c. 2005 Religion News Service
Religious Groups Cite `Moral Duty’ of U.S. to Stop Darfur Genocide
WASHINGTON (RNS) Religious groups on Wednesday (Sept. 21) stepped up pressure on the Bush administration and Congress to help end the genocide in Sudan’s Darfur region, saying the United States has a “moral duty” to intervene.
The Save Darfur Coalition, an alliance of 134 religious and humanitarian groups, said Washington must provide increased aid to African Union troops who are on the ground in Darfur and impose economic sanctions on the Sudanese government in Khartoum.
Leaders met with Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick and members of Congress and delivered a letter to President Bush as part of the “National Day of Action for the People of Sudan.”
“The United States has a moral duty to lead the world to stop the slaughter of innocent civilians in Darfur,” said the Rev. Richard Cizik, vice president of government affairs for the National Association of Evangelicals.
“But we didn’t just say, `Do something.’ We proposed specific steps to resolve this horrific humanitarian crisis that is killing one Darfurian civilian every four minutes.”
Government-backed Arab militias have killed some 400,000 black Africans in Sudan’s western Darfur region since 2003, according to the United Nations. There are an estimated 2.5 million refugees in Sudan and neighboring Chad, and 3.5 million are facing starvation.
The Sudan crisis has garnered widespread attention from religious groups. Many praised Bush’s actions in Sudan but said more remains to be done. They also urged Congress to pass the Darfur Peace and Accountability Act, which would increase aid to African Union troops and push the U.N. Security Council to support greater involvement in the area.
In a separate statement, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops joined calls for action in Sudan.
“We cannot stand idly by while human life is threatened,” said Bishop John Ricard of Pensacola-Tallahassee, Fla., chairman of the bishops’ international policy committee.
Other groups involved in the Save Darfur coalition include the National Council of Churches, the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, the Unitarian Universalist Association and American Jewish World Service.
“Sixty years ago, after the Holocaust, the world vowed `never again,”’ read a full-page ad in The New York Times placed by American Jewish World Service. “That pledge was repeated after the genocide in Rwanda in 1994. We cannot wait any longer to make good on our promises.”
_ Kevin Eckstrom
Evangelical, Jewish Leaders Oppose Changing Endangered Species Act
(RNS) Evangelical and Jewish leaders are joining forces through a newly announced “Noah Alliance” to defend the Endangered Species Act from efforts they say will weaken it.
In a teleconference with reporters Wednesday (Sept. 21), members of the new alliance, which includes scientists and clergy, declared that their concern for creation is both scientifically and biblically based.
“The protection of endangered species has been a long-standing concern for scientists, conservation groups and wildlife agencies,” said Calvin DeWitt, president of the Academy of Evangelical Scientists and Ethicists and professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“And we are here to state today emphatically that protection of God’s creatures, especially at-risk species, also is a profoundly religious issue.”
DeWitt’s academy includes almost 70 members who recently signed a statement on the “Critical Importance of Conserving Endangered Species” and who represent a range of denominations and teach at colleges across the country.
Rabbi Dan Ehrenkrantz, president of the Wyncote, Pa.-based Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, said the nation’s policy-makers should protect the act, signed into law in 1973, and consider religious wisdom along with scientific research.
“It is, quite simply put, that we should not destroy what we cannot create,” said Ehrenkrantz, a signatory on a September statement from almost 70 rabbis and scientists. That statement, drafted by the Coalition on the Environment and Jewish Life, was titled “The Entirety of Creation: A Jewish Call to Protect the Endangered Species Act.”
The new Noah Alliance has developed newspaper, radio and television ads. Some members have planned meetings with congressional representatives to discuss the issue.
On Tuesday (Sept. 20), several House members introduced the Threatened and Endangered Species Recovery Act, which they said will fix long-standing problems with the Endangered Species Act, such as “rampant litigation” and bureaucracy.
“Without meaningful improvements, the ESA will remain a failed managed-care program that checks species in but never checks them out,” said Rep. Richard Pombo, R-Calif., the chairman of the House Resources Committee, in a statement.
_ Adelle M. Banks
Vatican Denies Harboring General Indicted for Balkan War Crimes
VATICAN CITY (RNS) The Vatican has denied that Roman Catholic monasteries in Croatia are harboring a Croatian general indicted for war crimes in the Balkans.
Vatican spokesman Joaquin Navarro-Valls made the denial Tuesday (Sept. 20) after Carla Del Ponte, the chief prosecutor for the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, told the Daily Telegraph of Britain that a Catholic monastery was providing refuge to Gen. Ante Gotovina, Croatia’s most wanted war criminal.
Gotovina was allegedly behind the deaths of more than 150 Serbs and forced tens of thousands to flee the Balkans during the Croat-Serbian civil war, which ended in 1995.
“I have taken this up with the Vatican and the Vatican totally refuses to cooperate with us,” the Daily Telegraph quoted Del Ponte as saying. “The Catholic Church is protecting him.”
Responding to the accusations, Navarro-Valls issued a statement noting that prior investigations into Gotovina’s whereabouts had “yielded negative results.”
Navarro-Valls said that Archbishop Giovanni Lajolo, the papal foreign minister, met with Del Ponte and asked her to produce evidence that substantiated her suspicions, but received no reply.
“Archbishop Lajolo’s request has not yet received any response from Ms. Del Ponte,” the statement said.
In her interview with the Daily Telegraph, Del Ponte said she was making her accusations public because she believed the Vatican refused to cooperate with her investigation. The Vatican could locate Gotovina in one of Croatia’s monasteries “in a few days,” Del Ponte told the newspaper.
According to the Vatican statement, Lajolo told Del Ponte his department is “not an organ of the Holy See that can collaborate institutionally with the tribunals.”
Gotovina is the highest-ranking official sought by the tribunal. In Croatia, a predominantly Roman Catholic country, Gotovina is considered a national hero for his role in expelling Orthodox Serbs from Croatian borders. He has been in hiding since 2001.
_ Stacy Meichtry
New Religion Opposing Moral Certainty Gets Executive Director
(RNS) An upstart religion called Universism has named a new leader who hopes to spread the neo-Deist movement nationwide.
Todd Stricker, 25, has been named executive director of the nonprofit organization and said he hopes to launch a new branch in Chicago.
University of Alabama-Birmingham medical student Ford Vox started Universism in 2003, saying that Christianity, Islam and to a lesser extent other world religions are harmful because they attempt to impose their own version of moral certainty on others.
Through the Internet, Universism has recruited 8,000 atheists, deists, freethinkers and others who rally around the notion that no universal religious truth exists and that the meaning of existence must be determined by each individual.
Stricker said he met Vox when they both showed up at an opposition rally to support the removal of a granite monument of the Ten Commandments placed in the state judicial building by former Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore.
“I met him in Montgomery at a protest of the Roy Moore rally,” Stricker said. “He was holding a sign that said `Osama Bin Laden hates the separation of church and state.”’
They immediately hit it off.
Stricker wants Universism to be the basis of civic activism and benevolence, like a church with social outreach and activities, but without the dogma.
Born and raised in Chicago, Stricker said he has been working full-time since he was 17. He works as a project manager for a woodworking company in Moody, Ala. But he plans to return to Chicago and base Universism there.
“I like the idea of making Chicago our base of operations,” said Vox, who plans to graduate medical school and begin his residency next year. “We’ll be more of a national force from that location.”
Other Universist groups have popped up in various cities, sponsoring showings of documentaries and panel discussions.
But Russell Moore, dean of theology at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, said Universism faces an uphill battle.
“Church is a community united around a common storyline and revelation,” Moore said. “It’s hard to mimic that sense of community without the storyline and revelation.”
_ Greg Garrison
Quote of the Day: Wall Street Journal columnist Manuel Miranda
(RNS) “How insulting. How offensive. How invidiously ignorant to question someone like Judge Roberts with such apparent presumption and disdain for the religion he practices. The JFK question is not just the camel’s nose of religious intolerance; it is the whole smelly camel.”
_ Columnist Manuel Miranda, in an editorial appearing on http://www.Opinion-Journal.com. Miranda compared the religious questioning in Senate hearings on Supreme Court nominee John Roberts to the grilling 1960 presidential candidate John F. Kennedy faced about Catholicism’s impact on his decisions.
MO/PH END RNS
