On Eid ul-Fitr

Newfound Riches Come With Spiritual Costs for Turkey’s Religious Merchants – NYTimes.com. There are some choice examples in this article of the rich religious. My favorite is the sofa that lifts up off of the ground during prayer time. I wonder how far they had to dig to find people who saw a strong dichotomy between being wealthy and being religious. I think this quote "The businessmen describe themselves as Muslims with a Protestant work ethic, and say hard work deepens faith," is rather telling. How many Turks are thinking of the Protestant work ethic? The class differentials in Turkish society seem to be the real story. The conflict between the material and the spiritual world seems to be a reach that they shoe-horned into the article.

LGBT and Muslim? A New Report Busts Stereotypes | (A)theologies | Religion Dispatches. LGBT Muslims, the report notes, are dealing with many of the same kinds of questions that LGBT Christians have been dealing with for decades—such as the authority and interpretation of scripture. In addition, conversations within Islam in America are complicated by a virulent Islamophobia that has flourished in the decade since the 9/11 attacks. As scholar Hussein Rashid, an RD associate editor, observes: “The intersection of sexual, religious, racial, and immigrant identities entail multiple types of marginalization.”