Is the Internet destroying our morals?

Earlier this month, Pope Benedict XVI issued a warning that the Internet was “numbing” young people and creating an “educational emergency – a challenge that we can and must respond to with creative intelligence.”

Speaking at a Vatican conference on culture, Benedict also expressed concern that “a large number of young people” are “establish[ing] forms of communication that do not increase humaneness but instead risk increasing a sense of solitude and disorientation.”

Benedict’s comments created an uproar, but he has a point.Studies show that Internet addiction is linked to depression; in 2007, the comedy websiteCracked offered a surprisingly moving take on this phenomenon titled “7 Reasons the 21st Century is Making You Miserable.”

It’s tempting, knowing this, to suggest that we all take a step away from our keyboards, turn off our computers, and go find a field to frolic in.

This article was written with John Shellito, who served as its primary author. Johnis a student at Union Theological Seminary, interested in how faith communities can resist oppression in economic, ecological, and social spheres. He graduated from Dartmouth College in 2008 and is currently pursuing ordination in the Episcopal Church.

“He was never what one might today term a culture warrior, nor could he easily be labeled conservative or liberal,” claims Eric Metaxas in one of many pungent lines from his groundbreaking new biography of Lutheran Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Yet Bonhoeffer has often been pigeonholed as a courageous radical, working secretly for the assassination of Adolf Hitler during World War II. At times, this story of Bonhoeffer the assassin has become so prominent in popular memory as to occlude another important aspect of his life: his work to formulate a theology that both embraced Christ and defended the Jews as the chosen people of God.

Last week the atheist blogosphere lit up with reports that Molly Norris, the Seattle cartoonist who inadvertently inspired “Everybody Draw Muhammad Day” (EDMD), had been forced to change her identity and go into hiding due to death threats she received from extremists.

How did these same bloggers who promoted EDMD respond to this news? They expressed sadness and frustration. And who wouldn’t? Poor Norris – imagine having to give up everything you knew because your life was in danger. They are right to condemn those who have targeted her.

However, many also used it as yet another opportunity to take broad swipes at Muslims.

For example, popular atheist writer P.Z. Myers addressed Islam as if it were a single entity, writing: “Come on, Islam. Targeting defenseless cartoonists is your latest adventure in bravery? That’s pathetic. It’s bad enough to be the religion of hate, but to be the religion of cowardice ought to leave you feeling ashamed.”

I’m disappointed at such assessments, and I have a feeling Norris would be too. After EDMD took off, she insisted that she did not wish for it to become a movement. In a post on her now defunct website, Norris asked people to try to find common ground with others instead, adding: “The vitriol this ‘day’ has brought out… is offensive to the Muslims who did nothing to endanger our right to expression in the first place. I apologize to people of Muslim faith and ask that this ‘day’ be called off.”

Scriptural Reasoning, a technique developed at Cambridge University and the University of Virginia, is known as much for its peer-reviewed journal as for its august participants. But it is on the verge of going mainstream, shaking up the way we understand each other’s scriptures and taking root on college campuses around the country.

Approximately twenty Scriptural Reasoning (SR) groups exist across North America and the United Kingdom. But that number is likely to balloon as college chaplains take SR to their campuses. Two leading scholars of SR, Peter Ochs, Edgar Bronfman Professor of Modern Judaic Studies at the University of Virginia, and Homayra Ziad, Assistant Professor of Religion at Trinity College, brought the technique to the annual meeting of the National Association of College and University Chaplains (NACUC) this past spring, where it was warmly received. Their goal was to share the methods of SR to ignite a movement among chaplains and, ultimately, colleges and universities.

Now, with the school year approaching, a number of chaplains have followed up with plans to start SR groups on their campuses as a way to enhance inter-religious engagement more broadly. Paul Sorrentino, Director of Religious Life at Amherst College and organizer of this year’s NACUC conference, plans to do just that, noting, “I believe it is both respectful of the texts and of the people of different faiths who study them.”

One of many images from www.yivoencyclopedia.org

From liturgy to ideology, Yiddish literature and the mass immigration to the United States, Eastern Europe birthed many of modern Jewry’s most important intellectual and social trends. Its impact on Jewish history is on par with that of Medieval Spain and al-Andalus, and even in some respects the period of the great Talmudic academies in Baghdad.

Yet its incredible history and derivate lessons have been largely limited to books and those familiar with them. The People of the Book have long allowed their expansive history to be confined by the medium through which it was presented. This trend has become particularly stark in recent years, as the Internet has expanded the ways in which history and knowledge can be transmitted, as well as the audience with which it can be shared.

Even as Jewish organizations have created websites, online forums, and online publications in response to the growing demand for online resources, Jewish education has remained largely offline. Even as the digitization of the Talmud has facilitated rabbinic scholarship, it has seemed taboo to suggest that Jewish history, philosophy, theology, and liturgy could be accessed through anything but a book or a knowledgeable person.

Just this past week, however, theYIVO Institute for Jewish Research made significant headway in changing the notion that education for the People of the Book might somehow be confined to books alone. After extensive planning and preparation, the institute launched an online edition of theYIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe. While it may not leave book learning totally behind (the print edition is being published by Yale University Press), it is set to alter the way that Jews learn about the heartland of Eastern European Jewry.

Photo by Katya Dreyer-Oren

How should future religious leaders be trained so that they can at once be rooted in their traditions and equipped to work with people of others? This question has been asked with increased urgency, as American theological seminaries have tried to adapt to what has become the most religiously diverse country in history. Answers have proven somewhat elusive.

This week, from April 14 – 16, a group of remarkable visionaries and emerging inter-religious leaders convened at Andover Newton Theological School and Hebrew College to discuss potential answers during the pioneering CIRCLE National Conference 2010. Participants included Brad Hirshfield, co-Founder of CLAL: The National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership, Ingrid Mattson, Director of the Macdonald Center for the Study of Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations at Hartford Seminary and Executive Director of the Islamic Society of North America, and Stephen Graham, Director of Faculty Development and Initiatives in Theological Education at the Association of Theological Schools.

It seemed fitting to hold the conference jointly at two of the few seminaries to cohabitate the same campus and maintain a close administrative and curricular relationship. Students at Hebrew College and Andover Newton can cross-register for courses, while several classes are team-taught by professors from both institutions. The campus also houses the Center for Interreligious and Communal Leadership Education (CIRCLE), whose “mission is to nurture a new generation of moral and spiritual leaders equipped for service in a religiously diverse world” through a fellowship program, leadership training, and inter-campus initiatives and programs. Its administrators, Dr. Jennifer Peace and Rabbi Or Rose, saw the conference as a natural extension of their work.

On February 24, Rev. Paul Raushenbush issued a call for articles entitled “Dear Religious (and Sane) America” to inaugurate the launch of the Huffington Post’s new religion section. According to the article,

HuffPost Religion is dedicated to providing a provocative, respectful, and hopefully productive forum for addressing the ways in which religion intersects our personal, communal, national and international life. HuffPost Religion will demonstrate the vibrant diversity of religious traditions, perspectives and experiences that exist alongside and inform one another in America and throughout the world.

Huffington is clearly trying to expand its reach and become one of the big players in religion media, much as it already has in politics, popular culture, and even business. Based on initial responses to the section, it appears to be well on its way.

1969 was a year that changed the lives ofLen and Libby Traubman. Their first child, Eleanor, was born. And like millions of other people, they saw the first photos of Earth taken from space. The image of our planet “embedded itself in us,” notes Len, and “emphasized the idea of echad, of wahad,” as “oneness” is known in Hebrew and Arabic. While it was a particularly formative year for the Traubmans, their life’s work to promote dialogue had not yet begun.

After years of volunteer work, in 1984 the Traubmans went to the Soviet Union as part of the Beyond War movement to find out whom these “enemies” actually were. In meeting face to face with many Soviet citizens who were assumed “ready to extinguish us at a moment’s notice,” they “found a way to connect through the telling of personal narratives.” The two had come to the table of dialogue with one “internal set of images” but left with another.

In the late 1980s, Beyond War and the Traubman couple were approached by Palestinian and Israeli citizen-leaders to apply their knowledge of dialogue to deeply troubled Middle East relationships. This resulted in the historic June 1991 conference in the California redwoods, which established a signed “Framework For A Public Peace Process” and affirmed that authentic citizen-to-citizen relationships and models of cooperation were necessary for any government treaty to succeed. This 1991 moment introduced to the world the term “public peace process,” having previously been known as “track-two diplomacy.” Even as government representatives meet to negotiate what everyone hopes will be a final peace accord, true peace cannot be reached until large numbers of individual Palestinians and Israelis engage to humanize one another by hearing one another’s stories with a new quality of listening-to-learn.

Many religious leaders like to feel in control and give others advice. Though I am still a very much a rabbi-in-progress, with three-and-a-half years of study to go before ordination, I think it would show a great deal more strength for clergy to admit their shortcomings and be honest about how often they (and fairly soon soon we) don’t know what to do or how to do it.

In the spirit of seeking, rather than giving, advice, I wanted to share some of the fears that I have about my future career – and lifestyle – as a rabbi. I was recently asked to record these as part of a professional development course at Hebrew Union College but thought they might be of interest here and foment conversation about the difficult life’s choices that many religious leaders face.