9/11, Religious Identity, Religious Freedom

http://www.religiondispatches.org/archive/culture/3301/%22you%27ve_never_met_a_muslim%22/  {Be SURE to check out the photo!  Remember to look at it again when we come to the Statue of Liberty in a later semester.)

I think that these accounts of New Yorkers' Muslim identity are illustrations of Foner's notion of Moral Freedom as well as FDR's Freedom of Worship.  At the same time, recent uproar about plans to build a mosque near New York's ground-zero makes evident that not all Americans are willing to extend this freedom to their fellow citizens.

Foner posits that extension of freedoms has not been merely a matter of including more sorts of people, but also a matter of expanding understandings of the freedom itself.  Surely this is the case for freedom of religion which has expanded from tolerance of some varieties of Christianity to an embrace of the notion of religious plurality, at least by some.