LEILA FADEL, HOST:
This week, much of the world celebrates beginnings as three major cultural and religious holidays coincide. The starts of Lent, Ramadan and Lunar New Year are all determined by different lunar calendars, and it's very rare for all three to intersect.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
I love this. And we've called up some experts - among them, a Jesuit priest and author, James Martin, who says that Christians mark a season of 40 days leading up to Easter.
JAMES MARTIN: The three pillars of Lent are prayer, fasting and almsgiving. And also, originally, one of the reasons to give up physical things like food was to save money and give it to the poor.
FADEL: Prayer, charity and fasting are also central to Ramadan.
MARTIN: It means that we are tied even more closely to our Muslim brothers and sisters, who are doing their own kinds of tenets and fasting. So I think it's wonderful.
INSKEEP: Ramadan begins in the United States tonight. And during the month to come, observant Muslims will fast during daylight hours. Here's Saad Omar, an imam with the Islamic Society of McLean, Virginia.
SAAD OMAR: We learn moderation through the fast. And we also develop a conscientiousness that we are fasting with a choice, and there are many people in the world that fast without a choice. And that empathy is central to Ramadan.
INSKEEP: Omar says the convergence of these religious holidays carries a reminder of our shared humanity.
OMAR: There is a spiritual dimension where two people can have very different ideas and worldviews and politics, but when they both feel love, the love probably has a similar flavor.
FADEL: And he says Ramadan, the month during which Muslims believe the Quran was revealed, invokes shared love.
OMAR: Ramadan is supposed to be a month of mercy and goodness and light that we communicate and extend to everyone around us, and that everyone receives the ripples of that light.
FADEL: Lunar New Year is also today. It's sometimes referred to as the Chinese New Year, and it's a holiday throughout much of Asia. In China, it's a weekslong period in which many workers in big cities return to their hometowns. In the United States, it coincides with the Mardi Gras, or Fat Tuesday, celebrations that precede Lent.
INSKEEP: And they're going to mix up the holidays this year in Metairie, Louisiana, which is where Stanley Su is a float lieutenant for the Krewe of Argus, whose Mardi Gras parade features a red-and-gold Asian zodiac-themed float with a towering cartoon-like horse, for the year of the horse.
STANLEY SU: Horse represent energy, freedom, power. And even though this Asian culture seen on the float, but we welcome everybody. No matter you are Asian American or local American or visitors, we welcome everybody join and celebrate with us.
INSKEEP: You can catch some Mardi Gras beads, along with toy horses and Vietnamese noodles, which are tossed to the crowds.
(SOUNDBITE OF PROFESSOR LONGHAIR SONG, "GO TO THE MARDI GRAS") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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