Religion Dispatches
…d “infection.” ### This article was made possible in part with support from Sacred Writes, a Henry Luce Foundation-funded project hosted by Northeastern University that promotes public scholarship on religion….
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…cropped the Ingres painting to make it more mysterious and suggestive. The Indian edition also has a lovely cover, a painting by Raja Ravi Varma of an Indian woman covered in jewelry and smiling seductively. Is there a book out there you wish you had written? Which one? Why? Sure: Anna Karenina. Or The Eustace Diamonds. Or Alice in Wonderland. I always wanted to write a novel, and did write one once, but it was awful (I showed it to some of my fri…
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…e large South Asian population in the district, which includes Hindus from India and the West Indies, Sikhs, and Muslims. Jois believes Democrats are ignoring Hindus and other religious minority groups at their own peril. “We all understand that politics works best when everyone’s voice is heard in the process. Yet for far too long, some of the largest-growing groups in New Jersey have been on the sidelines in politics,” he said. “That’s why our c…
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…make contact is generally met with a blatant prohibition or, at the very least, with ominous warnings. Those of us who nonetheless choose to live dangerously—to do public scholarship—challenge this model because we are convinced that connecting with the public, though admittedly dangerous, is a potential source of power, a mode of dismantling dominant systems of oppression. It is a potent tool for the scholar willing to take the challenge and to…
Read More…ith Indians, up to a third of the Hindu population in the U.S. is not from India and close to 40 percent of the Indian-American population is not Hindu. Nepal is one of three Hindu majority countries in the world, and in 2015, the country was impacted by a devastating earthquake. To accommodate survivors of the quake, the Obama Administration granted temporary protected status (TPS) to nearly 10,000 Nepalis, most of who are Hindu. Last month, the…
Read More…make contact is generally met with a blatant prohibition or, at the very least, with ominous warnings. Those of us who nonetheless choose to live dangerously—to do public scholarship—challenge this model because we are convinced that connecting with the public, though admittedly dangerous, is a potential source of power, a mode of dismantling dominant systems of oppression. It is a potent tool for the scholar willing to take the challenge and to…
Read More…ith Indians, up to a third of the Hindu population in the U.S. is not from India and close to 40 percent of the Indian-American population is not Hindu. Nepal is one of three Hindu majority countries in the world, and in 2015, the country was impacted by a devastating earthquake. To accommodate survivors of the quake, the Obama Administration granted temporary protected status (TPS) to nearly 10,000 Nepalis, most of who are Hindu. Last month, the…
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…ikes back The final ending of the Khalistani uprising of militant Sikhs in India’s Punjab in the 1990s came from a barrage of military and police repression. Although many of the former militants in the movement told me that the movement had already self-destructed from within, they admitted that the presence of the police had a chilling effect on the movement’s control of the countryside. When the police or military respond too strongly they can…
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…of social mores, cultural productions, religious practices, and political codes. As the United States continues under the fraught leadership of Donald Trump, we find new iterations of the “Christian nation,” new connections and clashes between immigration bans, the religious right, and women’s rights. But if oppression relies on strange alliances, so does resistance. Sowing the seeds of liberation often entails looking back to the past and reaffi…
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…igious hate crimes are also on the rise. Hindu nationalism runs rampant in India. Myanmar continues its genocide against the Rohingya. The UK’s Labour Party is trying to address its antisemitic legacy—sort of. France is at it again, and by “it” I mean state-sponsored Islamophobia. The hits just keep on coming. It has never been clearer that religious literacy—learning to think critically about religion—prepares you to better understand and navigat…
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