Tuesday, 22 January 2013
HINDU SNOWMAN
Monday, 21 January 2013
MUSLIM SNOWMAN
CELEBRATING DIVERSITY ON CAMPUS: RELIGION OR BELIEF SHOWCASE
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| African Student Society |
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| Ahlul Bayt Islamic Society |
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| Cathsoc: Leicester Universities Catholic Society |
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| Christ Embassy |
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| Hindu Society |
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| Islamic Society |
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| Krishna Consciousness Society |
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| Leicester Council of Faiths display (half of it) |
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| Kash Bhayani & Sheri Paige (VP Welfare, DMU Students' Union) |
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| Leicester Council of Faiths display (the other half!) |
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| Leicester Secular Society |
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| Stamp It Out! |
PRAYERS IN MEMORY OF DAMINI
This article appears in today's Leicester Mercury:
Prayers in memory of Damini
Around 100 adults and children said prayers yesterday for the 23-year-old medical student whose rape and murder in India provoked international outrage.
They gathered at the Shree Sanatan Mandir Hindu temple, in Belgrave, Leicester, for the hour-long ceremony which included the singing of devotional songs.
Ramanbhai Barber MBE, president of Shree Sanatan Mandir, said the congregation was united in its horror at what had happened to Jyoti Singh Pandey – known as Damini – who was attacked and raped on a bus in Delhi, before being thrown off the moving vehicle.She died in hospital.
The congregation is to write to the Indian High Commission in London calling for tougher laws to prevent similar attacks in the future.
Mr Barber said: "We all prayed and sang bhajans to grant peace to Damini.
"We need strong laws to stop these gangs who have forgotten our morals and values. We urge the Indian Government to take steps to ensure this.
"Damini is everyone's loss, and we all wish she was still alive. We hope she rests in peace."
Mr Barber said a lot of people travel to India, and added: "We should feel safe and secure to travel without fear.
"We want assurance that travel to Delhi, or any part of India, will be safe for our sisters and mothers."
Sunday, 20 January 2013
WORLD RELIGION DAY 2013
Today (third Sunday in January)
is World Religion Day. Established in 1950 by the National Spiritual Assembly of the
Bahá'ís of the United States, World Religion Day has been
increasingly taken up in other countries - at first by national and local
Bahá'í communities in different parts of the world, although it has also become
an event widely recognised and keenly celebrated by people of other faiths
too. The purpose of World Religion Day is to:
- bring together people of various faith communities
- celebrate the unifying power of religion
- promote inter faith understanding
- encourage religious leaders and adherents to acknowledge the similarities between their faiths and work together for the common good.
In the United States, 16 January is National Religious Freedom Day, officially proclaimed each year by an annual statement by the President of the United States. I can't say whether it's more than just a happy accident that these two dates are observed so close together, but hopefully, there's a mutual reinforcement of the positive message of the unifying power of religion, that it can illumine hearts and minds with its own positive light.
While there's no celebration of World
Religion Day in Leicester today, the event at De Montfort University tomorrow
(Monday 21 January) has been scheduled to recognise and tag on to World
Religion Day. That’s definitely progress. When I've blogged about World Religion Day in previous years (see blog posts for 2010, 2011 and 2012) I've lamented the local neglect of what could be a very significant event for Leicester. DMU is holding the first public observance in Leicester of this annual
occasion that I know of (although it's being billed as Celebrating
Diversity on Campus: Religion or Belief Showcase to
help make it more specific to the university).
There’s a good collection of tweets about World
Religion Day, many of which show what's happening in other places around the
world. Just search #worldreligionday. Our American
friends may or may not know that today is also given over to a number of other "national days", including Buttercrunch Day, Cheese Lovers' Day, Penguin Awareness Day, Disc Jockey Day. There are clearly just too many of these days for the
calendar to accommodate, so some of them have to bunch up and share. Today is also Buzz Aldrin's birthday. Now that's more like it!
Saturday, 19 January 2013
SIKH SNOWMAN
Friday, 18 January 2013
THIS WEEK'S VISITORS (1,810)
Regular update on the number of pageviews received from different parts of the world in the week just ending.
- United Kingdom 719
- United States 534
- Russia 267
- France 66
- Germany 62
- Ukraine 44
- India 40
- Spain 32
- Israel 25
- Poland 21
This week's total: 1,810 (last week: 1,681). These are aggregates of figures from the top ten countries only. Blogger's analytics doesn't show the numbers of pageviews below the tenth-ranking country and they don’t show the cumulative total including those additional countries, which is undoubtedly larger than the number shown above.
The world map at the top of this post is the graphic that I see on the stats page. The darker the green, the more pageviews from that country. I can see different versions of that map for "now" (i.e. in the last two hours), "today", "this week", "this month" and "all time". They're updated each time I look at them.
WHAT'S TO CELEBRATE ABOUT BEING A MULTI-CULTURAL CITY?
This letter appears in today's Leicester Mercury:
What's to celebrate about being a multi-cultural city?
In his First Person column ("Let's start new year with pride and confidence", Mercury, December 31), Sir Peter Soulsby reckons that two events need celebrating.
Firstly, the census shows Leicester to be one of the most "diverse" cities in the country and, secondly, Richard III's remains are probably ours, which will be good for tourism.
This does not seem to make a great deal of sense. To begin with, why are we supposed to be celebrating the idea that Leicester is now one of the least English cities in England?
Are we not supposed to enjoy our own company? In which case, why would tourists?
And Richard III is part of English history – any tourism would be based on the idea of our monocultural, English heritage, wouldn't it?
Which is going to be tricky anyway because, dead kings apart, we seem to have knocked down a very respectable proportion of our historical heritage and seem to be waiting for a large part of the rest to collapse from neglect.
Besides which, how is more immigration a good idea when we cannot find enough jobs to keep the present population fully employed, in tourism or otherwise?
Or enough housing since we are now supposed to wreck a large part of our very attractive and tourist-friendly countryside in order to accommodate a population which, I have read, makes us the fourth most densely populated country in the world.
Possibly a new walk to a world of muck, brass and realism is in order.
Russ Ball, Leicester
Thursday, 17 January 2013
COMMON SENSE AND TOLERANCE IS WHAT WE NEED
The Venerable David Newman's First Person column appears in today's Leicester Mercury:
Common sense and tolerance is what we need
The European Court of Human Rights' rulings this week on the four cases of alleged religious discrimination reveal what a lack of imagination our law-bound culture displays.
Issues that might have been resolved with a bit of common sense and compromise have become expensive displays of intolerance. Whose intolerance – the employers or the employees? There's the issue. One person's freedom is another person's bondage.
If I want my neighbourhood to be quiet, I discriminate against those who want to make a noise, and vice versa. If my conscience makes me a vegetarian then I shouldn't work in a butcher's. But if employed in a supermarket, it should be possible for me not to have to work on the meat counter.
Clearly all the cases were not the same. Wearing a cross as a mark of faith should cause no problem in a tolerant society, provided that any health and safety issues were explained and heeded.
A marriage counsellor who preferred to give sexual advice and therapy to heterosexual couples rather than homosexual couples (and vice versa) could be accommodated in most organisations, unless of course it was contrary to their original job description, just as many professionals specialise in different areas.
A university lecturer who said that he didn't really get on with small children would not get prosecuted for not going to work in an infant school.
They tried to trap Jesus into taking a grand defiant step of conscience which polarised faith and the authorities when they asked Him if it was lawful to pay taxes to Caesar, the hated occupying and oppressive power of His day.
He asked to see a coin, pointed to Caesar's head and inscription on it and told them to give to Caesar what was Caesar's and to God what was God's.
In other words, he was saying that it was right and possible to be a good citizen and a conscientious believer; and both individuals and organisations should work to enable both.
The individual conscience may not always be right, but it should always be treated with respect. Similarly we may disagree with the prevailing ethos, but we should choose our battles carefully and always be lovingly principled.
Exchanging religious intolerance for secular intolerance (or vice versa) is not a recipe for a good society.
The Venerable David Newman is Archdeacon of Loughborough.
BBC RADIO LEICESTER: EAST PARK ROAD INCIDENT
MB: It’s eight minutes past eight. Now: next this morning, police and religious leaders in Leicester are calling for calm following an attack on a restaurant in the city earlier this week. The police are continuing to question six men after a number of people were injured in the incident on East Park Road on Monday night. Now, detectives have also confirmed they’ve now spoken to a Sikh girl and her family regarding a separate incident.
Raj Mann is from the Leicestershire Sikh Alliance, and he’s worried these recent incidents could cause friction in the community.
RM: In Leicester we are a community of communities and we enjoy good standards of community cohesion; there is room for improvement on that. Unfortunately, the police yesterday mentioned two religions, mentioned Sikh-Muslim tensions.
MB: Well, Luman Ali is from the Federation of Muslim Organisations. He’s calling for calm and urging people to work with facts, not rumours.
LA: I think it’s up to us to monitor the concerns of our youth and make sure things don’t get out of hand. This is always the case when you have incidents of violence. It’s a process of misinformation which we have to work hard to work against, especially in the form of these text messages that fly around with misinformation that aren’t helpful to any of us.
MB: Now members of the faith communities in Leicester met last night with the police. George Ballentyne, from Leicester Council of Faiths, was there and joins us now. Good morning George.
GMB: Good morning.
MB: What exactly happened last night?
GMB: Well it was a very productive meeting and I think it was very positive. We had 30 people there in all, and there were representatives from the Sikh and Muslim communities, as well as other faith communities in the city. I should just mention that the two people we’ve just heard from, they were both at the meeting last night, both contributed to it. And we spoke with Rob Nixon (who’s the City Commander) and two of his colleagues, about the current situation of the investigation into the incident. Then we went on to talk about some of the underlying issues that are of concern to the communities, in terms of protecting young people and vulnerable people. And then we devoted the last part of the meeting to talking about how to move forward, how to preserve that unity amongst the communities that Leicester is so famous for and how to also work with (like) the city’s Safeguarding Board, with schools, with GPs, to make sure that these kind of situations are open, not confined inside the community networks and that there are actually practical ways of addressing these issues that don’t end up with the kind of incident that we saw a couple of nights ago.
MB: George, apart from the specific concerns about protecting vulnerable children and this specific incident, were there major concerns about any disruption to that unity and racial harmony in our city?
GMB: Well of course there were, because we have to be careful in Leicester that we don’t become a kind of site for working out a national situation and we were very conscious that we have to attend to what’s going in Leicester, what the people do in Leicester and keep things within our own community, rather than making it a place of working out difficulties that are happening in other cities around the UK. We’ve always been aware that the situation in Leicester tends to be different from what we see in other parts of the country. There’s a higher degree of integration, there’s a higher degree of a kind of happy living alongside each other and we really (uhm …). You know, that exists because people work at it, it’s not an accident; and when something like this happens, we have to be really careful to take action. Rob Nixon, the City Centre Commander, was praising the faith communities that within 48 hours of the incident, we had this quite large-scale meeting of people who are opinion-formers and influential speakers within their own communities. And he felt that this was a sign that we really do want to take this topic seriously and address it in a way that will deal with it and heal any kind of rift that may have emerged within our communities in the city.
MB: Now, much of this disruption seems to have been caused by the rumours that have been flying around on texts and so on – some of them may have been malicious, we don’t really know – but how can that sort of thing be stopped?
GMB: Well social media’s a great thing and I’m a big fan of it and even just in the ten minutes before coming on air, Radio Leicester and I have been tweeting and retweeting each other, saying to people: listen to this spot, find out what’s going on. But it’s also a terrible rumour mill it’s the way it is now that (you know) people can express their opinions or their beliefs or their misconceptions about things and it’s part of the freedom that we have to do that and people have to be very conscious, I think, and very self-aware that someone may only see one tweet, one Facebook post or something like that and it could really inflame things, it can give people the wrong idea. But it also meant that the police, the Council of Faiths, other organisations involved, like the Federation of Muslim Organisations, the Leicestershire Sikh Alliance, we’re all using social media responsibly right now to try to get the facts out there, get the names of the people that folk can talk to if they’re concerned and help to actually help to show the process that’s going on in a very live and transparent and current way.
MB: I have to say that we should take things at face value more than we do, we believe, or many people believe what they red and there are lots of untruths around on social network sites and so on and that can be damaging, can’t it? But no doubt the faiths in Leicester are determined to work together and that’s the strength of Leicester, isn’t it?
GMB: I really think that’s so. I mean, there were people there from every walks of the communities there last night, from the kind of folk who really pride themselves on having their ear to the ground and knowing what’s happening amongst people on the street, through to those people who are very involved with the places of worship and the community centres, working with all different kinds of different people within the communities. The most important thing, really is that the message we call want to come out from last night is that this is not a faith-on-faith issue, it’s not a community-on-community issue, the police are very clear that what we are dealing with is criminal behaviour, it’s criminality, not conflict of belief or conflict of practice among the communities and the important thing is to deal with the situation as it exists and everybody’s really now into this process of dispelling some of the myths, make people feel a bit more secure and happy about what the police are doing, how the communities are meeting together – and the Leicester Council of Faiths has such a good track record over more than a quarter of a century of helping to promote trust, understanding and co-operation amongst the communities. And it’s at times like this when we are put to the test and we hope that we are able to do it in such a way that serves the greater good in the city.
MB: Okay George, just remind us then, if it’s not “faith-on-faith”, how would you describe this: just pure criminality?
GMB: That’s the term that the police want to use. Whoever would have done this and however it would have arisen, this is criminal behaviour.
MB: George, thank you for joining us this morning. George Ballentyne from the Leicester Council of Faiths. And we’ll follow that story here on BBC Radio Leicester; any developments, you’ll hear them first here on 104.9 FM.
Just after a quarter past eight. The headlines on BBC Radio Leicester: As you’ve just heard, the Council of Faiths in the city has told this programme they’ll work together to heal any rifts in the Spinney Hill community after an attack on a restaurant on East Park Road earlier this week.
If you visit this blog before Thursday 24 January, you can hear the interview on BBC Radio Leicester's Listen Again facility, starting at 0808.
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