I am ambivalent about giving any additional attention to a hate-filled, fear-driven, religious leader like Pastor Terry Jones. Once the Gainesville, Florida minister is being covered by the New York Times however, it seems that coverage is assured. The only question which remains is what shall be the response? (more…)
Eat, Pray, Love is all the rage, again. After its run on bestseller lists a few years back, it is set to be a major movie success, starring Julia Roberts. It makes one wonder why, and whether or not it tells a story which makes us feel that we need exotic travel to stimulate our spiritual journeys. But do we? (more…)
Every year the onset of Ramadan ushers in a strange cultural transformation in urbanized Muslim societies. A natural consequence of waking up to eat in the darkest hours of morning, fasting from dawn to dusk, and consuming huge amounts of food at sunset is that your biological clock along with the rest of your bodily functions goes completely haywire. In Muslim majority societies however, fasting isn’t an individualistic phenomenon, but a socially driven lifestyle readjustment– (more…)
I’m a white conservative evangelical Christian who grew up in Nebraska and Colorado. I own a couple of guns, and I hunt and fish. Yep, I drive a pickup truck and listen to country western music. In my small-town Nebraskan childhood I never met a single black or brown-skinned person. Everyone was white. All ranchers and farmers. All drove trucks with gun racks and an NRA sticker on the back. No lie, my first bumper sticker on my first car said “God created men, Winchester made them equal.” I’m serious! (more…)
Once upon a time there lived a girl named Khalida in Kandahar, the southern region of Afghanistan. It is the spiritual base of Taliban, a puritanical movement which proclaims its roots in Islam.
When she was just eight years old, a ragtag militia from her town took control after fierce fighting with the bandits that controlled the city, terrorizing the people and holding them as hostage in their own (more…)
The thought of going without food or drink for more than 12 hours a day may not be everyone’s idea of a good time, but Ramadan in Dubai, is fun! Growing up in various parts of the Muslim world, I have very nostalgic memories of Ramadan, or the month of Fasting, being about more than abstinence, being actually festive. Families getting together for the meals that signal the start and stop of the fast, everyone making a more conscientious effort to pray, not swear and be mindful of themselves (more…)
The Anti-Defamation League has betrayed itself and its own principles, by coming out against the Park 51 project (which is still being characterized incorrectly as the “ground zero mosque”). Their press release (in full below) is even worse than the denunciation of the project by Sarah Palin or Newt Gingrich, because they explicitly concede that the muslim community has the right to build (more…)
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