Category: Social Issues
Who is a Muslim? Tension at an Interfaith Ramadan Gathering
I helped my Muslim friends break the Ramadan fast at the home of Abdel, an Indian scholar of classical Islam who works at the Great Mosque in Rome to facilitate interfaith dialogue and to ameliorate I... Read More
The Yoga of Ecology: A Day In The Life of the Green Wheeling Initiative
In my previous “Yoga of Ecology” post, I shared the truly brilliant and compassionate work of the Green Wheeling Initiative (GWI), a grassroots ground-up local food movement in Wheeling, W... Read More
“You shall destroy all the peoples”: Does the Bible advocate genocide?
In the parsha for last week, Parashat Eikev, Moses instructs the Israelites on how to enter the land of Israel. The general idea is that if the Israelites observe God’s commandments, they will be re... Read More
Reza Aslan’s Jesus
Reza Aslan has a remarkable ability to make ancient stories come alive. I have assigned his earlier books, No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam and Beyond Fundamentalism, in und... Read More
The Post-Colonial Method versus the Sociological Method in the Study of Religion: Top-down or Bottom-up?
In the current study of “religion,” two different methods have developed that are often in tension with each other. The first is the Post-Colonial Method (PCM)[1] with scholars like Talal Asad, ... Read More
Ramadan Diary 1434/2013 Week 2
Day 8 – Tuesday, July 16, 2013 As I go over my ending from the last week, I realize how depressing it sounds. While it was not meant, I suppose it is because when one realizes how human-h... Read More
Are We a Racist Country? Some Thoughts on Trayvon Martin and Bigotry in America
My first semester of college I signed up for a Sociology class, wherein the professor, a middle-aged white woman, viewed her students as a guaranteed audience for her political opinions. I didn̵... Read More
The Rise of the Theological Left: A Response to Tony Jones
A new study from Public Religion Research Institute has been getting a decent amount of press lately, mostly for its contention that theological progressives in the U.S. are on pace to outnumber th... Read More