Muslims on terrorism, and protecting against H1N1
I've been away the last couple of days, and will be back to posting full-time on Thursday. In the meantime, we did have a couple of stories in the newspaper on Sunday that you might have missed.
In the first, a Muslim scholar told a Baltimore conference on Saturday that the use of Islam to justify killing is "an innovation" in the religion, and added: "Most innovations lead to hellfire."
"The Satan always has people that he will be able to deceive," Dr. Waleed Basyouni told hundreds at Ilm Fest 2009, an Islamic education conference making its first appearance in Baltimore. "The good news," he said during a presentation he called "Reclaiming Islam from the Jihadists," is that "the nature of the Muslim community is to fight terrorism. The nature of the Muslim community is to reject extremism."
Read the rest of the story at baltimoresun.com.
In the second, we reviewed preparations for H1N1 among different faith congregations. We were interested in the comments of the Rev. John Kingsbury, pastor of St. Mary's in Annapolis. He had taken precautions against the spread of the virus during Mass, but worried that the spiritual impact of the pandemic "has yet to be faced,"
"There will be less, probably, Communions to hospitals," he said. "I'm guessing the hospitals will begin to become stricter with people visiting if things become more serious.
"People dealing with mass suffering -- by which I mean, a lot of people sick -- are going to want spiritual comfort at the very time that it's going to be the most difficult to give it."
