God at the Movies: The Enduring Influence of Religion in Film
“Marvel is doing some interesting things with religion,” says Hussein Rashid, assistant dean for Religion and Public Life at Harvard Divinity School. He mentions Loki and Thor about Norse Gods, and Moon Knightabout Egyptian Gods. “I am really curious to see if they will explore the Jewishness of The Thing, who is Jewish in the comics, in The Fantastic Four [2025].”
Faith leaders reflect on difficult questions as Israel-Hamas war colors holy days
Rabbi Josh Franklin, Pastor and author Henry Brinton and Muslim elder Hussein Rashid answer the question, “What is the most difficult question your flock is struggling with?” these days.
District 214 hosts World Religions Summit, explores religious diversity in a multicultural society
The all-day summit brought together 75 students from four schools, classmates in the district’s World Religions courses. Keynote speaker Dr. Hussein Rashid, assistant dean of Religion and Public Life at Harvard Divinity School, talked about religion in the cultural landscape — how religion and religious traditions are embedded in daily life — with Chicago as a model.
The great journalist Ahmed Ali Akbar invited be to his recap show of Ms. Marvel to talk Episode 5, “Time and Again,” about Partition.
You can find the episode here.
Here & Now host Scott Tong asks Rabbi Josh Stanton and Muslim elder Hussein Rashidhow they are counseling and consoling their flock during this time of heightened anger, hatred and violence because of events in the Middle East.
This segment aired on October 19, 2023.
Our latest episode tells the story of how Islam arrived in America, possibly as early as the 1400s on ships from Europe and West Africa.
We have two guests on this episode. One is Sylviane Diouf, a visiting scholar at the Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice at Brown University. She has written of the role that Islam played in the lives of African Muslims enslaved in the Americas. Our other guest is Dr Hussein Rashid, assistant dean for Religion and Public Life at Harvard Divinity School, whose research focuses on Muslims and US popular culture.
I was recently invited to join a panel on MSNBC with my friends Rabbi Joshua Stanton and Dr. Rev. Jacqui Lewis to talk about religion and peace.
Marvel’s latest adversary for ‘Daredevil’ exposes its blindness to antisemitic art
Not everyone sees the “Daredevil” images as only antisemitic. “The image also seems to pull on anti-Arab imagery,” said Hussein Rashid, an independent scholar whose focus is religion and comics.
“The use of symbols against an adversary or The Adversary is quite common in comics,” said Rashid, adding that “comics, not just Marvel, are replete with images and storylines that continue to reinforce narratives of marginalization.”
Though he admits that the comics companies are improving on this score, “these tropes need to be pointed out.”
“You can’t go more than a block without finding a house of worship in New York City, an actively used house of worship,” said Hussein Rashid, a scholar of religion with The New School and Union Theological Seminary.
While accurate and up-to-date data on the state of religious identity in the five boroughs is hard to find, Rashid and other scholars say the city is as spiritually diverse as it’s ever been, even as religious affiliation is declining here in step with the rest of the country.
Source: New York City’s religious diversity bucks stereotypes
Can the World’s Religions Help Save Us from Ecological Peril?
Visotzky brought in theologian Hussein Rashid ’96CC, who was exploring similar questions from a Muslim ethical standpoint. The scholars, who had spun off from a larger interfaith study group at Fordham Law School, decided to examine the issue of water as a way to focus their work, and for World Water Day 2017 they published a series of tracts around water-related themes. That got them invited to the Vatican to meet with the pope about Laudato si’.
“For me, reading the encyclical made me think of an eighth-century figure named Ja‘far al-Ṣādiq,” says Rashid, who teaches at the New School and UTS. “There’s a work attributed to him where he says for a believer there are four relationships that keep you in balance: to God, to yourself, to other people, and to the rest of creation. My understanding of what Pope Francis was doing really resonated with that.”
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