The author T.M. Luhrmann, writes in NYT that evangelical Christians are on the rise because their relationship to God is as a Companion who can help them to go through difficult times, and not to look for explanation of why tragedy happen to them. Tragedies can be explained in many ways in this knowledge based scientific society, but evangelical believe God can help to heal these tragic wounds (F.Sheikh).

Some excerpts;

“Like many secular observers, I was interested in the fact that people like me seemed to experience reality in a fundamentally different manner. I soon came to realize that one of the most important features of these churches is that they offer a powerful way to deal with anxiety and distress, not because of what people believe but because of what they do when they pray.”

“One way to see this is that the books teaching someone how to pray read a lot like cognitive behavior therapy manuals. For instance, the Rev. Rick Warren’s “The Purpose Driven Life,” one of the best-selling books of all time, teaches you to identify your self-critical, self-demeaning thoughts, to interrupt them and recognize them as mistaken, and to replace them with different thoughts.”

“It’s just like talking to a therapist,” one woman told me, “especially in the beginning, when you’re revealing things that are deep in your heart and deep in your soul, the things that have been pushed down and denied.”

“The churches I studied resisted turning to God for an explanation of tragedy. They asked only that people turn to God for help in dealing with the pain.”

“This approach to the age-old problem of theodicy is not really available to mainstream Protestants and Catholics, who do not imagine a God so intimate, so loving, so much like a person. That may help to explain why it is evangelical Christianity that has grown so much in the last 40 years.”

It can seem puzzling that evangelical Christians sidestep the apparent contradiction of why bad things happen to good people. But for them, God is a relationship, not an explanation.

This may seem theologically simple-minded — indeed, even some evangelical Christians find it so. But there are lots of ways to explain things in this sophisticated, scientifically aware society. What churches like these offer is a way of dealing with unhappiness. Tragedy, and prayers that apparently go unanswered, can actually strengthen believers’ sense of a bond with God. That’s when they feel that they most need Him. Click link below for full article;

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/14/opinion/sunday/luhrmann-when-god-is-your-therapist.html?hp

( Shared by Nasik Elahi)

By Naomi Schaefer Riley

When it comes to intermarriage, Muslims are becoming the new Jews.

About a century ago, when hundreds of thousands of Jews were immigrating to the United States, only about 1 percent, by some estimates, married non-Jews. Now, about30 percent of Jews are married to someone outside the faith. American Muslims are going through a similar transition, one that could profoundly change the Muslim experience in the United States. Click below to read full article;

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/american-muslims-are-following-jews-when-it-comes-to-intermarriage/2013/04/12/1c23d352-97bf-11e2-b68f-dc5c4b47e519_story.html?hpid=z2

An interesting review by Seamus O’Mahony  on Hitchens’s Book, Mortality, a collection of articles he wrote for Vanity Fair after he was diagnosed with cancer of esophagus. A person who spent his whole life, and became famous, for arguing for reason, depended more on hope than on statistics and reason when faced with mortality. (F. Sheikh)

Some excerpts from the review;

“I am intrigued by Mortality for one main reason, which is this: Hitchens’s beliefs about his advanced cancer and its treatment were, for a man whose fame rested on his scepticism, uncharacteristically optimistic. I hesitate to use the word delusional, as he admitted that he would be very lucky to survive, but he clearly steadfastly hoped, right to the end, that his particular case of advanced cancer might lie on the sparsely populated right side of the bell-shaped curve of outcome statistics. He famously mocked religious folk for their faith in supernatural entities and survival of the soul after bodily death, yet the views expressed inMortality are just as wishful and magical. “The oncology bargain [oncology is that branch of medicine which deals with the treatment of cancer],” writes Hitchens, “is that in return for at least the chance of a few more useful years, you agree to submit to chemotherapy and then, if you are lucky with that, to radiation or even surgery.” Years? I must now confess to a professional interest. I am a gastroenterologist in a large acute hospital, and I have diagnosed many patients with oesophageal cancer. “Years” is a word not generally used when discussing prognosis in Stage Four oesophageal cancer, “months”, in my experience, being a more useful one.”

“An American physician, Ken Murray, wrote a piece called “How Doctors Die”, just a few weeks before Christopher Hitchens died in 2011:

Years ago, Charlie, a highly respected orthopedist and a mentor of mine, found a lump in his stomach. He had a surgeon explore the area, and the diagnosis was pancreatic cancer. This surgeon was one of the best in the country. He had even invented a new procedure for this exact cancer that could triple a patient’s five-year survival odds – from 5 percent to 15 percent – albeit with a poor quality of life. Charlie was uninterested. He went home the next day, closed his practice, and never set foot in a hospital again. He focused on spending time with family and feeling as good as possible. Several months later, he died at home. He got no chemotherapy, radiation, or surgical treatment. Medicare didn’t spend much on him.
It’s not a frequent topic of discussion, but doctors die, too. And they don’t die like the rest of us. What’s unusual about them is not how much treatment they get compared to most Americans, but how little. For all the time they spend fending off the deaths of others, they tend to be fairly serene when faced with death themselves. They know exactly what is going to happen, they know the choices, and they generally have access to any sort of medical care they could want. But they go gently.”

Concluding paragraph:

“We should be wary of mocking beliefs which we do not share. One man’s delusion and folly is another’s “radical, childlike hope”. As news of Hitchens’s cancer diagnosis first became widely known, evangelical Christians speculated on the internet about whether his illness would lead to a religious conversion. In Mortality, Hitchens scoffs at the notion. But in his time of “living dyingly”, he did find a kind of faith. This was not a return to the Anglicanism of his upbringing, or the Judaism of his mother’s family. Hitchens, the arch-mocker, the über-rationalist, the debunker of myth, found solace and consolation in the contemporary rites of genetics and oncology. Reviewing Arguably (Hitchens’s final prose collection), the philosopher John Gray observed: “That Hitchens has the mind of a believer has not been sufficiently appreciated.”

Click link below to read full article:

http://www.drb.ie/essays/the-big-d

(Shared By Tahir Mahmood)

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