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On the Ethics of the Tibetan Self-Immolations

…f great moral courage. Drawing from earlier scriptures, the fourth-century Indian Buddhist master Asaṅga speaks of a threefold classification of “giving” that includes giving material goods, spiritual counsel, and life. Of these three, Asaṅga considers offering up one’s life to be the highest form of giving. That said, Indian and Tibetan texts also set forth stringent conditions that must be met before an individual is allowed to offer up his or h…

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How Robert Bellah (1927-2013) Changed the Study of Religion

…ovements were emerging in other traditions in other parts of the world. In India, for example, bhakti movements of social rebellion were erupting throughout the subcontinent, eschewing Brahmanical authority for the fellowship of devotees of a new breed of eclectic saints and teachers who could be outcastes, blind, female, or partly Muslim. Elsewhere in Asia, what has been called a “Protestant Buddhism” was appealing to the masses in the way that a…

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The Sacred and the Dead: How an Iranian-Jewish Angeleno Discovered Her Tribe

…to me. I have never returned to Iran. Sometimes it saddens me that I know India, Thailand, and other countries better than the place of my birth. I have never smelled the air at the Caspian Sea or walked through the bustling streets of Tehran. I have spent my academic career documenting the stories of immigrant Iranians as a way mitigating the absence of a country that is a part of my life, my culture, the language that I speak, and the food that…

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“Burka Avenger”: Pakistan’s Middle Class Gets a Feminist Cartoon

…mics study (PDF) documented an upswing in gender equality and education in India after the arrival of cable television. “Introducing cable increases the likelihood of current enrollment for girls by 3.5 percentage points,” the authors wrote, describing a shift over four times larger than the 0.83% increase created by the Pakistani government between 2005 and 2011. The show could have the same effect in Pakistan, particularly if public interest sta…

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Some Thoughts on Richard Dawkins’ Terrible Tweet

…mans had become Islam’s historically most powerful civilization. Along the Indian Ocean rim, as Engseng Ho argues in The Graves of Tarim, a new, peaceful, entirely non-militarized trade linked East Africa to China. (He’s at Duke University.) The artistic and aesthetic legacies from these periods speak for themselves. The Alhambra Palace in Granada, which so inspired Washington Irving. The Taj Mahal in Agra. The Blue Mosque in Istanbul. The wonderf…

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Sikh Prof Attacked on Heels of New Study

…only about 20% can identify the country of origin of the Sikh faith (it’s India). 49% of Americans believe “Sikh” is a sect of Islam, and most Americans identify the practice of turban-wearing primarily with the figure of Osama bin Laden, a fact that makes it more believable that in 2008 alone fully 9% of New York City Sikhs said they had been assaulted because of their religion. But it’s not just association with radical Islam and the resulting…

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Pigging Out: What ‘Radically Unkosher’ Jewish Foodies Like Michael Pollan Are Missing

…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…

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Two Women and a Mosque: A Convert Community Grows in Panama City

…s. Throughout the twentieth century, Panama received Muslims from Lebanon, India, Pakistan, and West Indian countries such as Jamaica. Each group worked to establish their own religious institutions and the support systems necessary to flourish as religious minorities in a Catholic country. In the 1960s and 70s, Lebanese immigrants collected money from their growing business enterprises to create their own mosque, cemetery and Arabic school in Col…

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Global LGBT Recap: Francis’s First Year; Homophobia and Development; African Activists Push Back

…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…

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Spiritual Unplugging, Or What to Do When There is Wifi at the Ashram

…on’t know how not to do this. Yet here I was at the Ananda Ashram in rural India, expecting (and craving) swift condemnation by the monks and nuns at the sight of an iPhone. I was on a university-sponsored trip to the subcontinent with other journalists, all of us covering politics and religion. The reporting would come later, however. First came three days in an ashram, and I hoped for a 72-hour hiatus from the compulsion to connect. But this ash…

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