At Yale, A Call For Christians, Muslims To Be At Peace by ARIELLE LEVIN BECKER Courant Staff WriterJuly 31, 2008NEW HAVEN —
The Rev. Robert H. Schuller, a California pastor and host of television’s “Hour of Power,” reaches 20 million Christian followers around the world. Sheik Al-Habib Ali Al-Jifri ranks among the 10 most popular Muslim preachers worldwide, with followers in the United States, Indonesia, Malaysia and across the Arab world.
On Wednesday, they shared a pulpit and a message: Muslims and Christians must come together and embrace their similarities. Loving God requires loving people, no matter their faith. And religion must be reclaimed from those who use it to divide people, or worse.
Let’s focus on what God wants us to do, to build, to redeem,” Schuller told the audience of Muslim and Christian scholars and religious leaders from around the world who gathered at Yale for a conference that organizers described as a seminal moment in interfaith relations.
The conference grew out of a 2007 open letter, “A Common Word Between Us and You,” signed by 138 Islamic scholars and clerics worldwide.
Editor’s note: The Christianity Today blog highlights the following:
Some 500 Christian leaders signed the document, including pastors Bill Hybels and Rick Warren, missions expert Jonathan J. Bonk, National Association of Evangelicals’ president Leith Anderson, theologian John Stott, and CT editor in chief David Neff.
See related articles: Common Ground: Conciliation with a Lie ,Islam and Christianity: The Deity of Christ , Islam: That Old Obstacle by J.Gresham Machen , Begging forgiveness of Islam? , Common Ground: Conciliation with a Lie , Rick Warren, Evangelicals, Invite Muslims to Love God Together** , Provoking The God of Jealousy
Here's more on Warren's pursuit of interfaith unity.
HT: Christian Research Network
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Come together
ReplyDeleteIt occurs to me, as i run through some of my "blog" neighborhoods, that there is an overly keen interest in righting the others perception, when we relly can recognize quite easily that we our sleves cannot possibly see the whole truth for what it is.
I like to remember the blind men gathered all around the elephant: all had a partial truth as to the true nature of the creature, but none had the whole truth.
And of course, I recognize that I am here also, sharing my partial truth about the matters at hand. The truth that only i possess is that I shall not deliberately exclude another's philosophy, and wage violence or judgment upon him, lest that manner of ideals lends it self to disrupting the peace of the whole, which i participate in.
We have more in common with the faiths of the world than our ego customarily allows, and we do not have to bow to any other, simply recognize the goodness and commonality of what exists in peaceful relations and make that goal our practice.
http://peacebwitu.blogspot.com/