Religion Dispatches
…slim. Musically, they function in a similar way to qawwals in northwestern India and in Pakistan. Their music draws on Indic and Islamicate sources. Parvathy Baul was the first female Baul I had seen in public, and her music demonstrated the ways that cultures combine to create new forms. The song in the clip below ends with an invocation of figures normally associated with the qawwali tradition, showing how the Baul tradition is still evolving. B…
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…wn Planet Probably a third of the world’s Muslims live in or come from the Indian subcontinent, such as this writer, descended from the steamy plains of the Punjab but raised in gelid New England. And South Asia’s a part of the world we never stop hearing about. Of course, most of this attention is directed to Pakistan, so let’s start there. In Silent Waters, we follow a young man from a small village impressed by the Islamist message coming from…
Read More…rk than most imagine. Muslims settled in New Amsterdam with the Dutch West India Company as early as the 17th century. Indeed, mosques are nothing new to Manhattan. Two guys walk into a bar… to go to church. The Internet is the next mission field for the LDS Church. “Our leaders were struggling for years to find a more effective, less annoying way to get our message across than knocking on doors,” said Scott Swofford, director of media for the chu…
Read More…oncos games this season. Which prompts the question, is football its own religion? Does the black church keep black women single? Julia Roberts has become a “practicing Hindu” after spending time in India shooting her latest film. Meanwhile, the U.S. Postal Service will issue a stamp commemorating Mother Theresa on August 26th, what would have been her 100th birthday….
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…e 1930s (Beau Hunks, among others) to Disney’s more recent Aladdin and the Indiana Jones franchise. It is so natural, so expected, that most of us have no idea how it affects us. I’ve asked my college students what they think of when they see a scene from a movie in which they hear the call to prayer and see a minaret or dome. The answer? “Something bad is about to happen.” Islamophobia can remain in latent form until it is triggered by economic,…
Read MoreToday, my friend Margot informed me that Eggs Benedict has pork in it. Just goes to show what I know, right? I don’t censor myself—and if you have been following you will see that I some times don’t even properly edit. This is not as easy as it may seem, this blogging for one hundred days— Ramadan through my first hajj. Meanwhile I AM actually fasting; and actually reading Qur’an everyday; I am actually attending tarawih regularly, and trying to…
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…e Separation, similar dynamics appear to be unfolding in the United States today, where a combination of forces—new cultural mores surrounding gender and sexuality, increasing religious diversity, and declining numbers of Christians—are disrupting the religious landscape and leading to a sense of angst among American Christians that their country is turning its back on what they believe to be its Christian heritage. Accordingly, Christian national…
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…a matter of fact, we’re seeing something of that with the sex selection in India and China, almost eugenic kind of selection. Walter: And the whole health care thing where rich people have access. That’s got to make a difference in longterm maintenance of genes and all that. Dan: That’s a trend that’s been accelerated, but it’s by no means a new one. I remember someone saying that we all have some royal blood in us because royalty tends to survive…
Read More…s several instances where textbooks included the Muslim attack on Delhi in India in the 14th century: “As many as 100,000 Hindu prisoners were massacred before the gates of the city.” TFN recorded Friday’s public debate. Here is a clip of a woman defending the resolution, in which she suggests that all textbooks should come with warning stickers so people know of a book’s “biases” before they ever open it. Notice that she only says what she belie…
Read More…oatian, Farsi (Persian), Fijian, Haitian, Hiligaynon, Hindi (Fiji), Hindi (India), Hmong, Ilokano, Indonesian, Kosraean, Laotian, Malagasy, Malay, Marshallese, Mongolian, Navajo, Palauan, Papiamento, Pohnpeian, Portuguese (Portugal), Romanian, Serbian, Sinhala, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swahili, Tahitian, Tamil, Telugu, Thai, Turkish, Urdu, Vietnamese, Yapese I’ll also be thinking about local translators sitting in their home countries, relaying…
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