Multifaithful

Today we bring back one of the speakers from our Acting with Awareness event on March 28th, Dr. Amishi Jha, to discuss her work in bringing mindfulness meditation to pre-deployment training in the military and into the world of college-level sports. For more from Dr. Jha, check out our last podcast, which has the full audio from Acting with Awareness!

MindfulNYU, in co-sponsorship with NYU's Leadership Initiative and NYU Stern's Leadership Development Program, is proud to bring you an evening dialogue entitled "Acting with Awareness: Mindfulness, Resilience and Leadership”. Dr. Amishi Jha and US Major General Piatt will discuss their work together bringing mindfulness training to active duty military cohorts in an interview-style evening dialogue, moderated by special guest and New York Times reporter, David Gelles. The insights and empirical evidence they have gained suggest that mindfulness is key for surviving, thriving, and leading in high pressure settings.

This week we are doing some acrobatics and flipping our host to become the interviewee! After just releasing Teaching Religious Literacy, a guide to teaching religious and spiritual diversity on college campuses, Ariel gives us some information on NYU's own Faith Zone program and why it is important to work in higher education. For more information on the book, check out: https://www.routledge.com/Teaching-Religious-Literacy-A-Guide-to-Religious-and-Spiritual-Diversity/Ennis/p/book/9781138635852

Listen for the full event audio of this year's Veritas Forum at NYU, The Closing of the Modern Mind: An Atheist and a Christian Discuss Pluralism, Faith, and Moral Disagreement. This event featured Pastor Time Keller, New York Times Best-Selling Author and Pastor at Redeemer Presbyterian Church, and Dr. Jonathan Haidt, Thomas Cooler Professor of Ethical Leadership at the Stern School of Business at NYU. To learn more about Veritas- Forum, check our their website at veritas.org. Speaker Bios: Timothy Keller is the founding pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan, which he started in 1989 with his wife, Kathy, and three young sons. For over twenty years he has led a diverse congregation of young professionals that has grown to a weekly attendance of over 5,000. He is also Chairman of Redeemer City to City, which starts new churches in New York and other global cities, and publishes books and resources for faith in an urban culture. In over ten years they have helped to launch over 250 churches in 48 cities. More recently, Dr. Keller’s books, including the New York Times bestselling The Reason for God and The Prodigal God, have sold over 1 million copies and been translated into 15 languages. Christianity Today has said, “Fifty years from now, if evangelical Christians are widely known for their love of cities, their commitment to mercy and justice, and their love of their neighbors, Tim Keller will be remembered as a pioneer of the new urban Christians.” Dr. Keller was born and raised in Pennsylvania, and educated at Bucknell University, Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, and Westminster Theological Seminary. He previously served as the pastor of West Hopewell Presbyterian Church in Hopewell, Virginia, Associate Professor of Practical Theology at Westminster Theological Seminary, and Director of Mercy Ministries for the Presbyterian Church in America. Professor Haidt is the Thomas Cooley Professor of Ethical Leadership, based in the Business and Society Program at New York University. He received a B.A. in Philosophy from Yale University, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of Pennsylvania. Professor Haidt is a social psychologist whose research examines the intuitive foundations of morality. His most recent book is the New York Times bestseller, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion. At Stern, he is applying his research on moral psychology to rethink the way business ethics is studied and is integrated into the curriculum. His goal is to draw on the best behavioral science research to create organizations that function as ethical systems, with only minimal need for directly training people to behave ethically.

Description: Today we are honored to welcome renowned meditation teacher and New York Times best selling author Sharon Salzberg to the podcast to help us get to know a little bit more about her personal journey through mindfulness, as well as the usefulness of mindfulness in a time as fragile as the current moment.

No, it's not a typo! Today we return to a subject we've explored before, interfaith work on college campuses, but through a new lens. We have a conversation with three researchers who are part of the IDEALs (Interfaith Diversity Experiences and Attitudes Longitudinal Survey) research study, who give us some insight on what their study looks like and the implications it has for religious life on college campuses.

Today we are joined by Yavilah McCoy, one of the foremost leaders in race-related Jewish studies and CEO of Visions, Inc. She helps us start to dissect the intersectionality of race and Judaism and gives us some insight on what it means to engage in social justice as while holding both of these identities.

Alex Mar, author of Witches of America and director of the film American Mystic, joins us to shed light modern day Paganism and the various ways it is being practiced today in the United States. Be sure to check out her book here: http://alex-mar.com

This week we welcome Rabbi Bruce Cohen, Rabbi of the oldest Messianic Jewish congregation in New York City. We delve into a discussion on what exactly Messianic Judaism is, how it's different from other forms of Judaism and Christianity, and how to dialogue about one's religion when it complicates existing standards and practices.

On this week's episode, we pay tribute to November's LGBTQ history month in a conversation with the director of NYU's LGBTQ student center, Jon Hurst. We discuss the history and function of LGBTQ student spaces, the intersectional nature of queer spirituality, and what it means to be an ally.

On this week's episode of Multifaithful, we are excited to welcome Shaykh Hamza Yusuf, co-founder of Zaytuna College in California and one of the most important Muslim scholars in the world. Shaykh Hamza discusses the intersections between religious and secular education in the United States and the ways in which both religious and secular identities can coexist in this arena. For more information on this topic, listen to the lecture that Shaykh Hamza gave along with Dr. John Sexton and Reverend Dr. Serene Jones in our previous episode.

In case you missed the incredible event last night (9/27), you can now listen to the full audio from The Secular and the Sacred in Higher Education: A Conversation with Shaykh Hamza Yusuf and Dr. John Sexton, moderated by Rev. Dv. Serene Jones. This lecture was the annual Fritzi Weitzmann Owens Memorial Lecture at the Of Many Institute for Multifaith Leadership at NYU and was cosponsored by the Islamic Center at NYU and the New York Community Trust. -- Shaykh Hamza Yusuf is an American-Muslim Scholar and President of Zaytuna College, the first accredited Muslim undergraduate college in the United States. The New Yorker Magazine called him "perhaps the most influential Islamic scholar in the Western World." He has authored several encyclopedia articles, research articles and published books, including "Purification of the Heart: Signs, Symptoms, and Cures of the Spiritual Diseases of the Heart" (Starlatch, 2004). Dr. John Sexton is an American scholar of Law and Religion and served as the15th President of New York University from 2002-2015. During his presidency, NYU was named the "number one dream school" four times by the Princeton Review. As president, Sexton taught a seminar on the Supreme Court's church and state cases, and a popular course called "Baseball as a Road to God," which is also the title of his book (Gotham, 2013). Moderator Rev. Dr. Serene Jones is a highly respected scholar and public intellectual. Rev. Dr. Jones is the 16th President of the historic Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York. The first woman to head the 180-year-old institution, Jones occupies the Johnston Family Chair for Religion and Democracy. She is also currently the President of the American Academy of Religion, which annually hosts the world’s largest gathering of scholars of religion. Rev. Dr. Jones is the author of several books, including Trauma and Grace (Westminster, 2009).

Joining us on the podcast this week are Sensei Chodo Campbell and Sensei Koshin Ellison, founders and executive directors of the New York Zen Center for Contemplative Care. We delve into a new topic for this podcast and begin to explore the ways in which we can approach death, and especially caring for those who are dying, with compassion, awareness, and even happiness. For more information on Koshin's book, check out the Amazon page here: https://www.amazon.com/Awake-Bedside-Contemplative-End---Life/dp/1614291195/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8

Welcome to a new season of Multifaithful! Joining us on this first episode is executive director of the Sikh Coalition Sapreet Kaur and Sikh activist Vishavjit Singh. We consider the history of Sikhism in America, explore Singh’s Captain Sikh America persona, and discuss The Sikh Project, an upcoming art exhibit sponsored by the Sikh Coalition (http://www.sikhcoalition.org/get-involved/sikhproject).

On this week's episode of Multifaithful, Reka talks to Lodro Rinzler, a Shambhala Buddhist teacher, author and founder of M N D F L and the Institute for Compassionate Leadership. They discuss the spread of mindfulness into organizations as different as NYU and Google and ways to bring mindfulness into any environment. You can find more information about Lodro here: http://www.lodrorinzler.com/about/

On this weeks episode of Multifaithful, Reka talks to Lama Rod Owens, renowned Dharma teacher and activist based in Boston. We discuss how mindfulness has inspired his involvement in various activist causes and how it can pave the way for a different kind of liberation.

On this week's episode, we begin a series of three mindful Multifaithful episodes hosted by the amazing Reka Prasad. In this episode she sits down with Buddhist teacher Qalvy Grainzvolt to discuss his journey to and through Buddhism and his approach to sharing the practice of meditation and mindfulness with others in today's ever-changing world.

On this weeks episode, we talk to Sarab Al-Jijakli, a well known Arab-American community organizer who has been at the forefront of organizing efforts in the United States on behalf of Syrian Refugees. We discuss various organizations working on this issue and ways for Americans to get involved and show support. In this episode, we highlight the following organizations (in order of mention): Network of Arab American Professionals (http://www.naaponline.org/) International Rescue Committee (http://www.rescue.org/) Sarab's Blog (https://sarabiany.wordpress.com/about-sarabiany/) Islamic Relief (http://irusa.org/) Karam Foundation (http://www.karamfoundation.org/) Arab American Association of New York (http://www.arabamericanny.org/) Arab American Family Support Center (http://www.aafscny.org/) Muslim Consultative Network (http://mcnny.org/) Muslims Giving Back (http://www.muslimsgivingback.org/) Syrian American Medical Society (https://www.sams-usa.net/foundation/)

This week's episode features Dr. Jerusha Lamptey, Assistant Professor of Islam and Ministry at Union Theological Seminary in New York. We discuss Islam as a field of academic study, how to teach a multifaith course, as well as her personal work in synthesizing feminism with comparative religious studies.

We are joined this week by the ever-wise and incredible Dr. Linda Mills, Vice Chancellor for Global Programs and University Life at New York University and one of the key founders of the Of Many Institute. Our conversation centers around the Of Many Institute, as well as the ways in which multifaith dialogue and understanding can be approached in a variety of global contexts.