Religion Dispatches
…ivative. But Islam has been in Bosnia for as long as it’s been in much of India, where my family’s from. It’s possible that many South Asians have been Muslim for less time than many European Muslims. The same goes for Istanbul, which came under Ottoman rule after parts of the Balkans. When we travel, we find such assumptions challenged, and we find that the ways in which the world works right now did not necessarily hold true in the past—in ba…
Read More…orth, probably Dubai in the south, central Europe in the west and probably India in the east to get this kind of economic power. It doesn’t deserve to be second fiddle to anyone, and with Turkey’s rise, I can see it playing a global role, in the near future, commensurate with its historic one. At the moment I’m overlooking the last stop on the European rail network. From here, you can go all the way to London. There’s another rail station on the A…
Read More…st Africans studying Qur’an—and speaking Turkish. Tourists from Indonesia, India, Egypt, and other Muslim societies, finding in Istanbul a cultural touchstone, an inspiring mix of the modern and the pious, challenging the traditional players in the politics of Islamic practice. They all come here for a reason; the visibility of Islamic practice a far cry from where the country was even two decades ago. Turkey offers something fellow Muslim nations…
Read MoreAs we passed by the “Little India” shopping center, the driver of the car next to us began excitedly waving to one of our hosts. It turns out that they knew each other, though the man’s cheerfulness belied his true purpose. He’d been living in America for years now, like tens of thousands of other exiled Bosniaks, and had returned solely for the commemorations at Srebrenica. His father’s body had finally been found; or at least all of it, except…
Read More…served them meat. The Hindus want the restaurant to pay for their trip to India to perform cleansing rituals for the carnivorous gaffe. Is Chain World a video game, a religion, or both? A couple in South Carolina saw the face of Jesus in their Walmart receipt. Jesus saves, indeed. Christ will no longer be a part of Campus Crusade for Christ. The evangelical college ministry is changing its name to Cru. Which sounds like a restaurant. Are the Ne…
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…phenomenon; variants can be found guarding temples and warding off evil in India, Myanmar, and beyond. But perhaps the most widely-recognized iterations of the mythological beast are the Egyptian and the Greek sphinxes. The Egyptian sphinx typically has a man’s head and a feline body, and serves the benevolent purpose of protection. (It is worth noting that Hegel described the Egyptian religion of which the sphinx was a part as a religion of the r…
Read More…nd French Jesuits from Canada mounted several missionary sorties among the Indians. Many colonists blamed the slave uprising of 1712 on Elie Neau, a Huguenot-turned-Anglican and an early advocate for abolition who ran a school for Africans in New York City. Roman Catholics arrived in greater numbers in the nineteenth century, from places like Ireland, Germany, and Italy. As with other groups, finding their place in the rich tapestry of American di…
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…g even nominal interest on the efforts of a women’s beading cooperative in India? Should I be engaging global economic instability through an even modestly risk-based structure? Isn’t that what sent my 401K into the crapper along with the market-invested retirement savings of millions of Americans? What’s more, is it appropriate for churches, mosques, synagogues, and temples to participate in market capitalism as an extension of their core spiritu…
Read More…, Moses is just another in a long line of law givers that includes Manu of India, Minos of Greece, and Mises of Egpyt. (See, they even all start with M, the film points out, suggesting a mysterious connection.) Similarly, the Ten Commandments are a derivative version of passages from the Egyptian Book of the Dead. For Zeitgeist, there’s nothing new under the sun-worshipers. The Bible is an “Astrotheological Literary Hybrid.” At the conclusion of P…
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…nt Tibetan history. Thubten Ngodup, a 50-year-old exiled Tibetan living in India, died in the Indian capital, New Delhi, in April 1998 after he burnt himself to protest against the Chinese rule. The radicalization of monks of such youth certainly raises a lot of important questions. Will there be more suicides in the weeks and months to come, and will it spill over into the exile community? Does the trend underscore the view that nonviolence does…
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