You may remember the Rev. Ann Holmes Redding, the Episcopal priest who converted to Islam but continued to maintain that she was a legitimate Christian minister. (I wrote about it here, here, here, here, and here.) Well, on March 31 she will be deposed from the priesthood if she doesn’t recant her Islamic faith, but before then she is getting some assistance from Morehouse Publishing, an Episcopal Church imprimatur, which is publishing her new work of evangelism. According to the blurb at ChurchPublishing.org:
An introduction to the major themes and passages of the holy book of Islam, this book invites readers of any religion—or none—to meditate on verses of the Quran as support for spiritual practices and growth. It guides the reader through the rich tapestry of the Quran, weaving through a number of themes, including the mystery of God, surrender to the divine will, and provisions for the spiritual journey. Quranic verses are supplemented by sayings of the Prophet Muhammad, the words of Rumi and other Sufi poets, and relevant quotations and insights from Jewish and Christian sources. The book also offers practical suggestions for expanding and strengthening one’s spiritual sinews.
The $30 paperback (!) is co-written by a trio of authors, who are described thus:
Jamal Rahman is a Muslim Sufi minister who teaches on the adjunct faculty at Seattle University. Author of The Fragrance of Faith: The Enlightened Heart of Islam, he is also a co-host on “Interfaith Talk Radio,” speaker, and retreat leader.
Kathleen Schmitt Elias, a former nun, is a Gregorian chanter, Jew by choice, meditation leader,and professional editor. She also lives in Seattle.
Ann Holmes Redding, PhD, is a professor of Christian scripture, preacher, speaker, and retreat leader, based in Seattle.
So we have one Muslim, one Christian whose apostasy led her to Judaism, and one Christian apostate to Islam whose apostasy is apparently too ticklish a subject to be mentioned on the book’s sale site.
Redding’s former employer, St Mark’s Cathedral in Seattle, gives some publicity in its newsletter to an event celebrating the publication of the book:
Please join in the celebration of the publication of Out of Darkness Into Light: Spiritual Guidance in the Quran with Reflections from Jewish and Christian Sources, co-authored by The Rev. Ann Holmes-Redding, Jamal Rahman and Kate Elias. The evening will also observe the 25th anniversary of Ann’s ordination to the priesthood in the Episcopal Church and her movement into the next phase of ministry as both Christian and Muslim.
“Next phase of ministry”? Not as a Christian. A Unitarian, perhaps. Or maybe she’s about to be ordained as an imam.
(Via T19.)
Worship resources to address torture during Lent
–From Swords into Plowshares, the blog of the Presbyterian Peacemaking Program; further investigation revealed this to not be a post about fasting
The World Council of Churches is convening its fourth “World Week for Peace in Palestine Israel” (an otherwise unknown entity apparently created specifically for this event) in June. The United Methodist General Board of Church and Society, a hotbed of anti-Israel sentiment, is promoting it with this:
The week began as a way to demonstrate to governments that churches worldwide are watching the occupation, deeply concerned at its consequences and acting together for peace. The week is anchored in the Palestinian Christian community and built by participants around the world as a common international public witness.
Participants are requested to plan their activities around these points:
- Pray with churches living under occupation, using a special prayer from Jerusalem.
- Educate about actions that make for peace and about facts on the ground that do not, especially, settlements in occupied territory.
- Advocate with political leaders using ecumenical policies that promote peace with justice.
Evidently it is unworthy of mention that among the actions that do not make for peace are suicide bombings, random shelling of civilian areas, anti-Semitic propaganda, continual incitement to violence against Jews in Palestinian media and educational materials, etc. It is also apparently unnecessary to mention that there are no settlements in Gaza, from whence most of the violence directed at Israel has come in the last three years.
The week calls participants to seek justice for Palestinians so that both Israelis and Palestinians can finally live in peace.
Justice for Israelis is apparently not necessary for the two sides to bury the hatchet.
It is now more than 60 years since the partition of Palestine hardened into a permanent nightmare for Palestinians, the WCC emphasizes.
Which would never have happened had the Arabs accepted the original United Nations plan to set up two state in the region and invaded Israel with the goal of driving the Jews into the sea. But mentioning this inconvenient fact would undercut the narrative that it is only about justice for one side, that only one side has taken aggressive military action, and that only one side has suffered over the last 60+ years.
“It’s more than 40 years since the occupation of East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza overwhelmed the peaceful vision of one land, two peoples,” WCC points out, adding “Yet the dream of one nation cannot be fulfilled at the expense of another.”
The blindness demonstrated by a statement like this is so extraordinary that I can only conclude that it is willful. Does the WCC really think that “the peaceful vision of one land, two peoples” was only “overwhelmed” in 1967? Did the 1948 invasion of Israel just not happen in the dimension that Geneva inhabits? Did the invasion preparations that were underway in 1967 that were only stopped by Israel’s pre-emptive action not happen in that dimension, either? And was the Yom Kippur war, launched with the express purpose of destroying Israel, a figment of the rest of our imaginations as well? Did Qiryat Shemona and Ma’alot and the Cave of the Patriarchs and all the other mass killings of Israeli civilians and other innocent bystanders just fail to register with the bureaucrats of the WCC, or are those lives and that violence inconsequential, and only the results of the Six Day War of any account?
There are times when my disgust with the politics of the World Council of Churches and its American mainline colleagues just makes me ill. This is one of them.
The Reformed Pastor 