Wilbur Awards to celebrate 70 years in Chicago, winners announced for 2019 – Religion News Service.
Documentary (up to 30 min.)
“The Secret History of Muslims in the US,” Zeyba Rahman, Hussein Rashid, Joshua Seftel, Negin Farsad, Maria Stanisheva; Doris Duke Foundation for Islamic Art, Smartypants Pictures & Animadocs, Brooklyn, New York
Hussein reflected a bit on human rights as that which we owe one another but “from a faith perspective, human dignity is vouchsafed by the divine, it is something is inherent and promised to us, over which we have no agency except to forget that we have it. And that’s an important way to think through, ‘How do we assure dignity?'”
Appreciating the expertise that farmworkers brought to creating the Fair Food Program’s human rights solution and how important it is to resist challenges to such expertise Hussein continued, “People say ‘who are you to say what it is that you need? How do you know what you need when you haven’t studied it?’ These are questions of performance that take away from human dignity. As a child of immigrants, as a person of color, as a Muslim in this country, I know that these goal posts are always moving. I have got a bachelor’s degree and three graduate degrees from Harvard and it’s not good enough.”
Today tens of thousands of farmworkers in seven states are harvesting free from slavery, sexual violence, and fear through the Fair Food Program which Harvard Business Review called “among the most important social impact stories of the past century.” Now the program’s model is being translated to supply chains around the world.”
Imaginary worlds extend and expand our visions of what is possible. In these worlds, we can fly with dragons or shoot lightning from our fingertips. Yet, this expansiveness does not always apply to the religious lives of the characters populating our narratives. Religion can be made flat, so that the lived religious experiences and ideals of characters are signified by objects: head coverings, prayer beads, or feathers. As a result, both the religion and practitioner are not fully realized. Conversely, imaginary worlds can add depth and nuance to religions that have been flattened in real life. This panel explores the tensions of how religion is (re)presented in fiction and in real life, and how it is actually practiced by adherents.
The Crisis Of Connection Book Launch Party Tickets, Wed, Nov 28, 2018 at 5:30 PM | Eventbrite.
Join us for a celebration our new book, The Crisis of Connection: Roots, Consequences, and Solutions, edited and authored by 20+ PACH members.
Muslims and Jews have a long history of interaction both in Europe and the Middle East — and that interaction hasn’t always been hostile. After all, like the Torah, the Muslim holy book, the Quran, tells the stories of Adam and Eve, Abraham, Joseph, Moses and Noah, and contains many parallel or echoing passages. What are the differences between these various accounts? How might we understand the common origins of these stories? How does examining the two approaches help us gain greater understanding of both Judaism and Islam?
The Sarah Play – 14th Street Y.
Three actors struggle with how to tell the ancient, sacred story of Sarah and Hagar, the mothers of Isaac and Ishmael, through a modern lens. Drawing from the Muslim, Christian and Jewish traditions, and trying various iterations to determine which religion’s version of the narrative gets told, the actors wrestle with how to tell a tale when there are multiple accounts of what happened.
Specialists will take the customary deliberations about arts and culture into new, substantive, and shaping discussion. Beyond “leisure” or “entertainment,” beyond art’s personal impacts, beyond contributions to tourism, community building, or the classroom, do the arts and culture power progress? This convening will ask if (and how) the arts provide structures and strategies for social change, how they help define peoples and nations, how they deal with actual matters of life and death. Are the arts essential in ways that economics and medicine and politics are? If so, how is this manifest? What are the theoretical bases that ground the arts and govern our expectations of them?
Jacob and His Twelve Sons: An Interfaith Perspective | The Frick Collection.
Sana Amanat Supercharges The Comics World – Bwog.
On Tuesday evening, Barnard’s Sulz Parlor was packed with eager listeners. Like her heroine, Sana Amanat was warm, funny and down-to-earth. Amanat, the child of Pakistani immigrants, worked in magazine publishing after graduating from Barnard. From there she moved to an indie comic book company. She was hired by Marvel in 2009, where she currently works as director of content and character development.
Interviewing her was Professor Hussein Rashid, adjunct professor of religion at Barnard, whose work focuses on Muslims and American popular culture. He starts with the most important question of all: How did her time at Barnard inform and prepare her for her work as a comic book editor?
Hussein