Source: Yahoo! News
When vandals ransacked and spray-painted swastikas and other hate symbols on the headquarters of the Dialogue Institute of Kansas City last fall, people of faith responded quickly and with heart.
First, they spread the word about what had happened to this Turkish-based Muslim group, which has promoted interfaith understanding here for years. Then they gathered at the United Methodist Church of the Resurrection in Leawood to hear speakers from various religious traditions pledge to stand with the institute and its shocked constituents.
That’s what Kansas City’s interfaith community does when slimy hate slides from under rocks to spread revolting messages of bigotry. And it’s been doing that for decades.
So on this Easter Sunday, I give thanks for this important work symbolized by the overlapping of major religious observances of the Abrahamic faiths (Judaism, Christianity and Islam): Lent (Feb. 22-April 6), Passover (April 5-April 13) and Ramadan (March 22-April 20).
Healthy, generative religion, it turns out, is still immensely important in Kansas City.
Yes, Christianity still has the most followers here, but America’s changing religious landscape has affected the metro, too, as American Christianity suffers diminishment and as the number of religiously unaffiliated people (called the “nones”) grows.
Religion’s fingerprints are all over Kansas City’s history. Sometimes in uplifting ways, sometimes far from it.
That history includes everything from fights over biblical support for slavery to the founding here in the 1890s of Unity, a spiritualist movement, to construction in Independence of the world headquarters of the Community of Christ (formerly the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints). As for theological seminaries and Bible colleges, we’ve got a handful of them.
One organization that has done as much as any other to foster religious education and dialogue is the Greater Kansas City Interfaith Council, created in 1989 by the Rev. Vern Barnet, long an advocate for religious literacy and cooperation.
Among other initiatives, the council sponsors the annual Table of Faiths dinner at which the area’s rich heritage of religious diversity is celebrated.
All of these efforts reveal that the need for reasonable religious voices hasn’t disappeared and may be more necessary than ever as our profound political divisions get reflected in our religions and sometimes result in people of faith dehumanizing others.
But as the Interfaith Council, the Dialogue Institute, the Good Faith Network of Johnson County and other risk-taking groups seek harmony, several agencies here are dedicated to working against the hatred displayed in racist, antisemitic and homophobic vandalism such as that found on Blue Valley High School’s football stadium press box in January.