9 Religion Themed Films At Sundance Film Festival 2012
from Huffington Post
The 2012 Sundance Film Festival began Jan. 19 and will continue until Jan. 29 in Park City, Utah. Sundance takes place annually in Utah and is the largest independent cinema festival in the United States. Religion and spirituality featured prominently at the Sundance Film Festival 2011, with 26 films exploring themes of ultimate meaning, bigger questions of life and the complicated role that religion plays in our world.
This year’s festival features at least nine films touching on the topic of religion and spirituality. While most of these films are set against a Christian background, “5 Broken Cameras,” directed by a Palestinian and Israeli duo, is a thought-provoking personal documentary on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Additionally, “Bestiaire” uses humans and beasts to explore the Hindu concept of darshan (an act of beholding the Divine).
From exposing the hypocrisy of the church to commenting on the sexual lives of rebellious religious teenagers to chronicling the hopeful story of Bishop Gene Robinson, the first openly gay bishop, these films explore a variety of themes.HuffPost Religion has compiled a list of films highlighted at Sundance Film Festival 2012 that explore the topic of religion and spirituality. Enjoy!
First Mosque Part of the Heritage of all Canadians
By Daood Hamdani
From Common Ground News Service
Ottawa – This May, as Muslims mark the twentieth anniversary of the induction of Al-Rashid mosque in Fort Edmonton Park, the country’s largest living history museum, the spotlight will be on the leadership role of Muslim women in this historic event.
Fifty years after they burst onto the front line to help complete the construction of Canada’s first mosque in 1938, Muslim women took over a floundering campaign to save it from demolition. They surprised many by not only preserving this irreplaceable piece of Canadian heritage but enshrining it in the history museum. Al-Rashid, once a bustling hub of community life, started drifting into disrepair after the congregation outgrew it and moved to a new Islamic centre in 1982. Numerous efforts to raise money and find a new location for the old structure failed. Al-Rashid was set for demolition in 1988. Out of options, the Muslim community could only hope for a miracle.
To many, including Canadians of other faiths, the loss of the country’s oldest mosque and a Canadian heritage building was unthinkable. Al-Rashid was more than a place of worship. It was also the story of the struggle, adjustment and integration of early Muslim settlers.
While the community braced itself for the inevitable, the Terrific Twelve, a group of twelve women who belonged to a relatively new and untested organisation, the Canadian Council of Muslim Women (CCMW), which was founded in 1982 to speak for Muslim women, defiantly dug in to save the mosque. Led by Lila Fahlman and Razia Jaffer, founder and president of CCMW respectively, these young, highly educated women of diverse ethnic and cultural backgrounds included second-generation Canadians and new immigrants, working moms, full-time homemakers and single professional women.
Places of Faith Tells What Really Goes on in America’s Temples Mosques and Churches
By David Briggs
From Huffington Post
What do Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn, Hispanic Catholics in central Nebraska, megachurch evangelicals in Houston and South Asian Muslims in suburban Detroit have in common?
More than many people could ever imagine.
Forget the popular cultural images from shows such as HBO’s “Big Love” that revive stereotypes linking Mormonism with polygamy or the ubiquitous images in the news associating Islam with terrorism. Look past the cultural crossfire that lumps religious liberals and conservatives into separate boxes defined by extremist political and social agendas.
The reality, as presented in a new book by two respected scholars, is that if you walk into a mosque, synagogue, temple or church next weekend, you will most likely find groups of believers in prayer and meditation seeking spiritual growth.
For six weeks, Pennsylvania State University sociologists Christopher Scheitle and Roger Finke traveled nearly 7,000 miles across the country visiting diverse religious communities. What they report back in “Places of Faith: A Road Trip Across America’s Landscape” is a portrait of people of faith sharing many of the same aspirations across theological and denominational divides.
They encounter members of a black church in Memphis and a Mormon congregation in a small Utah town giving personal testimonies amid Sunday worship and religious education classes lasting three hours and more. In both the Friday prayer service at the Islamic Center of America in Detroit and the Saturday morning Shabbat service at B’nai Avraham in Brooklyn, the authors find immigrants from Africa, Asia and Europe praying for the well-being of humanity.
These straightforward observations of faith groups at worship have a critical role to play in public discourse on religion especially when an increasing body of research reveals sharp declines in religious prejudice, the more people of different beliefs get to know one another.
“Places of Faith” allows “students and people in general to look over our shoulder and to find out what these communities are like and how similar they are in many ways,” said Finke, who is also director of the Association of Religion Data Archives.
KidSpirit: Where Youth and the Spirit of Pluralism Converge
by Elizabeth Dabney Hochman
Take a moment to look back on your youth. Do you remember being 12 or 14? That awkward age on the cusp of adulthood, when you were neither a child nor yet an adult, but alternately identifying with both? Imagine your deepest held values and beliefs at that age; your fledgling sense of self and vulnerability. Did you have opportunities to share what mattered to you? To listen to voices different from your own and marvel at their unique worth and beauty? Flash forward a few years to your late teens and early twenties. How do you recall that sense of self now? Stronger? More settled? Perhaps a bit less open-minded than before?
We know that traits we develop as children become the basis of the adults we will become. If a child develops empathy, for example, early in life, we know they are more likely to be empathic later on. Conversely, what happens with negative traits? What about intolerance or its cousins, aggression and fear?
As supporters of interfaith work, we know that building greater understanding and dialogue among diverse groups is a crucial aspect in creating a more peaceful world. We know listening to each other and educating ourselves about our neighbors is central in our interdependent world. Although there are myriad ways for adults to enhance their inner development and pluralistic understanding, there are surprisingly few outlets for youth to develop these same skills, and fewer options still for young teens. How can we hope for a world with greater compassion and understanding without nurturing these qualities in youth?
KidSpirit, an organization I founded in 2007, is an online magazine and social networking community that empowers youth from all backgrounds and traditions to tackle life’s big questions in a spirit of openness. The magazine is a nonprofit, ad-free quarterly, written and edited by youth. It embodies a vibrant dialogue between an all-youth Editorial Board based in New York, and kids ages 11-16 around the world who send us their poetry, original essays and artwork for our quarterly themes. All youth, regardless of background or location can participate fully in this forum free.
Our complimentary group guides for teachers and mentors working with youth augment any curricula from religious education to creative writing and are available for download.
My hope in founding KidSpirit was to create a non-commercial platform for youth to share their beliefs, values and creativity and to support their development into becoming world citizens with strong inner grounding. Over the last five years, KidSpirit’s issues have had themes ranging from conflict-resolution and peacemakers and mourning rituals around the world, to moments of transcendence, analysis of materialism in culture and reflections on creativity and meaning (you can see an archive of all of our issues online by clicking here). Our young contributors span many parts of the world and they shine as brilliant examples of the honesty, joy and poignant questioning that so often characterizes the shift from childhood to adulthood.
Our all youth Editorial Board has read essays, poetry, journalistic articles and reviewed original artwork from kids from India and Great Britain to Ukraine and the United States, all based on open exchange on probing topics they choose. The cultural and religious dialogue has taken our editors and readers in unexpected directions that would have been almost unthinkable a generation ago.
In one recent meeting, we were fortunate to have a visit from a new young contributor from Afghanistan. This girl, just 15 years old, was in New York to give a speech about the extraordinary circumstances of her life, and was able to share in the editorial process. Nilab sat on the floor with a dozen or so teen editors, each scribbling on their own copy of an article in the process of being edited for publication. After a period of intense concentration, conversation erupted about the piece in question. The dialogue was vibrant but open and constructive, and as usual, the meeting concluded with cookies. Nilab’s fascination with the proceedings was palpable and she contributed much to our afternoon. It was incredible to witness her joy at the experience and the deep respect that her American peers felt for her.
Another ongoing relationship has come from a writer named Prerna who found KidSpirit from a web search while in her home city of Kolkata, India. Over the years, she has shared her views on Gandhi, written about the festival of Diwali and crafted a piece about meaning in life. Each of her submissions has been through a vibrant and interactive process with the editorial board, resulting in growth on all sides.
In many ways, KidSpirit is a reflection of our increasingly pluralistic world. It welcomes kids who identify themselves as belonging to a church, temple, or synagogue, as well as those who don’t. But most importantly, it offers an oasis for youth to pause while in the maelstrom of adolescence and to connect with each other respectfully on questions of meaning. To observe and facilitate that process is to be filled with wonder.
Elizabeth Dabney Hochman is the Founding Editor of KidSpirit Online and KidSpiritMagazine, a nonprofit web community and magazine that empowers teens to explore life’s big questions in a spirit of openness. A graduate of Princeton University, with a Masters in Music from the Mannes College of Music in New York City, she has over fifteen years’ experience as an opera singer. She and her husband live with their two daughters in Brooklyn, New York.
Why Is Religion So Big in American Politics?
Embracing Diversity for Peaceful Cohabitation in American Cities
By Frank Fredericks
From Common Ground News Service
New York – In the 19 November 2011 issue of The Economist, the cover story, called “The magic of diasporas” outlines the benefits of mass immigration, particularly to the West. However the changing demographics in major metropolises can also be a highly destabilising force.
This is especially true in the United States in cities where immigration is high and demographics can change significantly in less than a generation. In some places this has resulted in an increase in hate crimes and communal tensions. Yet some cities handle racial and ethnic diversity better than others and provide valuable lessons for other communities.
One example of this is Queens, one of the lesser known boroughs of New York City. Queens is the most diverse county in America; US Census Bureau statistics suggest that 138 languages are spoken there. Is it a hotbed of racial and ethnic tension? Crime reports suggest surprisingly that it’s not. So how does Queens handle all of this diversity?
In 2010, the state reported only 51 hate crimes in Queens, or .02 incidents per 1,000 people, which is slightly less than the national average. While Queens may be extreme with regards to its diversity and its success at managing diversity, it is not the only such example. London, Kampala, Sydney and Singapore all have strikingly similar stories.
My Religion is Better Than Yours
By Gadadhara Pandit Dasa
From Huffington Post
I don’t know about you, but I’m definitely tired of encountering this attitude. Most people who make such statements don’t have deep knowledge or set of experiences within their own tradition, what to speak of other people’s traditions. I am confident that if we made even a little bit of an endeavor to understand another’s faith, it could make all the difference in the world.
The first time I watched “Jesus of Nazareth” with a group of fellow Hindu monks, we all marveled at the life of Jesus and the seriousness of his teachings, and immediately we could find similar teachings from within the Hindu tradition. The video inspired me to read the Gospels, which surprised me even more. The mood of a practitioner described by Jesus is identical to descriptions in the Gita and the Bhagavat Purana.
“You have heard the law that says, ‘Love your neighbor’ and hate your enemy. But I say, love your enemies! Pray for those who persecute you! In that way, you will be acting as true children of your Father in heaven. For he gives his sunlight to both the evil and the good, and he sends rain on the just and the unjust alike” (Matthew 5:43-45)
Click here to read the full article
Speaking Out Against Mosque Desecration
by Rabbi Gideon D. Sylvester
from Common Ground News Service
Jerusalem – Across the world, people were outraged by the news that mosques in Israel had been desecrated and racist graffiti scrawled across their walls. Israeli Jews felt ashamed. We asked ourselves: do the perpetrators have any understanding of Jewish history and theology, – which clearly teach respect for every human being and the necessity of standing up against injustice wherever we see it?
Growing up in the shadows of the Holocaust, I, a young British Jew, learned about Kristallnacht, the night in 1938 when dozens of German synagogues were attacked. In youth groups we discussed how the demonisation of people and the destruction of their religious buildings were a first step to genocide. We proudly proclaimed, “never again” – never again should this happen to Jews; never again should it happen to any other people.
We understood the Biblical requirement for a sovereign Jewish state to care for everyone, including those who do not share our heritage.
Exploring our relationship to other faiths, we discovered that from medieval times, great rabbis taught their followers that Islam is a monotheistic religion whose adherents must be treated with respect. When the great Jewish philosopher, Maimonides, pondered why God had created so many people whose faith differed from his own, he concluded that although God’s will is unfathomable, Islam and Christianity seemed to be part of the divine plan to spread ethical monotheism throughout the world.
Meaning Making: An Inter-generational Collaboration
by Honna Eichler
from State of Formation
While interfaith dialogue attempts to increase understanding between groups of people from different traditions, too often the work itself occurs in silos. Barriers exist between people of different ethnic and cultural traditions, generations, socioeconomic classes, gender, and education backgrounds between the most open minded conversation partners.
Part of the work of State of Formation is to deconstruct silos and dismantle barriers to foster conversation where it once was challenged to survive. Over the past few months, State of Formation (SoF) staff have been in conversation with those at The Interfaith Observer (TIO) to produce an inter-generational conversation around meaning making within different religious and ethical traditions. With a shared writing objective, fifteen contributors from both organizations wrote about Meaning Making from their own backgrounds.
The Interfaith Observer is an electronic journal created to explore interreligious relations and the interfaith movement. View supporting documents from The Interfaith Observer on Meaning Making by clicking the highlighted text.
Christians and Muslims Unite at Nigeria Protest
By Jon Gambell
From Huffington Post
LAGOS, Nigeria — A human wave of more than 20,000 surrounded the Muslim faithful as they prayed toward Mecca Friday, as anti-government demonstrations over spiraling fuel prices and corruption showed unity among protesters despite growing sectarian tensions in Africa’s most populous nation.
While violence sparked by religious and ethnic divisions left about 1,500 people dead last year alone in Nigeria, some hope the ongoing protests gripping the oil-rich nation will bring together a country that already suffered through a bloody civil war.
“It shows that Nigeria is now coming together as one family,” said Abdullahi Idowu, 27, as he prepared to wash himself before Friday prayers.
Labor unions, meanwhile, announced Friday they would halt their five-day strike for the weekend, allowing families stuck largely inside their homes to go to markets and rest. Union leaders also plan to meet President Goodluck Jonathan and government officials on Saturday for new negotiations, just ahead of a promised labor shutdown of Nigeria’s oil industry.
Nigeria, which produces about 2.4 million barrels of crude a day, is the fifth-largest oil exporter to the U.S. While the country has a several-week stock of oil ready for export, the threatened shutdown Sunday could shake oil futures as traders remained concerns about worldwide supply.
The strike began Monday, paralyzing the nation of more than 160 million people. The root cause remains gasoline prices: President Goodluck Jonathan’s government abandoned subsidies that kept gasoline prices low Jan. 1, causing prices to spike from $1.70 per gallon (45 cents per liter) to at least $3.50 per gallon (94 cents per liter). The costs of food and transportation also largely doubled in a nation where most people live on less than $2 a day.
Anger over losing one of the few benefits average Nigerians see from being an oil-rich country, as well as disgust over government corruption, have led to demonstrations across this nation and violence that has killed at least 10 people. Red Cross volunteers have treated more than 600 people injured in protests since the strike began, the International Committee of the Red Cross said Friday.
“Over 4,000 persons have also been temporarily displaced there as a result of the strike and communal tensions,” said Mamadou Sow, the deputy head of the committee’s delegation in Nigeria. “Most of them have now started to return to their homes.”
