Category: Religion

Frances Kai-Hwa Wang

Living in harmony in a great world house on MLK Day

By Frances Kai-Hwa Wang, Jan 18, 2010 9:17 AM

In Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Nobel Peace Prize lecture, given in 1964, he talks about the idea of a house, “We have inherited a big house, a great ‘world house’ in which we have to live together - black and white, Easterners and Westerners, Gentiles and Jews, Catholics and Protestants, Moslem and Hindu, a family unduly separated in ideas, culture, and interests who, because we can never again live without each other, must learn, somehow, in this one big world, to live with each other.”

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Sandip Roy

Christmas Miracles in India

By Sandip Roy, Dec 25, 2009 1:50 AM

Christmas feels smaller and bigger in Calcutta.

When we were kids we used to go to see the Christmas lights on Park Street, the main restaurant drag in Calcutta. Restaurants with names like Sky Room and Moulin Rouge twinkled with lights. Flury’s fine confectioners would stay open late for Darjeeling tea and plum cakes. Calcutta, the most British of India’s big cities, celebrated Christmas as if the 1950s had not gone out of style.

This year as I walked down Park Street and saw the trees and restaurants strung with twinkling strings of lights, it felt a little shabby. Nothing, it seemed, had been updated in the last twenty years, unless you consider the new McDonalds an upgrade. Sky Room was gone. The fancy restaurants of our childhood looked a little timeworn, the uniforms of the doorman seemed a little shop soiled.

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Frances Kai-Hwa Wang

Learning about Christmas and Santa through the claymation classics

By Frances Kai-Hwa Wang, Dec 22, 2009 3:34 PM

Asian American journalist Lisa Ling once said on The View that as a child she thought Santa liked Caucasian children better than Chinese children because he always left much better and bigger gifts, like stereos, for her Caucasian friends, whereas he only left small gifts, like batteries and toothbrushes, in her stocking.

When I heard that, it was as if I was hearing silver bells. I always got batteries and toothbrushes in my stocking, too. I had grown up thinking that gifts from Santa always had to be small in order to fit inside the stocking.

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M. Junaid Levesque-Alam

Islam, abortion, and the Stupak Amendment

By M. Junaid Levesque-Alam, Nov 25, 2009 10:09 AM

Editor's note: M. Junaid Levesque-Alam, 26, writes about America and Islam at his website, Crossing the Crescent, and for WireTap Magazine, where he is also the immigration blogger. He has also been published in Colorlines, ZMagazine, and The Nation's website.

The national health care debate has taken on crystalline characteristics, refracting the light of American political tensions in a dozen different directions. Partisans of class, race, and immigration politics have been galvanized by myriad issues—real or imagined—raised by the prospect of reform. To that loaded list we can now add gender: the House passage of the Stupak Amendment, which imposes strict requirements on abortions offered through a proposed government-run and subsidized insurance, has rankled feminists and buoyed anti-abortion advocates.

Opposition to abortion is a well-known tenet of the Catholic Church, which has 46 million adult adherents in the U.S.—the country’s largest religious minority. But what about the religious stance held by one of the country’s smallest religious minorities—Muslims?

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