The Huffington Post has a great story about 10 Muslim women who are challenging religious and cultural norms in the Middle East. The series includes a short video clip for most featuring each woman and a short paragraph biography. The series includes the following women: Haifaa al-Mansour:  Saudia Arabian filmmaker, whose film Wadja,challenged norms about men and  women working together. Syria female fighters:  GlobalPost profiles one small female Islamic unit in Aleppo. Raha Moharrak:  She is first Saudi woman to climb... Read more

More rioting, more trouble over Muslim head coverings in Paris. In one incident, police stop and check the identity of a woman in a niqab, a full head covering. In another incident, school authorities tell a Muslim mother she cannot accompany her son on a school trip while wearing her hijab. Angelique Chrisafis, writing for The Guardian, explains that this is all about separating church and state. “At the heart is the rule that any state worker in the public service... Read more

Here’s a great case for class discussion. You cannot yell “FIRE” in a public theater, but in 1977, neo-Nazis could march in Skokie, Ill., a predominantly Jewish town. Today, in France, the French prosecutor asked Twitter to turn over the “data necessary for identifying the authors of anti-Semitic tweets that were accompanied by the hashtag #UnBonJuif (#AGoodJew.),”  according to this article in Tech President and this one from NPR. Did Twitter “cave” to French authorities? Do the authors of the anti-Semitic... Read more

Erin Luhmann, who traveled with NY Times Op-Ed columnist Nicholas D. Kristof, reports on conditions in West Africa including malnutrition in Mali,  club foot in Niger, and the refugee crisis in Darfur. Luhmann won Kirstof’s annual “win a trip” competition.”  Nothing, she says at the beginning of this report, prepared her for what she saw in West Africa. You can also read Kristof’s column about Darfur here, where he reports that mass atrocities have resumed in Darfur and that “it’s... Read more

Interesting and sad demographic about disease in Africa from the newspaper, Al Jazeera. Although a child dies from malaria every 60 seconds, tuberculosis and especially aids, have a huge impact. You can listen to a short documentary about the crisis here. The impact of malaria on Africa is an important topic that the Tony Blair organization,  Face to Faith, discusses every year on World Malaria Day. The Tony Blair organization works to bring together students from different religions and cultures,... Read more

Hind Makki, a radical Muslim feminist, looks at mosques around the world who allow and do not allow women to pray together.  She highlights the successes and failures in her Tumbler blog called, Side Entrance.  Her work and blog was also noticed by the Huffington Post, which just did an interesting story about her and her motivations.  The story also includes a slideshow of women prayer areas around the world. You can follow Hind Makki on Twitter at @HindMakki. Religion... Read more

Writing for the Washington Post, Andrew Doran, a former State Department employee, writes about the plight of Middle Eastern Christians as revolutions continue to shake the Middle East. He argues that they are caught in the middle between Muslim fundamentalism and modernity.  He notes that Muslim religious toleration has been a hallmark of Islamic history, especially during Islam’s golden age in medieval Spain under the Umayyad dynasty. There, Christians and Jews were seen as “people of the book.” What happened... Read more

Most religion courses begin with a definition of religion. Names like Rudolf Otto, Ninian Smart, Mircea Eliade, and Emile Durkheim are often discussed. Must a religion have a god or higher being to be classified as a religion? Should it include worship? These are some of the questions that Supreme Court justices in England are weighing as they try to decide if a couple can be married in a Scientology chapel. According to the Guardian online newspaper, the registrar general... Read more