There were 60 founder member organizations: national faith community representative bodies of the Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Jain, Jewish, Muslim and Sikh communities (the Zoroastrian community joined in 1989, but had been involved in consultations before the Network was established); national inter faith organizations; local inter faith bodies; and educational and academic bodies with an interest in multi faith and inter faith issues. National inter faith bodies included UK chapters of international inter faith initiatives. The pattern of membership today is similar and there are nearly 200 organizations in membership.

It has also worked to ensure that the importance of religious identity and of good inter faith relations is understood in wider society.

IFN sends Circulars throughout the year to member bodies about matters connected to its work and developments relevant to inter faith engagement, including in as the area of public policy. It also distributes information more widely through its regular newsletter, which carries information about inter faith projects, relevant national updates, research projects, funding opportunities, and upcoming inter faith events.

Part of IFN’s work involves advocacy in the area of faith and public life. IFN links in direct membership many local inter faith organizations (LIFOs) in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. Within England, IFN links in membership a number of regional multi faith bodies, which play a significant role in their regions.

Vision

IFN’s vision is of a society where there is understanding of the diversity and richness of the faith communities in the UK and the contribution that they make; and where they live and work together with mutual respect and shared commitment to the common good.

Mission

Working with faith communities, inter faith organizations, educators and others to increase understanding and cooperation between people of different faiths and to widen public awareness of the distinctive religious traditions in the UK.

Working to achieve this through: supporting and encouraging inter faith initiatives and sharing good practice between these; helping create opportunities for mutual learning and tackling prejudice; and offering opportunity for engagement between faith communities and Government and other public agencies on relevant issues.

Values

Service to others, Integrity, Accountability, Trust, Consultative and cooperative working, Valuing diversity, Inclusiveness, Listening and openness, Courtesy, Mutual respect, Respecting dissent and people’s right to express this.

Contacts

• Address: Mary Sumner House, 24 Tufton St, London SW1P 3RB, UK
• Phone: +44 20 7730 0410
• Email: ifnet@interfaith.org.uk
• Website: www.interfaith.org.uk

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)

Christians continue to make up a majority of the U.S. populace, but their share of the adult population is 12 points lower in 2021 than it was in 2011. In addition, the share of U.S. adults who say they pray on a daily basis has been trending downward, as has the share who say religion is “very important” in their lives.

Currently, about three-in-ten U.S. adults (29%) are religious “nones” – people who describe themselves as atheists, agnostics or “nothing in particular” when asked about their religious identity. Self-identified Christians of all varieties (including Protestants, Catholics, members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and Orthodox Christians) make up 63% of the adult population. Christians now outnumber religious “nones” by a ratio of a little more than two-to-one. In 2007, when the Center began asking its current question about religious identity, Christians outnumbered “nones” by almost five-to-one (78% vs. 16%).

The recent declines within Christianity are concentrated among Protestants. Today, 40% of U.S. adults are Protestants, a group that is broadly defined to include nondenominational Christians and people who describe themselves as “just Christian” along with Baptists, Methodists, Lutherans, Presbyterians and members of many other denominational families. The Protestant share of the population is down 4 percentage points over the last five years and has dropped 10 points in 10 years.

Source: Pew Research

On February 10, RFI held a virtual event, “Jews, Christians, and Muslims: Allies in Pursuit of Truth, Virtue, and the Common Good?” featuring three world renowned scholars, Dr. John Finnis, Rabbi David Novak, and Shaykh Hamza Yusuf, in which the above questions were explored. Kent Hill, RFI Senior Fellow, and Ismail Royer, Director of RFI’s Islam and Religious Freedom Action Team, hosted the event, which was the fourth and final in a series exploring truth, virtue and the common good in monotheistic religions.

Watch event at: www.religiousfreedominstitute.org

Comparative Perspectives from Malaysia and Britain

By Sara Ashencaen Crabtree

Publisher: Routledge (January 31, 2021)

Drawn from over fifty-eight individual, in-depth, qualitative interviews with women of faith in Malaysia and Britain, Women of Faith and the Quest for Spiritual Authenticity is a multifaith, multicultural and cross-cultural comparative focus that explores women’s religious expressions, as derived from practising Buddhists, Hindus, Christians, Muslims, Jews, Wiccans and Druids among others.

This is an ecumenical and entertaining ethnography where women’s narratives and life stories ground faith as embodied, personal, painful, vibrant, diverse, illuminating and shared. This book will of interest not only to academics and students of the sociology of religion, feminist and gender studies, politics, ethnicity and Southeast Asian studies, but is equally accessible to the general reader broadly interested in faith and feminism.

About the Author

Sara Ashencaen Crabtree is Professor of Social and Cultural Diversity at Bournemouth University, UK. She has worked extensively in Southeast Asia, Hong Kong and the Middle East and is widely published in the areas of gender, vulnerability, discrimination, disadvantage, cross-cultural issues and belief.

Table of Contents

1. Searching for the Sacramental: An Introduction
2. Gender and Faith: A Critical Review
3. ‘When Eve Delved’: Fieldwork Reflections
4. What is it to be a Woman of Faith?
5. God the Patriarch and Other Relatives
6. The Sacred, Sacramental and Sex
7. The Damnable, Salvational and Salvageable
8. Conclusions and Contemplations

Source: Routledge

Religion is a “red line” for many people, the study – based on a survey of 11,700 adults in England and Wales – will say. This is particularly so in the case of Muslims.

Almost three-quarters of non-black or Asian respondents said they were comfortable with a close relative marrying a black or Asian person, but only 43% were comfortable with a close relative marrying a Muslim.

Muslims were most often the subject of negative attitudes held by other faith groups, but were also the group most likely to hold negative attitudes towards people of other religions.

The researchers focused on the question of marriage as a way of measuring tolerance and prejudice. They found that the public is largely positive about intermarriage across ethnic and national lines. However, the word “Muslim” triggered more negative sentiment than the word “Pakistani”, even though the vast majority of British Pakistani people are Muslim.

Prejudice based on religion was stronger among people aged over 75, those with no or few educational qualifications, people from non-Asian ethnic minorities, and Baptists.

Men appear to be more uncomfortable than women about the idea of a close relative marrying someone from a different ethnic, national or religious background.

Among Hindus, Sikhs, Jews, Buddhists and people of no religion, the majority felt uncomfortable with the idea of a close relative marrying a Muslim. Among Christians, there was a significant minority.

A majority of Muslims were uncomfortable with the idea of a close relative marrying a Buddhist, Hindu, Jewish or Sikh person, or someone of no religion. Almost four in 10 Muslims were uncomfortable with a close relative marrying a Christian.

The study also found that attitudes within minority faith communities were undergoing significant generational shifts. In particular, British Muslim women were exercising more freedom to decide when, whom and how to marry.

Source: The Guardian

According to Cardus, Victoria-based theologian Chris Stackarus while in seminary co-founded Neighborly Faith, “a charity that introduces Muslims and Evangelical Christians to one another on college campuses across North America.

He is completing his PhD in theological studies at the University of St. Michael’s College in the University of Toronto where he writes on the history of Vatican II, said Cardus. “An important part of my work has been to build bridges with the Muslim community in Canada and to speak out against anti-Muslim attitudes,” said Stackaruk. “We can’t have religious freedom in Canada unless we genuinely respect our differences,” he added.

Also appointed to the Cardus council is David Anderson, who represented the Saskatchewan riding of Cypress Hills-Grasslands until last year when he announced he was retiring from politics before the fall federal election.

Source: The B.C. Catholic

St. Louis is named after King Louis IX, the only French King to be canonized by the Catholic Church, who is considered by the church to be a model Christian monarch. King Louis IX was also a notorious anti-Semite. He oversaw one of the infamous medieval disputations, in which rabbis were forced to debate with Christians the merits of Judaism, and the subsequent burning of 12,000 copies of the Talmud in 1243. He required Jews to wear badges so they can be easily identified, and he outlawed banking, which led to the expulsion of many Jews from France and the confiscation of their property. The funds that Louis IX confiscated went towards his two crusades, in 1248 and 1270, to fight Islamic kingdoms for control over the Land of Israel.

Louis IX is honored with the entire city of St. Louis being named after him, as well as a statue in Forest Park, the city’s major park, atop Art Hill overlooking the city. Umar Lee and Moji Sidiqi, of Muslims for a Greater St. Louis, together with Israeli-American restauranteur Ben Poremba want to change that and have launched a petition.

Source: The Jerusalem Post

Our households – who lives with us, how we are related to them and what role we play in that shared space – have a profound effect on our daily experience of the world. A new Pew Research Center analysis of data from 130 countries and territories reveals that the size and composition of households often vary by religious affiliation.

Worldwide, Muslims live in the biggest households, with the average Muslim individual residing in a home of 6.4 people, followed by Hindus at 5.7. Christians fall in the middle (4.5), forming relatively large families in sub-Saharan Africa and smaller ones in Europe. Buddhists (3.9), Jews (3.7) and the religiously unaffiliated (3.7) – defined as those who do not identify with an organized religion, also known as “nones” – live in smaller households, on average.

Why study households from an individual’s point of view?

Household size is one easy way to compare the lived experiences of people around the world. Bigger households are common in less-developed countries, where people tend to have more children and families share limited resources. Smaller households are prevalent in wealthier countries, which tend to have aging populations and lower birth rates.

But the number of people in any given household is only one dimension of living arrangements. Since households of the same size can be so qualitatively different from each other – a three-person household might consist of a couple and one child, a child with a parent and grandparent, a husband and two wives, or numerous other combinations – understanding the distribution of various types of households also is valuable.

Globally, the most common household type is the extended family, accounting for 38% of the world’s population. But some religious groups are more likely to live in extended families than others. Hindus are the only major group in which a majority lives with extended family, such as grandparents, uncles and in-laws. Muslims, Christians and Jews are more likely to reside in two-parent households, composed of two partners with one or more minor children. Living alone is unusual among all religious groups, but it is more common among Jews than among the world’s other major religions: About one-in-ten Jews worldwide are in solo households. From a global perspective, Jews also are much more likely than non-Jews to live in households consisting of a couple without children or other relatives.

Source: Pew Research Center

This course was part of a unique academic partnership between The Schechter Institute of Jewish Studies and PThU. During the week there were lectures and seminars about the history and archaeology of Jerusalem, holy places in Jerusalem and the relationship between Jews, Christians and Muslims in the city. Prof. Doron Bar and Dr. Tamar Kadari, SIJS president and dean respectively, were both lecturing in Amsterdam. “What unites the students is the fascination for the city. Jerusalem is not an empty theme,” said Dr. Lieve Teugels, Lecturer in Jewish Studies and Semitics (PThU), in her welcome speech. “I know that all the conversations and discussions this week will be conducted with respect for each other and each other’s convictions.”

The summer school, supported by an Erasmus+ grant awarded by the European Union to the two institutions in November 2018, explores a city holy to three religions. The course provided students with a unique opportunity to engage in conversation with students and professors from all over the world. The school focuses on biblical history and archaeology; the religious significance of Jerusalem in Judaism, Christianity and Islam; the meanings of pilgrimage; the architecture of holy sites; and the impact of contemporary politics on the city…

Source: The Schechter Institutes