by Mirabai Starr
Here in the mountains of northern New Mexico where I have spent most of life, the winter solstice season is marked by fire. During Advent, families and businesses fill small paper bags with…
Love in a Time of War
Getting to Know You While We’re in Turkey
What happens when a Muslim, a Christian, and a Jew walk down the street together? The beginning of a bad joke, right? Wrong. The Muslim was Plemon el-Amin, imam of the Atlanta Masjid of Al-Islam. The Christian was James Lampkin, senior pastor of Atlanta’s Northside Drive Baptist Church. And the Jew was Sherry Frank, executive director of the Atlanta Chapter of the American Jewish Committee. The street was Yerebatan Caddesi in the old city of Istanbul. The year was 2002. This walk marked the beginning of a remarkable experiment in interfaith community-building by a city nearly 6,000 miles away.
Peace in Middle East Will Come Only with Help from All of God’s People, says Yehezkel Landau
PULASKI, Tennessee – There will be peace in Israel and Palestine, Professor Yehezkel Landau – founder of a joint Jewish-Palestinian-Christian peace initiative in Israel – told a small group of Middle Tennessee religious leaders during the first evening of a three-day conference, Our Muslim Neighbor Initiative. But religious leaders must be part of building that peace.
When a King and a Pope Sit Down to Talk Religion…
Living Your Faith in the Bosom of Abraham
The Secret Power of Interfaith Encounters
Love is the Means and the End
I approached this book with high hopes and some trepidation. I longed for interspirituality when I had no name for it. I knew I wanted more than interfaith dialogue, useful as that is as a starting place. I am usually disappointed when authors compare faiths. My experience of heavily negative criticism of Christianity and blithe misinformation makes me wary.
Faithful to the Truth
Mirabai Starr speaks of the great tree of monotheism with its roots entrenched in the immutable soil of the metaphysical truth of love and its trunk extending heavenwards.
Mirabai Starr – An Interview about Writing God of Love
Mirabai Starr’s new book, God of Love – A Guide to the Heart of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, will be disconcerting to many in an arena that seems sometimes to have been written to death – the complexities of the Abrahamic faiths. The interconnections Starr explores seem novel but obvious at first. As the interconnections accumulate, though, familiar sacred texts become powerful and compelling in new ways, a source of hope for those who’ve concluded that Abrahamic violence is forever intractable.
Love in a Time of War
Here in the mountains of northern New Mexico where I have spent most of life, the winter solstice season is marked by fire. During Advent, families and businesses fill small paper bags with dirt and nestle yellow votive candles inside them. They line the adobe walls around their homes and the low hanging flat rooftops of their shops with these homemade lanterns, called farolitos, and kindle them at sunset. The entire valley glows with tiny golden lights. What began as a Spanish Catholic tradition is now a cherished ritual for our entire multicultural community.
“Interfaith 3.0” from the Outside
In the December 2011 issue of The Interfaith Observer, Bettina Gray wrote about the recent changes in the interfaith movement. Her piece is impressive and inspiring, an optimistic view of our interfaith future. She wrote as one with significant experience and a long history in interfaith work; but she also wrote from the perspective of someone embedded in the “mainstream” religions that have dominated interfaith work since its beginnings. Once restricted to Abrahamic faiths (Christianity, Judaism, and Islam), the administrative core of interfaith work gradually expanded to include the other two members – Buddhism and Hinduism – of what have been called “the big five” religions.
Religious Leaders Assess Impact of Social Media
DOHA, Qatar — Hundreds of Muslim, Christian and Jewish leaders from over 50 countries gathered in Qatar’s capital city this week to discuss the intersection of social media and religion at the 9th Doha Conference of Inter-faith Dialogue, a three-day affair which concluded on Wednesday October 26.