Samir Selmanovic’s Daughters: Don’t Buy His Book!

This video is worth watching. Really.

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Good without God

Greg Epstein, the Humanist chaplain at Harvard, whom RRC sponsored to speak in November, gave an interview to Terry Gross on Fresh Air this week. You can read about it and listen to it here.

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Hanukkah at MacDonald’s

“Celebrating Hanukkah in a McDonald’s with Muslim and Christian high school students in North Philadelphia must be a first”, says Reconstructionist Rabbinical College student Ari Hendin, who is also an intern with the Interfaith Center of Greater Philadelphia. Hendin had been asked to lead a brief teaching on the meaning of Hanukkah on Sunday, December [...]

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The Gift of Gaining a New Perspective

The Philadelphia Jewish Exponent published an op ed this week in which I shared the gift of learning I gained from studying the Joseph story from a Muslim perspective. You can read it here.

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Clear Thinking on Fort Hood

Professor Husssein Rashid, who will be teaching Islam at RRC this spring, had a very thoughtful post on ReligionDispatches regarding the recent killings at Fort Hood. Read it here.

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Minarets in Switzerland

While following the conversation regarding minarets in Switzerland,  I found particularly helpful two opinion pieces by young Muslim Leaders who have been involved with RRC.  Asma Uddin, one of the participants in our retreat for Muslim and Jewish Emerging Leaders this summer, is now an attorney at the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty. She  published a [...]

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Abrahamic Interfaith Dialogue that “Gets to the Point”

An article in the New York Times today introduces the reader to three clergy- and to three friends- who are working to “increase interfaith understanding” not just through seeking out commonalities, but through respecting difference- even as they broach difficult issues, such as Israel.

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Moral Equivalence? Following Up on Major Hassan

My colleague Rabbi Brant Rosen in Evanston, Illinois quoted my last blog post(see below)  in a recent post of his own about the discussion in the media around the Fort Hood killings. I am always impressed by the level of thoughtfulness and respect shown by those who respond to Rabbi Rosen’s blog entries. Clearly, there [...]

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The Search for the ‘Why’ of Fort Hood: What would Reinhold Niebuhr Say?

On November 10, David Brooks of  The New York Times, weighed in on the Fort Hood tragedy with a column entitled “The Rush to Therapy.” As often, Brooks sounded some important themes that resonate with me and then, at the crucial moment, went wildly off track. In this piece, he makes the altogether helpful point that [...]

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American Academy of Religion Annual Convention Begins in Montreal

I am blogging from my hotel room in Montreal where I am attending the AAR annual meeting, a gathering of 4,500 scholars of religion from across North America. It is an exciting time for the academic study of religion. A field that was once devoted primarily to history and texts, to the study of institutions [...]

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