Religion Dispatches
…ga guru Baba Ramdev for having made major advances in popularizing yoga in India. (Recently, Ramdev has made the outrageous claim that yoga can cure homosexuality—he also supports the Indian government’s ongoing criminalization of sex between consenting adults of the same sex—as well as the far-reaching claim that it could cure cancer.) Modi’s recent efforts to reclaim yoga for India are just one part of a much larger public movement to define yog…
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…’t see his site as a true contribution to the sex-positive Christian movement. Restoring Christian Sexuality is just another porn site, parading in its Sunday best….
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…alues of the world’s religions—Hindu, Muslim, Christian, Jewish, etc. He visited Gandhi’s home and his cremation site, affirming the value of nonviolent resistance as the greatest mean to sustainable social change. Yet he also gave meandering, academic answers to students pressing him on the topics of jihad and Pakistani support for terrorism. And he showed fear before principle in the decision not to risk being photographed in a head-covering goi…
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…on the other side. When he and his brother Peter Lalonde first turned the best-selling books into movies, they argued it wasn’t possible to make Left Behind in a way that would appeal both to people who were waiting for the rapture and people who thought the whole thing was preposterous. You couldn’t do both. They made the movie cheap and released it to the home market. It only had a limited run in theaters the following year Peter Lalonde said s…
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…executive director of Students for a Free Tibet, who regularly travels to India for nonviolence trainings. In India, “their action is a little bit more spontaneous.” A New Revolution The March 10 National Uprising Day protest in Delhi was bigger than ever this year. Tempa Tsering, the official representative of the Dalai Lama, says more than 1,000 gathered in front of the United Nations’ office to mark the anniversary of the 1959 rebellion in Tib…
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…h we will go to Mina, etc. There is still no address for the hotels, but a local phone number. There is also information about processing customs at Jeddah, meeting the tour guide, and information that says “the group” will proceed to Makkah—which means the first will have to wait for the last person, which is the beginning of feeling like you are a group. They even include suggestions to “get to know” your fellow travelers. I still had no idea wh…
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…ual recompense. In the video message that was played before my last United Airlines flight, you expressed your desire to greet each and every passenger; you invited us to sit back, relax, and enjoy the flight. If I could greet you now, I would want to know: were you unaware of the monstrosity that was about to follow? There, rising above the hiss of the pressurized air, as the video monitors snapped to the image of an engorged sun bursting from be…
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…way from the hard work of repentance, who tickle our ears with promises of cheap grace, and offer a vision of the cross of Jesus that has nothing to say to the crosses, and lynching trees, of history. But, if we do, we will be settling for the gospel of Caesar, not the good news of Jesus Christ. Perhaps it is time to put down the chalk, stop drawing pyrotechnical conspiracy theories that play into our worst fears and listen, instead, for the diffi…
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…There were fliers portraying President of the current opposition party in India, the Indian National Congress party, Sonia Gandhi and Hillary Clinton as horned demons on a “witch hunt” to “get Modi” and his party for alleged involvement in the 2002 riots in Gujarat. Modi governed the state during the violence that took the lives of more than 1,000 people, most of them Muslims. In stark contrast, there were large posters displaying Trump in what a…
Read More…no office I could do to secure what was demanded of me, so the day for my flight came and went and the ticket never got used. During that year, a woman read my tea leaves after supper with some of my new friends. If you don’t know how that works, first I drank a cup of tea with leaves still settled at the bottom. Once the liquid is mostly all drunk, the reader takes the leaves, swishes them around in the bottom of the cup, turns the cup upside do…
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