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Claude, Adieu: A Farewell to Lévi-Strauss

…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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Is Monsanto Satan? The Pleasure and Problem of Conspiracy Theory

…) I knew Monsanto sues farmers into oblivion, caused a rash of suicides in India, suppresses negative media coverage, and pays politicians, and scientists to lie on its behalf. But there was one story I didn’t believe, because I knew it wasn’t true: Monsanto hadn’t paid me. So I did what any academic or journalist would do, and started learning more about the company that supposedly had me on its payroll. In the process, I discovered that very lit…

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10 Years Later: An American Muslim Looks Back at Iraq

…the war. My mother’s family (which is, immediately speaking, from northern India) is supposedly descended from an Iraqi who left Mesopotamia around 1250. In Indo-Islamic culture, among others, we have shajaras, literally (family) trees. That’s how we know. This fortunate ancestor (being Arab) spoke Arabic, so he found employment in the service of the Delhi Sultans, and the family line was from then on inseparable from Islamic law, arts and letters…

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Mini-Review of A Jihad for Love

…umerous awards including Best Film at the Tri-Continental Film Festival in India and Best Documentary at Turin LGBT Film Festival. The film explores the lives of gay and lesbian Muslims in several different countries, portraying jihad not as a holy war but as a struggle to reconcile one’s faith with one’s sexuality. The film doesn’t feature experts or religious scholars, but rather individual women and men who are trying to find their place in a f…

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SoulCycle Looks to Sell its Soul

…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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You Are Not Your Star Sign

…his arms. Ophiuchus has long been part of sidereal astrology (dominant in India, among other places), but absent from the traditionally twelve-signed tropical system most popular with American newspapers until now, with the revised map of the night sky and its influence on human destiny. Just as the revision of the Zodiac had induced popular outcry—people who had long self-identified as melodramatically emotional Pisces were suddenly told, for in…

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The Landmark 85-Year-Old Report Absent From Debates Over Missionary’s Death

…s death, Chau highlighted the motivating force behind his journey into the Indian Ocean: “You guys might think I’m crazy in all this …. But I think it’s worth it to declare Jesus to these people.” There is no end to the commentary on the meaning of Chau’s death. To some, he’s a martyr invoked in the same breath as Jim Elliot and his fellow missionaries who lost their lives in efforts to reach the most remote populations for Christ in Ecuador in 19…

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Back to School at The First Public School In the Country To Require a World Religions Course

…differences between Sunni and Shia Muslims, to the Hindu values invoked by India’s BJP party, to Biblical allusions that saturate American political rhetoric, survey data shows Americans know almost nothing about religion. Religion scholars (including Diane Moore, Stephen Prothero, and myself) have suggested that change must begin in the schools. The establishment clause does not forbid teaching about religion from a non-devotional perspective and…

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Barbara Ehrenreich’s Bright-Sided Explores the Dark Side of Positive Thinking

…has brought more layoffs and financial turbulence to the middle class, the promoters of positive thinking have increasingly emphasized this negative judgment: to be disappointed, resentful, or downcast is to be a ‘victim’ and a ‘whiner.’” It’s satisfying, in a cranky contrarian way, to watch a writer as smart as Ehrenreich take aim at something as universally revered as dogged optimism. Yet while America’s obsessive positivity might be risible, it…

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Taqwacore Roundtable: On Punks, the Media, and the Meaning of “Muslim”

…MIDIval PunditZ consider themselves to be part of Asian Massive], and the Indian Cyber Mehfil groups are all in communication with one another and often work together on projects. Is there something similar with TQ emerging? BU: Not yet, just some contact with British Asian geezers like Asian Dub Foundation, Fun Da Mental and Alien Kulture. There are Taqwacore groups in Scotland and London, but no one has contacted us to do a tour. Most of them d…

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