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Sacred Matters | The Muppets are America

Sacred Matters | The Muppets are America. The Muppets offered us biting social commentary when their show began nearly forty years ago. Now, with their videos, they are showing us an antidote to the xenophobia infecting our political and popular discourses. In their videos, they are offering a hopeful and positive vision of America, which includes all of the people living in it — divorced, gay, Muslim, black, etc. — a message that will hopefully be even more explicit in their show.

New York City’s religious diversity bucks stereotypes

“You can’t go more than a block without finding a house of worship in New York City, an actively used house of worship,” said Hussein Rashid, a scholar of religion with The New School and Union Theological Seminary. While accurate and up-to-date data on the state of religious identity in the five boroughs is hard to find, Rashid and other scholars say the city is as spiritually diverse as it’s ever been, even as religious affiliation is declining here in step with the rest of the country. Source: New York City’s religious diversity bucks stereotypes

Islam scholar Bernard Lewis left unfair legacy of disdain for Muslims – Religion News ServiceReligion News Service

Islam scholar Bernard Lewis left unfair legacy of disdain for Muslims – Religion News ServiceReligion News Service. Lewis’ transformation from scholar to neo-imperialist was not sudden, but there is a hint to be found in “The Assassins.” Originally published in 1967, it is an erudite work that sought to correct the record on the Nizari Isma’ilis, a Shiite Muslim community that had long been maligned as consumers of hashish, known in Arabic as “hashashin,” which transformed into the word “assassin.” The book fascinated me because it was a scholarly book at a time when scholarship was rarely applied to such topics.…