Religion Dispatches
…k titled The Change Manifesto which according to the Institute’s Faith and Freedom Newsletter, “reminds us” that despite talk by the “presidential candidates … about reducing taxes, lowering gas prices and reforming Social Security…. none of that will matter unless we first restore the rule of law and abide by the Constitution.” “We are on the cusp of a new era of progress, but we can’t sit back and hope our elected officials will carry us there….
Read More
…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…
Read More
…legation spoke for nearly an hour about the so-called crisis of 1948, when India and Pakistan had been partitioned. In fact he was confusing the subcontinent for mandatory Palestine, as India and Pakistan were partitioned in 1947. He railed on and on about British imperialism, and the nefarious designs of the English monarchy upon South Asia—you can’t make this stuff up—and concluded by suggesting that India and Pakistan, which were apparently on…
Read More
…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…
Read More…ys Ministry’s Bob Shine points out that Gracias, in addition to heading up India’s bishops’ conference, “is also a member of the eight member Council of Cardinals formed to advise Pope Francis.” The archdiocese of Delhi stated that it was opposed to any law that would criminalize homosexuality while reaffirming the hierarchy’s position on marriage equality. In addition, writes Shine: … India’s Christians are a minority struggling for recognition…
Read More
…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…
Read More
…sh rule and what sociologist M. N. Srinivas called the “Brahminization” of Indian culture. Colonizing British deemed those religious activities in India that were closer to their own as more evolved and genuine than others. These were the hierarchical, centralized and vaguely monotheist (or deist) theologies of Saiva and Vaisnava Brahmins. The Brahmins themselves had been struggling with armed tantric monastic orders on one front, unsubordinated f…
Read More
…anization is the South Asia Association for Regional Cooperation, in which India plays a dominant role but the group also includes Afghanistan along with Pakistan. Equally relevant is the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), consisting of China, Russia, and four Central Asian countries; Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, and India have membership as observers. At a recent meeting of the SCO, Russia proposed an interesting solution to stabilize the A…
Read More
…ries, centers on a tale even older than Francis Xavier’s failed mission to Japan. Beginning as early as the ninth century, stories of a Christian saint known as Josaphat began to circulate among monastic orders in Jerusalem, and later fanned out to all corners of Christendom. According to the tales told about him, which soon were translated into a dozen languages, Josaphat was the son of an Indian king but had renounced his wealth and royal status…
Read More
…ve me in that letter of the painful difficulties I would face in mastering Japanese. Doubtless, he spoke these words as someone who knew first-hand what that pain was like. Liberated from the burden of weighing the Japanese option further, I ran off at full speed in another direction.) Another reason I admired Bellah’s work was his original insights into and timely appropriations of the great sociologist Émile Durkheim. While American sociologists…
Read More