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At the UN, Conservative Christian Agenda Cloaked in Human Rights Language

…s noteworthy for affirming a positive “Right to a Religion”—in contrast to freedom of thought, conscience, and religion, the standard in accepted international instruments. Here again, the Declaration cites the UDHR but omits its crucial inclusion of the “freedom to change” belief and highlights “the right of parents to guide the moral and religious education of their children.” Thus, it exemplifies one conservative response to the challenge of ch…

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How to Meet Muslims: A (Cinematic) Primer

…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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RDBook: Is Nothing Secular? A Review of Jewel of Medina

…lar, the knowledge of the early Islamic world, especially as it is used to promote proper behavior, remains in the anecdotal, atomized form, and should only be put into narrative history by those qualified to do so, the educated, religious elite. The first attempt to write a full narrative biography of Muhammad was begun toward the end of the first Islamic century and completed shortly after the centenary of Muhammad’s death (632 C.E.). The author…

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Come Hell or High Water: How the Melodrama of Disaster Leaves Us Vulnerable

…e wants to hug the limelight and show off their effectiveness.” Studies in India show that declaring a state of emergency after a disaster can give politicians a boost in the polls during election years—but only during election years. The public forgets quickly, which means that there’s little incentive to create best practice plans and mechanisms for reducing the scale of disasters, since by election time no one is likely to remember. “Voters rew…

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Week in Religion, Sunday Edition

…oncos games this season. Which prompts the question, is football its own religion? Does the black church keep black women single? Julia Roberts has become a “practicing Hindu” after spending time in India shooting her latest film. Meanwhile, the U.S. Postal Service will issue a stamp commemorating Mother Theresa on August 26th, what would have been her 100th birthday….

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To Fight White Supremacy We Must Resist Essentialism: The Author Responds

…yoga, for power and for profit, against religious and sexual minorities in India. We also sabotage the scare tactics of Hinduphobes who warn of the subtle ways yoga challenges the Christian commitments of naïve American yoga practitioners. It is not the scholar’s place to establish or verify claims about origins or authenticity. Such efforts fail to account for the complexities of the cultural phenomena those scholars claim to represent. Arguments…

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Telling the World a ‘Big Story’: RD in Conversation with Karen Armstrong

…d by your encounter with Asian religions. Would you still call yourself a “freelance monotheist?” Or is “freelance religionist” a better moniker? Yes, I wish I had never made that quip about being a freelance monotheist. I drag it around with me wherever I go. What I meant was that at that time I drew nourishment from all three of the Abrahamic religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam and that I could not see any one of them as superior to th…

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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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Arrest the Pope: New Atheist Effort to Seek Justice in Sexual Abuse Crisis Should Be Applauded

…ent back to Italy. “Father Vijay Vhaskr Godugunuru was forced to return to India and then was transferred to Italy after pleading no contest to assaulting a 15-year-old girl while visiting friends in Bonifay, Fla,” according to the AP. “He now ministers to a parish in a medieval town of about 4,000 in Tuscany, where he hears confessions, celebrates Mass and works with children.” SNAP, The Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests is pushing for…

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Religion is Not about Belief: Karen Armstrong’s The Case for God

…e religious, Armstrong explains: Religion as defined by the great sages of India, China, and the Middle East was not a notional activity but a practical one; it did not require belief in a set of doctrines but rather hard, disciplined work, without which any religious teaching remained opaque and incredible. The Ascent of Intellectual Orthodoxy For most of Western history, religion has been primarily a matter of orthopraxy, not orthodoxy. In fact,…

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