I have a child who is getting ready to apply to colleges now, and that is making me go back and ponder many things about my own college application experience . This has me thinking about how we fully belong in, and are excluded from, the...
I recently had a lovely conversation with a group of young people , beautiful people, who are searching and seeking for a life that is spiritually open and porous, inviting and welcoming, yet rooted and grounded in teachings and practices that...
The holy and blessed month of Ramadan is upon us. It’s a holy month for Muslims: we work on inner purification and discipline, as well as an embodied practice of empathy and justice, identifying with those for whom abstaining from food is not a...
A few years ago, I went into the Shinto shrine of Fushimi-Inari in the lovely city of Kyoto for the first time. It was a warm and humid summer visit to this thousand-year-old shrine, and a few of us made the pilgrimage together. A lovely...
The Doris Duke Charitable Foundation for Islamic Art, an extension of the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, recently announced the 11 recipients nationwide of its annual Building Bridges Grants Program awards, two of them based in Durham: Duke...
When I was going through the rigor of university, there was a beautiful forest close to the school that I would go to periodically for a hike. I tended to go there when it felt like the world was crashing down around me and I felt overwhelmed....
My musical tastes often turn back to a generation before I was born: the soulful tunes of 1960s and 1970s, the rock of the ’60s, and even the hip-hop of the ’80s and ’90s when I was still too young to fully grasp just how revolutionary and fierce...
