Video: Beautiful Adhaan

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…

Brad Hirschfield: My Neighbor’s Faith: The Rabbi And The Christian Cab Driver. I could feel how torn he was. His most important teacher had told him that he had a choice to make. He felt pulled in different directions by the two things that mattered most in his life: his wife and his faith. Nobody had told him that his wife could be completely with him on his journey even if they were never going to be in complete agreement. My teacher in Hebron, for whom any difference was an excuse for disconnection, expressed the same mind-set. Either the cause…

Within a month, two interesting pieces regarding teaching and talking about religion came into my RSS feeder. [Apparently the new NY Times permalink generator next to the article doesn’t produce permalinks. Go NY Times, try really hard to make yourself irrelevant in the digital age, and you may actually succeed at something in the 21st century.] The first is about a professor asked to teach by a religious program. The second is by a professor of religion who writes about our inability to talk about religion in the classroom. I’m reminded of a story when I was teaching an introductory…