By Trent Gilliss, senior editor (@TrentGilliss) | Monday, June 17, 2013 - 6:37am
We've been consumed with sundry details as this project takes the next step in its evolution, so this week's capsule will be rather brief. I hope you don't mind me giving you a bit of a behind-the-scenes tour!
One of the tasks we've been focusing on? Finding new office space for our production team to create great interviews and public events. And, boy, have we seen some doozies. Even in the dustiest of places, Krista can pull off the flip-flops and yoga pants... and remain stylish and clean!
We've also rediscovered our inner flaneurs, exploring hidden basements and alleys, and seeing architectural elements like these classic limestone columns supporting a massive 150-year-old building near the mighty Mississippi!
And, of course, we did visit some magnificent spaces (a bit out of our reach) with curtain walls of glass revealing these unbelievable vistas of urban lakes and the tree canopies of Minneapolis neighborhoods.
I'd be remiss if I didn't share this Sightings commentary from Martin Marty, "Interfaith Marriages: Religious Tolerance or Religious Dilution?" In it, Dr. Marty invites interfaith couples to reflect on their marriages and tell their stories — to further our cultural understanding and to challenge the binary headlines:
"Years ago Jews and Catholics were most feared and despised, but today they are most readily accepted by others! One reason for the change is interfaith marriage, and, alongside it, many other means of getting to know 'the other.'"
I'll leave you with this thought from Krista (@KristaTippett):
Doing good by those we know & love is the most exacting discipline, the grit test of character, the measure of a life.
And, please know that if you ever want to get in touch with me — to critique, to suggest a voice, to submit a post for publication — you can always reach me at @TrentGilliss on Twitter or at tgilliss@onbeing.org. Or follow our show account (@Beingtweets). It's got personality too!
“Every living and healthy religion has a marked idiosyncrasy” wrote philosopher George Santayana, and its power comes from the “special and surprising message and the bias which that revelation gives to life.” He preferred to see religions interact positively, but he also knew the difficulties based on difference. A religion “offers another world to live in,” and “another world to live in. . . is what we mean by having a religion.”
Intense religious groups isolate themselves in cells and can create problems for the health of their members and “the others” to whom they must relate. Americans see the worst of this in inter-faith and intra-faith conflicts the world around.
American citizens have the luxury of conversing, arguing, testing, and experimenting with challenges to our tentative and sometimes tense resolutions. Talking about all this at a distance is a luxury; when it comes close to home, everything is more complicated. In the free ways of citizens in this free society the most “up close” problem area is interfaith marriage, which hits at the most intimate and demanding relations, under one’s roof or over one’s fence or on the other branches of a family tree.
This late spring much discussion is prompted by Naomi Schaefer Riley’s much-noticed book, Till Faith Do Us Part: How Interfaith Marriage Is Transforming America, and transforming America it is. The Economist's headline on the book admirably condensed the issue; is it “A Welcome Sign of Tolerance, or Dangerous Dilution?” People who care about civility in a civil society have to care about the “tolerance” side and people who care about religion in a religious — not all that, and not only, "secular" — society have to care about the “dilution” side.
Ms. Riley herself and many reviewers are in “interfaith” marriages, and find much to affirm in many of them, but they are also aware of what social scientific data says about the causes of changes in marriage trends. Some data suggests that, among large communities, Mormons and Muslims are the most successful at holding off marriage “across the aisles,” to use The Economist’s terms.
Ask, in polls, which religion “other than your own” you view most positively, and the largest set of respondents lists Mormon and Muslim as problematic. Years ago Jews and Catholics were most feared and despised, but today they are most readily accepted by others! One reason for the change is interfaith marriage, and, alongside it, many other means of getting to know “the other.”
One little e-column cannot begin to canvass such a broad field of inquiry and issues as this; my file of print-outs on the subject bulges, and, in effect, whispers: “Mention me, even if you can’t do me justice.” So here is a mention, and a hope that people rejecting, entering, living with, suffering because of, and setting examples in interfaith marriages will keep telling their stories and the rest of us will keep reading about them, learning from them, and remembering The Economist’s tagline.
Years ago Cardinal Joseph Bernardin introduced himself to a Protestant gathering upon his arrival in Chicago. He told the audience that he read the appeals by couples to enter into interfaith marriages, Catholic rules being tough. He surprised all when he said that he was cheered when couples took the issue seriously, and his spirit sagged when they were casual and un-knowing. For good reason. Bernardin's is not the only reaction or response, but it invites reflection. We reflect.
Author Martin E. Marty is the Fairfax M. Cone Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of the History of Modern Christianity at the Divinity School at The University of Chicago. His biography, publications, and contact information can be found at www.memarty.com
This essay is reprinted from Sightings from the Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago Divinity School.
There is a poetry in one's heritage that is powerful. With each generation, a new identity is created by joining the experiences of those who came before with the challenges of a changing world. So how do modern day, Asian-American poets create their own identities while still remaining true to their ethnic and cultural backgrounds?
Bao Phi was born in Saigon, Vietnam and raised in the Midwest. The son of Chinese and Vietnamese parents, slam poetry became a way for him to express his feelings on race and identity in America. He joined the speech team at his high school and carried this passion into a full scholarship at Macalester College. The art form helped him make sense of the world as a teen, becoming a career and a passion in his adulthood.
The subjects of his poems are both fictional and real. They are drawn from the stories of his childhood and tend to be semi-autobiographical. His poem "The Nguyens" illustrates the commonality that a name and a heritage can carry while also demonstrating the vast personal differences of Asian Americans.
Last name Nguyen, all of them. They’re not related, but they’re more related than any of them will ever know.
They sell cars in Orange County. They sell shoes in Queens. They hustle from White Bear Lake to Frogtown, Minnesota.
They drawl their way through your heart in Virginia and Texas. They lost everything to Katrina in New Orleans.
They fight for their lives every day in Boston. They bake mango cheesecakes in Oakland and San Francisco.
This 2010 reading of "The Nguyens" was featured on MN Original.
Mr. Phi currently works as the director and curator of Equilibrium, a spoken word series at the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis that focuses on bringing poets of color together on a local and national level.
If you're interested in hearing another story about the power of poetry and identity, check out Krista Tippett's interview with Sarah Kay. She's a young, spoken word poet who has become a role model and teacher to teenagers around the world. Millions have viewed her TED talk, where she shared the main stage with figures like Bill Gates and Jamie Oliver. She puts words around what she knows about poetry, stories, and being human and connected in this age.
"Real time is true;
redundancy that's happening now.
Remember those swaths of time between high holy seasons:
Ordinary time.
Nothing dramatic is happening;
this is where we're living."
Simply marvelous.
And Andréana Lefton (@AELefton) graces our blog this week with "A Dark Privilege: Bearing Witness to Victims and Prisoners of Conscience in Iran." Bahá'í leaders in Iran are being persecuted and imprisoned — simply for their faith. From a desk in London, Ms. Lefton reflects on their circumstances and how they remind her of the sacrifice and the richness of human life:
"They are traces of human beings who learned to drink the bitter with the sweet. Memories of weddings, a favorite poem, and the dreams a young girl who dove headfirst into the ocean, arms and legs flying."
While editing Ms. Lefton's commentary, I happened upon this video interview with Roxana Saberi, the American journalist who was accused of espionage by the Iranian government. She talks about the time she spent in an Iranian prison and the relationships she developed with Mahvash Sabet and Fariba Kamalabadi, two of the seven Yaran ("the Friends"), who are sentenced to 20 years in prison because of their faith:
"I think the lessons that Mahvash and Fariba taught me in prison are universal. And they can apply to anybody, anywhere in the world. You don't have to be in prison. We have our own prisons, are own adversities, and we can try to turn those adversities into opportunities."
Seeing this early one morning…
…and reading this:
"Radical change remains a possibility within us right up until our last breath. The greatest tragedy of human existence is not to live in time, in both senses of that phrase."
Famously secular Western/Northern Europe has been bound for a renewal of spiritual curiosity, a predictable decade or so behind the U.S.
…and the forces that shape our lives:
"I worry that technology is to this century what ideologies were to the last - "solutions" in which hope and hubris merge dangerously."
Where might you take this idea? Are you concerned that this is true, or do you see it differently? Jump into the mix with Krista and others on this conversation.
A rally in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, for the seven Bahá’í leaders in Iran, known as the Yaran ("Friends in Iran"), who were incarcerated by the Iranian government in 2008. (Credit: Comunidade Bahá'í do Brasil/Flickr, cc by 2.0)
In a dim office in south London, I am alone at my computer. The shadows of trains pass in front of the sun. In the alley, a man begins tuning his guitar. One by one, I open the files I have been assigned to catalogue. One by one, I unlock a face, a name, a story. There are over two hundred. A community of believers who died for their faith.
I am constructing a wall of memory. Names, photographs. And for those without a snapshot, a single red candle, unflickering in virtual space.
This should be ancient history. This should be a research paper on early Christian martyrs. Every file should bear names and dates far removed from modern consciousness. But instead, I find myself looking at high school students, mothers, newlyweds, grandparents. Men in flared pant suites and lipsticked girls with fiery eyes. Their dates of death are a rough variation on a theme: 1980, 1981, 1983.
In 1979, Iranians overthrew the Shah for a new Islamic republic, led by a Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khomeini. Now, in the clergy-controlled state, there are only four official religions: Islam (preferrably Shi'ism), Christianity, Judaism, and Zoroastrianism.
Left off the list is Iran's largest religious minority, the Bahá’í Faith, whose followers are deemed heretics and systematically persecuted. The persecutions began at the religion's birth, when its founder, Baha'u'llah, declared his revelation in 1863. Thousands of Iranians converted to the Faith, leading to mass arrests and killings, the destruction of Bahá’í property, and the banning of students from places of learning.
With intermittent lulls, the arrests and hate crimes continue to the present day. In May 2008, seven Bahá’í leaders were arrested and thrown into prison, for the simple fact of their beliefs. Their arrests were an eerie reminder of the abduction of the Bahá’í leadership in 1981. That year, all nine members of the Iranian Bahá’í Spiritual Assembly disappeared. They are presumed dead.
In addition to targeting Bahá’í leadership, the Iranian government has made no secret of its efforts to bar Bahá’ís from education and employment. In a private memo signed by the Supreme Leader Ali Khamanei in 1991, the "Bahá’í question" was clearly and ominously addressed. Some excerpts:
"The government’s dealings with them must be in such a way that their progress and development are blocked."
"They must be expelled from universities, either in the admission process or during the course of their studies, once it becomes known that they are Bahá’ís."
"Deny them employment if they identify themselves as Bahá’ís."
"Deny them any position of influence, such as in the educational sector, etc."
"A plan must be devised to confront and destroy their cultural roots outside the country."
Today, these seven Bahá’í leaders have been in prison for five years. They are sentenced to 20 years, the longest to be served by prisoners of conscience in Iran today. All over the world, from Washington DC to London and Budapest, people are coming together to demand their release.
As I sat in that dark London office, alone with the faces and stories of women and men who refused to deny their faith and were put to death because of it, I began to see their sacrifice in a more human light. This is a world that too easily contains death and sacrifice in two-dimensional space, flattening out suffering into a stark chiaroscuro of darkness and light. But in some ways, this denies the relevance of their lives to ours. Although most of us will never be called upon to lay down our lives, each of us will be tested.
There is a dark privilege to being so close — in history's time — to religious persecution. It enables us to remember the richness of human life and voice sacrificed to ignorance and hatred.
The privilege is that we are not left with only paper icons in a Book of Saints. We have living proof of the Iranian Bahá’ís' sacrifice in the lives of their children and relatives. I encourage everyone who meets an Iranian Bahá’í not to be shy. Ask to hear their stories.
For me, the privilege of handling the files of executed Bahá’ís is that it enabled me to view these believers from another time and place as part of my own life story. And though we are left with only memories, these soul scraps are more precious to me than any physical remains.
They are traces of human beings who learned to drink the bitter with the sweet. Memories of weddings, a favorite poem, and the dreams a young girl who dove headfirst into the ocean, arms and legs flying.
A.E. Lefton is a poet, journalist, and educator currently living in Budapest, Hungary. She is a programs manager at the Romedia Foundation, which works to change perceptions of Europe's Roma people through film, advocacy, and education. You can read more of her thoughts on education and social justice on FireWired.
One night when I couldn't sleep, I decided to listen to the latest On Being podcast, which was a really arresting conversation between Krista Tippett and a poet I'd never heard of, Marie Howe. There were so many words, lines, thoughts that stood out to me as I listened, and I kept thinking, I should write these down. But then they were more than just thoughts; it all sounded like a poem to me.
When I was about 19 or so, I found a book of poems in the library by the amazing Annie Dillard, who'd written a book that had recently blown me away (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, of course). Annie handled words like a cross between an athlete who performs stunning feats without a second thought [apparently] and an astronaut who sits on a thin ledge between life and death and fixes some billion dollar spaceship part with a jerryrigged toothbrush. (Okay, that sentence proves that I'm not Annie Dillard. w00t!)
My point simply being that Annie could've been putting out loads of volumes of profound, elegant poetry made of her own words if she wanted to, but instead, she put out this odd and brilliant book of "found" poems. Basically, she played around with scraps of words and phrases from the random sources she so delights in (e.g., an 1800s manual of boys' projects, a Russian hunting memoir, van Gogh's letters, the Apocrypha) and found the poetry in them. Anyway, I recalled the book and thought, Why not?
As Annie says in her Author's Note, "I did not write a word of it." In other words, Marie Howe said all of this. I might have contributed punctuation; I might not have.
The Poetry of Ordinary Time an interview with Marie Howe (a found poem)
I.
The parables and the stories—
all those great old stories—
so much mystery and complexity.
The story’s all there, but we know
that the story, the real story
is inarticulate.
The spaces in between.
You can hold what can’t be said.
The mystery of being alive;
a basket of words that feels inevitable.
A counter spell.
This is what we all need to walk around with.
Maybe the first poem
was a lullaby a woman sang to her child,
the incantatory everything is okay, everything is okay, everything is okay.
We prayed for rain, or we thanked the gods for the corn,
or we sang to the deer we were going to catch.
Its roots can never wholly be pulled out from
sacred ground.
Language is almost all we have left
of action in the modern world,
unless we’re in Syria or we’re in Iraq.
Action has become what we say.
In a big house different people experience different things.
Trauma shatters a unity. You are now in separate shards.
As much as you want to be all in the same room,
trying to speak to another,
shard to shard.
When I was a girl, I would have to go to the backyard and
pick up
every cigarette butt.
I would think of Saint Teresa. Just do every act as a prayer.
Then my father would come out and say, You've missed this one, this one, and this one.
Everything in the world is trying to tell us this now,
even as we’re speeding up and speeding up,
and speeding up, and staring into our screens.
It hurts to be present.
Rinsing the glass
under the water.
Slow down enough to just
simply be there.
My daughter used to say to me, Mom, slow down. If you slow down, you're going to get there faster.
Just watch. See that white car? Slow down.
Then we would get to the place and she’d say, See, the white car is behind us.
When you’re very sad,
the only thing to do is to go learn something.
Write 10 observations of the actual world.
Just tell me what you saw this morning
in two lines. I saw a water glass on a brown tablecloth.
And the light came through it in three places.
No metaphor.
You have to actually endure the thing itself,
which hurts us for some reason.
It hurts us.
We want to say, It was like this. It was like that.
We want to look away.
And then they say, There's nothing important enough.
And then its whole thing
is that point.
No abstractions, no interpretations.
Then this amazing thing happens. Clinkety, clank, clank, clank, onto the table pours all this stuff, and it thrilling.
The slice of apple, and then that gleam of the knife, and the sound of the trashcan closing, the maple tree, the blue jay.
it almost comes clanking into the room.
II.
Last spring,
somebody was drawing on the sidewalk in blue chalk.
All it said was HAPPINESS,
with a big blue arrow, THIS WAY.
One day,
I was waiting for my daughter and her friends to
get off one bus to get on another.
There
was the big blue chalk HAPPINESS,
and a big circle drawn on the sidewalk said HERE.
And everybody who walked by stood in the circle. We did too.
It’s the this.
This is the whole
thing.
Why would I compare that to anything
when it’s itself?
III.
There’s a silence
in the center of everything.
Maybe that’s the thing
we are afraid of.
Silence is the heart.
It has everything in it:
our death;
our life—the universes beyond
this universe, the galaxies.
The cricket, the snow.
Such a relief;
you can rest in
it.
The robots were going to take over
and the machines were going to take over.
Just last week it occurred to me: They have.
It's just different from what we expected. You think evil is going to come into your houses
wearing big black boots.
It doesn’t come like that.
It begins in the language.
What face do you look into more
than any other face in your life?
I gaze into that face.
I do what it tells me to do.
It’s different from what we expected.
It’s like sugar.
There’s this new firmament,
and there's no one in charge.
I don’t even know what I mean by soul.
I don't know anymore.
Real time is true;
redundancy that’s happening now.
Remember those swaths of time between high holy seasons: Ordinary time.
Nothing dramatic is happening;
this is where we’re living.
Finally we’re stopped long enough
to feel ourselves alive.
To move through the world transparently—
that would be a relief.
All I know is that
things have happened that I don't understand
that feel like the most important things
that have ever happened to me.
The unendurable happens.
People we love die;
we’re going to die—
one day we are going to have to leave our children,
leave the plants, the sunlight,
the rain and all that.
It's unendurable.
Art knows that
we’re both living and dying
at the same time.
It can hold it.
I thought, I can either let this crack my heart
open or closed.
I turned around and the
billion other people on this earth who’ve
lost a person they love—there they all were.
I turned around: I just joined you.
Welcome. There were millions of people;
I was glad to be with them.
We join each other;
We’re not alone.
During the course of a week, I read so many lovely letters and responses to our public radio program. Oftentimes people extend a simple "thank you" or a humble "this show caught me at the perfect time." But, we also receive more devoted notes from folks who offer a piece of themselves.
"I was on the job today getting upset at all that has to be done and trying to find a good station on the radio. Being frustrated with the numerous commercials, I switched to NPR radio where I heard the subject of poetry being discussed.
It got my immediate attention, because I have missed poetry in more ways than I care to admit. I have tried a lot of other ways to generate my inner thoughts in order to inspire myself but, in most cases, I failed miserably. Staying away from poetry was something I did deliberately because I got frustrated with the competitive nature that the genre seems to take on when too many poets are gathered in one room.
But something hit me today here on the job. I guess you could say that my creative juices were flowing. A title came to my mind which read, "Doing What You Love and Loving What You Do."
The title seems to sum up how I was feeling and it led me to think back on my days of intense writing. I had to ask myself a question, "Do you love writing?" Of course the answer was a resounding yes!
Then the next obvious questions would be, "What is it about writing that I love so much?" I found the answer to not be as obvious as I thought it would be. Poetry has always been my escape.
It came very natural for me and there are those who say when it comes that easy it is not you who manifests the talent but rather it is a gift that is given to you. I have heard stories where people said that they were many gifted people who did not take advantage of their gift and end up losing it. I guess that statement was always in the back of my mind, which I believe held me back somewhat.
Sometimes it takes being away from something to truly appreciate its value, and I am finding this truth to be very pronounced at this point in my life.
As I have stated above that my reason for not getting deeper into poetry was because of the competition. Now that I think about it, that statement may not be entirely true. I have to bear some of the blame. Every artist wants to be recognized for his work, and I am no different. But in trying to please everyone else, I have gone away from the very thing that I truly love.
I miss what this art form meant to me, how the words would magically appear in my head, how I would force myself to come up with the next rhyme, not wanting to move onto the next sentence until the present line matches the previous.
I blame myself for allowing my mind to be distracted from what was important and what gave me the most joy. Writing gives me the power to open closets that I have no business opening. It allows me to tell the stories that were not meant to be heard, and it provides me the ability to do this in a creative way. For that, I am very grateful.
With all this in mind, I have answered my own question, which is to get back to what I love, because that is where true happiness lives."
Christian Wiman's pen went silent for three years. Poetry about the ineffable just didn't seem fitting during his intensive bouts of treatment for cancer. And then, one day in what came as a shock to him, he sat down and wrote the line:
God goes, belonging to every riven thing he's made
The lines flowed into what Mr. Wiman describes as a "highly formal" poem, "Every Riven Thing," which would end up being the title of a book of poetry. On its face, the poem may appear to be a villanelle, a poem that repeats two lines in every stanza and uses two rhymes throughout the poem. But the syntax of that one line changes in every stanza — and with each change, a nuance of meaning shifts:
God goes, belonging to every riven thing he's made
sing his being simply by being
the thing it is:
stone and tree and sky,
man who sees and sings and wonders why
God goes. Belonging, to every riven thing he's made,
means a storm of peace.
Think of the atoms inside the stone.
Think of the man who sits alone
trying to will himself into a stillness where
God goes belonging. To every riven thing he's made
there is given one shade
shaped exactly to the thing itself:
under the tree a darker tree;
under the man the only man to see
God goes belonging to every riven thing. He's made
the things that bring him near,
made the mind that makes him go.
A part of what man knows,
apart from what man knows,
God goes belonging to every riven thing he's made.
Now you must go out into your heart
as onto a vast plain. Now
the immense loneliness begins.
~Rilke
This poem by Rainer Maria Rilke follows the course of change though seasons and captures the loneliness of uncertainty in everyday life. Yet there is a sense of connection to the earth and a feeling of humility in the final verse. How would you describe this sense of endurance that might sustain us through the changing seasons and through difficult times?
Onto a Vast Plain
You are not surprised at the force of the storm—
you have seen it growing.
The trees flee. Their flight
sets the boulevards streaming. And you know:
he whom they flee is the one
you move toward. All your senses
sing him, as you stand at the window.
The weeks stood still in summer.
The trees' blood rose. Now you feel
it wants to sink back
into the source of everything. You thought
you could trust that power
when you plucked the fruit:
now it becomes a riddle again
and you again a stranger.
Summer was like your house: you know
where each thing stood.
Now you must go out into your heart
as onto a vast plain. Now
the immense loneliness begins.
The days go numb, the wind
sucks the world from your senses like withered leaves.
Through the empty branches the sky remains.
It is what you have.
Be earth now, and evensong.
Be the ground lying under that sky.
Be modest now, like a thing
ripened until it is real,
so that he who began it all
can feel you when he reaches for you.
Reprinted from Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows' translation of Rainer Maria Rilke's Book of Hours
Like all parents, Muslim parents have their fair share of do’s and don’ts for their children. Unlike most parents though, terrorism and how to handle its misguided association with Islam figures in some of our talks.
In the wake of the Boston bombings and given that one of the suspects was only a few years older than my own boy, the need for us to talk with Yousuf took on even greater urgency. Conversations usually begin with “most Americans recognize that not all Muslims are violent just because a few are,” and progress to “but I still don’t want you to talk about bombs, guns, or shooting, even if it’s a game you’re discussing.”
These are tough conversations to have with an 11 year old, but they’re discussions we cannot avoid. As Muslim parents, we recognize just how vulnerable our children are.
The harder conversations go something like this: “If you are harassed or teased and called a terrorist, tell a teacher.” When my 11 year old insists that is tattling, I explain that even if it makes him look weak, it’s wiser to tell a teacher than to navigate these waters alone. I don’t want him to get into a potential argument because there’s a chance it could escalate. Best-case scenario, my child could put up a brave front, maybe while fighting back tears. Worst-case he could push back and end up suspended.
Like the rest of the nation, I feel such regret and sadness that the Boston bombing suspects, both well-liked seemingly well-integrated young men, came to be so terribly misled. As a parent, I also recognize the agony their mother and father must have felt, watching helplessly, from thousands of miles away, as their children were hunted and gunned down.
As much as I fear I will alarm him with talk of the bombings in Boston, I take on the subject. “If there are Muslims who try to tell you it’s okay to be violent, remember what your parents have taught you. In Islam, war is between militaries alone — no civilians, women, children, schools, hospitals and other civic amenities can be targets.”
A pre-teen, my son actually listens to me and shares his thoughts and concerns. Shielding him from these difficult discussions today may mean losing an opportunity to imprint the idea that, in Islam, taking an innocent life is tantamount to killing all of humanity. Not talking about this may mean throwing away a chance to warn my child that he needs to be conscious of those who may try to lead him astray.
I talk about how terrible the bombings have been for the victims and their families. “If you, as you grow older, have issues with the policies of any nation or differences of opinion, civic involvement is the way to change the status quo, not violence,” I drill into his young mind. I reiterate that there are acceptable and unacceptable ways to address issues and differences of opinions, violence not being an option.
I fear there may be a time when we aren’t there to be a sounding board for our kids. As my son takes in every word, I quietly hope I’m not scaring him.
Frustrated, my son asks, “Why do some Muslims have to go and mess it up for the rest of us?” “Because, somehow, they’ve come to believe that their actions are justified,” I respond. “But they aren’t,” I am quick to add.
But there is more on my mind that I don’t bring up. I don’t get into a tirade about how the media ties this crime to our faith or calls it a return to terrorism to U.S. shores. What about the Sandy Hook murderer who opened fire on little children? Deemed mentally ill, no ties were drawn to an ideology for his actions. Or the white supremacist, who shot and killed six people at a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin? He was not considered a terrorist by the media. Why are only Muslim suspects’ and criminals’ actions automatically motivated by faith?
These thoughts aren’t far from my mind, but I don’t need to add that kind of baggage to this conversation with my 11 year old. He has enough on his plate.
Naazish YarKhan is a writer, publicist, and communications strategist in the Chicago area. You can follow her on Twitter at @yarkhahn.
A version of this article was published by the Common Ground News Service on May 14, 2013. Copyright permission is granted for publication.
If you could stand in someone else's shoes... Hear what they hear. See what they see. Feel what they feel. Would you treat them differently? A video that speaks to the connections we all need.
Sarah Kay says that listening is the better part of speaking. A spoken word poet who’s become a role model for teenagers around the world, she shares how she works with words to make connections — inside people and between them.
Are we in the matrix? Physicist James Gates reveals why string theory stretches our imaginations about the nature of reality. Also, how failure makes us more complete, and imagination makes us more knowledgeable.
You might call Tami Simon a spiritual entrepreneur. She's built a successful multimedia publishing company with a mission to disseminate "spiritual wisdom" by diverse teachers and thinkers like Pema Chödrön and Eckhart Tolle, Daniel Goleman and Brené Brown. She offers compelling lessons on joining inner life with life in the workplace — and advice on spiritual practice with a mobile device.
The poet Christian Wiman is giving voice to the hunger for faith — and the challenges of faith — for people living now. After a Texas upbringing soaked in a history of violence and a charismatic Christian culture, he was agnostic until he became actively religious again in his late 30s. Then he was diagnosed with a rare form of incurable blood cancer. He's bearing witness to something new happening in himself and in the world.
Disruption is around every corner by way of globally connected economies, inevitable superstorms, and technology’s endless reinvention. But most of us were born into a culture which aspired to solve all problems. How do we support people and create systems that know how to recover, persist, and even thrive in the face of change? Andrew Zolli introduces "resilience thinking," a new generation’s wisdom for a world of constant change.
Author Martin E. Marty is the Fairfax M. Cone Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of the History of Modern Christianity at the Divinity School at The University of Chicago. His biography, publications, and contact information can be found at 
