by Marium Mohiuddin
“You have to come and help me right now!” he said. All I could think was “it’s 4 a.m., and there’s no way I can sneak out.” My parents would kill me. Despite being a senior in college...
by Sparrow Etter Carlson
I write this now with my hand on my heart, and here it will remain. For what follows is about the precious people within our midst who are treated as ex-humans in our society and...
by Mohammed Jibriel
I recently learned about the concept of moral injury, which describes the profound psychological, behavioral, social, and spiritual distress that...
by Zack Ritter
“All 40,000 Palestinians killed in Gaza are terrorists,” she said as we were eating cookies, standing around the flickering flames at Shabbat services. I was...
by Daniel Tutt
This past year I’ve been leading a new initiative at Unity Productions Foundation (UPF), whose mission is to counter bigotry and create peace through the media. Its documentary film The Sultan and the Saint is…
by Ruth Broyde Sharone
The iconic image of a male storyteller addressing an enraptured audience pressed shoulder to shoulder around a glowing campfire may soon be replaced by hijab and sari-clad young women holding their smart phones.
by Rev. Bud Heckman
One of the biggest religion stories today is the rising number of Americans who no longer identify with a particular religion. That is a given. But disaffiliation is only one side of the story.
by Megan Anderson
Below you will find our top picks from 2017. They cover the prayerful to the prophetic; they call us to reflect and to take action. Their messages are pertinent to the situations today and contain lessons each of us can learn from. So kick back and prepare to be inspired, challenged, and have your thoughts provoked.
by Megan Weiss
Very few religious, much less interfaith news publications have a related social arm, an active presence in the community they address. But Spokane Faith and Values (SpokaneFāVS), a small digital interfaith news platform in Spokane, Washington is proving it can happen.
by Megan Weiss
TIO is now on YouTube! What is on our channel? Since the launch of TIO’s new website in September 2016, each issue has included “feature videos” which are included in one of that month’s articles or seemed important to share with TIO readers.
by Paul Chaffee
What does living life as an ‘interfaith activist’ mean? Millions have joined the cause in recent months, so we can well ask ourselves: What do interfaith activists share in common within our own communities and in the world? A quick, simplistic answer might be that all of us are striving towards peacemaking with ‘the other.’
by Paul Chaffee
A largely unknown treasure for interfaith activists is the convention held each year by the Religion Communicators Council (RCC). Founded in 1929, the RCC has given annual awards to religious communicators and to secular communicators working on religious subjects since 1949.
by Megan Weiss
I have always loved libraries. I worked at my hometown library for six years and at one point dreamed of becoming a librarian myself. Now this dream has come true, although in an unexpected way, since never once did I think I would be building a library from the bottom up!
I’m the daughter of second-generation Americans (SGAs). My four grandparents immigrated to the United States in the early twentieth century to escape desperate economic conditions and the grinding anti-Semitism they faced as Jews in Eastern Europe. Each settled in the Midwest United States and eventually in Omaha, Nebraska, where there was and remains a small but vibrant Jewish community.
A recent study of young British Sikhs shows that while they may be digitally savvy and engage with religion on the Internet, for many of them, traditional offline community and authorities continue to play a central role.
When Heidi Campbell crossed the Atlantic to do graduate work at the University of Edinburgh in 1996, a new electronic tool called the “Internet” became a comfortable lifeline for staying in touch with friends and family. She was captivated by the new technology, ending up doing her Edinburgh doctorate on church and another new internet-enabled phenomenon, virtual communities. (For the uninitiated, virtual communities are groups of computer users who know and interact with each other electronically, not in person, at least much of the time.)
“Wait, you’re a Muslim? But you’re not even brown!”
When Emina, a member of Project Interfaith’s Youth Service activities in 2010, was faced with this challenge, rather than becoming defensive or shutting down, she took it seriously. With a video camera turned on, she explained her identity as a Muslim woman and addressed some of the misconceptions underlying that question. That got the staff at Project Interfaith thinking. We asked ourselves, What if more people had the chance to define and share their religious or spiritual identity in their own words and to confront the misconceptions and misunderstandings they face because of this? Thus RavelUnravel was born.
It is difficult to know where to turn to get accurate, interesting, creative, not to mention, meaty theological reflections exploring the social issues we face in the world today. The online forum State of Formation (SoF) offers such a place, and as the forum grows, the continuing legacy of writers, ideas, topics, and dialogue grows as well.
Spirituality & Practice is a website with 27,000 webpages, each a resource for individuals and communities seeking spiritual wisdom and guidance in their everyday lives. The site receives about 1.5 million unique visitors each year (more than 6,000 every day), who click on 5 million page-links. The site also hosts more than 100 online on-demand e-courses, all having to do with spiritual practice. Thousands sign up each year for the modestly priced courses. Hundreds of books and movies have been reviewed, and spiritual leaders from dozens of different religious traditions, alive or passed, are profiled, quoted, and linked to additional resources. S&P includes blogs, “Praying the News,” curricula, videos, galleries, poetry and stories, and more.
This past April, Allen Downey, a professor of computer science at Olin College of Engineering, published his study on the relationship between Internet use and the decline in religious affiliation among Americans. His findings went viral. Downey concluded that the Internet is responsible for a growing number of Americans who do not associate themselves with a religion. Many news outlets reported on Downey conclusions, most without any criticism: a quick Google search of “The Internet and religion” results in nothing but paraphrases from this single study.
