#PrepareNY Launch

Mapping Religious Life in New York, Block by Block – NYTimes.com. Tony Carnes and I met for breakfast at Penelope, a homey little cafe across Lexington Avenue from First Moravian Church. Penelope sits one block north and three avenues east of Marble Collegiate Church, where Norman Vincent Peale preached for 52 years, and it is a 2.8-mile drive from Sons of Moses, the tiny Lower East Side synagogue where you can still hear Lithuanian Yiddish.  This is how Tony Carnes sees New York City. A Texas native, who came to New York as a young man to study at the…

The good folks at Jews on First were kind enough to include an essay I wrote at Religion Dispatches as part of their resource kit. Park51: Sermons and Essential Observations. Broad attacks have been launched against the validity of Islam as a religion and the situation of Muslim-Americans has been made more precarious in ways that many Jews have found to be all too familiar. In the course of our research on the issue, we have found many articles and sermons to be very helpful in charting the course of the controversy and in articulating principles that can help guide…

Hebrew Is the Focus of a Brooklyn Charter School – NYTimes.com. Every so often, Aalim Moody, 5, and his twin sister, Aalima, break into a kind of secret code, chatting in a language their father does not understand.  Walking along Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn, they make out the lettering on kosher food shops and yeshiva buses, showing off all they learn at the Hebrew Language Academy Charter School in Midwood, where they both attend kindergarten.  …  Aalim and Aalima are not Jewish. They worship at a mosque affiliated with the Nation of Islam. But at the Hebrew Language Academy, they…