Juan Cole, a Professor of History at the University of Michigan, is a well-known spokesman on the Middle-East, of liberal bent, a person who believes in inclusion rather than exclusion. Yesterday he attended the annual conference of the Muslim Public Affairs Council with, of all people, Rick Warren and Melissa Etheridge, who is gay.
He came away from the conference not only liking Rick Warren, but looking up to him, admiring him. It is worth reading Cole's post about the meeting here. Actually it's worth reading Cole's blog, Informed Comment, on a regular basis.
Living outside the US, I see it on a smaller screen, and on the screen, both left and right can seem equally shrill. I wonder, for instance, how many on the left have ever actually listened to Rick Warren or learned anything about him. I had seen and paid little attention to his book, The Purpose Driven Life, when an Episcopal priest, a pretty liberal one, mentioned to me that he thought the book was quite good, worth reading, worth heeding.
I didn't get the book, though after Juan Cole's endorsement and with the expensive miracle of always-available books that the Amazon Kindle offers, I think I may. (I do suspect Kindle enables book addiction.) But the priest's mention of his admiration for Warren softened my outlook a bit and I found myself paying attention when Warren made the news. And I think he did quite a credible job interviewing Obama and McCain at his church. Not many of my friends in the Northeast agreed with me.
As maybe Jimmy Breslin said, we don't have to literally "love" our neighbors in the sense of thinking we have to be best friends, we have to get along with them. We have to learn to be a little flexible, and figure if for some reason we can't agree with EVERYTHING they say, we inevitably have some things in common with them. So maybe we can learn that Rick Warren is leading a purpose-driven life that is doing more good for more people than, say, your average liberal.
Certainly those of us who don't do all that much for the world with our time and resources could adjust our perspective and our judgment to allow that we shouldn't be excluding from consideration of decency people who come from what at first seem like radically different perspectives.
And Melissa Etheridge, whose marriage plans were destroyed by the approval of Proposition 8 appeared on the same stage with Warren. Warren is an Etheridge fan, apparently.
And don't forget, American Muslims were the hosts for all of them.