“In her email to me this week, Laura said  how elated she was that since Cuba decided to recognize Good Friday as a holiday, she can live her life as God asks. Then, in an attached Microsoft Word document, she wrote (in Spanish):

‘Dear Sister,

I have so many marvelous things to tell you!!! I have had so many transforming and beautiful moments during this Lent that I have to share them with you. Every year, I live Lent in a different way and with different intensity. Well, you could say that this year God knocked me off my feet. That’s not to say I heard divine voices, but God spoke to me in the deepest part of my heart, telling me that even though I am his beloved daughter, that does not give me any privilege or advantage over anyone else, whether that person is a believer or not. Rather, I should be the humblest of all people; I should not fall into the temptations to hate, to have hard feelings, to be selfish; temptations that surround us and can trap us in this world full of competition and rivalries (we live in a world that thinks that the law of retaliation — “an eye for eye, and a tooth for tooth” — will resolve problems). That is why we need to love, it is love that unites us with God and with our neighbor, it is love that allows us to forgive others and forgive ourselves.

Pope Benedict’s visit was an oasis, for this Lenten period and for my whole life, like a spring of crystal clear water in which I can drink and see my true essence reflected.

I had the privilege of receiving the Pope when he arrived to the Archbishop’s residence in Santiago. I was very close when he arrived in the Popemobile, and my heart leaped for joy and my whole being smiled (those around me said my eyes were shining too). I only know my heart was pounding and I wanted to have wings to fly to the Pope’s side and ask for his blessing (like the sick person in the Gospel who is cured just by touching Jesus’ mantle).’”

Read the series of posts on Pope Benedict XVI’s visit to Cuba in March 2012.

“Perhaps by now you have seen one of these images of two ideological opposites, Pope Benedict XVI and Cuba’s Fidel Castro, who met for 30 minutes at the end of the Pope’s visit to Cuba in March. If you don’t know the history of Cuban communism or the main themes of Benedict’s writings on liberty, reason and truth, you may have missed the significance of his words to the Cuban people. For example, Benedict’s profound statement “No hay patria sin virtud (“there is no authentic fatherland without virtue”) seemed to be a play on the Cuban slogan “patria o muerte” (fatherland or death). As I’ve written before about the contradictions of Cuban communism, there is nothing virtuous in denying people liberty in order to achieve a real or supposed collective well being.

As a college student with great interest in development in Latin America, I made my first trip to Cuba (my mother’s homeland) in 1994. From 1994-2006, I traveled to Cuba 7 times. (In case you are wondering, although traveling to Cuba for tourism or business is prohibited, travel for Cuban-Americans like myself to the island is not prohibited by US law). During my many trips, I became close friends with a group of young Cubans in Santiago who are very active in the Catholic Church. This March, the Pope first visited Santiago. One friend in Santiago, an active Catholic and a member of the political group Christian Liberation Movement, who I will call Rodrigo, wrote to me,

‘I’m exhausted but seeing the Pope has renewed my spirit. I was at the Mass and at his pilgrimage to Our Lady of Charity. His words words of hope echoed with the heart of all Cubans. It’s hard to express what is is like to have him so near; you can see goodness and purity incarnate in a human being.’

Watching Pope Benedict celebrate Mass on Wednesday, March 28th, 2012, I was struck by several themes in his homily, all themes of his extensive writings, but which take on particular significance in Cuba. Those themes are: trust in God, truth, reason, religious freedom, and reconciliation. The text of the homily can be read in Spanish or English on the Vatican’s website, and if you speak Spanish, I strongly encourage you to listen to the Vatican’s video recording of the homilyto hear how Benedict emphasizes words like authentic liberty and the innatedesire to search for truth.”

Read the full post on Black, White and Gray.

“Can ideas from economics, such as that monopolies are lazy and that competition leads to better products, be applied to understand religion? Every year I teach my students–both those in my class on economic sociology and those in my class on sociology of religion–about the economistic or the rational choice perspective on religion.

Most people think individual religious behaviors and religious organizations are driven by emotions, theology, and/or tradition. But rational choice theories of religion are modeled are assumptions about human behavior now current in mainstream economics: humans are rational, self-interested beings who seek to maximize rewards and minimize their costs. What makes religion so powerful in motivating  human behavior is that most religions promise rewards or punishment in another life.

One path-breaking book which applies the rational choice perspective to American religion is Roger Finke and Rodney Stark’s The Churching of America 1776-1990: Winners and Losers in Our Religious Economy, which won the Distinguished Book Award from the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion. Given that the U.S. has never a state-established religion, religious groups here have always had to win over adherents. To explain which religious groups thrive under these conditions of an open market for religion, Finke and Stark use vocabulary about markets, calling established churches lazy monopolies and describing tent revivals as an important part of competition between religious firms. Because of the American constitutional protections of religious freedom, the U.S. has always had an open religious market, and in that market, upstart, preaching, fiery sects win more followers, both historically and today. How does this happen? The free market gets rid of weak religious firms and rewards the ones that work hard to get people to join.”

Read the full post on Black, White and Gray.

“A public event on March 1, 2012, hosted by Georgetown University’s Berkely Center for Religion, Peace & World Affairs launched the monograph Religious Freedom: Why Now? Defending an Embattled Human Right, authored by Timothy Shah under the auspices of the Witherspoon Institute’s Task Force on International Religious Freedom. At this event, Princeton political science Professor Robert George quoted extensively from Martin Luther King’s Letters from the Birmingham Jail to illustrate why religious freedom deserves legal protection. In the Birmingham letters, Reverend King argued persuasively that human laws can be judged unjust when they degrade basic human goods. Racial segregation, King argued, debases human dignity because it designates one group (Whites) as superior to another group (African-Americans); thus such laws are unjust.

Too often, we think that asserting ‘I want something’ equals ‘I have a right to something.’ But just as African-Americans had the right to civil equality because it upholds their human dignity, George explained that human rights exists only when if those rights leads to a human good.  To illustrate, there is no human right to take an innocent human life because being dead is bad. The human good is to be alive, so our laws protect human life.  To talk of human rights thus requires explaining the good those rights protects.”

Read the full post on Black, White and Gray.

“My students next will read Amartya Sen’s Development as Freedom, in which he argues that material goods are means to higher ends, namely freedoms. When I had the honor of meeting Amartya Sen in person, I asked him, “Do you think the Cuban economic model is a good one?”

Sen’s emphatic response was, “A system where nobody is allowed to read the newspaper cannot be a model for anything.”

Sen cut to the chase—he didn’t start off saying things many academics sympathetic with Cuba or socialism generally have told me, like, “Well, Cuba has good health care,” or “Cuba doesn’t have rich people who own everything.” For Sen, the truth or falsehood of those statements are overridden by the evident fact that Cubans aren’t free. They aren’t free to read the newspaper, they aren’t free to practice their religious faith, they aren’t free to critique their government, and they aren’t free to choose what they feel like buying with their meager salaries of under $20 a month.”

Click here to read the full post.

“In his recent column responding to the You Tube hit video, “Why I Hate Religion, but Love Jesus,” New York Times Columnist David Brookssent a clear message to many would-be reformers: if you desire reform, you are better off joining a movement tied to a tradition….

I admire the energy and optimism of those calling for religious, economic or political change. Yet, I agree with Brooks that not everyone is called to be a prophet. I learned great intellectual humility when I completed my Ph.D. thesis. It took 6 years of study, writing and research to come up with one important and well-argued thesis in sociology. If it took me 6 years to say something original to my field of study, shouldn’t I pay attention to the ideas that founded this nation? Shouldn’t I learn about the traditions that have guided Christian thinking for two thousand years? Shouldn’t I consider competing arguments about the best way to organize economic life? The best ideas show they understand the alternatives, that is, the traditional arguments, and demonstrate why the new ideas are superior.”

 ”Although he is known by many as a political dissident, Islamic scholar Mohsen Kadivar emphasized to me over lunch recently, “I never wanted to get involved in politics. I just wanted to be a scholar of religion.” But when the intelligence service in his home country of Iran killed at least four dissidents accused with apostasy and claimed a fatwa of unknown religious authority to justify the killings, Kadivar objected. In articles he wrote and speeches he delivered at a mosque to several thousands of believers during the holy nights of Ramadan, Kadivar argued that according to the Qur’an and the authentic tradition of the prophet Muhammad “terror is forbidden in Islam.” Punishment, he argued, is only the job of the court, not anyone else. It is not lawful, he argued, to kill dissidents for religious crimes.”

Click here to read the full post.

“In December, Georgetown scholars Tom Farr and Tim Shah organized an online debate through the New York Times that asked if religious freedom is under threat in the U.S.  was particular struck by the viewpoints of representatives of minority religions in the U.S.– such as Sikhs and Muslims–who feel misunderstood, mis-represented, and often find it difficult to carry out their basic religious duties.”

“Rather than attributing a natural disaster to an individual’s sins or the collective sins of a people, Father Jadotte’s homily emphasized a recurring theme in Catholic social and moral teaching: the people of God are called to build a just world, achieved through a constant conversion that obliges them to keep improving this world even when tremendous obstacles arise.

This homily extends the “theology of grace and hope” I wrote about in Faith Makes Us Live to the latest and probably greatest tragedy in Haitian history. This theology of grace and hope is powerfully illustrated by the picture placed on the altar of Notre Dame, which shows a man in Haiti gazing at the ruins of Sacred Heart Catholic Church. A crucifix remains standing, and at the foot of the crucifix is an image that looks remarkably like the Virgin Mary. The stained glass window behind the picture depicts the Virgin Mary and says in Creole “Mother Mary, you always come to our rescue.”

Click here to read the full post.

“Until recently, I thought leisure was what I do when I’m too tired to work. After much prodding, I finally read Josef Pieper’s Leisure the Basis of Culture. While clearly upholding the material and spiritual value of all work, Pieper critiques the modern view of life as “total work.” Although no one really works 24/7, the ideological commitment to “total work”, subscribing to the idea that hard work defines the good life, can be just as harmful as (almost) never taking a break from work.

Why? Because, Pieper masterfully explains, the view that the highest good is found in hard work emphasizes reason and cognition as the only path to knowing. As an intellectual, I rightly prize knowledge. But Pieper challenges us: is knowledge only acquired through arduous mental labor? Pieper asserts:

“The essence of knowledge does not consist in the effort for which it calls, but in grasping existing things and in unveiling reality. Moreover, just as the highest form of virtue knows nothing of ‘difficulty,’ so too the highest form of knowledge comes to man like a gift–the sudden illumination, a stroke of genius, true contemplation; it comes effortlessly, and without trouble.” (p. 34)”

Click here to see the full post.