Religion Dispatches
…they’re doing so over the advice of religious opponents, who echo a famous Indian guru: the Buddha. On July 7, 1993, Mia Zapata, lead singer for up-and-coming Seattle band The Gits, left a bar to walk home alone at 2 A.M. She never arrived. At 3:20, a prostitute found her body in an alley, raped, beaten, and strangled to death. Two decades later on December 16, 2012, after boarding a minibus in Delhi, India, Jyoti Singh Pandey didn’t make it home…
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…ately is not just this towering search engine that heals the wounds of the India-Pakistan partition: it is all of us who contribute to Google’s base of knowledge. We love them for it. This affective pull is exactly why we need to interrogate the premise and context of the advertisement and so many others like it. But when we take a step back, questions arise. Do we truly think that worldwide corporate expansion creates the conditions for interfait…
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…i and Naik share common goals: define yoga as authentically and originally Indian, reclaim yoga for India from illegitimate co-opters across the world, and make yoga readily available to Indians across the nation. In short, reclaiming yoga for India became a central part of Modi’s nationalist agenda. 4. High Yoga After debuting from October 2013 to January 2014 at the Smithsonian Institution’s Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, the “Yoga: The Art of Trans…
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…imated at about 9 percent, and decreasing almost daily due to migration to India and abroad. The lack of U.S. involvement in Bangladesh is multi-fold. Though the country is a trade partner with the United States, it lacks the strategic significance of its South Asian neighbors India and Pakistan. Additionally, the attacks against the bloggers are often presented in U.S. media without context. Perhaps more problematically, many Bangladeshis, partic…
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…portant than the story he tells. His admirers don’t need proof of where in India he went or how long he stayed, because the image of India and spirituality is so intertwined that any amount of time spent there is enough to transform your life and worldview. Shetty has retained the soft voice and the aura of the calm oriental monk, but he’s ditched the beard and robes for a clean-shaved face and trendy, stylish clothing in an attempt to appeal to t…
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…ches will present a series of articles from the magazine’s Fall 2023/Winter 2024 issue. To fight a War on Terror, the state needs terrorists. Indeed, it creates them. As author, researcher, and organizer Dr. Maha Hilal observes, “If you followed the logic of the U.S. government when it comes to post-9/11 detentions, the prevailing wisdom seems to be that if you treat a person like a terrorist, they become one.”[1] The Public Eye, Fall 2023/Winter…
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…not the intended audience for Trump’s Bible. Instead, when Trump sought to promote his latest wares, he didn’t approach Black American voters like some “low-rent televangelist,” as he had with the GBUSA, but rather as the neighborhood sneaker vendor. Unlike the GBUSA website, The Never Surrender High-Top Sneaker site doesn’t make grand claims about patriotism and values. Moreover, there’s no formal advertising campaign, and the site is much less p…
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…ocratic turnout. Trump understands that if the abortion issue dominates the 2024 campaign, his bid may well be doomed. So he’s seeking to elicit a reaction so visceral and powerful that it overshadows abortion rights. This is precisely what making the election about his use of fascist tropes would accomplish. The 2024 election will either be about abortion rights, or it will be about Trump. One way or another, it will be a referendum. Which framin…
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…ramifications for the upcoming presidential elections. At the beginning of 2024, mention of a report on Russian persecution of Ukrainian Christians started showing up in some evangelical publications, mostly notably in a February 6 story in Christianity Today. The report, “Faith Under Fire: Navigating Religious Freedom Amidst the War in Ukraine,” was published in November 2023 by Mission Eurasia (an evangelical mission agency founded when the Sov…
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“Mamas are the key political force in 2024 and we need to harness that energy!” Ron DeSantis called down from the stage in the Franklin Ballroom of the Marriott Hotel in Philadelphia, where 650 “joyful warriors” had gathered for the second annual “Moms for Liberty Summit.” The Florida governor was met with raucous applause—just as when he claimed that “[the Left] has awakened the most powerful force in the country: mama bears!” DeSantis, along wi…
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