(Display Name not set)March 2009 Archives

For many American Muslims, the mainstream presentation of their diverse voices seems lost in a vacuum dominated by simplistic, cardboard stereotypes depicting them as fundamentalists or perpetual suspects. Thankfully, Link TV in collaboration with One Nation has provided a way to creatively showcase the American Muslim voice in their annual "Link TV: One Nation, Many Voices Muslim American Film Competition."

The contest received more than 100 submissions for the five different categories reflecting the gamut of sentiments and emotions reflective of the unique American Muslim experience-- one that has been forever altered since tragedy of 9-11.

Nabil Abou-Harb, a 24-year-old from Georgia, won the grand prize and $20,000 cash prize for his five-minute video, "Arab in America." The video--with professional production values and quality acting--was a satirical, bittersweet, yet ultimately optimistic depiction of Arabs having to "white wash" their identity to blend in and avoid harassment. The Arab protagonist is forced to change his name to "Samuel Adam Baker" in order to obtain a lucrative job, and he must continue to lie about his piquant Islamic practices as to avoid "detection" by his often ignorant co-workers.

By Valerie Reiss
Fresh Living

As part snarky native New Yorker, part spiritualish yogini, I can semi feel Gwyneth Paltrow's pain from the media-whipping she's gotten for GOOP, her recent holistic lifestyle venture. Launched last September, GOOP (a name made from her initials) aims to educate about things like balance, yoga, healthy-but-tasty eating, detoxing, conscious parenting, and the like in a simple, from-the-heart way. Meaning, of course, she has been slammed by critics who seem to feast on the flesh of the sincerely seeking. A couple of weeks ago the New York Times explored the mocking in a style section feature.

Though Paltrow wouldn't comment for the article, the Times sited a USA Today quote from her dissing the haters' hating: "'People get a hit of energy when they are negative about something. And they do not understand why they do not have a happy life.'" And then the Times jumped in with its own negativity bong hit: "It's the kind of statement better left to a guru than an It Girl."

Read the rest of this post on Beliefnet's new blog Fresh Living.

By Rebecca Cusey

The mid-February sky shone bright and blue over the mountains of Switzerland when the creators of the upcoming movie "Angels & Demons"--the sequel to the film "The Da Vinci Code," both based on the novels by Dan Brown-- brought a gaggle of wide-eyed journalists to tour sites from the movie. Geneva is home to CERN., a real-life residential scientific community, and locale of a fictional murder that starts the action in the film.

CERN, which stands for European Council for Nuclear Research in French, hosts 7900 scientists from 80 countries, with the philosophy that discoveries are immediately shared openly with the world. Its main claim to fame is the supercollider, a tube that runs underground, 27 km in circumference, which accelerates electrons to just below the speed of light and then crashes them into each other. They then use huge, complicated cameras to try to capture and understand the pieces that go flying from the collision. As the scientists explained the process, using very small words and repeating themselves patiently, I fell in love with the idea that the most cutting edge science in the world isn't so different than my 7-year-old son at playtime. Crash things into each other and see what they break into. Yeah. I can wrap my mind around that.

And yet, fascinating. They keep finding smaller and smaller pieces of the stuff the universe is made of. "The science that we're after that we're trying to describe is the most fundamental," explained CERN antimatter physicist Tara Shears, "We're trying to understand the universe. How it came into existence. How it evolved to the present state. We can recreate conditions back to a billionth of a second after the Big Bang. It's a bit of a hubristic aim but it is the aim of science and physics to understand how everything works."

In "Angels & Demons," which stars Tom Hanks, the murder at CERN sets up a deep and irresolvable conflict between faith and science. However, the CERN physicists we spoke with do not perceive that conflict in their work. "As scientists, we deal in facts, and we can only get facts from experiments we can rerun and verify," said Shears, "What goes on behind those experiments, when it comes to interpreting those results, what gave rise to them, why they look the way they did, we can't say anything about that as a scientist. We can't test it. And if we can't test it, it's hypothesis, it's conjecture, it's faith. So there is a boundary where science stops and faith and religion, if you like, take over in a regime where science can never tell you anything. So there's not conflict, there really isn't."

In the upcoming "Angel Wars: The Messengers" animated action series, a group of angels are sent to earth to fight fallen angels who seek to corrupt and destroy humanity. The DVD releases March 17.

By Chris Sagona

When Peter Manseau, a Washington DC-based religion writer, saw his unborn daughter's ultrasound in utero, he felt his calling to write "Rag and Bone: A Journey Among the World's Holy Dead." It was seeing the technician identify her bones, the femur, the upper and lower arms, that inspired him to ponder the mystical and physical nature of bones he'd seen across the world.

Relics.

In some cases, scary relics. Saint Anthony's tongue, a black cone-like slab in Goa, Italy. St. John the Baptist's finger, a blackened, child-sized digit, displayed in a church in Florence, Italy. It's allegedly the finger with which John allegedly pointed out Jesus, "the one" holier than him. And in the case of Buddhists, less visually disturbing relics, such as the hair of Buddha.