Blog Posts by Subject: Religion

Have you found your calling? The May film screening from The National Black Programming Consortium, The Calling, explores this topic as it follows seven people who feel that they have found theirs.

From the NBPC website you find the following description:

It takes a true calling to make faith a way of life. The Calling is a four hour documentary series that follows seven Muslims, Catholics, Evangelical Christians and Jews on a dramatic journey—training to become professional clergy. Embarking on life 

How many times have you vowed to build more downtime into your weekend schedule? How often have you done it?

So many things get in the way—deadlines, e-mails, children, chores. And although we long for unstructured time, in some other part of ourselves, we're also proud of how much we work and revel in our inability to stop doing so.

The question of whether to rest or not on the weekend didn't use to be so tortured. Only during the past half a century did Americans become free to disregard the ancient commandment not to work one day a week.  



"Faith" by Omnia, a 10th grader at Bard High School Early College in Manhattan. "When asked to take a picture of what faith means to me, I took a picture of my best friends," wrote Omnia. "True friendship is the result of faith and trust in one another."In our work at the Tanenbaum Center for Interreligious Understanding, we regularly come across public school educators who believe that they are not supposed to talk about religion in the classroom. On 

The New York Public Library's Three Faiths exhibition explores the commonalities between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.  But what of the other faiths of the world? There is much to be learned from all of them. Here is a selection of recently published books that discuss those differences as well as the importance of promoting greater tolerance and understanding.

Beyond Tolerance: Searching for Interfaith 

When I started blogging last May, I hoped to post frequently, but my "day job" of cataloging the books I'd like to write about kept getting in the way. This year, I made a New Year's resolution to blog more regularly. To get started, I thought I would pick a "Spencer Collection Book of the Month" at the beginning of each month and write a short post about it—just enough to share with my readers some of the things that make it special, because the

So where is faith, exactly? What is the 411? Where can we see the role of religion in our lives and communities? The answer, of course, is pretty much everywhere. Religion, it seems, is all over the place, even in our relatively secular “modern” society. But where should we look if we want to understand the religious traditions of our neighbors? What kinds of things should we focus on?

These are some of the questions posed both by NYPL’s  exhibit, Three Faiths: Judaism, Christianity, Islam

Jurgen Habermas famously addressed the controversial subject of post-secularity  in his "Notes on a Post-Secular Society." Therein, Habermas concludes to think and understand the post-secular concludes with a Kantian limit, "So, if all is to go well both sides, each from its own viewpoint, must accept an interpretation of the relation between faith and knowledge that enables them to live 

A New York choir rehearses in the 1870s.For millennia, worship has been coupled with music. This bond often has been an uneasy one, and nowhere has that uneasiness been so openly displayed as in the churches of New York City. Beginning in the Colonial era, when a handful of musicians stubbornly tried to practice their craft in the face of indifference and puritanical sneers, New York's liturgical music slowly gained in artistry until it reached dizzying heights in the Gilded Age of the 19th century. By that time, many of the city's churches had become famous for services that featured 

Students outside the Three Faiths exhibitLast week, students from the Seward Park Library's Center for Reading and Writing, the Library's free adult literacy program, took a field trip to the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building to see the exhibit, Three Faiths: Judaism, Christianity, Islam.

As the group trundled up the library 

Hebrew text of first words of GenesisFrom “Abracadabra” to “Shazam,” and from “Say the magic word” to “Open Sesame,” humans have long believed that words and languages have a power far beyond and far deeper than their simple rational meanings.

The ancient peoples of Mesopotamia developed a mythological explanation for this belief. Humans, the ancient legend of the Tower of Babel story goes, once spoke a divine language, the language God gave to us. This divine language enabled the first humans to communicate with God 

In every corner of the world, as far back in history as the time machines of archaeology and anthropology can take us, music has been used by humans to communicate with the gods. It’s hard to remember in our world today, steeped as it is in the bubblegum profanity of pop culture; but Mongo Santamaria’s album, Afro-Roots, reminds us. It is a gateway into the spirit-world. The conga drum itself is our metaphysical guide, bridging the gap between the visible and invisible worlds, and thus bringing us into direct contact 

Last week, a group of adult students and volunteer tutors at the Seward Park Library's Center for Reading and Writing, the library's free adult literacy program, gathered for an introduction to the Three Faiths: Judaism, Christianity, Islam exhibit at Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, and to gauge interest in a field trip. 

"Who has been to the 42nd Street Library—the 

In October, The New York Public Library launched a large exhibition, showcasing materials from its permanent collections, to celebrate the Three Faiths of Judiasm, Christianity, and Islam. From NYPL's website:  "Jews, Christians, and Muslims all possess a book that they regard as the Word of God. That Word—and the way it has been written, copied and illustrated over the centuries—is the basis of Three Faiths." 

The

In 1947, a Life magazine headline read: “New York Lamasery: a new Tibetan temple bewilders Staten Island.”

An American woman, Jacques Marchais -- a pioneer collector and respected expert on Tibetan art -- had created a uniquely peaceful museum. Nestled into the side of Lighthouse Hill, one of the highest points on the eastern seaboard, Marchais had designed a small complex of fieldstone buildings and gardens resembling a rustic Tibetan mountain monastery; she 

If the Three Faiths exhibit has piqued your curiosity, here are five books that offer some historical background to the origin and development of the three religious traditions.

Abraham: A Journey to the Heart of Three Faiths Bruce Feiler New York: W. Morrow, 2002

The author presents Abraham as he is portrayed in all three 

The First Polyglot Psalter, Psalter, in Hebrew, Greek, Arabic, and Aramaic; Genoa: Petrus Paulus Porrus, 1516The New York Public Library, Rare Book DivisionJews and Muslims have a particular attachment to languages as expressions of the Word of God. Hebrew and Arabic are both sacred languages since both are in a sense the language of God Himself.

But there is an important difference. The Jews lost their Hebrew as a living language while the Bible was 

If you find inspiration in thoughts of pen angles and letter heights, please visit the “Scriptorium” at The New York Public Library’s “Three Faiths: Judaism, Christianity, Islam” exhibition.

In the Scriptorium you will see the tools of the scribe: paper, ink, and pens, and learn how they have been used to create religious manuscripts over the centuries. The exhibit hall also contains a lighted table, with 

Myriam de Arteni has been painstakingly repairing the library’s vast collections for more than three decades. But for de Arteni, conserving works in the “Three Faiths” exhibit--which include some of the library’s oldest and most precious documents--has been one of her most ambitious projects yet.

How does this exhibit compare to other exhibits you’ve worked on? Was it among the most ambitious?

Yes, it was very challenging because it features such rare and fragile 

Welcome to week three of the October 2010’s Readers Den. Here are some discussion questions:

Joe Sacco wrote Palestine with the intention of showing the realities of the occupied territories and the affect on the Palestinians. According to David Thompson’s 2003 online review in The Observer, “a number of stridently Zionist web sites have perversely, accused Sacco of 'Jew-bashing' and his Seattle