Is religion the cause of so much of the violence racking today’s world? Or is faith just one of many factors? Or collateral damage? Those are tough questions, the kind that are usually posed to religious leaders, not by religious leaders.
But Cardinal Timothy Dolan wanted to switch things up on his weekly radio show, so he invited a minister, a rabbi, and an imam to tackle that issue. What sounds like the opening line of a joke was actually an in-depth discussion of “the rise of religious intolerance.”
“I don’t know if there would be anything more pertinent today, or more timely today, than religious harmony, or the lack thereof,” Dolan, the Roman Catholic archbishop of New York, said March 31 in opening a special edition of his program on the Catholic Channel of the SiriusXM network.
“The elephant in the room is that today, whether we like it or not, religion is often the cause of scandal,” he said.
“Religion is supposed to be an overwhelmingly positive force that brings people together, that increases love and understanding, human progress and human enlightenment.”
But many people today — believers and nonbelievers alike — see religion as the opposite, he said, and “that keeps the four of us up at night.”
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