Here are the top posts for April. This timeline got the most page views. Timeline of World Religions Our Blogs Make the Washington Post World Religions Graphic Face to Faith/ World Malaria Day In Pictures: India’s Parsi Read more

The Gulabi Gang are pink sari wearing women in India who brandish big sticks and go after corrupt public officials and boorish men. According to this BBC news article, they come from India’s northern Uttar Pradesh state’s Banda area. The leader is Sampat Pal Devi, who was married at 12, and is now fighting the system with like minded women. She describes her goals like this: “We aim to empower women, promote child education with an emphasis on girls, and... Read more

Hind Makki tweeted this great infographic about the veil. It outlines the veil’s history and even includes photographs of veil wearing women in public office. I would love to print this out as poster. Read more

I am covering the Sunni Shia split in my religion class and saw this nice map from The Pew Center on Religion and Public Life. Here’s more on Sunni Shia split from another Pew Center survey and a short news clip about the difference. Read more

Here are some very useful and cool tips from New York Times tech columnist, David Pogue.  Did you know for example, that in a text on any phone, all you need to do is press the space bar twice and a period will appear?  Instead of using the scroll bar to move up on any page, just hit the space bar to scroll down a page and the shift key to scroll up. Watch the 5 minute clip for 8 other... Read more

As part of World Malaria Day, my religion students learned about the tragedy of malaria in a Face to Faith video conference with malaria expert, Saleema Abdul Ghafur.  She is the director of the African Leaders Malaria Alliance, an alliance of 49 African presidents and prime ministers.  She works to raise money to defeat malaria. Today, she described a double tragedy, one to the victims of malaria and one to the survivors.  She said that women and children suffer most—over 650,000 die each... Read more

Tibetan Buddhists can spend 7 to 10 days making an intricate sand mandala like the one above. The mandalas usually represent an imaginary palace that the monks think about during meditation. Once the monks complete the mandala, they destroy it, demonstrating that nothing is permanent and that attachments only lead to suffering. The Huffington Post has a short story explaining how this picture of the mandala went viral after an original posting on Reddit. They also have a nice slide show of mandalas around... Read more

In his blog, Informed Consent, historian Juan Cole, argues that Muslims are no more violent than Christian, Jews, or Buddhists. “It takes a peculiar sort of blindness to see Christians of European heritage as “nice” and Muslims and inherently violent, given the twentieth century death toll I mentioned above,” he notes. Read more

 Twenty years ago, in April, 1993,  Elie Wiesel dedicated the Holocaust Museum with this touching speech. Read more

Here is the trailer for the Unity Productions Foundation documentary on Islamic art and architecture, called Islamic Art: Mirror of the Invisible World. The film’s website has some good resources including a linked list of museum resources for Islamic art. The documentary was first broadcast by PBS last year and is now available on DVD. Read more