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

…ety representatives from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Nepal and Sri Lanka.on August 18 and 19 in Dhaka, Bangladesh. According to a report from the UN Development Program, participants affirmed that “Religious leaders and faith-based organizations have a crucial role to play in upholding the human rights of sexual minorities and ensuring appropriate and accessible health services, including for men who have sex with men (MSM) and transge…

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A Devil’s Dozen of the Best ‘New Religion Journalism’ Books of the Decade

…e Trump adviser Stephen Bannon. Drawing his title from the triple brackets used online by white supremacists to identify individuals who are Jewish (or whom they think are Jewish), New York Times editor Jonathan Weisman used the symbol in an act of reclamation and resistance against ascendant antisemitism. Drawing from his own experience, as well as analyzing the rise in hate crimes and speech against Jews both internationally and in the United St…

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Hagee and McCain Part Ways

…eology of hate.” Through it all, the McCain campaign apparently saw more pluses than minuses in keeping the Hagee endorsement. The break came only when a Hagee sermon appeared that called Hitler an agent of God, hunting down Jews to force them to go where God wants them: the land of Israel. According to the New York Times, “Rabbi Eric Yoffie, president of the Union for Reform Judaism, the country’s largest branch of Judaism, said that while he did…

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White Christian Nationalism May Not Be Religious, But It Is Christian

…they presume to be lost: white and Christian dominance. In a larger context, none of the nationalist and exclusivist movements—Jewish nationalism in Israel; Islamism in parts of Africa, the Middle East, South and Southeast Asia; Hindu nationalism in parts of India; Buddhist nationalism in Sri Lanka, Myanmar and Thailand—that have grown in recent years are grounded in theology. They’re all connected by a shared sense of grievance and an imagined co…

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Religious, Spiritual, and “None of the Above”: How Did Mindfulness Get So Big?

…uccess of these early Asian Buddhist reformers—from places as disparate as Sri Lanka, Burma and Japan. Their innovative efforts positioned the Dharma as consistent with “reason” rather than superstition, “empiricism” rather than divine revelation and ultimately the “spiritual” rather than the “religious.” It is also in part due to the parallel efforts of Indian gurus, such as Vivekananda, who presented yoga as an ancient wisdom tradition to help A…

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After Michael Jerryson (1974-2021) Nobody Will Ever Look at Buddhism the Same Way

…of the most virulent are the Buddhist riots against Muslims in Myanmar and Sri Lanka where vitriolic monks have added to the climate of hate and ethnic anger. It was this violent side of Buddhism that both troubled and interested Jerryson. It troubled him since he admired the tradition and cherished its attitudes towards peace and tolerance. But as a scholar he was also fascinated with the diversity within the Buddhist community and the degree to…

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January 6 protester holds giant image of White Jesus in a Make America Great Again cap.

America Appears to be Heading for a Religious Civil War

…d 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 losing its privileged station. Co…

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It’s Theology, Not Baseball: Misunderstanding Iraq’s Sectarian Conflicts

…rend is hardly confined to Muslim-majority societies. Buddhist Myanmar and Sri Lanka, Hindu India, and Christian Uganda and Zimbabwe have done their share of official hate-mongering. So has the United States’ principal ally in the Middle East, Israel. As David Sheen has noted in these pages, none other than the former Chief Rabbi of Israel, Ovadia Yosef, invoked biblical passages to call for the eradication of Palestinians. Far from being an isola…

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Chatting with Myanmar’s Buddhist “Terrorist”

…as Galagoda Aththe Gnanasara, the leader of the Bodu Bala Sena movement in Sri Lanka, which Time, Economist, and other international news media have also criticized. Much like Wirathu, he has railed against the imagined threat of a small Muslim minority in his country, and like Wirathu was accused of inciting riots against it. I asked Wirathu if he and the BBS were working together, and he admitted that he had met with Gnanasara, but insisted that…

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Monks With Guns: Discovering Buddhist Violence

…history of Buddhism across Mongolia, Tibet, Japan, China, Korea, Thailand, Sri Lanka, and India. Our intention is not to argue that Buddhists are angry, violent people—but rather that Buddhists are people, and thus share the same human spectrum of emotions, which includes the penchant for violence. Although the book only arrived at bookstores last month, it apparently touched some nerves in the academic community before its release. Some have obje…

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