Formal opening of Roxbury mosque, two days of events set for this month

The Muslim American Society, which is operating the new Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center, or ISBCC, has scheduled two days of events to celebrate the completion of the building. The building had a soft opening last fall, during Ramadan, and has been in use since then, but the events on June 26 and 27 mark its formal inauguration as the Muslim community prepares to expand programming in the building. Major inaugural events will include an interfaith breakfast at the Reggie Lewis Track and Athletic Center, across the street from the mosque; a ribbon-cutting, call-to-worship, and prayer service at the mosque; and a celebratory dinner at the Boston Marriott Copley Place. The dinner will feature a speech by US Representative Keith Ellison, a Minnesota Democrat who is the first Muslim to serve in Congress; the breakfast will feature William A. Graham, Harvard Divinity School dean and a noted scholar of Islam, as well as a variety of local religious leaders. Mosque officials say they expect Governor Deval Patrick to attend the breakfast and Mayor Thomas M. Menino to attend the ribbon-cutting.

"I see this as continuing the historic role that Boston has played in the cultural and religious history of America," said Bilal Kaleem of the Muslim American Society. "This is where the Pilgrims landed and where a lot of the country's first churches are, and we really see Muslim history in America having one of its key moments here."

Kaleem argued that the ISBCC is different from other mosques in America because it is located in the city rather than the suburbs and because in addition to serving as a mosque, it aspires to function as a community center with a mission of "integrating Muslims into active civic life."

The 68,000-square-foot mosque has a capacity of about 3,000 worshipers and is already drawing about 600 to Friday worship, Kaleem said. The mosque has been in the works for nearly 20 years, has cost about $15.6 million so far, and has been riven by controversy and litigation over a variety of comments and organizational affiliations of mosque backers as well as over the city's role in providing the land for the mosque.

Defenders of the mosque have suggested that the criticism is intensified, if not motivated, by bias; critics of the mosque have said they have legitimate concerns about the associations and ideas of its leaders.

He shot a picture of the sign, but then, knowing that photography of burial grounds can be a sensitive issue, asked whether it would be OK to take more. "I'd prefer you don't," a tribal leader, David White, told Greene. "Bad things have been known to happen to cameras. The medicine there is very powerful."

Greene honored the request, but he already had the lone photo in his camera. You probably already know where this is going: Greene headed from the reservation to Fenway Park to shoot a Phish concert. He found a spot on Lansdowne Street where he could get an aerial view of the crowd, sat on a railing, and placed his $1,500 zoom lens on a waist-high concrete wall. As he shot the concert, the zoom lens tumbled off the wall and fell two stories to the ground below, where the filter and the hood smashed.

Needless to say, we decided not to publish the photo of the burial ground marker in the paper or on this blog. But Bill did come back with some great pictures of a Nipmuc drum practice, and you can take a look at one of them above.

Hughes has had a pretty rough run in New Orleans, where the archdiocese was decimated by Hurricane Katrina and where the archbishop decided he needed to close multiple parishes (and allow the arrest of some protesters in the process) because the Catholic population had dropped so precipitously. Hughes has been criticized for his role as an aide to Cardinal Bernard F. Law in Boston during the period when abusive priests were being moved from parish to parish. This year he also drew headlines when he refused to attend the commencement at Xavier University because Donna Brazile, a Democratic political consultant and a Catholic who supports abortion rights, was being honored. Over at Whispers in the Loggia, Rocco Palmo sums up Hughes's time in New Orleans this way: "a prelate whose seven-year tenure proved unpopular in many quarters, both as a result of Hughes' history in the abuse-tarred Boston chancery over earlier decades and his more recent task of handling the 370,000-member archdiocese's need for post-storm adjustments."

The pope appointed Bishop Gregory Aymond to replace Hughes. The Times-Picayune in New Orleans reported that after Hughes lauded his successor, he offered an apology to "those who experienced continued hurt or also experienced anger."