In Monday’s RNS report Omar Sacirbey writes about Muslims looking to blacks for guidance on civil rights: African-American Muslims trace their Islamic heritage to slaves brought to North America in the 17th century, some 10 percent to 30 percent of whom were estimated to be Muslim. Many call themselves indigenous Muslims. Despite that role, many African-American Muslims complain that Muslims who immigrated to the United States in the 1960s have never taken them seriously as faith partners, and marginalized them in American Islamic institutions. But that may be changing as mainly South Asian and Arab Muslims feel their civil rights at risk in the post-Sept. 11 world. Increasingly, they are turning to African-American Muslims for their civil rights experience. That is translating into increased cooperation between American Muslim and African-American organizations.
Tim Wendling reports on Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, who rode the gay marriage fight to GOP prominence: In June 2003, a group of evangelical Christian leaders met in Arlington, Va., to map strategy for a clash they viewed as the political equivalent of Gettysburg: same-sex marriage. For Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, the timing couldn’t have been more perfect. Thought to have little chance of winning the Republican primary for governor, Blackwell seized the moment and led a successful, high-profile campaign to outlaw gay marriage in Ohio in 2004. Largely as a result, Blackwell is a national political figure and, courtesy of the organizers of the Virginia conference, a member of the Arlington Group, a powerhouse, by-invitation-only organization whose roughly 60 members have direct access to the White House.
Jean Dubail reports on scholar Karen Armstrong, who works to find common truths among religions: At a time when tensions between and within the world’s major religions are roiling, Karen Armstrong reminds us that from their very beginnings, all of humankind’s major faiths have shared essential truths. Armstrong, the one-time Roman Catholic nun who has become a leading scholar and popularizer of religious history, recounts the founding and development of these faiths during the so-called Axial Age from 900 B.C. to 200 B.C. This period-the Great Transformation of her book’s title-proved pivotal to the development of monotheism in Israel, of Hinduism and Buddhism in India, of Taoism and Confucianism in China and of philosophical rationalism in Greece. Her point is that despite great differences among the peoples in these widely scattered regions, their faiths bear certain remarkable similarities.
