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Global LGBT Recap: World Vision Caves, World Congress of Families Vamps, God Weeps

By Peter Montgomery

…pporting Honorees at Asia Pink Awards Earlier this month in Singapore, the Asian gay men’s magazine Element hosted the first-ever Asia Pink Awards, which honored 15 LGBTI activists from around the region. In addition to pop culture figures, HIV and equality activists, and human rights lawyers, religious leaders were among the honorees. Another local hero is Reverend Dr Yap Kim Hao, a bishop and now pastoral adviser to a gay-friendly Singaporean ch…

Eight General Seminary Professors “Resign” Without Their Knowledge

By Anthea Butler

…of trustees (posted at safeseminary.org): He (Dean Dunkle) once described Asian transit passengers in the San Francisco Bay area as “slanty-eyed.” In a large community meeting last spring, he compared the technical side of theological education to “looking up women’s skirts.” Before several faculty members and students, he spoke, as an obvious act of intimidation, of how “black people can do such interesting things with their hair,” a comment abo…

Feared Taliban Leader Killed, But Military Strategy is Not the Answer in Afghanistan

By Mark Juergensmeyer

…estroy. Like the North Vietnamese, many Afghan activists—and an increasing number of Pakistanis—are motivated to fight against the American presence because of their love of freedom. They see the US military, like the Soviet forces before them, as a foreign occupying power. The Taliban, as draconian as they may be, are seen as enemies of the enemy: us. It is the US military presence, paradoxically, that is uniting the Taliban and marshaling wide p…

Herman Cain Doesn’t Know his Afghan from his Uzbek

By Haroon Moghul

…ions little room to maneuver. Perhaps one reason we haven’t seen a Central Asian Spring is because these mostly Turkic, largely Sunni countries are still in a post-Communist hangover, trying to figure out who they are and what their place in the world is. By far the most populated of these vast, sparse countries is Uzbekistan, and it’s unfortunately inappropriately named dictator, Islam Karimov, is a holdover from the Soviet era. He is also easily…

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

By Gordon D. Newby

…publications was a firestorm of criticism by Muslims writing in the South Asian press against his views, with the result that Western Orientalist scholarship about Muhammad and Islam became synonymous with the colonial domination of South Asians under the British Raj and of Muslims everywhere. In September, 1988, the novelist and Emory University professor, Salman Rushdie, published the well-known novel, Satanic Verses, a term first coined by Wil…

What Not to Wear: Uzbek Muslim Leaders Don’t Want Women to Wear Arab-Imported Hijab

By Fatemeh Fakhraie

…t comes to treatment of its populace. The extremism that has plagued other Asian countries, notably Afghanistan, has Uzbekistan understandably worried. But in the country’s attempt to run from religious extremism, it needs to be careful about running into the “secular extremism” that leads to disenfranchisement of women who choose to wear headscarves in Turkey. The bottom line is that legislating or persuading people to wear a certain type of clot…

Promise Keepers 2.0: Women and Jews Invited

By J. Terry Todd

…a spiritual spin. The stadium rallies provided tableaux of white, Latino, Asian, Native American, and African American men, singing, holding hands, and praying together in a show of Christian male bonding. True, Promise Keepers provided no theological or political critique of structural racism in the United States—racism was deemed a personal sin to be confessed. These attitudes about race found their iconic moment at the 1997 DC rally. When whit…

Does Christopher Hitchens Think Mormons are Sinistererer?

By Joanna Brooks

…Martha Ertman observes, “Again and again, commentators from high culture (media and legal experts mainly) and popular culture (cartoonists and authors of magazine articles) portray[ed] Mormons as barbaric, lascivious, despotic, disorderly, foreign, black, Asian, and/or childish.” The question is will people actually know anything more about the seven million Mormons who live, work, and vote in this country when the elections are over? Or will fol…

Hindu American Community Finally Coming Around for Pride Month

By Murali Balaji

…s departing from ritualistic focus. To complicate matters more, some South Asian LGBTQIA organizations have remained skeptical of and hostile towards Hindu religious institutions and organizations, making communication and collaboration all the more challenging. For the SSVT, Saturday’s event was in some sense a validation of efforts to engage a new generation of prospective congregants. Many Hindu temples across the United States are suffering a…

Trump Administration Is Not-So-Subtly Christianizing Foreign Policy and Aid

By Murali Balaji

…ance, the initiatives introduced by Pence and Pompeo threaten to make U.S. foreign policy—and foreign aid—more tied to the interest of Christian groups. Some of those organizations have loudly complained about anti-proselytizing laws in several Asian countries (including Nepal and in some states in India), which, coincidentally have non-Abrahamic majorities. They may now find a more sympathetic ear in Foggy Bottom as the Trump Administration goes…