Religion Dispatches
Today, my friend Margot informed me that Eggs Benedict has pork in it. Just goes to show what I know, right? I don’t censor myself—and if you have been following you will see that I some times don’t even properly edit. This is not as easy as it may seem, this blogging for one hundred days— Ramadan through my first hajj. Meanwhile I AM actually fasting; and actually reading Qur’an everyday; I am actually attending tarawih regularly, and trying to…
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…a matter of fact, we’re seeing something of that with the sex selection in India and China, almost eugenic kind of selection. Walter: And the whole health care thing where rich people have access. That’s got to make a difference in longterm maintenance of genes and all that. Dan: That’s a trend that’s been accelerated, but it’s by no means a new one. I remember someone saying that we all have some royal blood in us because royalty tends to survive…
Read More…s several instances where textbooks included the Muslim attack on Delhi in India in the 14th century: “As many as 100,000 Hindu prisoners were massacred before the gates of the city.” TFN recorded Friday’s public debate. Here is a clip of a woman defending the resolution, in which she suggests that all textbooks should come with warning stickers so people know of a book’s “biases” before they ever open it. Notice that she only says what she belie…
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…e Separation, similar dynamics appear to be unfolding in the United States today, where a combination of forces—new cultural mores surrounding gender and sexuality, increasing religious diversity, and declining numbers of Christians—are disrupting the religious landscape and leading to a sense of angst among American Christians that their country is turning its back on what they believe to be its Christian heritage. Accordingly, Christian national…
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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…rence in Lucknow in 1911 called for the Christianization of the Muslims of India. More recently, the 9/11 attacks, according to Kidd, “Re-energized those familiar themes of Muslim conversions and Islam’s place in the end times, two themes common in American Christian rhetoric, even before the American Revolution.” And while he doesn’t dismiss the powerful effect of the 9/11 attacks on American public opinion, Kidd takes the long view, tracing the…
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…im’s actions metonymically represents Islam; not only throughout the globe today but also throughout its fourteen centuries of history. Pundits, Islamophobes, and Muslim apologists alike look to the Qur’an and the Islamic tradition as the source that could explain or condemn Mohamud’s actions, but his motives seem to make most sense in the context of this new media landscape in which, as Marshall McLuhan argued, “the medium is the message.” Media…
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…wn Planet Probably a third of the world’s Muslims live in or come from the Indian subcontinent, such as this writer, descended from the steamy plains of the Punjab but raised in gelid New England. And South Asia’s a part of the world we never stop hearing about. Of course, most of this attention is directed to Pakistan, so let’s start there. In Silent Waters, we follow a young man from a small village impressed by the Islamist message coming from…
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…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…
Read More…oatian, Farsi (Persian), Fijian, Haitian, Hiligaynon, Hindi (Fiji), Hindi (India), Hmong, Ilokano, Indonesian, Kosraean, Laotian, Malagasy, Malay, Marshallese, Mongolian, Navajo, Palauan, Papiamento, Pohnpeian, Portuguese (Portugal), Romanian, Serbian, Sinhala, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swahili, Tahitian, Tamil, Telugu, Thai, Turkish, Urdu, Vietnamese, Yapese I’ll also be thinking about local translators sitting in their home countries, relaying…
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