Health

Stress

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My eye was caught in the paper yesterday by the happiness of this young woman graduating. I was curious about her relationship with the older woman. Turns out she is a Ugandan who lost both parents to AIDS and was adopted by an affluent US family at age 12. She says she finds it hard to see her friends leave food on their plates because she recalls so well going out to the garden every day with her mother in Uganda to see what there was left to eat, and sometimes finding nothing. Her personal journey and struggle is an extraordinary story of our current world.

Inter-Culturalism

Military evangelists

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For the latest in Mikey Weinstein’s campaign for religious freedom in the US military check out this video “showing that US military forces in Afghanistan have been instructed by the military’s top chaplain in the country to “hunt people for Jesus” as they spread Christianity to the overwhelmingly Muslim population.” If this is all news to you, check out Jeff Sharlet’s lead article in Harper’s this month (online for subscribers only), or mine from last year in the UK’s New Humanist.

Inter-Culturalism

Sri Lanka

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My family has had some close friendships with Sri Lankans over the years, my mother and sister especially. The first Buddhist I ever knew was Sri Lankan. Now we hear terrible things in the news. I get an email with loads of info. I write back after a week or more: “Raj, I didn’t reply because I didn’t know what to say: like the rest of the world you are rightly complaining about, I am too swamped to pay attention to Sri Lanka, or to know how to get my head around the issue.

Inter-Culturalism

Nice work in Liverpool

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My friend Howard Grace, a gentle, innovative Christian, wrote to me about his recent work in high schools in Liverpool, UK, with two Muslim colleagues (at right). Musa led the sessions and started by asking why two young African Muslims and a relatively old English Christian would want to work together to visit schools like this. It was to build trust across what is often perceived to be the divide of Muslim/Christian/Western relations. Amina Khalid, who arrived in England at 13 as a refugee from Somalia, told about the racial abuse and bullying she had endured at her English school, and asked what she should have done. Some of the bigger boys said “Fight back.”