Mubaraks

Why the World Needs Religious Studies | Culture | Religion Dispatches. May the field forgive me for offering a bit of very crude historical psychoanalysis and master-narrativizing to catch everyone up on where we stand. Academic, non-sectarian religious studies in the United States can be more or less traced to the Supreme Court’s 1963 Abington Township v. Schempp decision, which carved out a distinction between teaching about religion, which is okay, and the teaching of religion, which violates the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause. Catechists had to shuffle out of public classrooms, and suddenly there was space for a new kind…

Love blooms in Zuccotti Park: Protesting  Occupy Wall Street lovebirds tie the knot  – NY Daily News. In front of about a dozen friends and onlookers, Emery Abdel-Latif, 24, and Micha Balon, 19, held a traditional Muslim wedding on Trinity Place and Liberty Street, perched on a small bench next to the park’s famous sculpture of a seated man with a briefcase.  “We have to be able to understand truly how unique this relationship is,” said Khalid Latif, the chaplain at New York University who married the eager duo.