Beyond Belief
Bach and Beer
Jan Kraybill’s got nothing against football. In fact, she’s come to love the Kansas City Chiefs. But you might say Kraybill fumbled the planning of her debut concert as principal organist at Community of Christ church in Independence, Missouri. [FLEX-CONTENT] It was not until about a month before the January 1999 concert, with promotions already…
Calls for Peace, not Pacifism
It was dark and cold outside Saturday as celebrants filled the venue on Kansas City’s West Side. But this crowd was not gearing up for a party in the final hours of the year; it was instead a predawn gathering at the Rime Buddhist Center for the city’s 31st annual World Peace Meditation. [FLEX-CONTENT] By…
Resurrecting A Neighborhood
As the early Sunday morning service at Metropolitan Missionary Baptist Church let out recently, Deacon Roosevelt Hall was happy to explain the large round button pinned to his lapel. “I’m committed,” it read. Yes, Hall said, it was about the 121-year-old congregation’s recently launched building renovation project. But that’s not all Metropolitan’s members are committed…
Commentary |Walls That Unite
One morning in June 2007, I stopped by the construction site of a Habitat for Humanity house in the 3700 block of Flora Avenue and noticed that work had come to a temporary halt. As I explained soon after that in a Kansas City Star column, someone at the site had noticed that something didn’t…
Commentary |Creating A Hub For Religious Fluency
Imagine a day when: Any Christian fifth-grader in Kansas City who meets a Muslim fifth-grader immediately says to the Islamic child, “salaam alaikum,” the traditional Muslim greeting that means “peace to you.” Any Buddhist adult here who encounters a Jew after sundown on Friday routinely greets the Jew with these words, “Shabbat Shalom,” meaning a…
A Force for Refugees
It was during daily walks from her lecture hall to hospital rotations that Sophia Khan first experienced poverty. Born to a wealthy family in Karachi, Pakistan, Khan was a second-year medical student in her homeland when she discovered that the unsheltered groups waiting outside the hospital were poor people wanting to be near their loved…
Picnic for Area Refugees Helps Newcomers Assimilate
When Ahmad al-Abboud brought his wife and five children to the United States from war-torn Syria, he carried with him a vision of this country — of scantily clad people kissing in the streets — he feared would clash with his conservative Muslim culture. But what he found upon settling in Kansas City in April…
My, How the Garden Grows
Located among strip malls, office buildings and rows of uniform houses, The Temple, Congregation B’nai Jehudah in Overland Park is in the heart of suburbia. But park your car behind the temple, which sits on Nall Avenue a little south of 119th Street, wander up a winding dirt path, and you will find that you’ve…
Commentary |Faith in KC’s Southeast High School
The last time I had seen Ke’Montay Smith was last spring at the final graduation of the soon-to-be-closed Southwest High, where she was a student. She was wearing her snappy ROTC uniform and was part of the color guard. But now here she was at Southeast High School’s orientation night in August. This lively, bright…
Seminaries Part of Metro’s Secret Sauce
Religion in the United States has been in transition for decades, as the percentage of the population identifying as Christian shrinks — and particularly as the religiously unaffiliated population has exploded to nearly 25 percent. The effects have rippled through the Kansas City area’s several seminaries and colleges that offer religious education. “The cultural challenges…