Search for "cheap guru airline tickets phone number 1-800-299-7264"

Growing Up Cult: A Memoir of Life with Sri Chinmoy

By Brittany Shoot

…bewildering experiments), she began to question the idea of devotion to a guru. After a number of attempts to leave, she broke free of the group at age twenty-five. I recently caught up with Tamm to talk about Sri Chinmoy’s death, her use of the word “cult,” and what her spiritual life looks like today. ** Did it make a difference to his followers that Sri Chinmoy was from India? Did it give him extra authority? In the late 1960s, there was a tre…

Let’s Stop Calling Rape and Harassment by Bikram Yoga Founder Just Another “Guru Scandal”

By Andrea R. Jain

…s revealed sexual corruption and secrecy as central to their lifestyles. A number of yoga gurus have been outed as sexually active, usually with young, white, female students. These scandals have left the American public thinking the “guru model” is problematic for its inherently undemocratic tendencies, suspecting the model is an extreme form of authoritarianism that inevitably leads to demise. In 1993, for example, Joel Kramer and Diana Alstad w…

Yoga Guru or CEO? Saving the Brand When Scandal Strikes

By Andrea R. Jain

…han “more modern and democratic” ones. Friend is not, however, the Anusara guru. Even though Friend uses the term kula (Sanskrit for “family”) to refer to the Anusara community—a term traditionally applied to disciples gathered around a guru—Friend rejects the label, preferring instead to call himself the founder and (until the recent restructuring) general manager of Anusara. But that doesn’t mean the infallible attributes often associated with t…

Death of a Self-Proclaimed God-Man: Sai Baba’s Controversial Career

By Andrea R. Jain

…mplex one to say the least, and it calls into question how we use the term guru in our popular discourse. Terms for religious exemplars, such as saint or guru, occur widely in the popular media and in popular culture generally in reference to figures assumed to embody ethical virtue. I encounter this assumption often in my undergraduate courses when I teach about saints or gurus and discuss the all too frequent accusations of sexual abuse that sur…

Pricey Tickets, Cranky Citizens, and Priests Behind Bars as Philadelphia Prepares For Papal Visit

By Anthea Butler

…to continue to shrink into the insularity and disorganization that caused the Philadelphia Archdiocese to decline so precipitously? It remains to be seen. Meanwhile, faithful Catholics and others who want to see the Pope may be losing heart. 10,000 tickets for the Pope’s Speech at Independence Mall sold out in two minutes on Tuesday, with 394k people trying their best to get a few. Tickets are already being scalped at $100 and up on craigslist. I…

The World’s Most Influential Yoga Teacher is a Homophobic Right-Wing Activist

By Andrea Jain and Michael Schulson

…yoga camps. He traveled the world. He taught yoga to Bollywood stars. The guru-entrepreneur is a familiar figure in India, and Ramdev is part of a wave of spiritual leaders who present yoga postures as a therapeutic fitness method. Few, though, have managed to achieve anything close to his prominence. Partly, that’s because of the gooseberries. As the origin story goes, a group of gooseberry farmers visited Ramdev in 2005 and told him that their…

Hillary Clinton’s Disgraced “Faith Guru” is Out… Now How About the “Faith Operations” Industry?

By Peter Laarman

Burns Strider, Hillary Clinton’s disgraced former “faith guru”—accused of sexually harassing at least two young women—was well known around DC as a kind of faith fixer years before the 2008 HRC campaign. I recall distinctly that when liberal religious leaders wanted to meet with senior Congressional Democrats during George W. Bush’s first term, Strider was the one to set it up. I even recall the oleaginous voice, the good ol’ boy style. The son o…

Mile-High Identity Politics: What We Can Learn From the Same-Sex Seating Controversy

By Eboo Patel

…, not the fourth century … You’re not free to practice your religion in my airline seat.’ ‘This is male entitlement .. the height of male arrogance.’ One comment referred to this as a ‘back of the bus’ issue; as in, women being asked to move in such circumstances was tantamount to assigning them a lesser status as citizens and lower dignity as human beings. Other readers proposed that airlines set aside special seating for men requiring such accom…

The Key to Understanding the Federalist Society Isn’t Originalism — It’s This 800-Year Old Tradition

By Peter Schwartz

…notions of “human dignity” and “human flourishing,” Catholic natural law—an 800-year-old tradition dating back to Thomas Aquinas—is a lens that offers utter clarity to conservative Catholic jurists, activists, policymakers, and scholars as they observe, describe, and engage the world. The power and sharpness of this lens allow them to confidently snap every human movement—every human desire and motive and act—into its divinely appointed and proper…

The Leadership Crisis at the End of the Megachurch Era

By Benjamin Dueholm

…in the learner, but to continue being needed. The Entrepreneur. Where the guru reveals, the entrepreneur makes. He innovates platforms, methods, models, and mobile apps. Where the guru introduces you to the power latent within you to lose weight—a power known to Socrates and the Berber herdsmen alike but long obscured to us—the entrepreneur invents a dietary or pharmacological regimen. In order to solve new or stubborn problems, it may be necessa…