Commentary

The Role of Blackness in the Hamline Islamic Art Controversy We’ve heard little about the students who initiated the complaint and why they objected to a painting of the prophet. Commentary by Kayla Renee Wheeler, Edward E. Curtis IV | Religion News Service In early October, Erika López Prater, a professor …

They say we dream more vividly as we grow older. That is certainly true for me. And I remember my dreams now in ways I never did when younger. And because I spent most of my life in newsrooms, that is where dreams take me. Soon enough, the newsrooms I remember will live only in dreams. And an institution so important to American democracy will be all but gone. Not a dream, but a nightmare.

Spiritual abuse is far too common, but we don’t talk about it. In fact, I had a counselor here on the Palouse once tell me she didn’t have the training to work with a spiritually abused client, and couldn’t think of a single person in the area she could refer me to. I get it. Things in the religious realm are unnerving. Some people won’t go near it. Others, though, will take advantage.

Yes, the Bahá’í teaching that “all the religions are one” is a challenging claim. Religions say different things, contradictory things, often in opposition to each other. In fact, in a single religious tradition — such as Christianity — various denominations often say diametrically opposing things on certain issues, such as who was Jesus, how do we attain salvation and should Christians be drinking alcohol.

Most Native Americans will say both good and evil exist, but Indigenous concepts differ from Eurocentric ideas when it comes to evil. As I have said before, there are hundreds of Indigenous tribes, and each has their own cultures and religions. As a rule, however, most seem to believe in evil – not as a concept or an entity separate from humans, but as an action made by humans.

Evil is an ineradicable part of the human condition. It is part of who we are. It is one of the inevitable consequences of human freewill. Evil is here to stay.