The flag of Pakistan, showing the Muslim star and crescent, as well as the color green (which has special significance in Islam)

Below are my presentation and handout from the Islam sections of my World Religions class.  Last night, we finished our coverage of Islam and began looking at Judaism.

Reminder: there will be no class next week (March 24) because I’ll be out of town.  We’ll resume class on March 31 by looking at contemporary issues in Judaism and beginning our look at Hinduism.

Helpful Links

Handbook on Islam: Don Tingle, who many at Lakeside know, has written a handbook on Islam for US military personnel. You can download the entire handbook from his website. You can also read an article about Don’s work from the Christian Standard.

Muslim Followers of Jesus? Although their presence isn’t widely acknowledged in the mainstream press, there are millions of people worldwide who claim to be Muslim followers of Jesus (who is called Isa in Arabic).  Christianity Today recently looked at this phenomenon, and also devoted an article to it in 2007.

Using the Koran to Preach the Gospel? The CAMEL Method uses the Koran to introduce Muslims to Jesus.  Last week, the New York Times examined critics and supporters of this method.

Download the handout and view the presentation by clicking “Read More.”

Handout

Download my 2-page Fact Sheet on Islam (PDF, 63 KB).

Presentation

Below is my Keynote presentation from the class.  It doesn’t include any notes or commentary, but it might help trigger your memory. If nothing else, it will show you some beautiful photos of Islam around the world.

Ehrman told Gross that he no longer considers the Bible to be the Word of God, but that he considers several of its authors to be “religious geniuses” — he explicitly included Paul and the writers of the four Gospels in this group of “geniuses.”

That’s interesting, isn’t it? Here you have 4 Jews and a Gentile, living and writing on the marginal fringes of the greatest empire in the world. Only in retrospective do we consider Israel and Jerusalem to have been an important part of the world. At the time, it was a minor province that, while occasionally troublesome, could be routinely put down by Roman force. Two of them (Paul and Luke) were well-educated by the standards of their day, but consider the others: John, a village fisherman; Matthew, a minor government official; Mark, whose “education” consisted of a series of missionary trips with Peter, Barnabas, and Paul.

According to Ehrman’s view of the Bible, there was nothing inherently special about the Jewish traditions they received. According to Ehrman, Jesus never rose from the dead, so Matthew and John might have known him and his teachings, but Mark, Paul, and Luke were all working from hearsay and secondhand stories. Not that his teaching counted for much: Ehrman’s new book makes the argument that Jesus was deluded. Would you trust your children’s education to the deluded followers of a deluded teacher?

And yet…

How do we account for this sudden explosion of religious genius? It’s as if Gandhi, MLK, Billy Graham, and the Dalai Lama all went to the same kindergarten.

Wouldn’t you want to know who they had as their teacher?

Each week, I’ll post some additional resources online, as well as the notes and slides from the class. For Christianity, here are a few good resources:

• GetReligion.org follows media coverage of all religions. It’s a great place to see critical assessments of how well the media covers various religions, as well as to learn a lot more about different religions.
• Christianity Today’s news page collects Christianity-related news from across the Internet. CT also has a Christian History page that collects articles about Christian history, as well as important events. By utter coincidence, today is the day when Alexander Campbell, one of the founders of the Restoration Movement, died in 1866.
• The official website of the Orthodox Church in America is a great place to learn more about the 2nd largest Christian communion in the world.

Are there any other resources you are looking for? Resources from last night’s class can be found by clicking “Read more.”

Resources from Class

Last night’s handout can be downloaded as a PDF.

The history of religion film from Maps of War is below. As I mentioned in class, this is a great film, with a couple of disclaimers:

• It only shows the “Big Five” religions (Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism) while ignoring many other historically important religions.
• Don’t imagine that the gray areas didn’t have religion. Religion has always been an integral part of human culture.
• It probably can’t be helped, but it would be nice to have some greater detail. For example, Christianity and Buddhism both look very, very different in different parts of the world, and major minority religions can’t be shown in this format.

Last night’s presentation:

Next week, we’ll be looking at Islam. It should be great!

If you are interested, feel free to join us, and let others know, too. I’ll be posting updates and helpful links about each of the religions that we cover. You can also drop in at any time. This ain’t college, you know.

Emergent Man

Ah, yes, another article proclaiming that smart people are liberal. Elizabeth Landau of CNN reports on a soon-to-be-published article by evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa that claims higher IQ is associated liberal politics and religion, as well as “sexual exclusivity” (a.k.a. monogamy).

I haven’t seen the article (it’s not available yet), but there are a couple of problems with the simple equation “smart = liberal.” First, notice how “liberal” is defined:

The study takes the American view of liberal vs. conservative. It defines “liberal” in terms of concern for genetically nonrelated people and support for private resources that help those people. It does not look at other factors that play into American political beliefs, such as abortion, gun control and gay rights.

Strange definition. In America, conservatives favor the use of private resources to help people. As far as the “genetically nonrelated” issue, I have no idea what that’s supposed to mean. Part of the problem here – as with most discussions of liberalism and conservatism – is that the terms can mean many different things.

Also, check out this paragraph from higher up in the article:

The reasoning is that sexual exclusivity in men, liberalism and atheism all go against what would be expected given humans’ evolutionary past. In other words, none of these traits would have benefited our early human ancestors, but higher intelligence may be associated with them.

How you ever met a man who strongly rejects “sexual exclusivity”? How is he doing with that, family-wise? How are his children doing? Are women anxious to bear his children? In every article I’ve read about evolutionary psychology, there comes a moment when the claims jump from evidence-based to assumption-based

Another scholar quoted in the piece might be onto something.

“The adoption of some evolutionarily novel ideas makes some sense in terms of moving the species forward,” said George Washington University leadership professor James Bailey, who was not involved in the study. “It also makes perfect sense that more intelligent people — people with, sort of, more intellectual firepower — are likely to be the ones to do that.”

So, here’s a question: if the US is headed toward greater secularism and lower rates of religious faith^[*], then will we one day see a future in which the intellectual elites embrace religion as a way of standing out from the crowd?

By the way, Kanazawa has a way himself of standing out from the crowd with his choices of research topics. He seems to be a pretty shrewd academic when it comes to getting publicity.

TIME’s John Cloud also reports on the study, but I have only skimmed his article. I receive TIME in the mail, and I have a pet peeve about seeing articles online before they’re available to subscribers of the printed copy.

There is nothing wrong with using Wikipedia to get a quick sense of a subject and to lead you to more reliable sources. Encyclopedias, survey-level textbooks, desk references, and similar resources have been used the same way for generations. If you are trying to nail down some definitive piece of information, then you should never settle for Wikipedia. As your starting point, however, I think there are few options that are much better.

For that matter, Wikipedia is an excellent resources for certain subjects, such as:

• Controversial subjects that many people, with many different perspectives, care a great deal about. Theology is a great example. If Catholics, Calvinists, Wesleyans, Orthodox, and even Swedenborgians can come up with an article on justification that they all more or less accept, I bet that’s going to be a pretty decent article.
• Obscure pop culture facts, like alternate versions of the comic book character Nightcrawler.
• People you are encountering for the first time, and need to get a quick triangulation on them, like Emanuel Swedenborg.

I use Wikipedia everyday, and there’s nothing wrong with it. If Wikipedia is your only source of information, then there’s something wrong with you, but don’t blame Wikipedia.

Byron Borger at Jubilee 2009

I spent the weekend at Jubilee, the annual student conference of the Coalition for Christian Outreach. Jubilee has a great reputation for emphasizing the theology of vocation – a reputation which was confirmed, by the way – but I didn’t expect the high level of fun generated by the conference. Saturday evening featured a hilarious (and moving) monologue from actress and writing Susan Isaacs (author of Angry Conversations with God) and a can’t-possibly-be-true-except-he-brought-pictures talk from Bob Goff, president of Restore International and good friend of Don Miller.

Photo: Byron Borger at last year’s Jubilee, but he looked basically the same this year. From livingjubilee via Flickr. Click for a larger image.

Occasionally, these streams of fun and vocation combined, such as the first night. In quick succession, seven speakers presented pecha kucha, a speed-presentation format of 20 slides, changing automatically every 20 seconds, whether the speaker is ready or not. The pecha kucha presenters included:

• David Greusel, an architect speaking on the connection between architecture and faith, especially what he called “the lie” that “secular work” doesn’t matter in God’s kingdom on earth (Greusel was the lead designer of Pittsburgh’s PNC Park).
• Gideon Strauss, President of the Center for Public Justice, who testified to the application of Isaiah 58 in our current society.
• Leroy Barber, president of Mission Year, speaking about Green My Hood, a program which identifies the abuse of the environment in poor urban neighborhoods and looks for ways to bring good creation stewardship into the inner city.
• Good friend of ESN Byron Borger of Hearts & Minds Books, who said that “part of this conference is learning to read deeply,” and reminded us that the word “disciple” means “student.”

As Benson Hines (who was also there) said on Twitter,

Lord, let me be as passionate about my calling as Byron Borger is about his.

More about Jubilee and some upcoming articles after the jump

I took advantage of the gathering of so many good Christian thinkers to conduct a few short interviews, which will appear on the ESN blog over the next week or two. I interviewed:

• David Naugle, professor of philosophy at Dallas Baptist University and author of (most recently) Reordered Love, Reordered Lives: The Deep Meaning of Happiness. If you are anywhere near Dallas, you MUST check out David’ incredible line-up of speakers for Dallas Baptist University’s Friday Symposium series.
• Derek Melleby, director of the College Transition Initiative at the Center for Parent and Youth Understanding, and author of The Outrageous Idea of Academic Faithfulness
• Jimmy Lin, an ESN member and “medical and scientific doxologist” pursuing an MD/PhD at Johns Hopkins

I ran out of time over the weekend, but I also plan to interview Alissa Wilkinson, editor of The Curator, assistant editor of Comment, and lecturer at The King’s College. There might be a few more interviews coming out of the weekend, too.

Speaking of Comment: this is a terrific publication from the Canadian think tank Cardus. Comment’s concerns overlap greatly with ESN’s, and I spent a very enjoyable evening in conversation with several Cardus staff about our common interest in raising the bar of Christian dialogue about culture.

Sunday morning, I hosted a breakfast for students interested in graduate school or anyone interested in ESN. We had a great turnout, especially for 7:30am on the final day of a conference! Fourteen in total, ranging from undergraduates still discerning God’s call to doctoral students to para-academic ministries like the Chesterton House and the Christian Studies Center at UK. You can expect to hear a lot more about these in the next few weeks.

Videos from last year’s Jubilee can be seen here, and I’m sure that new videos will be posted just as soon as Scott Calgaro and Chris Carson recover from this exciting – and exhausting – weekend.

Where: Lakeside Christian Church, Lakeside Park, KY (directions)
Dates: March 3 through May 5 (no class March 24 or April 28)
Time: 6:30pm to 8pm

We’ll be covering the history, beliefs, and practices of major world religions and new religious movements, including:

• Christianity
• Judaism
• Islam
• Hinduism
• Buddhism
• Mormonism
• Wicca
• Scientology

…with a few more thrown in just to be safe. The class will include time for discussion and coverage of the current state of each religion in the world and the U.S.

I hope you can make it!

Photo: Buddhist Temple in Bangkok, Thailand, by Stuck in Customs via Flickr

“Each academic discipline raises different questions for (Christians who are involved in those disciplines),” he explained. “I’ll be talking about some of the issues I’ve struggled with as a Christian and as a sociologist (and about) the ways that I, as a Christian, can teach sociology.” He added that he will focus on ways that individuals can work through issues such as the ones he experienced.

Pray for Tom as he finishes organizing this event. Pray, too, for the students, faculty, and church members who will attend the event and for Donald Kraybill as he prepares his talk.

Also, read Tom’s latest post on the ESN blog, What are you picking up for Lent? We’re used to the idea of giving up something to grow closer to God, whether for Lent or some other reason, but what about adding something to our lives?

In InterVarsity and many other Christian organizations, we’re used to thinking of Christians as a minority – even a persecuted minority – within the academy, particularly at the more prestigious universities. For example, responding to a common question asked by many faculty and graduate students, we recently published an essay by Ken Elzinga of the University of Virginia titled “Being Open About My Faith Without Turning People Off.” There is another way of looking at Christianity in the university, however.

Photo credit: Interfaith chaplaincy banner at Nichols College, by Svadilfari via Flickr. Click for larger image.

Last week, my friend Julie forwarded me a link to Tricia Seifert’s article, “Understanding Christian Privilege: Managing the Tensions of Spiritual Plurality” (PDF). Comparing “Christian privilege” to the more commonly used terms male privilege and white privilege, Seifert identifies several areas of university life in which structure or assumptions favor Christianity over other religions, such as:

• the academic calendar, which includes breaks for Christmas and sometimes Easter, but not High Holy Days, Ramadan, or other religious festivals
• meal plans, which often don’t take into account the dietary needs of non-Christian students
• at private colleges, chapel space, which, even if open to non-Christian use, is usually filled with Christian imagery (see this story about the recent creation of a Pagan worship space at the Air Force Academy)
• nondenominational, but Christian “flavored,” prayer at graduation ceremonies and athletic events

Seifert offers some practical advice for addressing Christian privilege, and also suggests that Christian privilege affects the learning community:

The responsibility of educating the whole student includes creating a community in which all students feel safe to practice and share their spiritual beliefs and supported in learning about the spiritual beliefs of others. To create such a community, educators need to help students develop the ability and willingness to question educational practices and programs that privilege the spiritual identity development of one group over others. Students have made great strides in questioning other forms of privilege, such as male privilege and white privilege. The changing demographics of our college and university campuses and their increasing spiritual plurality necessitate a commitment to helping the campus community recognize and confront Christian privilege in the same way that it has confronted other forms of privilege.

Take a few minutes to read Seifert’s article (it’s about 6 pages) and consider what you think about the idea of Christian privilege.

Some questions for discussion:

How would you respond to Seifert’s article?

Do you agree that there is Christian privilege within the academy? Why or why not?

How do you think religious plurality affects the campus learning community?

How can Christians best contribute to the religiously diverse community at secular universities?