Another happy opportunity to showcase the work of my erstwhile students, who have been producing fantastic work (even if I’m a bit late in posting some of it):
- “The battlefront that I see is not between Islam and the West or Muslims and America but between all of the moderates and all of the extremists. We have to band together to combat the extremists of all religions,” said [Imam Feisal Abdul] Rauf.
That’s from the first of two pieces by Heather Higgins at CNN’s Belief blog on the quiet ongoing efforts to build the Lower Manhattan Islamic Center . The first post describes a 9/11 memorial ceremony hosted by Rauf, the original moving spirit behind the center. Rauf’s comment sums up his approach to religion, so different from that of the ad hoc coalition of the intolerant who mislabeled the project as the “Ground Zero Mosque.”
Higgins’s follow-up post is on the opening of the center’s initial stage with an exhibition of portraits of children from 169 countries who now live in New York City. - On NBC Nightly News, Yardena Schwartz produced this report on Leah Brown, a single mom who created a health care research company – helped by a project encouraging women entrepreneurs. It’s not just about breaking the glass ceiling, but also smashing the glass walls of thinking too small.
- From Mumbai, Raksha Kumar describes the gentrification pressures on the city’s shantytowns: You can sell the land under your shack to developers for tens of thousands of dollars. But then where will your children sleep? It’s on the New York Times’s India Ink blog.