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Hopping on the Meditation Brandwagon: “Heartfulness” Makes Landfall in Los Angeles

…cost a penny—at least not at first. The conference and the materials were free, and there’s nary a dollar sign to be seen for any of their heartfulness services on the website. But for the organization to have the reach and global real estate it apparently possesses, there is certainly a point at which revenue (donation!) is extracted. That combined with the nebulous promise of transformation (if only you connect with a Los Angeles-based trainer!…

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“The Slut Assumption”: Myths About Jewelry Reveal Diamonds Aren’t Always A Girl’s Best Friend

…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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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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CERN: Where Particle Physics Collides with Human Sacrifice (Apparently)

…g around a statue of Shiva (a gift from the Department of Atomic Energy of India). A woman in white is brought forward and stabbed, prompting the anonymous cameraman to flee in terror. The Telegraph noted the cameraman’s reflection in the office window suggests that he is also wearing a ritual cloak and likely a co-conspirator. CERN administrators have dismissed the footage as a hoax and opened an internal investigation. But many remain puzzled as…

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When Religious Disagreement Seems the Least of Our Problems: The Future for “Interfaith” in a Divided Society

…ement, but Patel has been anointed as the figurehead of something. Born in India and raised a Muslim in Illinois, Patel experienced racist and Islamophobic bullying as a child. In 2002, he founded Interfaith Youth Core, a nonprofit that supports interfaith organizing on college campuses. Today, he runs the IFYC, writes books and articles, and speaks on campuses. He also served on Barack Obama’s faith council. Interfaith Leadership is a business-sc…

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In Repudiation of its Devastating Doctrine of Discovery, Vatican Masks the History and Responsibility of Catholic Church

…rts, for example, that: assimilation policies and land dispossession were “promoted by the governmental authorities of the time”; the Doctrine of Discovery was a specifically political debate, “according to which the discovery of lands by settlers granted an exclusive right to extinguish, either by purchase or conquest, the title to or possession of those lands by indigenous peoples”; and that it was a debate in which these historical/political pa…

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Trump Election Could Threaten LGBT Rights Globally

…on ORAM…. But activists in countries where US support has been critical to promoting LGBT rights say they are afraid more broadly that a Trump victory could tacitly encourage governments with weak commitments to human rights or democracy. “I don’t think he’d be able to hold our leaders accountable or uphold American values abroad,” said Clare Byarugaba, who co-chaired the coalition of groups in Uganda that fought the sweeping Anti-Homosexuality Ac…

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What a Forgotten 19th Century Suffragist Can Teach Us About Women’s Rights vs. The Religious Right

…ity among the sexes and religions. Suffrage was part of the broader set of freedoms that Gage sought, but freedom goes well beyond that. What Gage saw was that you can’t just “get out the vote.” You have to change the mythologies. New stories need to be told, even if they are the old stories that have been forgotten.   [Research for this essay is greatly indebted to the ongoing work of Sally Roesch Wagner, and the Matilda Joslyn Gage Home in Fayet…

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Religion in Real Time on CNN’s “Believer”: A Conversation with Reza Aslan

…and practice of widely misunderstood religions. From the ascetic Aghori in India to Vodou in Haiti, from the doomsday cult of “JeZus with a Z” in Hawaii to Scientology in America and Santa Muerte in Mexico, the series takes viewers on an intriguing, and sometimes harrowing, tour of religion in real time—as far from orthodoxy as you can get. A couple of weeks ahead of the show’s March 5th premiere, Reza and I talked about the decline of religious l…

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Peter Berger, Sociology’s Defender of God (1929-2017)

…the absolutists. The discussion came to the case of sati, the practice in India of widow-burning, where the grieving widow was supposed to throw herself onto the funeral pyre of her departed husband and achieve a kind of divine immortality as a result. Berger listened to the cultural defenses of the practice for a moment or two, and then he had had enough. Berger stood up, his voice thundering as he pointed an accusing finger at each of us. “If t…

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