While Muslims and Jews say they’ve felt targeted by anti-Islamic and antisemitic rhetoric, it’s most often in the context of being seen as part of a larger group, they said in the study. Whereas evangelical Christians say they more often feel singled out when taking an individual stand based on their moral views, the report found.

Rachel Schneider, one of the report’s authors, said they learned that people often experienced workplace discrimination in the form of microaggressions — such as stereotyping and othering — not just in the hiring, firing and promotion process.

The report, “How Religious Discrimination Is Perceived in the Workplace: Expanding the View,” draws its research from Rice University’s “Faith at Work: An Empirical Study,” which included a survey of more than 11,000 people. Additionally, researchers conducted in-depth interviews with nearly 200 of those who were surveyed, including 159 Christians, 13 Jews, 10 Muslims and 12 nonreligious people. The research was funded by the Lilly Endowment.

A large proportion of Muslim (63%) and Jewish (52%) participants reported religious discrimination compared with other religious groups.

Perceptions of religious discrimination varied within Christian subgroups, with evangelical Protestants the most likely to report experiencing religious discrimination (36%), whereas roughly 20% of Catholics and mainline Protestants each reported religious discrimination, according to the report. About a quarter of other Christian/other Protestants say the same (24%).

Among nonreligious participants, 27% perceived religious discrimination in the workplace.

Source: Religious News Service (RNS)

ISPU have, created in partnership with Georgetown University’s “The Bridge Initiative”, used an “Islamophobia Index (II), in which it has selected five negative stereotypes that have been linked with a greater acceptances for anti-Muslim policies. It then measures the level of public endorsement of these negative stereotypes, to provide a evidence-based way to predict Islamophobia. The Index calculated levels of agreement with these five statements: That Muslims living in the United States are more prone to violence than others; that they discriminate against women; that they are hostile to the United States; that they are less civilized than other people; and that they are partially responsible for acts of violence carried out by other Muslims.  The poll found that the level of public endorsement of these five negative stereotypes, and therefore the score of Islamophobia among the general public went up from 24 in 2018 to 28 in 2019.

Aside from Muslims, the faith groups scoring the lowest are Jews. The Poll found that 53% of Jews report having positive views of Muslims. White Evangelicals scored highest on the index (35), with 44% holding unfavorable opinions, compared to the 20% who held favorable opinions.

Read the full report here.

Continue reading at: Euro-Islam.info

“The most dangerous challenge facing Christians and Muslims is a misconception, misunderstanding, how to deal with the other. You have to listen to others,” Imam Nasser Ibrahim of Al-Rashid Mosque, told Catholic Register on September 11.

Canadian Muslims and Catholics cooperate in different fields like education, social services, housing, refugee settlement, and social justice. Yet, there are new calls on both sides to do more than sharing social issues but to understand each other in a deeper way.

The ‘Meet&Greet’ event, held on August 28, was preceded by a visit to Al-Rashid Mosque from Archbishop Richard Smith in 2017. During the new event, Smith spoke with leaders of multiple Muslim branches in St. Albert, the historical heart of Catholicism in Alberta. The event included a tour of the Mission Hill site, including Mary’s Grotto and the cemetery where many Oblate missionaries are buried. Smith has previously hosted a gathering of Muslim leaders at his home following the January 2017 shootings at the Quebec mosque as a reminder of their shared values and trust.

“My hope is to celebrate decades of understanding between the Archdiocese of Edmonton and the Muslim community with women and youth projects that strengthen and give back to all communities,” said Dr. Nahla Gomaa, a member of the Edmonton Council of Muslim Communities, a coalition of 12 faith-based organizations.

Source: aboutislam.net

By far, Hindus and Unitarian Universalists have among the largest share of those with a college degree – 77% and 67% respectively. Roughly six-in-ten Jews (59%) have college degrees, as do similar shares in both the Anglican church (59%) and the Episcopal Church (56%).

These groups are among the top of a list of 30 U.S. religious groups ranked by educational attainment based on data from our 2014 Religious Landscape Study. Given the strong correlation between educational attainment and economic success, it is not surprising that Jews and Hindus, on average, have high household incomes, with four-in-ten Jews (44%) and roughly a third of Hindus (36%) living in households with annual incomes of at least $100,000, according to the 2014 study.

Other religious groups also have a higher percentage of college graduates than the full sample of more than 35,000 U.S. adults surveyed in the 2014 Religious Landscape Study, among whom 27% completed university. They include Buddhists and members of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) – both at 47% – as well as Orthodox Christians (40%), Muslims (39%) and Mormons (33%). Since Catholics make up one-in-five adults, it is not surprising that their share of members with a college degree (26%) roughly mirrors that of the general public.

One-in-five members of historically black Protestant denominations – the National Baptist Convention (19%) and the African Methodist Episcopal Church (21%) – have a college degree, as do members of the Southern Baptist Convention (19%).

Our study also looked at educational attainment in three categories of religiously unaffiliated people. About four-in-ten atheists (43%) and agnostics (42%) have earned college degrees, as have nearly a quarter (24%) of those who say their religion is “nothing in particular.”

Source: Pew Research Center

Other troubling findings include the belief, held by 83 percent of Catholics, that dialogue is undertaken to convert Muslims to Christianity and the disclosure of high quotients for Islamophobia in the Catholic media and among best-selling Catholic authors. The report confirms that face-to-face encounters are key to building positive attitudes between strangers. One-third of Catholics who know Muslims met them in the workplace. Almost a third claim them as friends, and 7 percent say they are family members. But overall only 14 percent of Catholics have a favorable attitude toward Muslims.

Veterans of interreligious dialogue comment that the secret to successful interreligious dialogue is spiritual friendship. While spiritual friendship has been especially prevalent in inter-monastic dialogue, it is also found in gatherings of Catholics and Muslims.

At Saint Paul’s Church in Cambridge, a few blocks from Harvard Yard, a Catholic-Muslim prayer and support group called a Badaliya meets to pray, study and converse with one another. It is part of a renewal of a post-9/11 revival of the Badaliya movement founded by Louis Massignon and his disciple Mary Kahil in the 1930s.

Another Catholic movement that has had enduring relations with American Muslims is Focolare. Its ties with the American Society of Muslims (formerly the Nation of Islam) and its leader Warith Deen Mohammed arose out of Focolare’s charism to unity. In the context of violent persecution of Christians, Muslims and others across the Middle East in 2014, the U.S. bishops’ Committee on Ecumenical and Interfaith Affairs said, “Through building networks of dialogue [we] can overcome ignorance, extremism, and discrimination and so lead to friendship and trust with Muslims.”

The Bridge Initiative is a program of Georgetown University’s al-Alaweed Center for Muslim Christian Understanding. The data was gathered in opinion polls by CARA, the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate, also located at Georgetown. The analysis and presentation are the work of the Center’s staff and especially of analyst Jordan Denari Duffner.

Continue reading at: The Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs at Georgetown University

In November 2015, I was part of a delegation participating in a dialogue looking at ways to prevent violence, especially in the name of religion. Among the delegates were members of the Anglican Church, the Armenian Church, the Church of Pakistan and Shi‘a Muslims from Iran.

I travelled from the UK and there were other participants from Germany, Iran Lebanon, Pakistan, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and United States of America. The discussion was very positive and fruitful. I provided a Shi‘a perspective on how to address the problem of violence in the name of religion and explained that there are three elements in the Shi‘a Islamic teaching namely rationality, spirituality and search for justice that when applied correctly can help to avoid extremism and fanaticism. This point was unanimously accepted by all delegates who saw them as positive elements for any religious tradition to consider. In that round of dialogue, I gave another lecture on Muslim Christian relations.

A few months ago, I was invited by the Ecumenical Centre of the World Council of Churches to teach in their annual summer course. Every summer they offer a three-week course for Muslims, Christians and Jews from different countries. Apart from studying it also gives them a chance to live together and experience and develop honest friendship.

The course is structured in a way that Muslims, Christians and Jews listen and attend each other’s presentations. My task was to deliver two sessions of 90 minutes introducing Islam followed by a Muslim lady, a scholar from Lebanon, who was supposed to talk about migration in Islam. Every year there is a theme and this year the theme was migration, reflecting the recent large scale exodus affecting Europe. The course also includes spiritual sharing and scriptural reasoning sessions as well as visits of the United Nations, the World Council of Churches, mosques and the Museum of the Reformation in Geneva.

Having accepted the invitation I traveled to Geneva from 26-28 July. There I met some of the professors and had informal meetings and discussions with the students but the main activity was to deliver the course. I started my presentation by providing some statistics about Islam and Muslims in general, giving an overview of the landscape of Islam followed by information on the historical background. This was particularly well received especially by non Muslims.

Continue reading at: Islam Today Magazine