wfn.org | Religious pluralism can be enriching

[FRANK_IMHOFF.parti@ecunet.org (FRANK IMHOFF)]

   says President of Latin American Council of Churches
Indicator for "religious emergency"

BUENOS AIRES (Argentina)/GENEVA, 20 August 1998 (lwi) - The president of
the Latin American Council of Churches (CLAI), Walter Altmann, has spoken
out in support of Latin America's religious plurality. "It can enrich us",
he emphasized in an address on "The Challenges of the New Religious
Movements for the Ecumenical Movement", delivered at the end of July at the
theological institute Instituto Superior Evangelico de Estudios Teologicos
(ISEDET) in the Argentinian capital Buenos Aires.

According to the Latin American news agency ALC, Altmann spoke of the
appearance of new religious movements in Latin America as an indication of
a "religious emergency". This emergency has to do not so much with the
churches internally but with the surrounding secularized society in which
men and women are searching for life's meaning. Many of them find this
meaning in religion and in religious groups "which are less
institutionalized than the traditional churches", added the Brazilian
Lutheran.

When one thinks of the new religious movements, one thinks above all of
their energy, their sense of solidarity and of community as well as of "the
dynamism with which they win over persons who move from one place to the
other....We always see others with their glaring faults and compare them
with our noble ideals", he continued, but "we should compare our own faults
with the ideals of others".

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Lutheran World Information
Editorial Assistant: Janet Bond-Nash
E-mail: jbn@lutheranworld.org
http://www.lutheranworld.org/