Religion Dispatches
…xamples that first came to mind started with the letter “I”: Iraq, Israel, India, Indonesia. Of course I quickly thought of exceptions to the rule, like Lebanon, Sri Lanka—and the United States of America. Europeans tell us that they don’t understand why we insist on bringing religion into politics. Their situation is certainly different from ours; according to a 2005 poll, only about half of the people in EU member countries “believe in a god,” a…
Read More…s decision to appoint Amal Suleiman to the same position a few months ago. India also saw a woman preside over marriages as early as last August. Al-Awani’s appointment and those like it look to be following a wider trend of women playing a more public role in religion. While women have always played a large role in religion by leading halaqas and organizing pilgrimages, these have traditionally been mostly female gatherings that were not highly v…
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…ks that Occupy Faith has set itself are: to ally with unions and others to promote fair wages for all, especially low-wage workers to work for fair tax policy to join coalitions supporting constitutional change to get money out of politics and limit the power of corporations to participate in events and initiatives organized to promote justice and fairness to take nonviolent, direct action to the streets and halls of corporate and government p…
Read More…ar, and Myra Bronstein, who was required to train her own replacement from India in order to qualify for severance. Greenhouse then provides an overview of what’s going on for workers: One of the least examined but most important trends taking place in the United States today is the broad decline in the status and treatment of American workers—white-collar and blue-collar workers, middle-class and low-end workers—that began nearly three decades ag…
Read More…bridge by reminding the jumper of his Christian faith. A former pastor in Indiana is going to trial for 10 counts of securities fraud after he defrauded parishioners in a Ponzi scheme. Archaeologists unearthed an 1800-year-old statue of the Buddha in India. In Iowa, a pastor is praying that the IRS comes after his church for his political campaign against three Iowa Supreme Court judges who ruled to allow same-sex marriages. The American Family A…
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…rst, Law’s Company acquired the similarly mismanaged and unprofitable East India and China companies, then slaving companies, then tobacco monopolies, and he even offered to buy up further quantities of the Crown’s bad debt, converting it to stock. Law’s public display of bewildering confidence in the future of his Company finally sold others on his ideas. The big idea man, who was also a consummate big talker, finally succeeded—for increasing pub…
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…Jewish foodies. Kashrut comes within a dense, rich, long-standing culture promoting, ideally, upright, prudent, modest living, including, reverence for and balanced coexistence with the natural world. The final, and perhaps greatest irony to the dismissal of kashrut, is that Jews through the ages have adopted the local cuisines and food cultures of all of their homelands—whether Persia, Greece, Morocco, Poland, or India—and adapted them all quite…
Read More…s under Muslim rule, with no mass conversion. Even if we combine Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh again, less than 1/3 of the population is Muslim, for an empire that existed for several centuries, it seems to give lie to your assertion that Muslims are forced to convert people. We can also look at Spain from the 8th-15th centuries, which is considered a golden age for Jews, Christians, and Muslims because no one was forced to convert. There is als…
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…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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…M. Hutchens of the Christian Zionist “Jerusalem Connection,” who has been promoting the piece. Why? Bartholomew: “I can see why Freund would enthuse over this, but it’s less clear why a conservative evangelical like Hutchens would want to promote the idea of 500,000 to 1 million Portuguese and Spaniards embracing a religion other than Christianity. Such are the mysteries of Christian Zionism.” Coral Ridge Ministries Produces Is Jesus God?: Since…
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