An Interfaith Gathering at the Salt Lake Tabernacle, Focused on the Old Testament Tabernacle
Artificial interfaith-dialogue-faiths results in watered-down joint statements that achieves little or nothing except guarantee employment for professional ecumenists. Thankfully, this was nothing like that.
At the invitation of an acquaintance who is on the faculty at the medical school of the University of Utah, my wife and I joined him and two Egyptian-American Muslim guests for an interfaith gathering at the Salt Lake Tabernacle last evening. The fireside was connected with the model of the Old Testament tabernacle that has been touring Utah in recent weeks and months, and, although it was conducted under the auspices of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (and featured a choir from the LDS Institute of Religion at the University of Utah, accompanied by Linda Margetts on the Tabernacle organ), its speakers included Protestant and Greek Orthodox clergy, as well as Imam Habib Sarfraz from the Khadeeja Islamic Center in West Valley City and Rabbi Samuel Spector of Congregation Kol Ami in Salt Lake City.
We thoroughly enjoyed the remarks of all of the speakers. I want to note that I was pleased by the concluding remarks of Elder Kevin W. Pearson of the Seventy, who is the president of the Utah Area of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and who presided at last night’s meeting. I was pleased because his address was not only friendly and welcoming to all but also, at the same time, clearly and resolutely Christian and specifically Latter-day Saint. I’ve been involved in a great many interfaith events on every inhabited continent except, for some reason, South America, and I like it when representatives of the faiths involved are forthrightly themselves. I’ve been in some where the Muslims, Christians, and Jews involved were so deracinated that the harmony their meetings achieved seemed to me to represent nothing of any significance at all, since they no longer represented their own traditions in any meaningful sense. I like to see representatives of actual living faiths discuss where they agree and where they differ; ecumenism between artificial interfaith-dialogue-faiths that results in watered-down joint statements that scarcely represent even those ghostly creations achieves little or nothing except guarantee employment for professional ecumenists.
I really liked Imam Sarfraz’s remarks; he told many of the same stories — e.g., about the involvement of the prophet Moses in the mi‘raj (“ascension) or isra’ (“night journey”) of Muhammad — that I like to tell in similar gatherings, and that I have specifically used in connection with events involving the tabernacle model.
And I would like to share two items from Rabbi Spector’s speech:
- He related a midrashic (which is to say non-biblical) story connected with the ancient tabernacle. According to this story, after Moses received God’s very specific instructions as to the design of the tabernacle, he set about to construct it himself. But he couldn’t. He lacked the skills. And, each time he tried, he failed. So two ordinary Israelites, a pair of craftsmen named Bezalel and Oholiab or Aholiab — who actually do feature in the biblical narrative — asked Moses for permission to let them try. And, of course, they succeeded. Which, Rabbi Spector said, shows that even the greatest of prophets needed faithful but ordinary people to help him carry out his divinely-assigned mission.
- He also told of one of his own greatest spiritual experiences. He has, he said, visited some of the grandest and most beautiful synagogues in the world — and he specifically and repeatedly told of how impressed he was and is by the San Diego California Temple, near which he lived for several years. Once, though, he was taking a group of Jewish school kids on a tour of Europe, during which they visited the former Nazi concentration camp at Theresienstadt. While there, they came into a small, dark room — somehow undiscovered by the camp guards — which a Jewish inmate of the camp had decorated with symbols of his faith and on the walls of which he had inscribed Hebrew prayers. “Can we pray?” his students asked. And so, in that dark room, amidst the profoundly dark history of that place, they recited the very prayers that a long-martyred Jewish inmate of Theresienstadt had prayed and written decades before — and, he said, he and they powerfully felt the presence of God. I believe him.
Several new items have appeared on the website of the Interpreter Foundation. I’m pleased to call them to your notice:
Conference Talks: “The Cosmic Mountain in Canaan and the Qur’an”
One Daniel C. Peterson gave this presentation on Saturday, 25 October 2014, as part of the Interpreter Foundation’s 2014 Temple on Mount Zion Conference.
The New Testament in Context Lesson 20: “What Lack I Yet?” Matthew 19–20, Mark 10, and Luke 18
For the 16 April 2023 Come, Follow Me segment of the Interpreter Radio Show, Bruce Webster and Kris Frederickson and Martin Tanner discussed New Testament lesson 20, “Thou Art the Christ” on Matthew 19–20, Mark 10, and Luke 18.
That discussion is now available, archived shorn of commercial breaks, for your listening pleasure. The other segments of the March 19 radio show can be accessed at https://interpreterfoundation.org/interpreter-radio-show-april-16-2023.
The Interpreter Radio Show can be heard weekly on Sunday evenings from 7 to 9 PM (MDT), on K-TALK, AM 1640, or you can listen live on the Internet at ktalkmedia.com.
As he has been doing regularly for quite some time now, Jonn Claybaugh has prepared a set of concise notes for Interpreter readers who are students or teachers of the Church’s “Come, Follow Me” curriculum plan.
Interpreter Radio Show — April 30, 2023
Martin Tanner and Terry Hutchinson were joined by Dan Peterson for this episode of the Interpreter Radio Show. Among other things, they discussed the said Peterson’s recent article in Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship, “How Things Look from Here.”
Interpreter Radio Show — April 23, 2023
In this episode of the Interpreter Radio Show, Newell D. Wright joined Steve Densley, Mark Johnson, and John S. Thompson for a discussion of his recent article in Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship, “Moving Beyond the Historicity Question, or a Manifesto for Future Book of Mormon Research.”
Some experts contend that the Christopher Hitchens Memorial “How Religion Poisons Everything” File™ is literally infinite. I haven’t yet made my mind up on that important philosophical question, and I prefer not to take a position on it. Nevertheless, the contents of the Hitchens File are plainly, indisputably, vast. Here are two more chilling stories that I’ve recently retrieved from it:
“Hundreds of Southern California Teens Gather to Help the Hungry”
