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Omid Safi


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Essay

January 14, 2016

Widen the Circle of Love

Pride for our identities and communities can be a source of strength. Pride can also lead us to forget empathy for those unlike us. A generous reminder that the reach of our compassion must stretch beyond the familiar.
Those who have suffered most may also be our greatest teachers on the road to courage. Omid Safi looks to the complicated, yet abiding faith one grieving father holds for his country for moral wisdom.

Essay

March 28, 2018

Let It Be Love

For Omid Safi, writing his weekly On Being column has been an exercise in planting seeds of joy and love, in service of cultivating justice in this world.
We spill something on ourselves, and then we postpone the inevitable: the cleaning. We often do the same thing with the pain and anger we inevitably experience. Omid and Rumi have something to say about stain-treating our hearts.
Recent mass killings in Oregon and abroad inculcate a kind of fear that can be paralyzing. Through the lens of a Native American tale, Omid Safi refuses to feed those wolves and chooses to feed another wolf: love.
If there's one thing winter teaches its humbled residents, it's that gratitude begins before the snow falls and happiness finds new heart in the thaw.
We might laugh at the clumsiness of the question, posed so often to people with brown skin in the U.S. But Omid Safi asks us to consider what we’re really saying when we ask this question — and how we might expand our imagination about what American identity is.