Friday, 20 June 2014
Thursday, 19 June 2014
World Peace and Prayer Days - 19 to 22 June 2014
From Global Indigenous Initiative:
World Peace and Prayer Days take place June 19 - 22, 2014, with a globally synchronized meditation with communities around the planet. GII's#HiddenSeeds supports this beautiful tapestry of people, worldwide, coming together in a spirit of unity and love for Source, the planet and one another.
Visit #Unify (http://unify.org/) for more information about the globally synchronized meditation. And, read this great article, "Honoring Sacred Sites, World Peace and Prayer Day" by Jacob Devaney:http://huff.to/1lDfky7
World Peace and Prayer Days take place June 19 - 22, 2014, with a globally synchronized meditation with communities around the planet. GII's#HiddenSeeds supports this beautiful tapestry of people, worldwide, coming together in a spirit of unity and love for Source, the planet and one another.
Visit #Unify (http://unify.org/) for more information about the globally synchronized meditation. And, read this great article, "Honoring Sacred Sites, World Peace and Prayer Day" by Jacob Devaney:http://huff.to/1lDfky7
Wednesday, 18 June 2014
Monday, 16 June 2014
Celebrating Ballarat's new Mosque #1
This report was published in The Courier, Balliarat's daily newspaper, over the week-end. I am expecting photos to come to me which should help in providing a broader report.
BALLARAT has ushered in a new era with the first dedicated prayer space for its growing Muslim population nearing completion.
Construction of the city's first mosque is due to be finished within two months.
The Courier was given a tour of the near complete Elsworth Street mosque on Saturday.
Once open, which could be as soon as August, the mosque will have the capacity to hold about 150 people and will be open every day from dawn.
Aisha Aboulfadil, a Muslim living in Ballarat for the last seven years, said the mosque represented more than just prayer.
"It can feel really disjointed here in Ballarat... it can feel like 'well I'm a Muslim and people accept that but why don't we have anywhere to pray?," she said.
"This is huge for Ballarat, it will bring people together, it will build our community, it will offer the chance to meet others of the same faith... it is so much more than just a place to pray."
A local 17-year-old Muslim refugee, who fled brutal conflict in Pakistan in 2012, said the mosque would make life in Australia without his family a little easier.
The teenager, who didn't want to be named, said he often travelled to mosques in Melbourne to pray.
"I pray everyday... but I've never had the chance to pray at a Mosque in Ballarat," he said.
"This means a lot for me, and it means a lot for Ballarat... it's a very big thing."
Ballarat's Muslim community, which includes about 70 families and a strong contingent of students, currently pray from home or use a dedicated space at the university for collective prayer on Fridays.
A topic of debate and anger in many communities around the country, the construction of the mosque in Ballarat has so far been smooth sailing.
Ballarat Islamic Society board member Mehfooz Ahmad said the group wanted to thank the people of Ballarat for their "overwhelming support".
"At the beginning there was a little bit of resistance... but now we can't thank the people of Ballarat enough for their support," he said.
Mr Ahmad was quick to denounce some of the myths surrounding mosques, including concerns about the traditional 'call to prayer' being played over loudspeakers.
"That will not happen here because it simply isn't required," he said.
He said many Islamic countries played the call to prayer over loudspeakers to remind people to pray, adding it wasn't required in Ballarat because of the small number of Muslims and the fact they would know prayer times at the new mosque.
While not a residential area by any means - the mosque is mostly surrounded by industrial buildings - the mosque is neighboured by two homes.
Mr Mehfooz said those occupants had also been supportive and co-operative.
Religion and women after trauma and violence
Religion is two-edged sword for women after trauma and violence
Left to right, Dr. Silka Spahic Siljak and Dr. Susan St. Ville
13 June 2014
Religion is a double-edged sword for women healing from violence and trauma, say two scholars whose work investigates and analyses the area.
Dr Susan St. Ville teaches in and directs the master’s programme at the Joan B. Krock Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame, U.S.A., while Dr Zilka Spahic Siljak, a Bosnian scholar, serves currently as a visiting lecturer in Women’s Studies and Islamic Studies at Harvard Divinity School.
The two theologians visited the Ecumenical Centre while facilitating the weeklong workshop on “Women’s Pilgrimage of Justice and Peace—Inspired by UNSR1325,” sponsored by the Ecumenical Institute Bossey, the educational engine of the World Council of Churches (WCC).
The seminar was developed by the WCC programme Just Community of Women and Men (formerly Women in Church and Society) led by Dr. Fulata Lusungu Moyo, programme executive, and focussed on making accessible UNSCR1325 to religious women.
UNSR1325 is the UN Security Council resolution that mandates focus on and involvement of women in post-conflict arrangements for peace-building and reconstruction, a key asset for developing or restoring gender justice in war-torn areas that have witnessed large-scale gender violence.
Religion: friend or foe of women?
While recent Gallup Polls, for example, still demonstrate the ongoing influence and authority of religion in people’s lives, says Siljak, it varies wildly in different contexts. In post-socialist regimes of Eastern Europe and during the Bosnian war, for example, religious institutions and church bodies proved not helpful to women. “Religion is not helpful if politicized or manipulated” as a tool of nationalism, she said. “But personal religion was helpful for women who had been victimized by violence as a means of coping with trauma and moving on to reconstruct their lives.” In the end, she said, their faith in God can help women heal.
Against a backdrop of institutional indifference, Siljak noted, women have created “alternative spaces” and faith-based organizations to address their concerns. Ironically, she said, the work of secular organizations can sometimes provide a platform for and impetus to religious women to organize.
Still, in many contexts “churches have been real resources for resilience,” said St. Ville, citing work in East Africa, particularly Uganda, where she has seen religious women create effective programmes for counselling and post-trauma life-support for women after 20 years of war.
Practice trumps and validates theory
Although at the forefront of recognizing and engaging diversity and the role of practice, feminist theory and theology still struggle for legitimacy in academic settings and are often seen as too abstract, both scholars affirmed.
“The WCC functions well as a partner in this dialogue” between theory and practice, said Siljak, since it provides access to a global infrastructure of women active in religious settings around the world, both individually and in powerful movements on the ground. “Women’s movements are feminist theory in practice,” said St. Ville, and theologians can “use the great religious infrastructure” to inform their theologies and support real change. To stay relevant, she said, theologians “should not allow theories to discount practice.”
Frontiers of feminist reflection
After a generation of pioneering feminist theology and historical work, and of feminist theory, where is the feminist engagement with religion headed?
Siljak finds inspiration in on-the-ground women’s movements, especially in Roman Catholic communities of women religious and in Islamic communities. There she witnesses women working with, through, and around religious traditions to find affirmation, respect, and authority. In nonreligious NGOs, too, Siljak experiences helpful inter-religious encounters of Christian, Muslim and Jewish women.
For St. Ville, the feminist quest still centres around the question, “How do women get agency?” whether in situations of violence and trauma, in creating movements for social change, or in the academic disciplines.
Although for post-trauma women “the theodicy question is huge,” she marvels at how, despite the checkered legacy of faith communities in relation to women, “People find their way through it in different ways, through their personal faith journeys.” Attending to how women actually cope as individuals and in movements, she says, is the privileged site of new learning, because “People find their way out of pain in amazing ways.”
The World Council of Churches promotes Christian unity in faith, witness and service for a just and peaceful world. An ecumenical fellowship of churches founded in 1948, by the end of 2013 the WCC had 345 member churches representing more than 500 million Christians from Protestant, Orthodox, Anglican and other traditions in over 140 countries. The WCC works cooperatively with the Roman Catholic Church. The WCC general secretary is the Rev. Dr Olav Fykse Tveit, from the [Lutheran] Church of Norway.
Visiting address: 150 route de Ferney, 1211 Geneva 2, Switzerland
Sunday, 15 June 2014
Pope Francis says "World economic system is 'madness; "
The article below is republished from Australia's ABC News website.
Comment from The Editor of Beside The Creek: And so say all of us???
World economic system is 'madness',
puts money ahead of people, Pope Francis says
Updated
Pope Francis has launched a sweeping attack on the world's economic system, saying it discards the young, puts money ahead of people and survives on the profits of war.
The 77-year-old leader of the world's 1.2 billion Roman Catholics said some countries had a youth unemployment rate of more than 50 per cent, with many millions in Europe seeking work in vain.
"It's madness," the Pope said in an interview with the Barcelona-based Vanguardia daily's Vatican correspondent Henrique Cymerman.
"We discard a whole generation to maintain an economic system that no longer endures, a system that to survive has to make war, as the big empires have always done," he said.
"But since we cannot wage the third world war, we make regional wars.
"And what does that mean? That we make and sell arms. And with that the balance sheets of the idolatrous economies - the big world economies that sacrifice man at the feet of the idol of money - are obviously cleaned up."
Pope Francis says there is enough food to feed all the world's hungry.
"When you see photographs of malnourished children you put your head in your hands, you cannot understand it," he said.
"I think we are in a global economic system that is not good."
The Pope says the people's needs should be at the heart of the economic system.
"But we have placed money in the centre, the god of money. We have fallen into the sin of idolatry, the idolatry of money. The economy moves by the desire to have more and paradoxically it feeds a disposable culture," he said.
The pontiff said the young were discarded when "the birth rate is limited" and the old were discarded when they no longer were considered productive.
"By discarding children and the old, we discard the future of a people because the young will pull us strongly forward and the old will give us wisdom," he said.
AFP
The World Cup and Ramadan
The stifling Brazil heat has already ensured there will be drink intervals at the World Cup, yet several footballers could also be affected by Ramadan, the Islamic period of worship, during the finals when the contest enters the knockout phase. For more please go to this link
Threatened animals from the Book of Genesis
The EPA recently announced its most aggressive plan ever
to reduce carbon dioxide emissions in the United States: 30% by 2030.
Cutting the poisonous greenhouse gas is the first of three objectives outlined in
Obama's Climate Action Plan (CAP)
and forms part of what Obama calls
"a moral obligation to leave our children a planet that's not polluted."
According to The Nature Conservancy, if climate change continues at its current rate,
a quarter of the earth's species could be extinct by the year 2015.
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