by Mona Eltahawy
I recently visited India to speak at a conference called “Future to the Responsibility”.
When I landed in Mumbai, a driver called Arun was fortunately waiting for me at the airport, armed with an umbrella for the rains which really taught me what a Monsoon is!
We had quite a long drive to the hotel […]
By Mona Eltahawy
When I first moved from Egypt to the US in the summer of 2000, my then-husband – an American from whom I am now divorced – offered to drive me to the neighborhood mosque. He had looked it up so that he could take me there when I arrived in Seattle.
As we approached […]
by Roy Howard
It used to be conventional wisdom to avoid religion and politics at gatherings of friends and family. Nowadays, it’s nearly impossible not to talk about them. I think that’s a good thing; after all, for people of faith their religious convictions, if they mean anything at all, certainly inform their political opinions. It’s […]
by Roy Howard
Merciful God of all people, we remember before you the people of Pakistan in the hour of their grief and the crisis of their nation. In this time, work with those who seek the peace of all people, that the leaders of Pakistan, along with other world leaders, would be instruments of wisdom […]
by Roy Howard
I just returned from Israel and the West Bank. Is there any hope left for peace with Israel and the Palestinians? Jackson Diehl of the Washington Post suggests that the last vestige of any remaining hope may life in the Annapolis Summit scheduled for early December. I agree with him. But, as always, […]
bu Jim Burklo
I learned something that impressed me when I visited Wichita a few weeks ago. As a passenger in a car driving over the river that bisects the city, I said, “Oh, there’s the Arkansas (ARkansaw)!” It brought back memories of a cross-country road trip I took many years ago, following the river down […]
by Roy Howard
This is a story about neighbors.
Marduk is my neighbor. We share a fence in the suburbs of Maryland near Washington, DC. “In my country” or “in my village” is how Marduk begins many sentences, having lived in Iran until seven years ago when he moved to Maryland with his wife and two children. […]
By Mona Eltahawy
I was well into my two-eggs-sunny-side-up brunch last Saturday morning at the local café when I found a copy of that day’s New York Times opened at the opinion section. I browsed it as I munched on my toast and then turned to the front page of the paper where a picture I […]
By Mona Eltahawy
Over the past month, I’ve been to Qatar, Germany and Egypt. As jet setting as all that sounds, I was counting the days till I was in Bellevue, Ohio for it was in this tiny town halfway between Cleveland and Toledo that my family would finally gather again for the first time in […]
Meditations on Ephesians 4:1-7, 11-16
By Jarrett McLaughlin
On a recent pilgrimage to Turkey I had the rare honor of visiting the ancient city of Ephesus. It was an incredible feeling to walk the streets of this ancient city where Paul assembled a rag tag group of Greeks and Jews into one of the first Christian churches […]
By Daniel S. Brenner
Working in a Christian Seminary, I sometimes feel like the wacky upstairs neighbor in a Hallmark Channel sitcom. Sure, the great rabbinic sages of past centuries, like Menachem Meiri and Yakov Emden valued Christianity’s contributions to building a more ethical and compassionate world – but would they have played Santa at the […]
Rev. Tom Are, Jr.
Rabbi Jonathan Sacks has written, “The radical transcendence of God in the Hebrew Bible means that the Infinite lies beyond our finite understanding.”1
In college I traveled to Egypt on one of those “see the holy sites” tours of the Middle-East. The first day we stopped for lunch in a crowded market place. […]