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Teaching the Dalai Lama’s Monks: Better Religion Through Science

…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…

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Eat, Pray, Trash: What the Critics Don’t See

…xuriates in the rich food of Italy; tries to still the “monkey-mind” at an Indian ashram; and embarks on a torrid love affair with a Brazilian in Bali. But the real journey, she writes, is inward. Italy is explicitly centered on “pleasure,” India on “devotion,” and Bali on “balance.” By the end, Liz has discovered the “physics of the quest”: If you are brave enough to leave behind everything familiar and comforting (which can be anything from your…

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Creationism v. Integrationism

…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…

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Ainslie Embree’s Gift to Religious Studies

…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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#NamaSlay, Or How Black Women Are Using Trap Yoga as a Mode of Spiritual Resistance

…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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Fox News Controversy on Yoga and White Supremacy Reveals Problem of Yoga Discussion

…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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Speaking for Hinduism in the Absence of a Conversation

…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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Sarah Palin to Tour Israel, Christian-Style

…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…

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Eat, Pray, Double-Standard

…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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What Irish Marriage Vote Means for Catholic Church; The Lonely Fight for Equality in Belize; Progress and Backlash in Tunisia; Global LGBT Recap

…n 1533. Of the 76 countries that still criminalize sodomy around the world today, most do so as a holdover from British colonial rule. (Britain repealed its buggery laws in 2003.) In Belize, antigay laws extend beyond the criminal code: Homosexuals are still technically an explicit class of prohibited immigrants, along with prostitutes, “any idiot,” the insane and “any person who is deaf and dumb.” ….In Belize, church leaders are granted deferenc…

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