Religion Dispatches
…sia (and Turkey, Malaysia, and countries with large Muslim minorities like India), have successfully kept what they wanted of their traditions and integrated what they wanted of other traditions. They are navigating what it means to be modern, which the Arab world is having difficulties with. Because of the popular conflation of Arabs and Muslims, both in terms of number and authenticity, including at bodies such as the Council of Foreign Relation…
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…ansa Yogananda, founder of the Self-Realization Fellowship, was the second Indian guru (Vivekananda was the first) to travel from India to the United States and to attract a large following of Americans interested in yoga. These gurus taught renditions of yoga that were radically different from the systems of stretching and muscle-building postures meant to function as fitness routines that we so often associate with yoga in the United States toda…
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….” Gandhi had the luxury of facing one huge evil—the British occupation of India—just as earlier U.S. social movements organized around resisting racial segregation or the war in Vietnam. One big target does have its advantages. But Gandhi saw his opposition to British rule as merely one part of his larger program of “constructive work.” (Here again Desai errs, claiming that “the more mature” Gandhi shifted his focus from politics to constructive…
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…ble book would have taken time and money I did not possess. Traveling from India to Egypt seemed to offer a fairly simple way of linking my south Asian heritage with the history of the regions where Islamic jurisprudence came of age. A less tangible motive also helps explain the book’s trajectory. Although it is no bad thing to recognize the diversity and benign qualities of Muslim life—and I hope my book does that throughout—I thought it crucial…
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…since the 1970s, when fetal sex determination via amniocentesis first hit India.) But sex-selective abortion in the U.S. as “gendercide” is a drumbeat being picked up in the anti-choice community. There a bill to ban sex-selection abortion circulating in New York, and Georgia Right to Life is trying to gather support for similar legislation. Live Action even addresses the issue in a February blog post quoting a Canadian Medical Association Journa…
Read More…hael Page, was motivated by xenophobia. On the other hand, the massacre in India 28 years ago was a culmination of tensions between the Indian state and the Sikh community. The most sacred of all Sikh places of worship or gurdwara had been occupied by the Indian army under state surveillance in June 1984. The anger at the desecration of the gurdwara found an extreme response when prime minister Indira Gandhi was assassinated by two of her Sikh bod…
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…felt that “they are not morally obliged to help somebody in severe need in India, even though to do so wouldn’t cost them much, compared to only 22% of Christians who respond the same way (a difference that is easily statistically significant).” He continued: In other words, the data shows that people who self-identify as Christians are considerably more likely to think there is a moral obligation to help somebody in severe need (in India) than p…
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…h sacred texts as the Kama Sutra and Krittivasa Ramayana. It was not until India came under British colonial rule—with its Christian assumptions about sex—that Section 377, the first Indian law banning “carnal intercourse against the order of nature,” was passed, in 1860. The efforts of modern-day Indian activists—both Hindu and non-Hindu—for sexual rights finally led to the overturning of Section 377, in 2009. A religion is not practiced in a vac…
Read More…ctivists had also slammed Wurst as the singer advanced in the competition. India: Profile of an Openly Gay Prince Manvendra Singh Gohil, Crown Prince of Rajpipla, India, was profiled this week in Frontiers, a Los Angeles-based publication. Manvendra was born and raised to assume the custodianship of the crown, with all the discipline, expectations and circumspection his catered life allowed. He was always surrounded by servants, so protected that…
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…shall come up in her palaces,” so missionaries saw the built landscapes of India and China as decrepit and decaying beneath their gilded surfaces. One missionary described his impressions of India as “disgust[ing]” to “every sense”: “I thought, Surely it can get no lower without opening the mouth of hell.” According to nineteenth-century missionaries, it was because “heathens” spent their time worshiping the wrong deities—spirits in nature, ancest…
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