COMMENTARY: The Year’s Top Ten Stories

c. 2000 Religion News Service (Rabbi Rudin is the senior interreligious adviser of the American Jewish Committee.) (UNDATED) Here are my picks for the top religion stories of 2000: 1. The current Middle East violence is more than a clash of competing nationalisms. Palestinians are engaged in a bloody war against Israel, the Jewish state. […]

c. 2000 Religion News Service

(Rabbi Rudin is the senior interreligious adviser of the American Jewish Committee.)

(UNDATED) Here are my picks for the top religion stories of 2000:


1. The current Middle East violence is more than a clash of competing nationalisms. Palestinians are engaged in a bloody war against Israel, the Jewish state. While Arab Christians are also involved in that war, anti-Jewish Islamic fervor is paramount, including ugly calls in many parts of the world to “kill Jews.” A negotiated settlement, which seemed possible last July at Camp David, now appears more remote than ever.

2. In March, Pope John Paul II visited Israel, Jordan and the Palestinian Authority. It was a major step in the Roman Catholic Church’s continuing efforts to build positive relations with Jews that began in 1965 at the Second Vatican Council. The pope’s presence at Jerusalem’s Western Wall, the Israeli presidential residence and Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial, were powerful and lasting images.

3. The leaders of China were unable to crush religious impulses among its citizens. The activities of the Falun Gong meditation sect and Beijing’s inability to squash the movement captured world attention in 2000. Falun Gong shattered the stereotype that Buddhism is passive and demands little zeal from its adherents. Has everyone conveniently forgotten the Vietnamese Buddhist monks of the 1960s who used self-immolation to express opposition to government policies?

4. While initial reports were somewhat overblown, it’s clear the recent discoveries of the genome project represent a quantum jump in knowledge about our genetic makeup. While profound differences exist among people, the genome findings graphically illustrate how much we human beings actually share, a belief first articulated in the book of Genesis. However, like many other scientific “breakthroughs,” the genome project’s long-range benefits may be years away.

5. The 2000 presidential election will forever occupy a prominent place in history books for many reasons, including the fact that Sen. Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn., the Democratic vice presidential candidate, was the first Jew ever chosen to run for one of our nation’s top offices. The campaign also featured George W. Bush’s controversial visit to Bob Jones University in South Carolina, an ultra-conservative Protestant institution whose leaders have historically espoused anti-Catholicism.

6. Emory University Professor Deborah Lipstadt won a decisive legal victory in London that dealt a crushing blow to the obscene belief the Holocaust never happened. British writer David Irving sued Lipstadt for libel because she had charged in her book that he was a Holocaust denier. After a lengthy and bitter trial, Lipstadt won the case and the judge clearly labeled Irving an anti-Semite and admirer of Hitler.

7. The fevered question of same-sex marriages and ordination of gays and lesbians will not go away. The issue was widely debated within mainline Protestant denominations. In March the Central Conference of American Rabbis, Reform Judaism’s rabbinic body, adopted a resolution permitting its members to participate in same-sex wedding ceremonies. Same-sex couples are now able to use Duke University’s chapel for weddings, and the issue also surfaced among Roman Catholic clergy and laypeople.

8. The road to interreligious amity continued to be bumpy in 2000. Many Protestant leaders were upset with “Dominus Iesus,” a Vatican statement that called non-Catholic Christians “gravely deficient.” Although the document did not specifically mention Jews or Judaism, some Jewish leaders saw the Vatican statement as a backward step in interreligious relations. Stung by such public criticism, at year’s end the pope and others hastened to reaffirm their commitment to mutually respectful interreligious dialogue.

9. The deaths of Cardinal John O’Connor, archbishop of New York, and Rabbi Alexander Schindler, the longtime president of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, robbed the religious world of two prominent leaders. Each man left a permanent mark not only upon his own faith community, but upon the general society as well. The outspoken O’Connor and the ebullient Schindler were both extraordinarily talented originals and are sorely missed.


10. While rabbinical schools and evangelical Christian seminaries continue to attract a large number of students, many mainline Protestant and Roman Catholic seminaries face shrinking enrollments. The acute shortage of Catholic priests is likely to intensify. Indeed, one of the reasons Archbishop Edward Egan was chosen as O’Connor’s successor is his ability to attract young men to the priesthood.

DEA END RUDIN

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