Friday, December 14, 2012

Church Opens Arms to Muslim Group, and Is Taken to Task

From The New York Times-

When the Muslim Public Affairs Council arranged to hold its annual convention at All Saints Church in Pasadena, Calif., this Saturday, leaders of both organizations believed it would be a bold demonstration of progress in interfaith relations.

But now the organizers of the convention have had to call in the local police department and private security guards after a conservative Christian group posted an article accusing All Saints, an Episcopal church, of harboring Muslim extremists, and the church received a barrage of hate mail.

“I’ve been called names all my life from the ultraconservative reactionary position,” the church’s rector, the Rev. J. Edwin Bacon Jr., said in an interview on Thursday, “but this is a level of demeaning that I’ve not seen before. Demeaning not just of me, but of the Muslim faith, of this organization, the Prophet Muhammad and the Koran. It tells me that there’s a culture of fear in America, a perversion of Christianity which has turned it into the religion of fear, which it of course is not.”


More here-

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/14/us/pasadena-church-criticized-for-hosting-muslim-convention.html?_r=0

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