Excerpt:
At Christmastime last year, I wrote about a vicar in a heavily Muslim part of Oslo who decided that the best way for a group of schoolchildren in her care to celebrate the holidays was to read aloud in church from the Koran.
She's not alone in her special understanding of her duty as a Christian cleric. The other day came news that Louise Britze Kijne, vicar of Holy Cross Church in Nørrebro – a heavily Muslim neighborhood in Copenhagen – had, with the blessing of her ecclesiastical higher-ups and her own parish council, invited an imam, Abdul Wahid Pedersen, to speak to her congregation on the subject of "peace" just after the wrap-up of the Pentecost Monday worship service.
Originally, Britze Kijne's idea was to have Pedersen speak during the worship service itself. But she changed her mind. Not because she realized it would a betrayal of her vocation or an affront to her congregants' beliefs, but because she worried that it might cause controversy. And she didn't want that.