For you to explore. Might help you as you think about Paper 2 prompt.
*new* Information about His Holiness, the Dalai Lama (Tibetan Buddhist leader)
http://www.dalailama.com/
*new* video of making a Buddhist mandala
*new* Thich Nhat Hanh (another Buddhist leader)
http://plumvillage.org/
A general resource:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/religions/
BBC on religion & ethics
http://www.bbc.co.uk/religion
al Jazeera on religion, spirituality & ethics -- a set of articles
http://america.aljazeera.com/topics/topic/issue/religion-spirituality-ethics.html
Krista Tippet's On Being
"On Being is a Peabody Award-winning public radio conversation
and podcast, a Webby Award-winning website and online exploration, a
publisher and public event convener. On Being opens up the
animating questions at the center of human life: What does it mean to be
human, and how do we want to live? We explore these questions in their
richness and complexity in 21st-century lives and endeavors. We pursue
wisdom and moral imagination as much as knowledge; we esteem nuance and
poetry as much as fact."
http://onbeing.org/
This episode looks particularly interesting, about being a modern Muslim in the U.S.:
http://onbeing.org/program/rami-nashashibi-a-new-coming-together/5011
I listened to the episode "A New Coming Together" with Rami Nashashibi and it was really beautiful to hear about his work in probably one of the most racially tense places in the US, the inner city of Chicago. He uses art and his faith to bring an otherwise divided community together, which I believe is a common goal in most modern theologies. His story about walking in his neighborhood with his daughter particularly touched me. He talks about how his neighbors were smoking pot on the front steps of their house and how much it bothered him that they did it while he was just out for a walk with his daughter. He decided to go up to them and talk to one of the guys. They had a long talk and the man was understanding and told him: "I want to grow with you, I want to learn from you" and he told him he wouldn't have to worry and that they wouldn't do it again. Rami reflects on the experience: "You could be overwhelmed by this dynamic that exists... but I find myself in those moments so desperately yearning for one experience that can confirm that it doesn't have to be this way. That you don't have to accept it. That you can engage those who you are told to fear." This story is so refreshing for me because it really gets at an important theme in my faith, which is respect for all life, even those "we are told to fear." He could have just accepted that he lived in a bad part of town and that that's just what people do, but instead he decided to challenge it and make a small difference. He treated the man with respect, explained to him his concern, and they were able to come to an agreement: how many problems would be solved if we talked TO the people we had a problem with, instead of just complaining ABOUT them?
ReplyDeleteI read, "What does the veil mean to you?" on the BBC website. It made me realize that there is a lot more uses to the veil than most people probably realize. When many American’s hear the word “veil” when it comes to a religion, they think of weddings, nuns, and Muslims and how many women wear hijabs. Some people see it as oppression (I did for a very long time) and others see it as modesty and morality. I thought that it was a sign of oppression because of what I knew about the Muslim religion until I saw this video on Buzzfeed: http://www.buzzfeed.com/chantelhouston/watch-four-women-experience-what-its-like-to-wear-hijabs-for#.jqey4nDoN It is a video of four women who choose to wear hijabs for a day and talk about their experience during and at the end of the day. When I listened to Edina Lekociv talk about how women wear them as a symbol of their modesty and a symbol of a woman’s intellectuality over her physical beauty really made me star to think. When the women went through the experiment, I came to the conclusion that there needs to be a change in the way that we see women who wear hijabs. Many of them are doing it out of personal choice because it is what they believe is the right thing to do according to their religion. The media has been giving the us in the United States a bad name to those who look different from us and that are from other countries from around the world, but there are so many people who have come here to seek a new home where there is freedom of religion. People need to realize that there are many different uses of veils all throughout the worlds history and that they are not all for bad reasons.
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