Religion Dispatches
…ga guru Baba Ramdev for having made major advances in popularizing yoga in India. (Recently, Ramdev has made the outrageous claim that yoga can cure homosexuality—he also supports the Indian government’s ongoing criminalization of sex between consenting adults of the same sex—as well as the far-reaching claim that it could cure cancer.) Modi’s recent efforts to reclaim yoga for India are just one part of a much larger public movement to define yog…
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…s in cash at the Karmapa’s makeshift headquarters near Dharamsala in North India. The Central Government of India, following weeks of investigation, finally cleared Karmapa of any wrongdoing (the money they found had indeed been an accumulation of donations). Speculations abound on what really triggered the raid last month, and there are various conspiracy theories, though it now appears that local politics played a key role. After the money was s…
Read More…reating serious backlash among BYU students and faculty. Since then, Honor Code enforcement has been conducted through referrals—even third party referrals—of suspect students to a campus Honor Code office, a system of enforcement that has created significant opportunities for abuse. (When I was a BYU student, it was possible to make an anonymous third-party referral.) Honor Code enforcement on campus has been used to bait and target gays and libe…
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…des. Perhaps, just to be safe, we should kick out all Catholic clergy from Germany, or eject the Catholic Church entirely from any place where it functions. To do otherwise would be “reckless.” If you think that language is offensive, consider that at least I am targeting a religious institution, which can bear responsibility for the actions of its employees. Douthat proposes not just “closing Germany’s borders to new arrivals for the time being,”…
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…ea came from, and what truths his fiction might reveal to us. Israel is in Germany and the Mormons rule a Missouri monarchy. I think you could do a much better job than me in explaining the doppelgänger world you created… The Arab states of the Middle East and North Africa are united in a democratic superpower—the UAS—with its capital in Riyadh. Persia, Kurdistan, and Turkey are independent democracies closely allied with the UAS. Israel, as you n…
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…give our people a future of prosperity and security the United States and India stand united.” He went on to praise the people of Mumbai, evoking Gandhi and particularly noting that the strength of India—like the strength of the USA—lies in diversity, which was on full display during those attacks when we saw “Hindus, Sikhs, Christians, Jews, and Muslims, protecting each other, saving each other, living the common truth of all the world’s great r…
Read More…fter being stopped at the Romania-Bulgaria border, the boy was returned to Germany. The boy told the Tagesspiegel newspaper that he had come out as gay, and as a result his father had decided to try and force him to marry a woman. Channel News Asia also reported on the story: In a case highlighting the problems Germany faces in integrating its four-million-strong Muslim community, Nasser El-Ahmad, who has a Lebanese background, has also told Germa…
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…executive director of Students for a Free Tibet, who regularly travels to India for nonviolence trainings. In India, “their action is a little bit more spontaneous.” A New Revolution The March 10 National Uprising Day protest in Delhi was bigger than ever this year. Tempa Tsering, the official representative of the Dalai Lama, says more than 1,000 gathered in front of the United Nations’ office to mark the anniversary of the 1959 rebellion in Tib…
Read More…scrimination and harassment, they also have an important symbolic place in India.” The Times of India reports, The Rajya Sabha on Friday unanimously passed a private member’s bill seeking equal rights with dignity for transgenders, who are widely scorned, ostracised and ghettoised in the country. It was historic not only because it was the first private member’s bill to be passed in the Upper House in 36 years, but also since it might turn out to…
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…ngly brutal sliver of history, after which most of the surviving Jews left Germany (and Europe). Germany, in turn, was forced by international powers to reform and repent. And pay. America’s crimes were drawn out over centuries. And while the Civil Rights Movement forced certain improvements to be made, America has never really had to reckon with its past and dramatically change course as a result. (One need simply walk around the hallways of publ…
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