Religion Dispatches
…r). To take a somewhat parallel case, Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh has promoted an appreciation for Jesus, but not for the Christian theology writ large. After all, a Buddhist would rightly be critical of a system that posits a belief in an essential soul. But where some Catholic voices (and Protestant ones as well) go out of their way to disparage yoga, Thich Nhat Hanh never uses incendiary rhetoric to tell his audience not to become Christia…
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…guess, the largest Muslim population in the world by 2050 will actually be India. 2008 Summer Olympics – Opening Ceremony – Beijing, China 同一个世界 同一个梦想 – U.S. Army World Class Athlete Program – FMWRC. Photo via U.S. Army/Flickr 3. Because China: That Thing about Muslim Plurality in 2070 Might Not Actually Be True The wild card that could sink item 2: China. Five years ago, China’s Christian population was an estimated 65 million—just 5% of the coun…
Read More…Lee Badgett from the University of Massachusetts presented a case study on India, which concluded that the economic costs of homophobia and LGBT exclusion ranged from .1 to 1.7% of the country’s GDP – a figure she said represented the tip of the iceberg because it was based only on labor and health impacts on which data is available. Luiz Loures, deputy executive director of UNAIDS and assistant secretary general of the United Nations, said that e…
Read More…s Muslims live in democracies. That includes Turkey, Pakistan, Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Mali, Tunisia, Nigeria, etc., most of which are Muslim-majority. Are these perfect? Of course not. But they are democracies, and they aspire to democracy. Many of the countries that aren’t democracies have attempted democratic transitions, and have been actively or indirectly blocked by our country. Which is a democracy. So, why does our democrac…
Read More…y and remembering our true African culture, one that celebrates diversity, promotes equality and acceptance, and recognises the contribution of everyone, whatever their sexuality. Affirming the point of Alimi’s commentary, Ghanaian presidential hopeful George Boateng this week “delivered some frighteningly brutal homophobic promises to the people of Ghana,” reports Joe Williams for Pink News. Speaking on Kasapa radio, the political hopeful said th…
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….” Mendies would know. Born in Nepal to a Canadian mother (who had come to India as a Christian missionary in 1946) and an English-Burmese father who reared him as an evangelical Christian, in 1989 at the age of 34, Mendies was found guilty of “proselytizing” (in this case, placing bibles in Nepali hotel rooms) and spent six months in Kathmandu’s Central Jail, where he shared a cell with 17 other prisoners. Nepal’s intensely complicated political…
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…rts, for example, that: assimilation policies and land dispossession were “promoted by the governmental authorities of the time”; the Doctrine of Discovery was a specifically political debate, “according to which the discovery of lands by settlers granted an exclusive right to extinguish, either by purchase or conquest, the title to or possession of those lands by indigenous peoples”; and that it was a debate in which these historical/political pa…
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…tions were normal within Tibetan cultural practices and that the video was promoted by Chinese agents and sympathizers in order to impeach his character in the West. Indeed, according to Vice, professor of China studies Timothy Grose believes that “the interaction is being weaponised by sympathisers of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).” In other quarters, accusations of pedophilia, “grooming,” and sexual assault flooded comment boards. In a matte…
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…mass religious violence around the world in settings as diverse as Egypt, India, Myanmar, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. At first blush, it may seem that the United States shares little in common with these developing countries. Yet I have found unsettling similarities. In all these countries, the widespread adoption of a more militant approach stemmed centrally from fears that a historically and culturally dominant religious group was in danger of los…
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…sis in countries as diverse as Brazil, Central African Republic, Pakistan, India, and Myanmar, where vigilantes from dominant religious communities routinely attack the homes, businesses, and houses of worship of religious minorities with impunity. As I show in my recent book The Global Politics of Jesus: A Christian Case for Church-State Separation, similar dynamics appear to be unfolding in the United States today, where a combination of forces—…
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