Religion Dispatches
…it meant to stand up to the mighty British Empire that occupied his native India, as well as to apartheid in South Africa.“ Clarkson told Religion Dispatches that that chance encounter was his “opening into the world of politics and clashing religious worldviews as I considered conscientious objection to the war in light of my Christian upbringing and Gandhi’s powerful call to conscience.“ Clarkson has written for Salon, Mother Jones, The Nation,…
Read More…y shrinks and the country has all but been partitioned by sectarianism. In India, a restive young population and dimming economic prospects have helped to fuel the rise of vigilante groups made up largely of Hindu men and tacitly backed by local and state officials from the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party. Even “secular” rulers and political parties have embraced religious institutions when it suited their convenience, tapping into their deep wells…
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…7th-century treaty between one of the Sultans of Aceh and the British East India Company that guaranteed their independence as “proof” they were not part of the former Netherlands Indies or modern Indonesia. For more than a century, Dutch Christian colonials and Indonesian secular nationalists found it convenient to label the Acehenese as Islamic fanatics, extremists, terrorists—or by whatever term currently in vogue for demonizing Muslim resistan…
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…
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…ed States was the ability to develop our own identity. I was brought up an Indian Muslim. There were so few of us Indians in the U.S. then that if you saw a woman in a sari on the other end of the shopping mall, you went running over to introduce yourself and, a day or two later, your whole families were having tandoori chicken picnics together. I was about 8 or 9 when I discovered that Hindus and Muslims were not divisions of the same religion. I…
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…drives the money changers from the Temple. For centuries, many temples in India functioned like banks, making interest-bearing loans. Commercialized forms of penance helped inspire the Reformation in Europe. The landscape of American religion is often conceived of as a market in which churches and denominations compete for worshippers. Sales tactics influence evangelists, and companies use religion to push political agendas. Nevertheless, there’s…
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…ned their wealth in complicity with the violent British colonial regime in India alongside questions about her lifestyle and motivations? Wouldn’t it be logical to ask what bolstered her lavish lifestyle of private flights and endless parties and fundraisers? And what, exactly, her wealth did?Remember, this is a show that has clearly demonstrated its concern over climate change, to which the wealthy disproportionately contribute (even as they’re l…
Read More…when they put down the twin towers I’ve been beating them up.” A native of India, Mr. Sen had saved enough money to open a small copy shop. While he had no family in the U.S., he had friends and associates who were part of this new life. While he was a Hindu, Sen had a Muslim roommate with whom he frequently discussed matters of belief. And when they did, Mr. Sen expressed his deep disappointment that there was so much violence in the world on acc…
Read More…oses. I witnessed another example of “swastika-phobia” on a trip to Kochi, India, once home to a sizable population of Indian Jews, a part of which is still known as “Jew Town.” I overheard an American tourist exclaim with alarm, “I was in Jew Town, and there were swastikas everywhere!” When her friend tried to explain that in Kochi the swastika is a symbol of Hinduism and not Nazism, she responded, “I know, but still!” Because the swastika inspir…
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…sibilities opened up by a more cosmopolitan empire and an enriched Muslim-Hindian synthesis. If he worried about anything, Lévi-Strauss worried about false dichotomies. He was interested in the hyphens that bind, not the selves that divide. Fascinated as he was by the mental structures the human mind imposes on reality as it attempts to make order and sense, he was not as simplistic a dichotomist as some of his critics believed. Binary logic is th…
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