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Sounds of Faith at the National Museum of American History

This week we feature selections from the December 8, 2019 Sounds of Faith concert at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History. According to Dr. Hussein Rashid a religious literacy expert and cultural competency consultant who teaches at the New School in New York,  if you don’t appreciate the religious and spiritual dimension of music you miss the depth of the genre.

New York City’s religious diversity bucks stereotypes

“You can’t go more than a block without finding a house of worship in New York City, an actively used house of worship,” said Hussein Rashid, a scholar of religion with The New School and Union Theological Seminary. While accurate and up-to-date data on the state of religious identity in the five boroughs is hard to find, Rashid and other scholars say the city is as spiritually diverse as it’s ever been, even as religious affiliation is declining here in step with the rest of the country. Source: New York City’s religious diversity bucks stereotypes

The Power of Names – Sacred Matters Magazine

The Power of Names – Sacred Matters Magazine. In many popular media reports, the default often seems to be Sunni Islam. It is unclear why this has become the baseline for what Islam is. Some academics have suggested, going back to the origins of the discipline of Religion, that Sunni Islam most closely resembled Protestant Christianity, which was constructed as the truest of religious groupings. As a result, structures that mirrored Protestant Christianity were elevated to true expressions of those traditions. Perhaps it has to do with the tyranny of the majority, so that by virtue of being the most…