News

'This is an issue of equality': Maryland law to allow religious garments in college sports

July 20, 2022

Executive Director for the Aspen Institute's Religion & Society Program, who studies religion, racism and justice — recalls his own experience of fighting for inclusion as a turbaned Sikh athlete.

Growing up in Texas, he says he and his brothers were often denied the right to play school and college sports because of their turbans, a religious head covering worn by men of the Sikh religion.

His is one of the voices welcoming the US state of Maryland's Inclusive Athletic...

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The legacy of a Taos Pueblo poet traced through what she touched

July 20, 2022

Her handwriting is found on empty cigarette packs, receipts, loose paper and dozens of notebooks filled front and back with her poetry.

Bernal’s family said they’ve discovered more than 800 poems she wrote in her brief life, cut short in part by debilitating medical issues. 

Her words are now painted on the front of a home that will soon host artists and anyone from Taos Pueblo who want a place to stay while they visit or work at the brand new Coral Dawn and Paul J. Bernal Center for Arts & Literature.

Source:...

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Do Jewish New Yorkers care about identity politics? Jerry Nadler hopes so.

July 19, 2022

Jerry Nadler was fishing for votes outside Zabar’s, that purveyor of bagels and babka on Manhattan’s West Side, when Carole Kaufmann stopped to take the congressman’s campaign flier.

“A heymisher man,” said Kaufmann, 86, using the Yiddish word for familiar as she admired the 75-year-old Democrat in his blue suit, red striped tie and sensible shoes. Nadler is Jewish, and Kaufmann likes that about him.

“I want him around,” Kaufmann...

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Churches sue to use hallucinogenic tea in religious practice

July 19, 2022

 Two Arizona churches are fighting in federal court to establish a right to use a sacramental tea brewed from plants containing a hallucinogenic compound in their religious practice.

The Arizona Yagé Assembly and the Church of the Eagle and the Condor allege in separate lawsuits that their constitutional right to the free exercise of their religion has been violated by federal agencies' seizure of their ayahuasca, an herbal tea that contains a small amount of dimethyltryptamine.

The churches are seeking a declaration that the government's actions stopping them...

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Kentucky GOP group blames hacker for calling new US firearms regulator part of a 'Jewish junta'

July 18, 2022

When Steve Dettelbach was confirmed last week as the director of the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, he became the beleaguered bureau’s first head to pass a Senate confirmation in eight years. For some, the confirmation offered hope of a changing tide in America’s sea of mass shootings.

But a county Republican group in Kentucky saw a different story: that Dettelbach is part of a “Jewish junta” that “is getting stronger and more aggressive.”

The Bracken County Republican Party, representing a rural county with a population of around 8,400...

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Fon du Lac and Grand Portage Ojibwe Tribes File Suit Against EPA

July 18, 2022

On July 14, the Fond du Lac and Grand Portage Bands of Lake Superior Chippewa filed a lawsuit in federal court against the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), citing the Clean Water Act. The lawsuit argues that the EPA approved recommendations by the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency (MPCA) to lower water quality standards, after tribes in Minnesota and the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe voiced against lowering the quality of water.  

“It’s really powerful how the Tribes have stood together in this,” Grand Portage Band of Lake Superior Chippewa’s Secretary and Treasure...

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A saint-soldier defending Sikhs and reviving the American melting pot

July 15, 2022

The Sikh Coalition was born in the hours after 9/11, out of self-defense. In those raw days after the attacks, Balbir Singh Sodhi was shot outside the gas station his family ran in Mesa, Arizona. In the months following, American Sikhs were beaten and their temples, called gurdwaras, were set on fire. Less than a year after Singh Sodhi’s murder, his brother was shot while driving his cab near San Francisco.

In those early days, and as violence against Sikhs has continued — the latest wave of anti-Sikh harassment hit Queens, New York, earlier this year — coalition members were...

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The Founder of Queen Meb Is at the Forefront of the Wiccan Revival

July 13, 2022

Erika Fortner may claim she’d never once considered a career in retail, but the founder of Queen Meb—the Northeast Broadway boutique that’s part Dosha, part Diagon Alley, offering tarot readings, brooms, and witching herbs, alongside body scrubs and lip balm—seems eerily well-suited for her current role. Fortner, who claims a direct lineage to the legendary Celtic sorceress who inspired her business’s branding, has always felt a kinship with the spirits. She earned a BFA from New York’s Pratt Institute while working as a tarot guide for the Psychic Friends Network (“nineties...

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'It has a pierced heart': an Indigenous tribe's fight to protect a sacred lake

July 13, 2022

In Ernie Stensgar’s Plummer, Idaho, office sits an heirloom older than any human, a relic passed down from his great-great-grandparents: a set of four 150-year-old gathering baskets, handwoven from Inland north-west reeds.

Built to last, the receptacles still haven’t frayed, despite age. They’re not museum exhibits, either. Stensgar uses them to collect mountain huckleberries, prairie plants and water potatoes from nearby Coeur d’Alene Lake, sacred water...

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The Far-Right Christian Quest for Power: 'We Are Seeing Them Emboldened'

July 8, 2022

Three weeks before he won the Republican nomination for Pennsylvania governor, Doug Mastriano stood beside a three-foot-tall painted eagle statue and declared the power of God.

“Any free people in the house here? Did Jesus set you free?” he asked, revving up the dozens before him on a Saturday afternoon at a Gettysburg roadside hotel.

Mr. Mastriano, a state senator, retired Army colonel and prominent figure in former President Donald J. Trump’s futile efforts to overturn the state’s 2020 election results, was addressing a far-right conference that mixed Christian...

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