by Abdul Malik Mujahid
from Huffington Post

Kim suddenly started hitting his chest. I thought he had a medical emergency but before I could call the stewardess, he explained that he was just nervous after watching a video about the immigration process before landing in Chicago. Kim is a junior at a high school in South Korea and was visiting the United States for a couple of months. He was sitting next to me on an American Airlines flight from Tokyo.

Kim was not the only one subject to the bad treatment. Hundreds and thousands of people go through this every day including diplomats, businessmen and journalists. The same week, former Indian President Abdul Kalam was frisked for explosives and humiliated by airport security in New York — a violation of an established protocol. He was fully identified and this was not his first time either. A couple of years ago he went through the same problem.

Kim’s nervousness is not unfounded. Seventy percent of mostly Western European travelers also showed extreme levels of anxiety saying when traveling to the United States; they fear U.S. immigration more than terrorists or criminals. It is then no wonder that travel from Germany, Japan, and the United Kingdom has actually dropped during the last ten years. These three countries along with Canada and Mexico account for about 75 percent of all travelers to the United States.

By Fatemeh Fakhraie
From Common Ground News Service

Portland, Oregon – People, Muslim and non-Muslim alike, often tell me that I can’t be both a Muslim and a feminist. At a recent book reading in Oregon, for example, a male audience member asked me, “How does that even work?” These questions demonstrate some of the rigid misconceptions individuals have about Islam and feminism; many people think that they’re mutually exclusive categories. In fact, as a Muslim feminist, I have found them to have more in common than people realise, especially when it comes to social justice.

Ethos – the fundamental spirit that guides my faith– is more important to me than edicts, or strict dogma, and so when religious questions arise, I defer to big-picture themes. One of Islam’s major themes is that of equity and justice. The Qur’an details equitable divorce proceedings, fair treatment of orphans and just conduct when it comes to prisoners of war — situations that differ in details and circumstances in our modern times, but which are often fraught with unfairness and injustice. When I read the holy book, the themes of justice and dignity for humanity stand out to me.

These themes are the same ideals I take from feminism. Some assume that feminism is concerned only with the protection and advancement of women. But as a bi-racial Muslim woman, I can’t ignore the ways that different socially constructed categories, such as gender and race, interact and interrelate. My feminism is concerned with the dignity and rights of every person. Regardless of gender, race, religion, ability, or anything else, we all deserve to have control over our own destinies, earn equal compensation for our work and have the same chances at happiness and success.

Click here to read the full article

from Huffington Post

The 2012 Sundance Film Festival began Jan. 19 and will continue until Jan. 29 in Park City, Utah. Sundance takes place annually in Utah and is the largest independent cinema festival in the United States. Religion and spirituality featured prominently at the Sundance Film Festival 2011, with 26 films exploring themes of ultimate meaning, bigger questions of life and the complicated role that religion plays in our world.

This year’s festival features at least nine films touching on the topic of religion and spirituality. While most of these films are set against a Christian background, “5 Broken Cameras,” directed by a Palestinian and Israeli duo, is a thought-provoking personal documentary on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Additionally, “Bestiaire” uses humans and beasts to explore the Hindu concept of darshan (an act of beholding the Divine).

From exposing the hypocrisy of the church to commenting on the sexual lives of rebellious religious teenagers to chronicling the hopeful story of Bishop Gene Robinson, the first openly gay bishop, these films explore a variety of themes.HuffPost Religion has compiled a list of films highlighted at Sundance Film Festival 2012 that explore the topic of religion and spirituality. Enjoy!

Click here to read the full article

from CNN

Click here to watch the video

By Frank Fredericks
From Common Ground News Service

New York – In the 19 November 2011 issue of The Economist, the cover story, called “The magic of diasporas” outlines the benefits of mass immigration, particularly to the West. However the changing demographics in major metropolises can also be a highly destabilising force.

This is especially true in the United States in cities where immigration is high and demographics can change significantly in less than a generation. In some places this has resulted in an increase in hate crimes and communal tensions. Yet some cities handle racial and ethnic diversity better than others and provide valuable lessons for other communities.

One example of this is Queens, one of the lesser known boroughs of New York City. Queens is the most diverse county in America; US Census Bureau statistics suggest that 138 languages are spoken there. Is it a hotbed of racial and ethnic tension? Crime reports suggest surprisingly that it’s not. So how does Queens handle all of this diversity?

In 2010, the state reported only 51 hate crimes in Queens, or .02 incidents per 1,000 people, which is slightly less than the national average. While Queens may be extreme with regards to its diversity and its success at managing diversity, it is not the only such example. London, Kampala, Sydney and Singapore all have strikingly similar stories.

Click here to read the full article

by Paul Brandeis Raushenbush
from Huffington Post

Jimmy Carter is the 39th president of the United States, founder of the Carter Center and recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. He has authored many books, the most recent being “Through the Year with Jimmy Carter: 366 Daily Meditations from the 39th President.” In this wide-ranging interview, HuffPost’s Senior Religion Editor spoke to President Carter by phone about the role faith played in the Israel-Egypt Peace Treaty, the time of his greatest alienation from God, faith in the White House and his personal daily devotional practice.

In addition to being a Governor of Georgia and President of the United States, you are known as a Sunday School teacher. Are you comfortable with that identity?

I started teaching Sunday school when I was 18 at the Navel Academy Chapel. I led services when we were out at sea while I was in the navy; taught Sunday school 14 times when I was U.S. President at First Baptist Church in Washington, D.C. I just finished my 650th lesson at Maranatha Baptist Church, so you might say I have been a Sunday school teacher all my life.

Who were some of your most influential religious teachers?

Well, my father was the main one. He was a Baptist deacon and Sunday school teacher, and I started going to Sunday school when I was 3. He shaped my early knowledge of Jesus, and I was baptized as a Christian when I was 11 years old.

Later, Billy Graham was probably the closest one to me. I believed what my father taught me about the separation of church and state, so when I was President I never invited Billy Graham to have services in the White House because I didn’t think that was appropriate. He was injured a little bit, until I explained it to him.

Among the theologians, I think Paul Tillich is probably the one I have read the most because he shaped my thoughts about the relation between religion and politics and the fact that religious faith was not incompatible with political service. I tried to apply my religious beliefs when I was governor and later president without being ostentatious about it.

But I don’t claim to be knowledgeable about theology. Most of my knowledge comes out of my experience and the lessons in the Bible. Every Sunday I’m home I teach 45 minutes and we boiled them down to one page for the new book, “Through the Year with Jimmy Carter.”

Click here to read the full article

By Samir Selmanovic and Bowie Snodgrass
From Huffington Post

We are coming to a realization that religious zealots cannot be fought with indifference. Extremists of all nationalities and religious persuasion feeding on prejudice, legislating exclusion, and resorting to violence cannot be prevailed upon by people with less passion. Telling them to “cool down” and to “be moderate” will not do it. We must allow fires greater than theirs to arise. Our passion for a whole and interdependent word must rise above their passion for a segregated and zero-sum world.

In Faith House Manhattan, a non-profit inter-religious “community of communities,” we believe that the time of isolated faith is over. We believe that to know who I am, I must also know who you are. For three years now we have hosted more than 60 Living Room gatherings where people can experiences the practices of another religion (or path, including atheism). We invite all to join our “co-laboratory” of interdependence: “Experience your neighbor’s faith, deepen your own.”

Our call is to get radical. Very radical. We hold that in today’s world, religious people have to remap their reality to include — in tension and in gratitude — ‘the other.’ While our ancestors may have fought for independence, ours is the great struggle for interdependence. ‘The other’ is not over there, but all around us. While we have been conceiving of the world in vertical terms (whose party is better, whose institution is larger, whose nation is stronger, whose god is bigger), the world is becoming increasingly horizontal, and wonderfully so. Can we learn to be a part of the whole?

Click here to read the full article

By Eric Marrapodi
From CNN

Two days before Christmas, Imam Mohamed Magid, the executive director at the All Dulles Area Muslim Society, preached about Jesus at Friday prayers.

“We live in a country with a majority of Christians, where Christmas is a major holiday… It’s a reminder we do believe in Jesus. Jesus’ position in Islam is one of the highest prophets in Islam,” Magid said, adding that Muslims view Jesus as a prophet on par with Abraham, Moses, Noah and Mohammad.

Often when he says the name of Mohammad or Jesus in conversation, Magid adds the Islamic honorific “Peace be upon him” after his name.

“Jesus is a unifying figure, unifying Muslims and Christians,” he said. The Quran, the Islamic scriptures, makes specific mention of Jesus and of his mother Mary. “It’s very interesting that there are many places where the prophet (Mohammad) is quoting Jesus.”

Christmas has a way of bleeding into other faiths in America. The Christian holiday celebrating the birth of Jesus Christ in a manger in Bethlehem 2000 some odd years ago is ubiquitous across the country, even if the American tradition has leaned away from the sacred and toward the secular.

Christmas at every corner can be somewhat problematic for those who are not in the estimated 246 million Christians living in the United States. But for some faiths, the season brings reminders of their own traditions.

Click here to read the full article

The movement does need public space

by Donna Schaper
from Religion Dispatches

Last week I argued in these pages that the Occupy movement might be diverted by its focus on getting physical outdoor space. I felt that the movement had gone viral—we were everywhere, and didn’t need a particular space any more. I was wrong.

We do need physical outdoor space. Trinity Church in Manhattan, sometimes meanly—and unfairly—referred to as a real estate corporation with an altar, could even give it. They own an empty downtown space at Sixth Avenue and Canal Street that is gated (providing security for occupiers) and accessible to public transportation so that allies, visitors, and media could join them. I really thought this demand was a sideshow until Thursday. Then I changed my mind.

That morning a dozen occupiers addressed forty or so clergy. We clergy were all somewhat skeptical of the demand for public space. You could hear the ministerial, rabbinical hrumph,hrumph in the room. (Most of us had never occupied Zucotti Park and a downward trend in temperature wasn’t going to improve on that.) But the occupiers edged toward the theological as they articulated a need for communal, inspirational, face-to-face contact in which they could “appear” to one another.

Secondly, they talked about the nearly complete privatization of municipal public space in a way that made a deep and tragic sense. Where can you go if you don’t own something? Does a public even exist if it has no space? The great irony is that they have been called the virtual demonstration, and here they were talking about old-fashioned, in-person, human interaction.

Third, they talked about the increasing surveillance of most space, private or public—the self-surveillance on Facebook, the constant camera, and the ask-no-questions “security” cordons. They reminded me of one of my first posts on this whole matter: we no longer march and the police pen us for “our own good.” What nonsense. A completely nonviolent movement does not need to be penned up for its own good.

And finally, they spoke of a new monasticism, in which people have given up everything to jump to a future they can only imagine. In the most recent newsletter posted by Occupy Theory [as of this posting, the site is down —Eds.], occupiers describe how sad they were about their lives, both present and future, until they found each other. If you were worried about “young people today” before, you will be terrified after you read about the emptiness, the bought-and-soldness, the futility, the lack of any place to be or person to be.

Click here to read the full article

by Whittney Barth

Dr. Diana Eck and the Pluralism Project are updating their award-winning resource to explore the religious diversity of the United States.  The first edition of On Common Ground: World Religions in America was released as a CD-ROM in 1996, providing teachers, students, and scholars with an innovative interactive resource in three parts: “America’s Many Religions,” “A New Religious Landscape,” and “Encountering Religious Diversity.”

The Pluralism Project is now poised to launch On Common Ground 2.0 (OCG 2.0), a web-based version of this time-tested pedagogical structure. OCG 2.0 explores religious diversity through introductions to many of the world’s religions, maps of religious centers in the context of the changing religious landscape of the United States, and essay explorations of the challenges that arise in the context of this new religious landscape.

Like its predecessor, OCG 2.0 highlights the Pluralism Project’s ongoing research into the changing religious demography of the United States and the implications of religious pluralism on public life, religious communities, and private institutions.  These findings are presented in a timely, interactive format suitable for students, educators, clergy, community and business leaders, and citizens interested in understanding the realities America’s multi-religious cities and towns. OCG 2.0 is the product of collaboration among student researchers, staff, and faculty. Ryan Overbey, Pluralism Project post-doctoral fellow, serves as the lead technology specialist.

The “America’s Many Religions” section will include essay sets covering fifteen religious traditions and their development in the United States, with select updates to reflect the complexities of a post-9/11 era.  Additionally, a new essay set on Atheism/Humanism will be included to explore the growing presence of these communities in American public life.

The “A New Religious Landscape” section will employ Geographic Information System technology to map the religious landscape of select cities and regions across the country, integrating census data and active links to organizational websites to offer the user a rich and dynamic educational experience. The organizational web links embedded in the maps emphasize the Pluralism Project’s commitment to empowering and encouraging communities to share their own stories.

Finally, the “Encountering Religious Diversity” section will include an updated essay collection that presents a few of the challenges that arise when campuses, hospitals, city halls, and church basements become workshops for religious pluralism.

OCG 2.0 is slated to launch late next year and is made possible by a generous grant from the Lilly Endowment, Inc.  If you have worked with earlier editions of On Common Ground, the Pluralism Project would like to hear your On Common Ground story.  How did you, your community, and/or your classroom utilize this resource? We invite you to share your thoughts with the Pluralism Project by e-mailing staff@pluralism.org or contacting us through Facebook. Want to stay “in the know” on OCG 2.0 updates? Follow us on Twitter @pluralismproj.

Let your story be part of 2.0.

Whittney Barth is the Assistant Director of the Pluralism Project at Harvard University