TruthBook Religious News Blog

New Nationwide Survey Reveals Personal Actions Are More Effective than Government Stimulus

HUNTINGTON, Ind., May 4 /Christian Newswire/ --

As our nation's economic crisis persists and families are brought to the brink with layoffs and foreclosures, more than two-thirds (70%) of U.S. adults believe that strong faith is one of the most important elements in helping a person persevere through the current downturn, and most (61%) believe their personal actions play a more vital role in helping to turn around the economy than the government stimulus plan.

These are just some of the results from a new, nationwide survey conducted during the height of the economic stimulus debate by Harris Interactive® on behalf of Our Sunday Visitor, one of country's largest Catholic publishing companies.

"A great frustration during a time of national crisis can be the sense of impotence, the inability of the individual to make a difference. And yet, looking beyond today's latest installment of dire news, most Americans believe they know what it takes to weather this crisis and that we can even benefit from it, one choice at a time," said Fr. Joseph Langford, author of the new book, Mother Teresa's Secret Fire. "In times like these, it's instructive to recall the message of Mother Teresa, who showed the world that the individual, clinging to the Creator, can endure enormous change and actually become a luminous force during the darkest of times."

Even after her death in 1997, Mother Teresa has continued to be a symbol of the human heart transformed by God's love--and a heart that transformed others. Secret Fire shows us how we all have the same opportunity to be touched and transformed by God, and empowered to share that gift with those around us, making our ordinary lives an extraordinary legacy of goodness.

This article contains an explanation of Mother Teresa's "Secret Fire," as well as more details of the survey. Please click on "external source" to access the complete article.

Labels: crisis, economics, faith, goodness, Harris Interactive, Mother Theresa, Our Sunday Visitor

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Tuesday, August 28, 2007

Einstein's God, or The Hopes for Secular Spirituality

Deepak Chopra
Posted August 27, 2007

It came as a shock when the letters of Mother Teresa, long concealed by the Church, recently came to light. Suddenly it was revealed that this saintly icon -- who is on the way to becoming an official saint -- had anguishing doubts about the existence of God.

Even though she was an outsized personality and a model of immense compassion, Mother Teresa wasn't all that different from ordinary believers who come to the conclusion that God is a myth, perhaps even a fantasy created out of whole cloth. A rash of prominent books by atheists like Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett, and Richard Dawkins have pounded away on the theme of delusion and fraud. Using science as their chief bulwark, they insist that religion serves the purpose of blocking reality. A rational secular society is their ideal, and their fervent hope is that religious yearning will be seen for what it is, a childish, irrational, and ultimately hopeless drive. Everyone can see the result. Neither side, the atheists or the religionists, have won the argument; they've simply become more entrenched in their original position.

All of which brings me to a revelatory chapter in another bestseller, Walter Isaacson's Einstein: His Life and Universe, which dwells on Einstein's view of God more completely than anything I've read before. At first the story of Einstein's spirituality conforms to any other twentieth-century skeptic. As a young man he rejected on logical grounds the literal truth of events recounted in the Old Testament. He moved beyond orthodox faith while struggling personally with his Jewishness. Being a scientist, he could have completed the easy trajectory then and there, ending up where Dawkins is, as a debunker of outworn superstition who saw the light of reason and used science as a weapon to combat the vestiges of belief in God.

Fortunately, Einstein was also a great mind, and his greatness took the form of a wider vision than either the religionists or the atheists who surrounded him. He continued his spiritual journey in a fascinating way. By stages he reconciled faith and science, not by offering a compromise that straddled the fence between these opposites, nor by saying that each side was right in its own sphere. Einstein took the bolder step of trying to understand if a single reality encompasses both drives in human beings, the drive to believe in a higher reality and the drive to explain Nature in terms of laws and processes that operate seemingly independent of God. Time, space, and gravity don't seem to need God at all, yet without God the universe seems random and meaningless. Einstein expressed this dichotomy in a famous saying: "Science without religion is lame. Religion without science is blind."

I'd like to retrace Einstein's lifelong spiritual path because what he was searching for -- and never quite found -- was secular spirituality, and in many ways that is our best hope today. Instead of falling back on traditional religion, which has been shattered by science and the horrors of the twentieth century, or erasing spirituality in favor of stark materialism, secular spirituality looks at the whole of life in a different way. God and reason are allowed not simply to co-exist but to fulfill a single vision. This vision is rooted in consciousness. Either we think like God or he thinks like us. If neither is true, there cannot be a connection between us. Einstein's ultimate goal, he said, was to understand God's mind, and to do that, the human mind must be explained first. After all, our minds are the filter through which we perceive reality, and if that filter is distorted and misunderstood, there's no possibility of grasping God's mind.

Einstein's spiritual ambition was enormous but largely private. However, thanks to his world fame as the most intelligent person alive (true or not), people flocked to hear what he had to say on every great issue, scientific, religious, even political (hence his involvement in Zionism and the development of the atomic bomb). In the next few installments of this post we'll see how he came to terms with a God that was unknown to the Judeo-Christian tradition but was still alive and real. By following a great man's thought processes, we might find a way to escape the deadlock between faith and science ourselves.

(to be continued)

Labels: Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett, Deepak Chopra, God, Mother Theresa, religion, Richard Dawkins, science, Walter Isaacson

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Friday, July 13, 2007

Doing Small Things With Great Love

This short clip of Mother Theresa speaking contains her now-famous advice to do small things, but do them with great love. An inspirational treat!

Labels: love, Mother Theresa, service

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Sunday, July 08, 2007

5Q+1 exclusive: Mother Teresa has been ‘beautified’

Thursday, July 5, 2007

Posted by Douglas LeBlanc

Kim Lawton is managing editor and correspondent for Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly on PBS, where she has worked since 1997. She began her career as a religion writer by covering the fall of PTL’s Jim Bakker in the late 1980s. She has written for United Press International, Religion News Service, News Network International, Christianity Today and International Media Service.

She answered GetReligion’s 5Q+1 with characteristic self-effacing humor.

(1) Where do you get your news about religion?

I monitor AP and Religion News Service every day, along with skimming the highlights from the major papers. (I unabashedly steal news ideas from my fellow members of the Religion Newswriters Association-in the most ethical way, of course.) And I get deluged with news releases and “pitch calls” from religious folks all the time. Many of our viewers offer story suggestions on our website.

I also try to read the news services and publications tied to religious denominations and movements: Catholic News Service, National Catholic Reporter, Christianity Today, Charisma, Christian Century, the Forward, Jewish Weekly, Tricycle, Episcopal News Service, Ecumenical News International, just to name a few. I make an effort to glance at the what-seems-like billions of religion-oriented blogs, but that quickly gets exhausting. The very best way I get news is by keeping plugged into a wide network of people who are plugged into what’s going on in the world of religion. (And sorry, I’m not going to divulge who all is part of that!)

(2) What is the most important religion story right now that you think the mainstream media just do not get?

Sadly, there are many. I don’t think a lot of the reporters covering the conflicts in Iraq and the Middle East fully understand all the religious factors at play there. I also think much of the reporting about faith and politics here in the U.S. is too simplistic. So many political stories just don’t convey the complexity and nuances of the religious dimensions.

(3) What is the story that you will be watching carefully in the next year or two?

I’m watching the seemingly-growing acceptance of religion and religious expression in public life. One of the most interesting manifestations of that right now is the 2008 presidential election season (see answer #2). Then, there’s also the seemingly-growing atheist-secular backlash!

(4) Why is it important for journalists to understand the role of religion in our world today?

Faith has an impact on virtually every area of life. As a religion reporter, I have covered institutional religion, spirituality and worship, but I’ve also covered wars and politics, natural disasters, human rights, philanthropy, music, pop culture, travel, business, and yes, even fashion and sports! If you don’t “get religion,” you don’t fully get virtually all of the best, most compelling stories of our times.

(5) What is the funniest, most ironic twist that you have seen in a religion news story lately?

Funny? It’s not exactly lately, but one of my all time favorites: In reporting on the Vatican beatification ceremony for Mother Teresa, a local news anchor said that she was being “beautified.” It made me want to check the tape for telltale Botox marks.

Ironic? A couple of weeks ago, a coalition of moderate and progressive religious groups held a Washington news conference to release a new poll saying that the mainstream media don’t cover their leaders as much as they cover religious conservatives. (Of course, my program had covered every event and person they cited as examples of how they are ignored. But that’s not my major point of irony.) Two days later, one of the groups wouldn’t let me bring a TV camera into a major event they were sponsoring because they had promised an exclusive to CNN!

And it’s not just the liberals. The following week, I had to push to be allowed to bring a TV camera into the Southern Baptist Convention’s annual meeting . . . even though the meeting was theoretically “open” to the media. And I wasn’t allowed to have a camera in a lunch meeting with Republican candidate Mike Huckabee, even though print reporters were allowed to be there. It’s a two-way street, people. If you want the media to do a good job covering you, you have to let us in to do our jobs!

Bonus: Do you have anything else you want to tell us about religion coverage in the mainstream news media?

Although the basic journalistic principles remain the same, expanding technologies are changing the way we cover religion. Visuals and audio are becoming more important, even in traditional text media. This is actually a strength for coverage of religion.

Bonus Bonus

This is the most fascinating, and at the same time, the most challenging beat in the world (see answer #4)!

Labels: Douglas LeBlanc, journalists, Kim Lawton, Mother Theresa, PBS, religion, world events