Gender and Sexuality

Muslim Women’s History Month: Spotlight on Noor Inayat Khan

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As a woman, I welcome the month of March—Women’s History Month—each year as an opportunity to pay tribute to women who have made significant contributions to our world. As a Muslim woman, I also look forward to this month as a time to recognize and celebrate the contributions Muslim women have made to the sciences, literature, honorable struggles such as the French Resistance, and so much more. During a time when women in Islam are viewed as dependent, covered up, and oppressed, I look forward to the narratives of strong, independent, and intelligent Muslim women of the past as a much-needed boost to the generally negative and (incorrectly) chauvinistic paintbrush that Islam has been painted with over the last few centuries. This month I will write a series of posts about several little-known Muslim women from whom I personally am honored to learn, and who can demonstrate what Islam really offers to women in terms of freedom, creativity, and authority.

Humanism

Humanistic Jews Plant a Tree

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Humanistic Judaism is a comprehensive response to the needs of contemporary Jews to create personal and communal experiences that celebrate identity, values, and connection. In my experience as the lay ceremonial leader of a congregation of Humanistic Jews, the pursuit of these experiences can lead to great rewards in unexpected places, places never visited by the other branches of the modern Jewish tree.

Christianity

Embracing Failure

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Every week at Rutba House, we have a time of confession. Years ago, we decided it was an importance practice to have in place, whether we need it this week or not. In community, we’re going to mess up. We all need space to be reconciled.
Often, when it’s time for confession, we sit in silence together and look at the ground.
But I’ve noticed something over the years: whenever one person is honest enough to confess their failure, everyone else inevitably joins them.

Christianity

Weekly Sermon: Breaking Ground – The Tower Complex

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Yet Jesus said No, you shall worship the Lord your God and serve God alone, and he remained with the powerless. Into that condition of powerlessness, which the world despises; into that dispossession, which Jesus did not abandon, God came. God comes, we must say, for this temptation can be a word to us about our endless struggle for powers and towers.

Judaism

Torah commentary- Ki Tissa: Allure of the Golden Calf

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In previous essays, in dealing with the dull repetitions of the mishkan (tabernacle) narrative, we discussed the idea of boundaries, of distance introduced as a result of the sin of the golden calf. The mishkan structure itself, and the garments of the priests, act as signifiers of, and simultaneously as a means of overcoming the boundaries and distance introduced by the sin of the golden calf. R. Zadok Hacohen adds an interesting comment, which would be incredibly radical except that the source of the quote is the Talmud (BT Nedarim 22: )
“If it weren’t for the sin of the Golden Calf, the Jews would only have received the Five Books of the Torah and the Book of Joshua”.

Christianity

Uncommon Prayers

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We are almost always counting, Precious Lord. Teach us soon to count our blessings. We are in a terrible hurry. Put something in the way of our rushing about and let us trip over it, finding a new appreciation for interruptions. Amen
We pray, O God, for that thing called integrity, that exciting marriage between our inner and outer lives. Help us to pay attention to our own nourishment and what we put into our bodies, our arms and our hearts. Help us find energy, to know that health is not so much the absence or disease as the presence or vitality. Make us into inner-actives; people who move with grace from the inside out and the outside back again. Help us to be both morally nimble and morally solid. Let us not be afraid of our confusion but rather embrace it with the power of wisdom in you. Amen

Christianity

The Fast We’ve Chosen: Begging with Our Friends

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Today Christians in Durham join sisters and brothers around the world to begin the season of penance that we call Lent. Pastors and priests call us to “remember you are dust and to the dust you shall return.” Recognizing that our sinful inclination is toward hubris, we dedicate forty days to the imitation of Christ’s humility through the practices of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving.
But this year, Christians in Durham face a challenge: we cannot give to the beggar on our city’s streets because panhandling has been outlawed in Durham.

Islam

Facing the Specter of Muslim American Terrorism

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February this year seems to be the month of revelations – not just heartfelt wows of love on Valentine’s Day, but something much more sinister and worrying. Four news reports with sometimes conflicting messages have been released this month from various sources, all discussing the perceived threat (or the lack thereof) of homegrown terrorism by Muslim Americans.

Christianity

Weekly Sermon – Breaking Ground: Endless Desire

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Hunger has this awesome characteristic: Everyone knows it. Not one of us passes a day without feeling it, or trying to keep from feeling it. Hunger binds us together—or rather, it could. But from fear of hunger, we retreat or recoil into our groups, into our selves, to secure our own satisfactions of endless desires, starving others out if we must. American slavery comprised many evils, but the engine for them all was endless desire for more money and its numberless mouth-watering satisfactions. The whole human predicament can be seen through this lens, how we responded when we hungered from the bottom of our endless desires; for human hunger is not just in the stomach, it is in our soul. That is why the legend of the Fall in the garden of Eden begins with a hunger in the heart of humanity.