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PFBC – Roots and Branches

[formatting is off. notes are incomplete. go read Rachel, she’s better.] Rabbi Arthur of the Shalom Center. Quoting friend and teacher: Different religions are like different organs in the body. Want them to do what they do, and nothing else, but also realize they have the same DNA. What is the DNA? and what unfolds for itself? Chris Walton, Philocrates: Do people interact with different perspectives within own faith tradition? (Good show of hands) Rachel: How do we connect across faith lines, and internally? easier to talk to other faiths than internally (Christian Alliance for Progress, Public Theologian) ep fracture…

Panel: Advancing Religious Literacies: Exploring Islam through the Cultural Studies Method

The loud discourse on Islam in the United States today marks Muslims as a threat, embroiled in pre-modern sensibilities, and unable to participate in democratic societies. These articulations are often made by recycling colonial and oriental images of Muslim women as oppressed and Muslim men as violent, with objects such as the hijab and the figure of the terrorist at the center. This rise of Islamophobic commentary has resulted in myriad incidences of bullying, teasing, and direct violence against teachers and students who identify, or are read by others, as Muslims. All this points to the lack of understanding about Islam and…

Teaching About Religion

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…