Religion Dispatches
…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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…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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…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…
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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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…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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…And most of its recent growth, in such developing Asian markets as China, India, and Russia, has been under the Amway name.” Despite hiring marketing executives to help revitalize the relaunch—and despite the fact that an FTC examination into Amway’s business practices concluded in 1979 that it was not an illegal pyramid scheme (because compensation is based on retail sales to consumers, and because salespeople are not paid for recruiting new col…
Read More…uman rights of transgender persons— including right to self determination, freedom of movement and freedom of expression—but these laws are also open to abuse. In this case, although the women were asleep while they were arrested in their hotel rooms, they are still being investigated under Section 28. Justice for Sisters criticized “dehumanizing” media coverage of the arrests. India: Legislature Rejects Decriminalization, UN Official Wants Court…
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…t of the regular centuries-old curriculum of all Tibetan Buddhist monks in India. Since the Dalai Lama was forced from China in 1959, India has graciously hosted him, the Tibetan government in exile, and thousands of Tibetans, including many monastics in new monasteries and nunneries. Unlike for Westerners, it is relatively common for Tibetans to become monks (even today, 1 in 10 Tibetans do). We just completed our second year of a five-year pilot…
Read More…l area, unlike Iraq which is an active war zone. In 2002, Gujarat state in India, the home of Gandhi, saw riots over the span of two months that resulted in the death of over 2000 Muslims and the displacement of over 150,000 people. The rate there was also 30 people/day. The complicity of Indian state actors, notably Narendra Modi, resulted in a denial of entry into the US. However, the loss of life over those months has not entered our consciousn…
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