Serving Humanity without Discrimination

If you want to see what compassion and humanitarianism looks like, then watch this video about Abdus Sattar Edhi called "Serving Humanity without any Discrimination." It comes from the non-profit group, "Think Twice about Pakistan."  It's just 9 minutes.

Nine Year Old Discuses Meaning of Life & Universe

You don't have to be a college graduate or a doctoral candidate to discuss the weighty issues of the world as this nine year old clearly demonstrates. Found it on Open Culture.

If the World Were 100 People Updated

Women's Rights in Islam

Christiane Amanpour, chief international correspondent for CNN, examines women's rights in Islam,  Judaism,  and Christianity  in a series she did called "God's Warriors." The one here  (8 minutes) is about women's rights in Islam.

Muslim Misconceptions

Is Islam a happy religion?  Are Arabs and Muslims one and the same?  Are Muslim women more oppressed than women in other religions?  Are Islam and terrorism closely linked?  What does the term Jihad mean?

Hussein Rashid, an associate editor at Religion Dispatches, attempts to dispel the misconceptions that surround these questions.  You can find a series of video clips about different aspects of Islam here at the Odyssey Network.

In Pictures: India's Parsi

Who are the Parsis? They are members of the largest Zoroastrian community in India. And the Zoroastrian religion is one of the world's oldest. It was started in Iran over 3,500 years ago. And many religious scholars believe that it influenced Christianity.

They are in the news because of a photographic exhibit of the community by the famous Indian photographer, Sooni Taraporevala, at Chemould Prescott Road in Mombay. The BBC has some of the photographs here.  Taraporevala is a Parsi herself and studied at Harvard and is most well-known as the screenwriter of the movie, Mississippi Masala.

You can read more about the fascinating Parsi community in the Economist here and listen to a story about them here at PRI's The World.  I did not know about the Parsi community but find them so interesting that I will try to integrate them into my religion class.

U.S. Christians’ Views on the Return of Christ

A majority of American Christians believe that Jesus will return to earth in the next 40 years, according to this 2010 survey by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.

Holi, Passover and Easter

Three religious holidays this week-- Holi, the Hindu festival of color that welcomes the arrival of Spring and officially begins on March 27th;  Passover, the Jewish festival that commemorates the emancipation of Israelites from the Egyptians and runs from March 25 through April 2nd;  and Easter, the Christian holiday that commemorates the resurrection of Jesus.

What's the Right Thing to Do? Michael Sandel's Famous Harvard Course

Should Judge Judy earn 20 times what a Supreme Court Judge earns?  Michael Jordan earns over $20 million dollars and Bill Gates is worth billions. Should those inequalities be permitted? 

This is what Michael Sandel's popular Harvard philosophy course, What's the Right Thing to do? is all about.  It's  now on the web for free and will also be offered for free through EdX. You can read more about it at this Open Culture site.

I use short clips from several of Sandel's episodes in my religion class when we discuss morality in some of the different religions we cover.  The topic for our next Face to Faith video conference is wealth, poverty, and charity.   In his 8th episode,  Sandel discusses  the morality of  wealth.  Is such wealth justified?  Is it good for the rest of society--for the poor, and the disenfranchised?  What do the great philosophers, like Jonh Rawls,  say about it?

St Peter's Square: 2005 vs. 2013

The papacy isn't the only thing that changed in the last eight years. Technology also changed as the picture above demonstrates. Thanks to my colleague, Jeff Feinstein, for sending me the link. Hard to believe what a difference eight years makes!

Religious Freedom at School

Can an elementary school student hand out an invitation to classmates to a Christmas party at her church? Charles C Haynes, senior scholar at the Freedom Forum First Amendment Center, discusses the decision by the three judge panel of the U.S. 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals. By ruling for the fifth grader's right to pass out the invitation, the court has written a new chapter in the debate, according to Haynes.  In effect, he suggests, "even in elementary schools, students are able to distinguish what comes from a classmate from what is sponsored by the school."

"Imagine a World Without Hate"

The Anti-Defamation League just launched a new campaign called "Imagine a World Without Hate" with this terrific video. My thanks to Larry Ferzallo for tweeting the link.

Is religion good for Women?

The Tony Blair Foundation and the Washington Post On Faith section asked a number of women to discuss the value of religion to women in this fascinating online series developed for the International Day of Women.   Does it help or harm women?   Some of the women include: Farah Pandith,  Special Representative to the Muslim Communities at the US Department of State,Katrina Lantos Swett,  Chair of the US Commission on International Religious Freedom, and Samina Yasmeen,  Specialist in Islam and professor at University of Western Australia.

In addition to writing a short blog, some women also dealt with the question in  a video, like the one below by Grace Lee Baughan from the Faith and Global Engagement Initiative at the University of Hong Kong.

  

The Religiously Unaffiliated: Diana Butler Bass

In this 14 minute clip, author Diana Butler Bass discusses with Religion and Ethics Newsweekly the implications of the religiously unaffiliated for the Christian Church. She says they are leaving the Church for a variety of reasons such as the hypocrisy of church leaders who are often more concerned about politics and money than faith. She deals with this in much more depth in her book, Christianity After Religion: The End of Church and the Birth of a New Spiritual Awakening

Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood Statement on Women

On Wednesday, last week, the United Nations proposed a declaration to condemn violence against women. Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood, according to the New York Times, took issue with that declaration and outlined a list of exceptions that seem to reflect the patriarchal view of the Brotherhood and frighten Egyptian liberals.  The Brotherhood says that the husband has "guardianship" of his wife and is not his equal partner. My thanks to David Korfhage for tweeting the link to this story.

St. Patrick's Bad Analogies

Watch early church trinitarian heresies in this humorous clip that I found at First Things. Partialism and modalism are defined here. 

St. Francis of Assisi

Watch St. Francis of Assisi on PBS. See more from Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly.

Who was St. Francis of Assisi, the namesake of the new Pope? This short clip from Religion and Ethics Newsweekly summarizes his life.

Pope Francis & the Jesuits

Pope Francis paying his hotel bill and endearing himself to the world for his simplicity. The Washington Post has a nice short clip from CBS reporter, Allen Pizzey, about the Pope's first day with the press. It also has a good story about the Jesuits here.

Another Face to Faith Video Conference

 

As part of World Malaria Day, my religion students learned about the tragedy of malaria in a Face to Faith video conference with malaria expert, Saleema Abdul Ghafur. She is the director of the African Leaders Malaria Alliance, an alliance of 49 African presidents and prime ministers. She works to raise money to defeat malaria. Today, she told us that Africa loses almost $12 billion dollars each year because of lost productivity from malaria deaths. She says that women and children suffer most and that their deaths lead to widespread poverty. Asked what motivated her work to eradicate malaria, Ms. Ghafur noted that service is a big part of the Muslim faith.

The conference included students from three other schools, one in England, another in Mexico, and one in Oklahoma. Saleema Abdul Ghafur skyped in from New York, our facilitator was in London, and the technical engineer who made sure we each had audio and video working, was in India. Quite a feat of technology.

The biggest problem for my students wasn't technology.  It was their teacher who got confused by all the different time zones and thought the conference was  supposed to start an hour earlier.  The mistake meant that we had to leave the conference after only half an hour because of our bell schedule and my miscalculation.

Nonetheless, my students were able to hear Ms. Ghafur speak and even ask her a few questions. Most importantly, they learned about a huge health problem in another part of the world and how that problem also creates widespread poverty, and lowers productivity in many African countries. And in Ms. Ghafur, they saw a great role model, someone who is making a difference and believes in service.

Selecting the Next Pope: CNN Explains

 

Another excellent clip, this one from CNN, on how the cardinals select the next pope.

India’s Shifting Gender Roles: One Girl’s Tale

The religion professor and writer, Stephen Prothero tweeted the link to this engaging story in PRI's The World.  Reporter, Rhitu Chatterjee,   profiles a young Indian girl in a remote village showing that in a country under fire for its treatment of women, unprecedented opportunity still exists for many women.

The story includes a couple of short videos, like the above, another in which the reporter allows the young girl to turn tables and interview her. It's a touching story about women in a country that desperately needs stories like this.

Kumbh Mela: A Week at the Largest Religious Gathering in the World

Wikipedia Commons

Eric Johnson,writing for the Atlantic Magazine, describes a week that he spent at the Kumbh Mela Hindu festival last month. The festival happens every twelve years at the confluence of the Ganges and Yamuna rivers.

Hindus believe that bathing in the water will wash away their sins and help bring salvation. But religion is not the only reason why this festival is so interesting.

What's amazing about Kumbh Mela is that it was the largest gathering of humans in history, with over 100,000,000 Hindus converging on the two rivers! You can read more about it in an earlier post.

This is a different story. The writer spent a week at the festival and even camped out in one of the tents in the temporary tent city near Allahabad. It's a great "inside" story if you are interested in learning more about the festival.

Face to Faith Video Conferfence/ Women's Rights

Today, my religion students participated in their first Face to Faith video conference. It was part of the organization's celebration of International  Women's Day.  Betty Anne Donnelly, who has worked with Catholic organizations all over the world in the areas of education, social justice and lay ministry, discussed womens' rights within the Catholic Church. She talked about working in the slums of Lima  Peru and about conversations with cardinals, one of whom told her that the biggest role for women was in the home.  She challenged my students to think about the importance of service, maybe for a year after college. She also asked them to think about their female heroes and why they were significant.

The discussion took place through Skype and a bridging software called Bluejeans.  Ms. Donnelly was in Massachusetts, the conference's facilitator was in England, and the technical specialist, who joined us at the beginning to make sure all systems were working, was in India.

I think the students enjoyed the discussion and some, I think,  were as amazed as I was, at how easy it is to bring interesting people from around the world into your classroom.

How Women are Remaking Buddhism

Writing in the Washington Post's On Faith Section as part of the International Women's Day series in collaboration with Tony Blair's Face to Faith Foundation, Joan Halifax, writes about the improving role of women in Buddhism. She says that Buddhists are reexamining patriarchal rules first developed by the Buddha himself, "with the intent to honor the equal rights and capacity for awakening of both men and women." She further suggests that  Buddhism is making "dramatic and positive changes" in the roles of women in the religion, especially in the Untied States, where she see more female roshis (Zen masters) in the US than in Japan.

The Struggle for Jihad

Two opposing sides try to define the meaning of jihad for advertisements on buses and metro in this excellent NY Times video clip. Thanks to David Korfhage for the link.

Sephardic Jews invited back to Spain after 500 years

The BBC Magazine reports that today, about 500 years since Spain's Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand threw out Muslims and Jews during the Inquisition, Spain is offering "fast-track" citizenship to Jewish descendants of the original Jewish community.

The story profiles one descendant who found the offer enticing but found that she did not qualify. Her descendants converted to Catholicism in order to avoid death or expulsion. Consequently,their descendants are not Jewish, so technically did not qualify for the fast-track citizenship.

Face to Faith Videoconferences

On Friday, if what the weather people are calling "Snowquester" does not keep us out of school, my World Religions class will discuss women's rights and the role of women in the Catholic Church through a program called "Face to Faith."  Tony Blair, the British Prime Minster from 1997 to 2007, started the organization as a way to bring together high school students of different faiths in different parts of the world through online-video conferences.

In addition to linking together classrooms from different parts of the world, Face to Faith also offers what they call special day conferences, often linked to the UN Calendar,  like the one I am doing on women's rights on Friday. We do it all through Skype. For the conference on Friday, our speaker will Skype in from England,our facilitator will Skype in from Utah,and our class will Skype in from Virginia.

 

Tibetan Book of The Dead

The Tibetan Book of the Dead is probably one of most well-known Tibetan Buddhist texts in the West. It describes the stages of death from a Tibetan's point of view. These stages include the period at the moment of death and the 49 day interval before rebirth. The book was composed by a monk in the 8th century and is often recited today by a lama (Buddhist spiritual leader) to a recently deceased person in order to help him understand his experiences and gain enlightenment.

Leonard Cohen, the Canadian singer, songwriter and poet, recites the Tibetan Book of the Dead in this 50 minute video. I found the video on Open Culture and they summarize the video like this: The film gives us an intimate look at this ceremony, performed after the death of a villager—with its intricate rituals and ancient, unbound, hand-printed text of the book—and touches on the tricky political issues of Buddhist practice in largely Chinese-controlled Tibet. In this first installment above, The Tibetan Book of the Dead: A Way of Life, the Dalai Lama weighs in with his own views on life and death (at 33:22).

The Holocaust Just Got More Shocking

 

According to the New Times, researchers have discovered and cataloged over 42,000 Nazi ghettos and camps. The numbers are much much higher than previously believed. Here's what the Time said: "The figure is so staggering that even fellow Holocaust scholars had to make sure they had heard it correctly when the lead researchers previewed their findings at an academic forum in late January at the German Historical Institute in Washington."  This story from The Mail Online is also very good and has interesting graphics.