Religion Dispatches
…ent last night in good spiritual company but it was almost two hours drive south to get there. Not being a night person, I got permission to stay over night in their retreat room. For people who let the hustle and bustle of city life get the best of them, I highly recommend such quarters: blissful darkness, with a gentle hooting owl in an otherwise silent night. But I was up and out this morning before the sunrise, because I have a full day ahead…
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…the Veiled), al-Hujwiri played no small role in the spreading of Islam in South Asia. One can’t help but wonder why a man of his stature would stir up so much enmity among Islamic extremists, to the point that they were willing to commit such an unspeakable atrocity in the name of their faith. Sadly, July’s bombing in Lahore would only be one of several strings of unprovoked acts of sectarian violence by Pakistani extremists this year, culminatin…
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…the ancient and classical systems of raja yoga or hatha yoga that saturate South Asian culture. For Yogananda, yoga was the scientific path to the experience of God, and that path was as much about Christ consciousness as Krishna consciousness. This was a hybrid product of Hindu, Christian, and modern ideas about the nature of God, the nature of the Self, and the nature of the human body. By the 1960s and the influx of gurus to the United States w…
Read More…eration were raised to understand that the indigenous peoples of North and South America are the descendents of the Lamanites, a belief that has been challenged by anthropologists. The Book of Mormon taught that the phenotypical features of Lamanites—their dark skin—came about as a consequence of unrighteousness. Unsurprisingly, the outlines of this story resembled general American Christian folk theology which attributed racial variation to Bibli…
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…row, as US policy evolved to support the country’s division into Sudan and South Sudan in 2010. But the law plays virtually no role in US policy toward Saudi Arabia, given that, for 15 years, the president has waived sanctions on the basis of US national security interests.) More recently, people generally mean that the US should engage “religious actors,” particularly groups on the ground in the Global South. Sometimes these groups are doing huma…
Read More…nce and England get a say in who does or doesn’t get bombed, and not, say, South Korea, South Africa, Brazil, Australia, Indonesia, or Kazakhstan? How is it that one member state, China, has more people than the other four combined, and yet is treated equally? The Palestinians were told, in the run-up to 1948, that their country would be divided according to international law. In order to be a part of the body that made that decision, however, the…
Read More…gesture could easily be chalked up to a diplomatic gesture from one small South Asian nation to another, but the humanitarian gesture is rooted in the long-running transcultural exchange between Sri Lanka and Nepal as major historical sites of Buddhism. “It is indeed our duty to help Nepal in this crisis,” a prominent Buddhist clergyman said. “It is a Hindu state with a considerable number of Buddhists living there. It is the place where the Bodh…
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…ut already has a thick goatee. When I tell him I’m a Jew he takes out his iPhone and wants to play me a song. Hebrew lettering appears on the bottom of the screen and a yarmulke-clad singer stands on a stage, microphone in hand. When he begins singing, in Arabic, Ahmed knows every word. He sings about chewing qat, about falling in love. “Most of the Jews here went to Israel, but they stayed Yemeni—listen to his accent! He’s a perfect Sana’ani. He…
Read More…he better approach. The civil rights organizations—Sikh, Arab, Muslim, and South Asian—now critical of the 9/11 Museum’s decisions have more at stake than Christian groups did during the “Antisemitism” film controversy. At that time, Robert Royal, vice president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, explained the general ambivalence: “As far as criticism of Christianity, we’re not as sensitive because, maybe, we tend to feel, Christianity has la…
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…nd 20th century in the context of Muslim–Christian polemics, especially in South Asia. It was mentioned already in Rahmatullâh al-Kairânawî’s 19th-century polemics against Christianity, and it also made an appearance in Mirza Ghulam Ahmad’s 1899 Jesus in India. As Oddbjørn Leirvik has shown, it rose to even greater prominence after the 1907 publication of the English translation by Longsdale and Laura Ragg. Within a year, it was translated from En…
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