Umar Hakim’s Muslim Faith Inspires His Fight for Social Justice — and a Responsible Banking Ordinance – Los Angeles News – The Informer

Someone who has actually read the Qur’an and figured out like all scripture, it is full of contradiction. The Meaning of the Koran – NYTimes.com. But I should concede that I haven’t told the whole story. Even while calling Jesus the word of God — and “the Messiah” — the Koran denies that he was the son of God or was himself divine. And, though the Koran does call the Jews God’s chosen people, and sings the praises of Moses, and says that Jews and Muslims worship the same God, it also has anti-Jewish, and for that matter anti-Christian, passages.

In his book Jerusalem: From the Ottomans to the British, Roberto Mazza a note issued by the British Foreign Office’s News Department: “The attention of the press is again drawn to the undesirability of publishing any article, paragraph of picture suggesting that military operations against Turkey are in any sense a Holy War, a modern Crusade, or have anything whatever to do with religious questions. The British Empire is said to contain a hundred million of Mohammedan subjects of the King and it is obviously mischievous to suggest that our quarrel with Turkey is one between Islam and Christianity.” [From…

Sisters of St. Francis, the Quiet Shareholder Activists – NYTimes.com. Long before Occupy Wall Street, the Sisters of St. Francis were quietly staging an occupation of their own. In recent years, this Roman Catholic order of 540 or so nuns has become one of the most surprising groups of corporate activists around.  The nuns have gone toe-to-toe with Kroger, the grocery store chain, over farm worker rights; with McDonald’s, over childhood obesity; and with Wells Fargo, over lending practices. They have tried, with mixed success, to exert some moral suasion over Fortune 500 executives, a group not always known for…