Religion Dispatches
…religious voters beginning to flex their muscles—Buddhists. A significant number of Buddhist immigrants who fled communist regimes in Southeast Asia tend to be politically conservative, which could help Republican candidate Sen. John McCain. But a solid majority of American Buddhists are converts, who tend to be liberal, and many back Democrat Barack Obama. McCain’s latest tactic of using “socialist/Marxist” smears against Obama lead to an odd ir…
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…rrored the Great Red Dragon of the Book of Revelation. Meanwhile, in South Asia, the naga—partially human, partially serpent—became bearers of good fortune. In Buddhism, a cobra-like naga named Mucalinda sheltered Gautama during his awakening under the bodhi tree. In China, dragons became, not beasts to be slain, but embodiments of Tian/T’ien, the very balance that brought cosmic harmony to the universe. Such concepts are mostly unknown to Western…
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…he end of the first millennium C.E., yoga systems were widespread in South Asia as Hindus, Buddhists, Jains, and others prescribed them. Throughout its premodern history, yoga was culturally South Asian but did not belong to any single religious tradition. The history of modern postural yoga also problematizes the identification of yoga as Hindu. That history is a paragon of cultural encounters in the process of constructing something new in respo…
Read More…ncealed evidence that American captives are being held alive in South-East Asia.” Trump may have claimed to valorize those who “weren’t captured” just a year ago, but his appearance at the mall on behalf of those who supposedly have been captured and never released marks another milestone in the un-reality show of the campaign. Aside from the compliments for the “beautiful” bikes and praise for the Hells Angels’-style protection they supposedly ha…
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…40 window. Moreover, Christian mission groups within India like Gospel for Asia and WorldVision are among the largest benefactors of aid, primarily from America. While these missionary groups coerce peacefully, or simply just offer money from their well-funded coffers to get locals (usually village elders first) to convert, the predatory proselytization reflects what religion scholar Rita Sherma calls “spiritual violence,” a derivation of Johan Ga…
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…d explicitly Jesus as “Nordic” as part of his attack upon immigration from Asia and Southern and Eastern Europe. Klan members of his age, likewise, linked the racial body of Jesus to their racial national view. Of course, other times, the imaging is unintentional or at least never spoken. When Mormons erected the Christus statue in the middle of the 1960s there was no direct discussion of this Christ’s race, face, or hair. But situated in its hist…
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…able Hmong population. The Hmong people, an ethnic minority from Southeast Asia, have a 5,000-year-old religious tradition which is shamanistic and animistic. In Hmong cosmology, the spiritual world and the material world are linked in complex ways, and the shaman works on behalf of the community to restore health, harmony, and to keep good relations with the ancestors (for an excellent documentary on a Hmong shaman from Appleton named Paja Thao s…
Read More…hundreds of millions of dollars to causes in Israel, the United States and Asia, Adelson—who has been there and done that—was nonetheless sufficiently emotional, when presented with a sculpture of Jerusalem, to wipe a tear from his eye. And speaking of tears, the best case scenario for Israeli news consumers: Adelson only spoke to American reporters so they had an alternative to the Jerusalem Post’s puff piece. Worst-case scenario? The Israeli pre…
Read More…ected those forms of social injustice to others he identified in Southeast Asia and, toward the end of his life, to the grinding poverty of the white and black underclass nationwide. We must never forget, West reminded us, that he gave his life in support of sanitation workers in Memphis. Third, there was the uncanny cadence of and timing, itself so central a piece of the spiritual sustenance the Black Church provides. West’s ability to sense the…
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…cient and classical systems of raja yoga or hatha yoga that saturate South Asian culture. For Yogananda, yoga was the scientific path to the experience of God, and that path was as much about Christ consciousness as Krishna consciousness. This was a hybrid product of Hindu, Christian, and modern ideas about the nature of God, the nature of the Self, and the nature of the human body. By the 1960s and the influx of gurus to the United States who suc…
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