Religion Dispatches
…espite complaints by U.S. conservatives that it threatens Lively’s rights. India: Resistance to Re-Criminalization but Uncertain Future for Legislative Fix In a show of defiance against the Indian Supreme Court’s recent ruling re-criminalizing homosexuality, a record 5,000 people turned out for Mumbai’s gay pride celebration last Saturday. (See photos here.) The Voice of America explores the response of India’s gay community to the ruling: “Despit…
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…s lived in distinct territories, and the Ottomans never ruled over greater India, a Muslim minority in India, under British rule, resented and feared British colonial aggression against an important symbol of their faith. So Shia and Sunni Muslims joined together to support what was traditionally a Sunni institution, the Caliphate. Fast forward a few decades to the Pakistan Movement, which grew out of concerns for the status of Muslim minorities i…
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…e early history of modern yoga as a response to Orientalist stereotypes of India as despotic, unscientific, mystical, effeminate, and in need of Western domination, science, reason, and masculinity. Yoga became a means through which Hindu nationalists could display Indian strength and independence in response to these Orientalist representations, which were used to support the colonial project. Nevertheless, the story of yoga’s popularization does…
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…emarkable book of essays, Utopias in Conflict: Religion and Nationalism in India (University of California Press, 1990), Embree showed how secular and religious visions of the Indian nation were fundamentally in competition, though he understood that the religious versions had their own political motivations. In a separate essay, he ruminated over the partition of India in 1948 and the creation of Pakistan. Though ostensibly an attempt to keep Mus…
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…ually be taught to all the thousands of Tibetan monks and nuns in exile in India. In the pilot we just completed, several professors and graduate students taught life sciences, neurosciences, physics, math, and science philosophy to thirty-three monks and 5 nuns. Evolution was the first life sciences topic two of my co-teachers and I decided to focus on. For my section, the monks developed an experiment to test the hypothesis, a small piece of Dar…
Read More…lating HAF with Dinanath Batra, the retired schoolteacher who sued Penguin India to “ban” the book in the Indian markets. “Similar to Mr. Batra,” Jerryson asserts, “Ms. Shukla considers religious organizations the controllers and arbitrators of academic discussion.” He then goes on to offer a dubious claim that he had been censored from offering comments on Shukla’s blog in the Huffington Post, since HAF—or any group or individual that writes for…
Read More…stice for Sisters criticized “dehumanizing” media coverage of the arrests. India: Legislature Rejects Decriminalization, UN Official Wants Court to Make ‘Enlightened’ Decision The legislature once again voted down a bill to decriminalize homosexuality. Juan Mendez, the UN’s Special Rapporteur on torture and other cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment told Firstpost this week that he hopes the Supreme Court of India, which is reconsi…
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…ern celebrity to don a bindi, or Coldplay the first English artists to use India as an exotic backdrop, the backlash from the Indian community was fierce. *** Breanna grew up in an atheist household in San Francisco, but lately she’s been searching for something more. “I’m in a physics program right now, and the more advanced you get in this stuff, the more you have to just shrug and admit you don’t know. So I started casting out for something to…
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…gious relationships, so much of that ended when I announced I was going to India. They couldn’t believe I was trading in my white Jesus card for yoga,” says Rogers. “I started a new spiritual journey of understanding what it means to be a woman of color and the divinity in that. I just don’t believe in rule books anymore.” When she returned to the U.S., she found yoga classes here to be lacking spiritual resonance. “I went to the mountaintop, I le…
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…ncy, a May poll found that 52 percent of Czechs support same-sex marriage. India: Profile of author whose stories in local language speak to isolated LGBT people Reuters profiles author Vasudhendra, who wrote stories about the life of his gay protagornist Mohandaswarmy for years before the author publicly came out himself. He tells Reuters that his stories, published in the regional language of the state of Karnataka, were initially written under…
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