c. 2008 Religion News Service
Former British PM Blair to teach religion course at Yale
(RNS) Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair has accepted a one-year appointment at Yale University to participate in a course on the connection between religion and globalization.
Blair’s appointment as Yale’s Howland Distinguished Fellow during the 2008-09 academic year was announced Friday (March 7). Blair served as British prime minister from 1997-2007 and converted from Anglicanism from Roman Catholicism last year. He plans to launch a foundation this year dedicated to improving interfaith relations.
Richard C. Levin, Yale’s president, said: “As the world continues to become increasingly inter-dependent, it is essential that we explore how religious values can be channeled toward reconciliation rather than polarization. Mr. Blair has demonstrated outstanding leadership in these areas.”
Details of the course remain to be worked out; the university said that Blair would work with the faculties of Yale Divinity School and the Yale School of Management.
Blair’s interest in faith set him apart from most other political figures in Great Britain, where public espousal of religious values, common among U.S. political figures, is relatively rare.
The planned Tony Blair Faith Foundation will “promote understanding between the major faiths and increase understanding of the role of faith in the modern world,” according to the Yale announcement. It has already been criticized by some in Great Britain in light of Blair’s support for the Iraq war.
“It is a pity that Mr. Blair did not think more deeply about issues of religious strife before he went and bombed Baghdad,” Ian Gibson, a member of the British Parliament, told a London-based newspaper in 2007. “Now he wants to be vicar to the world? It is ridiculous.”
Blair’s foundation has support from leading British advocates for inter-faith dialogue, including the Rev. Guy Wilkinson, the Church of England’s adviser on interfaith relations, and Sir Sigmund Sternberg, the co-founder of the Three Faiths Forum.
_ Chris Herlinger
Southern Baptists launch initiative on creation care
(RNS) A group of Southern Baptist leaders has launched a new initiative on the environment, saying that their denomination’s past declarations on the issue have been “too timid.”
“We believe our current denominational engagement with these issues have often been too timid, failing to produce a unified moral voice,” reads the initiative’s statement, which was released Monday (March 10). “The time for timidity regarding God’s creation is no more.”
Though SBC President Frank Page is among the initiative’s 45 signatories, officials at the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, the Southern Baptist entity that addresses environmental matters, have not signed the statement.
The four-page document says despite “justified disagreement” about the issue among Christians, there is a biblical mandate for churches to be actively involved in preaching and practicing care for creation.
The Southern Baptist Environment and Climate Initiative has been spearheaded by Jonathan Merritt, a seminary student and the 25-year-old son of former Southern Baptist Convention President James Merritt.
The younger Merritt said he was moved to act after hearing his professor at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest, N.C., compare destroying creation to ripping out a page of the Bible.
He said the new statement is not meant to contradict a nonbinding resolution passed at last year’s meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention, which questioned findings that global warming is primarily human-induced.
“Rather, it is a unique voice that advances our stand on the issue beyond where they’ve been in the past,” he said.
He is encouraging additional Southern Baptists to sign the statement on the initiative’s Web site, baptistcreationcare.org.
Barrett Duke, vice president of the Southern Baptist Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, said the commission discussed the document with Jonathan Merritt but was not comfortable with its final version.
“We didn’t feel that it was appropriate for us to tell Southern Baptists what we thought about how they expressed their opinions,” he said.
_ Adelle M. Banks
Episcopal Divinity School makes deal to cut costs
(RNS) Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Mass., has teamed up with nearby Lesley University in a bid to cut costs, bolster academics and keep the seminary financially viable.
In an agreement announced last week (March 6), EDS will sell seven buildings in its coveted location near Harvard Square to Lesley for $33.5 million.
Administrative synergies are in the works, too. Lesley will deliver some student services for EDS students and provide them with access to some graduate courses. Both schools will share library services.
For EDS, the deal aims in part to provide relief from the costs of maintaining 20 buildings, including some more than 100 years old, on its eight-acre campus. Savings will enable EDS to invest more in academics, such as two new faculty positions approved in the areas of religion and society and early Christian history.
“The partnership with Lesley University is designed to anchor the financial foundation of EDS while releasing our creative energy as never before,” said EDS President and Dean Steven Charleston. Charleston also said he will resign as president and dean on June 30.
For EDS, the announcement marks the culmination of a five-year planning process to find a remedy for the school’s financial challenges. A team of faculty, administrators and trustees explored options such as selling the campus and moving to a new location, or turning the school into a think tank or a foundation.
The EDS deal comes as the latest in a recent series of restructuring measures at Episcopal seminaries. In February, cash-strapped Seabury-Western Theological Seminary in Evanston, Ill. announced plans to discontinue its three-year, residential Master of Divinity program. Also in February, Bexley Hall said it would be closing its satellite campus in Rochester, New York. All 11 Episcopal seminaries have been exploring for more than a year how they might collaborate to address challenging trends.
_ G. Jeffrey MacDonald
Quote of the Day: Rabbi Steven Lebow of Marietta, Ga.
(RNS) “The right thing isn’t vengeance. The right thing is justice.”
_ Rabbi Steven Lebow of Temple Kol Emeth in Marietta, Ga., speaking about how people should react to the death of slain Auburn University freshman Lauren Burk. Quoted by The Associated Press, he suggested that mourners turn their anger into positive actions like donating to charity or giving blood.
DSB/RB END RNS
