In an increasingly globalized and diverse society, discourse is imperative to creating positive change. Those in positions of privilege and opportunity have the responsibility to bring stories from the fringes of society towards the core of our normative narratives. This message was the essence of Dalia Mogahed’s lecture titled “Who Speaks for Islam? The Modern Muslim Mind and the Quest for a Brighter Future”, delivered the evening of November 13, 2019 at the College of Islam

She sat across from her future self and tried to maintain eye contact but was in so much awe that it was an arduous task to not break it. She marveled at this adult version of herself, a picture of steely-self-confidence. Her future self’s chestnut hair laid in effortless curls around her shoulders and the caramel highlights that lined each strand shone in the sun like threads of gold in a queen’s tapestry. Her adult self was certainty incarnate, the embodiment of all that wa

Emily Dickinson died 134 years ago, having lived out her last years in complete solitude. She had asked her family to burn her poetry because she did not want the world to see it. After her death, her sister Lavinia opened a wooden chest and inside, poems upon poems upon poems. Her family went on to publish them, and now we have them with us today, to read, to learn from, to cry over, as all good poetry incites strong emotion. Let’s jump to the present day. Me. I am 18 years

The first time I heard the term “third-culture kid” I was in a high school Literature class and I had no idea what it meant and honestly, I really didn’t think twice about it. I never imagined how over the years, this term has come to define the way I view myself and my experiences. A third-culture kid, or TCK, is when a child grows up in a culture that is different from that of their parents. That child is also exposed to a variety of different cultures and usually they find

There is something about coming to college that changed how I view friendships. Perhaps it’s the fact that we are learning so much about the world around us on a daily basis that it feels difficult to settle for less open-minded and less tolerant peers. Perhaps being in a different environment and meeting hundreds of new people introduce us to the possibility of having friends you don’t settle for, but rather people you genuinely want in your life. In high school, I had this

The South Asian Society and the Peace and Conflict Studies Club organized an open discussion on Citizenship, Religion, Resistance in Postcolonial South Asia, on February 16, 2020. The panelists for the discussion were Father Robin Seelan from Loyola College, Kartikeya Uniyal from Georgetown University in Qatar, and Dr. Lipika Kamra from O.P. Jindal University, who joined virtually through zoom. The discussion centered on the current protests happening in many cities of India

My forward journey led me to Wuthering Heights; a colossal mansion that is haunted by the contingencies of “what could have been” (T.S Eliot). It was stationed at the very top of the hills, in a vast expanse of nothingness like the open sea that stretched to a destination which is beyond what the human eye can see. There was no society to stimulate the mind so that the inhabitants of the house were stuck in an unwavering state of lethargy. The house was subsumed in the swirli