rev. Robert Barron says celibacy sets the priest apart as a symbol of the world to come.

The scandal surrounding the Rev. Alberto Cutie has raised questions in the minds of many concerning the Catholic Church's discipline of priestly celibacy. Why does the church continue to defend a practice that seems so unnatural and so unnecessary?

There is a very bad argument for celibacy, which has appeared throughout the tradition and which is, even today, defended by some. It goes something like this: Married life is spiritually suspect; priests, as religious leaders, should be spiritual athletes above reproach; therefore, priests shouldn't be married

This approach to the question is, in my judgment, not just stupid but dangerous, for it rests on presumptions that are repugnant to solid Christian doctrine. The biblical teaching on creation implies the essential integrity of the world and everything in it.

Genesis tells us that God found each thing he had made good and that he found the ensemble of creatures very good. Catholic theology, at its best, has always been resolutely, anti-dualist - and this means that matter, the body, marriage and sexual activity are never, in themselves, to be despised.

But there is more to the doctrine of creation than an affirmation of the goodness of the world. To say that the finite realm in its entirety is created is to imply that nothing in the universe is God. All aspects of created reality reflect God and bear traces of the divine goodness - just as every detail of a building gives evidence of the mind of the architect - but no creature and no collectivity of creatures is divine, just as no part of a structure is the architect.

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Michael Gerson
The Washington Post

Some friends who are loyal alumni of Notre Dame are distressed that God's alma mater is hosting a pro-choice president at commencement. For decades, they argue, Notre Dame has accommodated, legitimated and enabled pro-choice views, compromising its identity as a Catholic institution. They question the wisdom of the Obama invitation, which they believe adds to that confusion.

But some critics go further, calling President Obama's appearance "an outrage and a scandal." And that goes too far.

The office of the president has meaning and importance that transcend the views of its occupant. Though elected by a part of America, the president becomes a symbol of its whole. The respect we accord him does not imply agreement or endorsement. It reflects our appreciation for constitutional processes. So a presidential visit is always an honor. The televised arrival of Air Force One, the motorcade, the playing of "Hail to the Chief," the audience standing as the president enters - all these express a proper respect for democratic legitimacy.

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Eboo Patel
for WashingtonPost.com

Sheikh Salahadin Wazir discusses his Muslim community after Friday afternoon prayers in Clarkston, Georgia.

I see the following headline in newspapers nearly every day: "Young Muslim Suicide Bomber Kills X People in Y Country." These headlines create problems that go deeper than the immediate violence, because the more sentences we read which begin with "young Muslim" and end with "terrorist", the more we expect those two things to be linked.

I usually write about the impact that the "young Muslim terrorist" frame has on non-Muslims, but I'm increasingly concerned about the impact it's having on Muslims too. My problem is not that young Muslims hear the terrorist story and aspire to that. It's that they hear the terrorist story, are repelled by it, but don't see an alternative grand narrative to aspire to because we haven't created one. As Alexander MacIntyre wrote, "I can only answer the question "What can I do?" if I can answer the prior question, "Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?"

So how do we communicate to young Muslims that we believe in their potential to create good in this world? We tell different stories…

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Eboo Patel
Interfaith Youth Core
AC360° Contributor

Picture religious violence. What images come to mind? A plane crashing into the World Trade Center on 9/11? A videotape confession by a suicide bomber?

The perpetrators of religious violence are masters of marketing. They want you to see them commit acts of violence, and they want you to associate it with their religion. In fact, the violence is in many cases simply an excuse for the image. The goal is not the murder of a few, it is the poisoning of many with the pictures of violence, with the ultimate hope being the incitement of a religious civil war in cities like Baghdad.

Now picture interfaith cooperation. Did your brain-screen go fuzzy? I wish interfaith images came just as readily and were just as clear as images of religious violence. In fact, I believe one of the reasons we lack a strong, cohesive interfaith movement is because of the absence of such clear visual reference points.

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Can Obama’s makeover of Bush’s faith initiatives speed the economic recovery?

The Root
Dayo Olopade

The first month of Barack Obama’s presidency brought change to all parts to Washington—none more sweeping than the passage of his American Recovery Act, designed to shock the U.S. economy out of its slump. A notable portion of the $787 billion should be coming to communities of color that have been particularly hard hit by the downturn. And one of the key vehicles for getting the money to needy citizens will be Obama’s brand-new Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships.

The president “wants one of the functions of that office to be the implementation of the Recovery Act,” said Melody Barnes, director of Obama’s Domestic Policy Council, where the faith office will be housed. “He’s outlined a few different ways in which he hopes the office will initially be quite helpful, one of them being the connection between the bill and the reality.”

Though the specifics of the distribution have yet to be filled in, lawmakers in heavily black districts are already expressing hope about the boost to religious-based organizations. "There are huge numbers of faith-based organizations that have nonprofit groups that are serving communities, especially in this time of crisis,” said Democratic Rep. Donna Edwards of Maryland following the Congressional Black Caucus’ first White House meeting with the president. “I think the administration has taken recognition of that.”

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President Obama announced Thursday that he is changing the Office of Faith-Based Initiatives.

Eboo Patel
Interfaith Youth Core

Two things struck me about President Obama’s Faith-based office yesterday: this matters to him, and he expects it to get things done.

I’ve been asked to serve on the Advisory Council for the Office , and had the honor of being part of a 30 minute Oval Office meeting with the President yesterday. He set out our charge pretty quickly: cooperate to serve others during this time of need in America, and be a positive example of interfaith engagement in a world torn by religious conflict. He spoke about the importance of engaging talented young people, of reaching out to the Muslim world, of working across religious diversity and also the secular / faith divide. The focus isn’t so much what happens in churches, synagogues and mosques – it’s what all those Christians, Jews and Muslims do in the world together.

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Deepak Chopra
On Faith
The Washington Post

When President Obama offered to reach out to the Muslim world for the mutual interest of both parties, he was saying nothing new. The West and the Arab oil-producing nations have teetered on an uneasy alliance for decades, the one depending on the other. As much as we grumble about being dependent on Arab oil, it serves our mutual interest to keep a steady flow of fuel coming our way and a glut of dollars in return. But when he added "mutual respect," Obama supplied a key missing piece, one that Muslims have longed for.

No doubt it's because of his diverse background - and in no small part because he had to forge an identity in the black community - that Obama knows what respect means to outcasts and the down-trodden. In a way, it's everything. The Muslim world, despite its windfall oil profits, feels like one of the great losers in the march of history. Muslims dwell on the glory days of Sunni culture, which kept science, mathematics, and philosophy alive while that knowledge was lost in Europe during the Middle Ages. The Ottoman Empire once embraced almost the entire Mediterranean basin and marched to the gates of Vienna. When World War I left Islamic power in ashes, a decline in confidence set in that has been deeply corrosive to Muslim identity and deeply humiliating, too.

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Eboo Patel
On Faith
Washingtonpost.com

George Stephanopolous revealed his roots as a preacher's son when he asked President-elect Barack Obama if he missed being a part of a faith community.

Obama's answer revealed his roots in the south side of Chicago.

After a brief reference to his own spirituality, Obama went straight into the community dimension of religion, pointing out that DC (like Chicago) is really two cities – one for the well-heeled people who work in government and government-related industries, and the other for everyone else, including some of the poorest people in America. He wanted those two cities more involved with one another.

When it comes to faith, Obama's first instinct is to respond by trying to bridge communities.

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Chuck Afflerbach
CNN San Francisco Producer

On stage at the parish hall, Rosario Frisse told the assembly to close their eyes and count to ten. The five hundred people packed into the auditorium—working class men and women, mothers holding babies, school kids doing homework—all did as she asked.

“In the time it took us to count to ten,” Frisse said, “another family in America has lost their home.”

Their concern showed on their faces, their demands were printed on the paper pennants they waved. Families First. 34% for Housing. Salve Su Casa, Spanish for Save Your Home.

The Monday night meeting had been organized by PICO National Network, a collection of religious congregations across the country tackling the foreclosure crisis on behalf of homeowners caught in the collapse. They came to Holy Rosary Parish in Antioch, California, a blue-collar suburb midway between San Francisco and Sacramento. This town has been hit hard; almost 8% of the homes here have been foreclosed…so far.

One by one the speakers came to the podium to tell their stories. Serefino Leon lost his Antioch home, only to see it sold at auction for half of what he had paid, at a price he could have afforded. Marian Youngblood was a loan officer in Kansas City, trained to falsify income amounts on applications. The borrowers would fall behind by the second loan payment. “As a Christian, it broke my heart,” she said. So she quit.
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