Category: Community
When the Walls Crumble
This layering of historical events onto a single day of mourning invites us to add our own personal losses to the sea of sadness and to have our pain held by our community. Channeling our imaginings o... Read More
Jews and Muslims in America: More in Common than We Think
Contrary to common assumptions, many Jewish and Muslim Americans enjoy warm relations. Yet we are only beginning to understand how and why this is so. A Gallup report released last week goes a long wa... Read More
Why I Stopped Observing Ramadan: A Unitarian Universalist’s Search for Spiritual Practice
As we enter the second week of Ramadan, hundreds of millions of Muslims around the world continue to fast as a prescribed spiritual practice in the Islamic faith tradition. Last year, as a part of an ... Read More
Dear Religious Americans: How Many Atheists Do You Know?
For the last several years, my work as an interfaith activist has been largely defined by a single question: “Wait — you do interfaith work, and you’re an atheist?!” That quest... Read More
An Atheist and Franz Kafka’s “The Castle”
This was first presented as “The Power of Kafka’s Castle,” at the Conference on Retaliation, California State University Fullerton, January 28, 2011. It was later revised and presented as “K... Read More
Hindu Community Makes Its White House Debut
Hinduism is hardly new to the United States. Swami Vivekenanda is thought to have first introduced it when he visited as part of the World’s Parliament of Religions at the Chicago World’s ... Read More
Don’t Ask, Don’t Tennessee: Why Muslims and the LGBTQ Community Should Be Allies
This year, two notable controversies have been brewing in Tennessee: a proposed bill that would forbid educators from using the word “gay” in the classroom, and a court battle to determi... Read More
On the Cutting-Edge of Interfaith Work: An Open Thank You Letter to the Sultan of Oman
The barriers to authentic interfaith relationships are great. But I write to let you know that Oman's investment in the CIP Summer School is possibly one of the most promising experiments in interfait... Read More