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Fake, Evil, Spiritual, Commodified; What’s the Truth About Popular Yoga?

By Andrea R. Jain

…seem “mundane” to the contemporary reader. However, for the mainstream turn-of-the-century American, it was antisocial heterodoxy. This demonstrates that not only was the sacralization of the body present in this early system of modern yoga, but it was also so significant to that system that martyrdom occurred on its behalf. In many articulations of modern yoga, body practices were censored for the same reasons Craddock had to sacrifice her life…

Mormon Leader Affirms Doctrine on Marriage; and More in Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…ion of gay marriage in the United States. But he told members of the nearly 16-million member faith watching around the world that the religion’s 1995 document detailing the doctrine — “The Family: A Proclamation to the World” — isn’t’ a policy statement that will be changed. He lamented that more children in the United States are raised in families led by unmarried mothers. “Even as we must live with the marriage laws and other traditions of a de…

Rising Influence of New Apostolic Reformation Teachings is Ominous Sign For the US — Especially For LGBTQ Students

By Jonathon Sawyer

…, whose nonprofit recently held its annual fundraiser at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago, told a crowd at the NAR-influenced Turning Point USA‘s Educators Summit that “Satan wants your kids” and that children in public schools are under spiritual attack by demonic “wickedness in high places.” These aren’t merely the efforts of some of the more brazen Christian Right warriors. Walters and Newman are diligently working alongside other conservative efforts…

Animal Sacrifice and Sexuality in Santería

By Nick Street

…ngage in ritual because I am not a Santero (a practitioner—most people use Santero [m.] or Santera [f.] to refer to initiated practitioners), but there is much more to the practice than its rituals. What aspect of the practice beyond its rituals has most sustained your interest? While most people might choose to study a movement like Santería because of their desire to learn about religious practice, I was initially intrigued by the space that I n…

Why I Will Not See The Help: A Rant

By Rosetta E. Ross

I will not see The Help. Because of all the “You’ve-got-to-read-about-these-black-women” that was made of it, I did purchase and read Kathryn Stockett’s book. I was skeptical because of the title, and because I learned it was a book by a white woman about black women servants. These details immediately brought to mind thoughts of the movie The Long Walk Home (the 1990 drama starring Sissy Spacek and Whoopi Goldberg) and NBC’s series I’ll Fly Away…

Huckabee in the Holy Land: A Christian Zionist Campaign

By Shalom Goldman

…948, played a significant part in US support for Israel. In the period from 1948 to the mid ’70s, when both the United States and Israel were led by governments with secular democratic agendas, the ‘Cyrus idea’ was present, if somewhat muted. The confluence of the George W. Bush presidency and a rightward shift in the Israeli government meant that visions of the Third Temple were no longer thought of as metaphorical. And although supporters of the…

California Tribes Denounce Catholic Church’s “Fraud” and “Blatant Fabrication” on Serra Sainthood

By Peter Montgomery

…thor of a MoveOn.org petition opposing the canonization. Steven Newcomb, co-founder and co-director of the Indigenous Law Institute and author of Pagans in the Promised Land: Decoding the Doctrine of Christian Discovery, connected Serra’s work to papal edicts going back to the 15th century calling for the subjugation of “barbarous nations” and the building of Christian empire. Newcomb is co-producer of a new documentary, The Doctrine of Discovery:…

Media Fail to Acknowledge That 2024 Hopeful Ron DeSantis is as Catholic as Biden

By Chrissy Stroop

…iffer sharply from Lisi’s. As far as I can tell, Lisi wants to highlight DeSantis’s right-wing Catholicism because he believes it should be acknowledged as a legitimate source of influence in American politics. For my part, it’s my strong conviction that religious beliefs should be allowed no influence whatsoever on policy that undermines equal accommodation in the public square for people who do not share those beliefs. Nor should they shape anyo…

American Civil Religion is Dead, Long Live American Civil Religion

By Peter Laarman

…eivable?? Let’s have a quick look at the main elements of the old religion: 1. The United States enjoys a unique (some would say, “a unique and God-given“) place in world history in that it was birthed from a bourgeois but still far-reaching revolutionary culture; 2. Our constitutional system, despite its creakiness and rigidity, still makes room for self-correcting reforms when existing social arrangements become intolerable; 3. This “nation of i…

SCOTUS Decision Changes the Meaning of Civil Religion in America

By Murali Balaji

…e, we thought the precedents set by the legislative reversals of Ozawa vs. United States and Thind vs. United States (and the shameful Dred Scott decision) would guide the Supreme Court to sanction racializing citizenship and giving the executive branch carte blanche to exclude certain groups. Tuesday’s 5-4 decision proved us wrong. The court’s decision does more than codify exclusionary policies and expand the executive branch’s authority (which…