"It's Really All About God: Reflections of a Muslim Atheist Jewish Christian," BY Samir Selmanovic. Jossey-Bass, $24.95 (320p) ISBN 978-0-470-43326-3

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY (7/13/2009): New York City pastor Selmanovic synthesizes his upbringing in a Muslim-atheist household and his own conversion to Christianity as a young adult to create this concise and entertaining interfaith memoir. The author vividly describes his childhood in Yugoslavia, where his Muslim father and Christian mother reveled in multicultural cooking and entertaining. Essentially raised to be an atheist, Selmanovic shattered his parents' world when he converted to Christianity at age 18 during his required army service. Searching for his own Christian identity, he eventually came to the United States in 1990, only to become frustrated that American organized religion confirmed some of his father's criticisms. Selmanovic's story goes much deeper while still being respectful of, and fair to, all faiths and beliefs. An active member of the interfaith movement, Selmanovic actually moves beyond just creating harmony between faiths toward achieving a detente between people of faith and atheists. He challenges clergy to reclaim a space outside institutional walls and Christians to tone down conversion rhetoric. Sprinkled throughout are Selmanovic's entertaining and illustrative anecdotes, including the quite memorable "Theology of Hemorrhoids." (Sept.)

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Publishers Weekly (July 27, 2009)

"In Profile: Samir Selmanovic"

Teaching About God Through Discomfort

Samir Selmanovic never gave God or religion much thought as a young man. Raised by culturally Muslim and loving parents who were essentially atheists, like many of their friends and neighbors in the Yugoslav city of Zagreb (now the capital of Croatia), Selmanovic didn't know what he was missing until his mandatory army service. Then he met an ascetic, homeless Christian, whose spirituality so enchanted him that he converted. In his new book, It's Really All About God: Reflections of a Muslim Atheist Jewish Christian (Jossey-Bass, Sept.), Selmanovic tells his story of struggles for spiritual definition.

His stunned parents nearly disowned him; later, he was disappointed by American Christianity, which he found to be overly individualistic. In times of spiritual crisis, Selmanovic began to not only draw upon his Muslim background but also turned to Judaism for inspiration (hence the inclusive subtitle to his book). Selmanovic credits his steadfast Christianity to other traditions: “I don't know if I would be a Christian today without other faiths.”

An ordained pastor and founder of the New York City interfaith organization Faith House, Selmanovic refuses to call his work “interfaith.” He says, “I am not so much interested in cooperation between faiths as in-depth [practice] and relevance of one's own faith in our interdependent world.” To illustrate his point, Selmanovic reflects on the future marriage of his daughter, who recently graduated from the eighth grade: “I'm sure my daughter will marry someone different than I expect. How am I going to live my faith and explain it to that other? Will my faith have an identity in isolation and be ineffective in a world that depends on diversity?”

He laughs as he describes how hard-liners of different faiths act as if they control divinity and spirituality, when, in reality, they cannot control their personal lives or even their bodily functions. This conclusion came to him when he tried to deliver a sermon while suffering a serious but socially unmentionable disorder that prevented him from standing comfortably for more than a few minutes. He takes a serious tone to describe his theory: “The Theology of Hemorrhoids is basically that our inability to handle the lowest level of our existence should tell us that we cannot be in charge of the Divine.”

With the passion and warmth of a spiritually secure individual, Selmanovic encourages people of faith to confront both skeptics and hard-liners: “I think that our passion toward God and toward humanity can overcome the fundamentalists. We can't tell the fundamentalists to cool down. We can tell them, actually, that, 'We are hotter [than you].' ”

—Asma Hasan

Selmanovic, Samir. It's Really All About God: Reflections of a Muslim Atheist Jewish Christian. Jossey-Bass. Oct. 2009. c.320p. index. ISBN 978-0-470-43326-3. $24.95. REL

Selmanovic's (founder & Christian coleader, Faith House Manhattan) book is in part the story of his remarkable spiritual and personal journey from Croatian Islam to Christianity to, finally, something richer beyond the conventions of Christian faith. To Selmanovic, modern religions and denominations have become self-serving God-management systems, containers and dispensers of God, and his aim is to embrace the diversities and even the mutually exclusive mysteries of the three Abrahamic faiths and atheism to gain a new perspective that is not about ourselves but about God. VERDICT A touching and personal point of entry into cross-denominational thinking. Recommended.

LINK

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/07/us/07beliefs.html?_r=3&scp=1&sq=Samir%20Selmanovic&st=cse

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Looking to Other Religions, and to Atheism, for Clarity in Faith

A month ago, when this column traced the argument of a book with the intriguing title of “Without Buddha I Could Not Be a Christian,” it was tempting to mention another recent book. “It’s Really All About God” (Jossey-Bass) carries the equally intriguing subtitle: “Reflections of a Muslim Atheist Jewish Christian.”

Samir Selmanovic, the author of the second book, even refers to Paul F. Knitter, the author of the first one, as a friend and mentor. Both books insist that other religious traditions can certainly be more than enemies, more even than innocent bystanders or friendly neighbors. Other religions, both authors claim, are essential resources for enriching one’s own.

But the books are very different. Mr. Knitter’s is the personal testimony of a scholar, carefully set out in theological terms. Mr. Selmanovic’s is the impassioned plea of a pastor and organizer, declaimed in ringing statements, sentence fragments, one-line paragraphs and catchy phrases that stop just short of a motivational speaker’s.

He is a storyteller — and he does have stories to tell. On Tuesday he spread some of those stories out on the dinner table of his Manhattan apartment. Here were photographs, taken in a public photo booth, of his honeymooning parents, his mother from a Roman Catholic family in Slovenia and his father from a Muslim family in Montenegro.

Born in 1965, Mr. Selmanovic was raised in a secular Muslim home in Croatia. It had, he writes, its own religion, with two doctrines, “Thou shalt enjoy life” — which meant food, family and friendships — and “Thou shalt not be a jerk” — which meant generosity, honesty and hard work. The family feasted on spitfire-roasted lamb at the end of Ramadan, without ever having fasted. They had a Christmas tree and Easter dinner, without ever going to church. For young Samir, “life was complete,” he recalls in his book.

“Until I became a Christian, and it all fell apart.”

Mr. Selmanovic’s clandestine conversion to Seventh-day Adventism while doing his obligatory military service in the Yugoslav army led to two years of banishment from his family and a rift that could not be healed for many years. It led to theological studies in the United States and to leadership of two swiftly growing churches, first in Manhattan and then in Redlands, Calif.

It also led to spiritual crisis, a reaction against believers, including himself, tempted to feel that they had exclusive possession of God. In 2007 he returned to New York City and founded Faith House, which brings together Christians, Muslims, Jews, atheists and others to learn from one another. He also directs a small Christian community called Citylights.

Mr. Selmanovic’s thesis in “It’s All About God” is that when religions turn into “God Management Systems” pretending to own God, they turn into idolatry. The quest to find God beyond the boundaries of one’s faith, he argues, has to be moved from occasional conferences resembling interfaith prom parties (“That was really nice. Let’s interfaith again next year.”) to something central.

“Other religions can challenge (or at least help us see) the idols we create because they expand the whole territory of knowing,” Mr. Selmanovic writes. “They pose difficult questions we don’t want to ask, make assumptions we don’t want to acknowledge or examine, create meaningful arguments against us we don’t want to consider, and expose harmful practices we don’t want to stop.”

Some of this message is less radical than Mr. Selmanovic can make it sound. The danger of turning one’s religion into a form of idolatry is not an uncommon theme among Christian thinkers. More than 40 years ago, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel made many of this book’s points in a landmark address, “No Religion Is an Island.” And Mr. Selmanovic’s prose often resembles a classic evangelical sermon, a confession of sin and call to repentance.

But that he pushes his argument into new territory might best be seen, not in his reflections on Islam or Judaism, but in a chapter titled “The Blessing of Atheism.” Atheism does not escape his criticism, but “atheism at its best,” he writes, “grabs us by the collar and throws us to the ground, demanding to see lives well lived, forcing us to dig deeper and live up to the best of our own religions.”

And in a memorable phrase: “Atheists are God’s whistleblowers.”

Mr. Selmanovic is not advocating a mash-up of faiths, even one throwing in nonfaith. He quotes Miroslav Volf, a Yale theologian and fellow Protestant from Croatia, on the need for boundaries: “Vilify all boundaries, pronounce every discrete identity oppressive, put the tag ‘exclusion’ on every stable difference — and you will have aimless drifting instead of clear-sighted agency, haphazard activity instead of moral engagement and accountability and, in the long run, a torpor of death instead of a dance of freedom.”

But Mr. Selmanovic sympathizes with everyone who ever puzzled at Christians “so bent on denying grace outside the boundaries of Christianity”; and he asks whether boundaries need to be walls. “Why not windows? Why not doors?”

Metaphors like walls and windows only go so far, however, in addressing how individuals will actually form religious identities more meaningful than the spiritual-but-not-religious cliché that Mr. Selmanovic writes “can be frighteningly undemanding.”

About this process Mr. Selmanovic, even more in person than in his book, does not claim to have the answers. On the one hand, “particularity matters,” he said, and it is “no good to go two inches deep into 10 different wells.” On the other hand, he said, “religion is going to adjust to an interdependent world” where no faith can exist in isolation. That adjustment will take time and be painful, he said, but “life itself will find a way.”

Q&A: Finding God outside our faith tradition

Robin Russell, Jan 15, 2010
 

Samir Selmanovic, whose efforts have been praised by key voices in the emerging church movement, is passionate about his Christian faith but believes that Christians must learn to respect other religions and even find God outside their own religion’s boundaries. 

Raised culturally Muslim (but practically atheist) in Croatia, Mr. Selmanovic converted to Christianity while a soldier in the Yugoslavian army. He went on to become a pastor in the U.S. and now is co-leader of Faith House Manhattan, which brings together people of faith—as well as atheists and humanists—to explore ways of living interdependently. 

In his new book,

(Jossey-Bass), he proposes a different way to practice one’s religion. He spoke recently with managing editor Robin Russell.

There’s nothing wrong with it. I think in fact it’s necessary to enjoy your own religion before you can respect the other. It’s a prerequisite—to be rooted in a certain place, so you really have something to offer others. None of us owns our stories; we have a responsibility to share it. And sharing presumes there is somebody to hear it, therefore we need to be hearers of other stories, too. If all of our stories are revelatory about God, then we owe those stories to others. 

I often say to Jews, “When are you going to start doing evangelism?” They say, “Well, no, we don’t do evangelism.” And I say, “Look, Judaism doesn’t belong to you—it’s a world heritage.” So many of us can benefit from it and then dig into our stories and traditions and find things about social justice. We give and receive our stories so that we know one another and we enrich the world.

Religion is something that helps us to live with uncertainty. A faith is a working relationship with a mystery. Religions start by saying, “Isn’t this life experience amazing—and isn’t it awful?” And what do you do with that? People start sharing with one another their insights to help them live with this unknown. I think that we have in this age of reason started to systematize this, to break down into propositions and certain statements of belief that we have to give assent to. 

Author Karen Armstrong talks about how religion in modernity has been shrunk, taking away from mythos and being explained in terms of logos. But people feel that life is larger than religious institutions, theologies, principles, steps—all of these things. In the last 50 or 100 years, religion has become more and more of a compartment of life. I think that’s the reason: People sense that life is bigger. 

So they opt for “spiritual but not religious.” But religion at its best is a resource, a treasure—a community of support. So what they’re saying is, “I want to be spiritual alone.” That’s like saying, “I like knowledge but not education.”

I use those words as adjectives simply to say that without Islam, Judaism and Christianity, I don’t know if I would still be a Christian. Those traditions and stories and people helped me on my Christian journey when I came to an impasse, or when it’s difficult or I’m disoriented or I can’t get it, or I’m frightened or bored. I turn to these others and say, “How are you doing this on your path?” And they give me a bigger picture, and ask questions I have never been asking and name things I’m afraid to name. They look into the blind spots and say, “Hmmmm. Why don’t you move your head a little bit this way and then maybe you can see this in your tradition?” 

In the Bible, strangers were those who helped us come to a place we have never been before, and to see things we cannot see on our own—like heavenly consultants. There are lots of examples in the Bible.

Why did we need Persian astrologers to name the Messiah? Why didn’t we just tell ourselves who the Messiah is? Why was the outsider needed? And Jesus was a stranger all the time. In Matthew 25, it says, “I was a stranger and you helped me.” The Bible is so obsessed with strangers because God is afraid—if I can use that word—that his otherness would be lost on us if we did not accept that those who are not in our image are nevertheless in the image of God. So God comes to us as friend and neighbor, but also as stranger who brings a new thing: Good News. Jesus was a stranger, it says in John 1, and they didn’t recognize him. 

In the Old Testament, we can see that Melchizedek the high priest shows up out of nowhere to bless Abraham, the first believer. And the Samaritan was a person of a different religion, and Jesus used a person who was wrong to teach the truth. I think God’s preference is for the poor, but also for the stranger.

What Christianity enlightens and offers to the world is God’s presence in human suffering. It accounts for the dark side in a way that I don’t see anyone else doing. And it’s full of compassion—that all suffering is redemptive because God has suffered. It keeps the tension between good and evil, but also brings the evil and suffering within God’s kingdom. If there’s no Jesus, then evil is an inexplicable malfunction. And this personal embodiment in Jesus of what is divine—I like that part.

We call people who use religion for their own goals “religious extremists.” But I think the deeper you go into your religion, the more compassionate you will be. If you are extremely religious, you will be extremely compassionate. Mother Teresa or Ghandi or Martin Luther King Jr., they were extremists; they were pushing it far enough. I think people who are extremists are not pushing their faith far enough: It has not informed them. They have not taken their religion deeply enough and broadly enough to help them live with uncertainty and help them live with unanswered questions and tensions and with imperfections of this world and of other human beings. 

Real relationship with humanity and with God is unbearable to them. Instead of living with uncertainties and difficulties and beauty and challenges of life, they would rather shortcut that into certainty.

There are two kinds of atheism. One simply resembles religious fundamentalism. It denies any self-doubt. It’s obsessed with having answers and it mocks to discredit others. It wants human community to change in its own image. It says, “In order for the world to really work, we need to get people off religion.” So we need to get 3.3 billion people to stop being religious before world will improve. It’s just naïve—it’s a dead-end kind of thing—in the same way fundamentalist Muslims want to make everyone Muslim before the world will get better. 

But there are atheists who are introducing new questions. They are like God’s whistle-blower as far as ethics are concerned, saying, “Look, if you say these things, you’d better live this way.” Some of the critics of our faith have been our best allies, like prophets. Because without Marx and Freud and Nietzsche, we wouldn’t be able to see a lot of the things we needed to see. They have been very helpful to us in making us better, in naming some of the idols we have.

When religious people get together, we objectify the other. But all of us have this process of doubt in ourselves. We question the existence of God every couple of weeks because of what we encounter. We have to be honest about that. And atheists help us not to live in God’s echo chamber. They bring different voices. They’re asking clarifying questions. They’re asking us to function for the common good. And atheists are as diverse as Christianity is diverse.

I am, very much. We are going through a period where what it means to be religious is changing. Religion has to adjust to an interdependent world. In the past, the strong city was a city with big walls. But today, the strong city is the city that has more bridges and airports and links. Links make you strong, and links are also boundaries, so we can have our identity. If our roots go deeper, we can afford to take off some walls. 

When religion is able to adjust to the world as is—kind of live in reality—I think it has a lot to offer, as long as it is dethroned from being a manager of all the mystery. Our stories are interdependent; our mysteries need one another. 

Religion is a way we give voice and structure and narrative and story to what really matters to us. That’s why religions are in conflict, because religions simply express what’s important to us. And as such, there is a future to it, because our lives are made of stories. And religions preserve those stories and connect them and help us live with unanswered questions. We borrow faith and optimism and strength from each other. Religion is story plus community plus impact, and it will be there.

http://www.umportal.org/article.asp?id=6318