30 Good Minutes – Melissa Rogers – Free Exercise for All

My on-line chat with the PrepareNY community about religion and politics is now up on the site. PrepareNY is an interfaith coalition, convened to help NY around the 10th anniversary of 9/11. June 21st Chat with Hussein Rashid – Prepare New York. Hussein is an academic, activist and lecturer. He has an extensive background in theology, interfaith dialogue and political consulting. So we thought he would be the perfect person to talk to about the role of Religion in Politics today!

The bravery of a young Staten Island hate crime victim | SILive.com. Ganging up on a helpless special needs kid because his family is Muslim may not walk or quack like a typical hate crime, especially when one of these alleged gems is black and his three alleged beloveds are Hispanic.  Don’t look now, alleged parents, but the apples of your eyes are cheesing in the same big picture with skinheads, the junior Klan and the rest of the Hitler youth.  Too bad your alleged whiz kids cut history class. They missed the lesson that taught about a time when…

by Zoe Pollock Scott Horton interviewed father and son Charles and Gregory Fried about their book, Because It Is Wrong—Torture, Privacy and Presidential Power in the Age of Terror. Horton asked why they paired torture with privacy and surveillance: [After 9/11] the general public, and even the informed public, reacted as if both transgressions were equally serious and equally deserving of condemnation. Indeed, there may have been a markedly greater tolerance of torture than of surveillance—maybe because few of us expect to undergo torture, but all feel our phones or Internet may be tapped into. This gets things exactly wrong.…