Religion Dispatches
…cation. Both our families are active Mormons. My uncle served a mission to Finland, my cousins to Venezuela and Minnesota. My father is a high priest, my aunt a former Relief Society president. Gary’s is an old Salt Lake family with generations in the Church. One of his brothers is a branch president of a Spanish branch in Salt Lake, and the other is a former bishop and current temple worker. Gary’s nephews and nieces have served missions in Irela…
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…e having four times as many teachers as Europe’s highest ranked system, in Finland. There are there separate government owned defense corporations. As for Greek health care, it is unclear whether waste or outright theft by state employees is the greater drain on a hopelessly overburdened system. And then there are the pensions: all men who work in professions deemed “arduous” by a mystifying government metric are eligible to retire at age 55, the…
Read More…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…
Read More…will visit Israel this week after a stop in India for the luminary-studded India Today Conclave—at which she will deliver a keynote address entitled “My Vision of America.” Palin’s trip to Jerusalem and Nazareth (just after Purim, Queen Esther’s big moment in the Jewish calendar) is probably no more than the usual Republican political stopover to show solidarity for Israel. To her loyal followers, Palin’s pilgrimage will be one more sign not only…
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…
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…r evangelical opponents of yoga, part of the problem is that it comes from India. In discussing yoga’s roots in India, he characterizes it as “almost manically syncretistic.” Mohler warns that if that syncretism is allowed to further infect the United States, we will end up living in the unthinkable: a “post-Christian” nation. But this attempt to produce a monolithic vision of yoga ignores the fact that it, like religion itself, is anything but a…
Read More…asure are frivolous acts — for women. Gilbert has a spiritual awakening in India, having travelled to the ashram of her ex-boyfriend’s guru. Ultimately, Hinduism’s teaching of the sacred in all of us resonates deeply in her. And yet, I must admit, it is much easier to stomach this message when it is proclaimed by the poor masses of India versus from a white woman from the United States. In a similar vein, the depiction of Hinduism in the ashram se…
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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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…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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