Religion Dispatches
…luding those fleeing religious intolerance in places like Central America, China, the Middle East, and Russia,” said Human Rights First’s Robyn Lieberman. ”We call on the faith leaders to voice their expectation for a world in which religious practice is free and safe, and we call on the Americans in particular to affirm their support for an improved U.S. asylum system that protects those who must flee religious and other persecution.” The orga…
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…h a memorial to death, and a celebration of possibility in traditions from China to Egypt to Ethiopia. Bread is ritually important in a Judeo-Christian context, but not in Asian religious traditions; and its non-universality, writes Plate, makes bread like religion: “It has some basic ingredients…and serves certain purposes…but when we get down to the nitty-gritty of it, the similarities between traditions can be difficult to sniff out.” Telling t…
Read More…en Dragon was going to be the long awaited sequel to Big Trouble in Little China. Turns out it’s a right-wing Christian anti-environmentalism DVD series. Bummer. Hummus sparked a controversy between pro-Palestinian and Jewish students at DePaul University. A federal judge has put a permanent hold on the Oklahoma ballot measure that prohibited Sharia law in state courts. In Saudi Arabia, the Mecca Clock Royal Tower is under construction. When finis…
Read More…the basis of his self-documented violent homophobic harassment of gay men and youth but on promoting racial slurs and extremism. He has been sentenced to five years in a penal colony. Taiwan: Lesbian Couple Challenges Child Custody Laws The China Times reports that a lesbian couple in Taiwan has launched a court challenge to laws that prevent one of the women from being a legal guardian to their two children, who were born through artificial inse…
Read More…beloved Southern Baptist missionary who spent forty years evangelizing in China. “Going into all the world, sharing the faith, and making disciples,” she now says, echoing the missionary line, “that sounded very exotic.” Nearly twenty years later, White found herself in Mexico, the wife of a young man she met at church soon after she enrolled at Baylor University, where the two would work as missionaries for a controversial charismatic group, sin…
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…articles—one for each youth—on protecting, respecting, and establishing a number of things. But if you had listened carefully, everything would have started to sound a bit off. The text being read was in fact not the 1989 human rights treaty but instead “A Declaration on the Rights of Children and Their Families: A Call From the Children of the World.” The subject of the event was not as the protection of children as such but the “protection of t…
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…he country: Some are thinking of leaving the mainly Muslim state bordering China if the law is passed by parliament, mirroring a move last year by Russia that outraged the West and was seen by critics as part of a broader crackdown on civil society. The law is backed by Muslim clerics: Maksat Hajji Toktomushev, Kyrgyzstan’s grand mufti, said there should be no discussion of gay issues. “These are psychologically ill people, their psyche is destroy…
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…at any point, except for a brief allusion to “the Zen people from ancient China” as folks who knew better than us. This is an example of what I call mystification: the obscuration of mindfulness’s roots and usual context so that it can be extracted from religion and recontextualized to fit new purposes. Instead of religion, the context for mindfulness on 60 Minutes is medical science. We’re shown headlines from journal publications that claim to…
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…Self-Realization Fellowship, a yoga organization that has attracted large numbers of disciples from all over the world to this day. The film serves as a reminder that modern yoga has not always been about the stretching and muscle-building postures meant to function as fitness routines that are so often associated with yoga in the popular imagination. Yogananda introduced Kriya Yoga, believed to be the scientific path to the experience of God, an…
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…enghazi but, alas, will see loss of life and property in other places during the still young but perilous 21st century. It is a century, our century, that belongs neither to the USA nor to China, neither to imperialists nor terrorists, but to the CyberKingdom and to those who grasp the endless good and evil wrought by the Information Age….
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