Category: Inter-faith

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation Radio: The Sufi Spirit, with Reza Shah-Kazemi « Ismailimail. Prayer that brings a permanent awareness of the Divine Reality is the aim of Sufism first and foremost, which London based Sufi scholar, Reza Shah-Kazemi, believes is the key to its universality. Sufism’s mystical universalism is what interests Hebrew University scholar, Sara Sviri, who reveals the fascinating phenomenon of ‘Jewish Sufism’.

Three Denver Muslims lead cheers for Tebow – Washington Times. This is the story of three sports-loving Muslim brothers and how they boosted the career of the NFL’s most famous Christian.

NEWSPAPER COLUMN: “My Family’s First Trip To A Mosque” | The Crescent Post. In September 2007 our Honda Odyssey idled in the gravel parking lot of a mosque in Clemson, S.C. As it turned out, the unadorned aluminum structure sat ironically and lonely on Old Stone Church Road in the Deep South. Suddenly my then-2-year-old daughter voiced the words that apparently reverberate in America from time to time: “Mosque … scary.”

What It’s Like To Be An Entrepreneur – Eboo Patel « crowdSPRING Blog. We’re thrilled to be part of a new web/TV reality series – Trep Life – giving audiences a unique, 360-degree view of what it takes to succeed as an entrepreneur. Each episode focuses on one company or organization. The first episode featured our friends Matt Maloney and Mike Evans from Grub Hub – a terrific place to find every restaurant that will deliver to you. Subsequent episodes featured Lara Miller, a designer and Executive Director of the Chicago Fashion Incubator, serial entrepreneur Howard Tullman, Redbox Founder Mark…

'Brothers in faith' | Recordnet.com. Worshippers at the Masjid al Emaan mosque congregate in a nondescript office park on Pershing Avenue in north Stockton. The mosque has been around for only a few years, and its small membership has diminished in the aftermath of an unsolved arson fire seven months ago.  Temple Sinai in Oakland is the oldest synagogue in the East Bay, dating back more than 130 years, with nearly 1,000 member families. In terms of its history and size, it would seem to be much farther from Masjid al Emaan than a mere 75-minute drive.  And yet, when…

Why the World Needs Religious Studies | Culture | Religion Dispatches. May the field forgive me for offering a bit of very crude historical psychoanalysis and master-narrativizing to catch everyone up on where we stand. Academic, non-sectarian religious studies in the United States can be more or less traced to the Supreme Court’s 1963 Abington Township v. Schempp decision, which carved out a distinction between teaching about religion, which is okay, and the teaching of religion, which violates the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause. Catechists had to shuffle out of public classrooms, and suddenly there was space for a new kind…

Stephen Shashoua: Artists of the World, Unite. We need to demonstrate – in word and deed – how much social capital we can unlock when everyone contributes and communal boundaries are no longer an issue. I believe that to do this we need to create a culture that encourages collaboration and participation in the civic space, where all communities are encouraged to bring their own talents and perspectives to the table.

Son’s Muslim faith divides one black family – The Washington Post. Joshua Blackwell finally visited his mother in North Carolina this summer and they talked about his conversion to Islam. The conversation didn’t go well.

Love blooms in Zuccotti Park: Protesting  Occupy Wall Street lovebirds tie the knot  – NY Daily News. In front of about a dozen friends and onlookers, Emery Abdel-Latif, 24, and Micha Balon, 19, held a traditional Muslim wedding on Trinity Place and Liberty Street, perched on a small bench next to the park’s famous sculpture of a seated man with a briefcase.  “We have to be able to understand truly how unique this relationship is,” said Khalid Latif, the chaplain at New York University who married the eager duo.

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…