COMMENTARY: My top 10 religion stories

(RNS) David Letterman has his Top-10 lists ever night, and every year I have one of my own. Here are my picks for the year’s top 10 religion stories: 1. President Obama’s speech to the Islamic world and his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance address reflect religion’s central role in today’s world. In Cairo, he reached […]

(RNS) David Letterman has his Top-10 lists ever night, and every year I have one of my own. Here are my picks for the year’s top 10 religion stories:

1. President Obama’s speech to the Islamic world and his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance address reflect religion’s central role in today’s world. In Cairo, he reached out in respect and friendship to Muslims, a gesture many observers believe has not been reciprocated. In Oslo, Obama invoked the spirit of the late theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, a “Christian realist” who urged people to recognize the existence of radical evil in the world and use force to oppose it.

2. The Vatican’s welcoming “open door” policy designed to attract disaffected Anglicans reveals the deep differences within the global Anglican family that counts the Episcopal Church as its U.S. branch.


3. The impact of Islamic extremism — including al-Qaida, Hamas, and the Taliban — remains an important story. In addition, Army Maj. Nidal Hasan’s massacre at Fort Hood and the journey of five young American Muslims to Pakistan to allegedly join a “holy war” against the U.S. stirred fears that U.S.-born Muslims may not be immune to Islamic extremism.

4. A Pew survey confirmed the continuing membership decline among many established religious groups in the U.S. and an increase in personal spiritual rituals and beliefs. The percentage of Americans who identify as “Christian” dropped to its lowest point ever — 78.4 percent — and Protestants constitute only 51 percent of the nation’s population, even as the number of atheists and those who chose “None” as their religious identity grow ever larger.

5. Pope Benedict XVI’s fourth year as pope was marred when he lifted the 1988 excommunications of four bishops of the ultra-conservative Pope Pius X Society. The excommunications, ordered by John Paul II, included Richard Williamson, who has denied there were mass murders during the Holocaust. Benedict’s action created a firestorm of criticism from both Christians and Jews.

6. In a surprise election result, Swiss voters who pride themselves for being “tolerant” and “neutral” approved a ban on building minarets at mosques. The 2.6 million Swiss voters supported the ban by a healthy 57.5 percent to 42 percent. Many Jewish, Christian and Muslim groups condemned the vote.

7. The Christian group “The Family” or “The Fellowship,” is best known for sponsoring the annual national Prayer Breakfasts,” but this year attention focused on some of the group’s most prominent members who publicly admitted marital infidelity: Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev.; Gov. Mark Sanford, R-S.C.; and former Rep. Chip Pickering, R-Miss. Meanwhile, another Family associate, Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., “counseled” the husband of Ensign’s mistress to forgive and forget.

8. Three major streams of modern Judaism — Orthodox, Conservative and Reform — originated in Europe. But 65 years after the Holocaust and the near-annihilation of European Jewry, Jewish life (even with the strong influence of Israel) is rapidly becoming more “American” in its religious education, literature, music, architecture, philanthropy, and political involvement. This process is also evident in the increasing role of women rabbis and lay leaders and multimedia worship services that would bewilder earlier generations of Jews.


9. An important but overlooked religion story was NASA’s discovery of water on the moon. For thousands of years, traditional religions have proudly proclaimed that human beings are God’s highest form of creation, “little lower than the angels” (Psalm 8). The possibility that some form of “life” may exist elsewhere in the universe has raised many theological questions. In November, the Vatican Academy of Sciences convened an astrobiology conference that explored whether there is life in the vast cosmos and as well as studying our beginnings on earth.

10. The 2009 deaths of two cherished rabbinic colleagues were especially painful: Leon Klenicki, the Anti-Defamation League’s interfaith director; and Michael Signer, the University of Notre Dame’s Jewish Studies professor.

(Rabbi Rudin, the American Jewish Committee’s senior interreligious adviser, is the author of “The Baptizing of America: The Religious Right’s Plans for the Rest of Us.”)

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