Read this engaging and important reflection from OnBeing about the value of diversity to help us grow to be better, smarter, and more resilient people. READ MORE (OnBeing) ...
Photo Exhibition Celebrates Diversity, Builds Bridges
A new photography exhibition, titled "I am Mohammed," features portraits of 14 people who all have one thing in common: They all bear the world's most common name—Mohammed (using one spelling or another). According to curator Narmeen Haider, the exhibition is meant to both celebrate the diversity within the Muslim community, with photos of Mohammeds hailing from Alaska to Afghanistan, and to help build bridges between Muslims and non-Muslims. "In your head," Haider says, "a Muslim looks so ...
Meet the Writer behind the First Muslim Marvel Superhero
In 2014, writer G. Willow Wilson published her take on Ms. Marvel, a character in the Marvel superhero universe. The character was originally created in 1968 and had traditionally been portrayed as white. In Wilson's version, Ms. Marvel is a young Muslim-American teenager of Pakistani descent whose real name is Kamala Khan—the first Muslim superhero in the Marvel universe. Read this engaging profile of Wilson, which discusses the writer's life, other work, and beliefs, as well as the ...
Aiming for Religious Pluralism
In this op-ed in Rice University's Rice Thresher publication, a group of interfaith students expresses why the university—and all institutions and communities—must aim not for religious tolerance, but for religious pluralism. As they say: "We have all heard we should be religiously tolerant of others, but tolerance only scrapes the surface... Religious pluralism goes beyond tolerance and facilitates, facilitating the implementation of a critical approach. It allows us to see past the ...
A Lesson in Religious Freedom
Read this engaging piece by Hiba Siddiqi for Religion News, in which she talks about how her high school's Muslim prayer room was an expression of the religious freedoms Americans value, respect, and fight for, and how the presence of the prayer room in her school served to normalize the Muslim members of the school community. As she explains: "I used to tell people that exposure to a thing results in the normalization of that thing, but I now realize that the only way to transcend lines of ...
