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Liberals Need Not Choose Between Sexual Abuse Survivors and the Religious Minority Communities That Failed Them

…er, as our own campaigns recognize, Islam is a religion that advocates for freedom of conscience and speech, and also one that recognizes the pursuit of knowledge. We maintain that the right balance between both of these considerations requires a respectful, open and honest dialogue that protects the rights of all members.” It took an extraordinary amount of courage for ordinary Ahmadis to speak up given the reported sanctions against those who sa…

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Pride Month & Prejudice; ‘Worrisome Time’ For LGBT People; Global LGBT Recap

…ong” for May and the Conservative Party to be aligning themselves with and promoting “an organization that promotes hatred, homophobia and misogyny born of religious fundamentalism and masquerading as religious freedom.” The UK’s general election will be held on June 9. Poland: Warsaw Pride parade draws crowd in spite of opposition from church, gov’t, nationalists A crowd estimated by organizers at 50,000 people and by police at 13,000 marched in…

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Does Religion Condemn Homosexuality?

…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…

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Polygamy, Genius, and the Origin of Religion

…y the photography critic Teju Cole. Reviewing photographer Steve McCurry’s new collection of photos of India, Cole makes a distinction between an individual piece and the total sensibility that’s developed by a body of work. Again and again, Cole writes, McCurry’s photos show modern India at its more colorful, traditional, and quaint. His framing edits out the cellphones and shopping malls in favor of the saris and oxcarts. In small doses that’s f…

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Fake, Evil, Spiritual, Commodified; What’s the Truth About Popular Yoga?

…rds, it is always historically contingent, so it changes form as it enters new social contexts. Yoga underwent popularization when its advocates constructed new forms that intersected with contemporary consumer culture, though it’s meant to serve as a case study of a much larger phenomenon: yoga, like religion generally, is a human product that has undergone assimilation to the emergent and dominant consumer culture, and products that intersect wi…

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Sikh Temple Shooting: Two Massacres and the Virtual Transformation of Trauma

…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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Right-Wing Religion, Anti-Globalism, Authoritarian Rule: America Catches Up With the Rest of the World

…, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi in Egypt, Recep Erdogan in Turkey, Narendra Modi in India, and Vladimir Putin in Russia. No surprise that one of the first responses around the world to Trump’s victory were scenes of cheering right-wing Hindus in India and admiring Russians in Moscow. One of the first notes congratulating Trump came from an enthusiastic Duterte in Manila who only weeks earlier called Barack Obama a “son of a whore.” Now that the have-nots h…

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South Asian Religious Leaders Challenged to Take on Stigma and Discrimination: Global LGBT Recap

…1,409 marriages, 56 percent were to female couples. According to Gay Star News, about 120,000 people are in civil partnerships, which they will be able to convert to marriages beginning in December. Costa Rica: Survey Shows Split on Religion and Sexuality According to The Costa Rica News, the Ecumenical School of Religious Studies at the National University released the findings of a telephone survey and set of focus groups on the religious belie…

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An American Muslim Abroad, Or, Things I Saw in Dubai

…rresponding phases of the moon, so one night it may only be dimly lit (the new moon); or fully flooded with light (for the full moon). Returning to my point, namely that the UAE is a more Indian Ocean-oriented, and South Asian, society than a stereotypically Arab one, this mosque clearly continues in the vein of Mughal and Indo-Islamic architecture and owes far less to traditionally Arab-Islamic architecture. Compare to the Taj Mahal, and Badshahi…

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Mormon-Born Daya Mata Typifies American Yoga

…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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