Religion Dispatches
…kes on Jesus as prophet and priest, but also as liar, lunatic and/or lord. Indian Blockbuster Jesus Opening our new testament of filmic gospels is the Telugu production Karunamayudu (“Man of Compassion,” directed by A. Bhimsingh, 1978), which has been seen by over 100 million viewers, a number rivaling many a blockbusting Hollywood film. For the past three decades in South India and beyond, villagers have gathered in front of makeshift outdoor the…
Read More
…ion and consolidation of the democratic movement in the global South. This newest volume, on Africa, is edited by Oxford emeritus Terence O. Ranger, and it complements the great work being done by such eminent religion scholars as Paul Gifford (author of African Christianity: Its Public Role, among other books on the subject, and who contributes a response to this volume) and Philip Jenkins (The New Faces of Christianity: Believing the Bible in th…
Read More
…e strengthened by the defeat of the military option proposed by Hamas. The New York Times Ad: On Wed. Jan.14, Rabbi Michael Lerner’s Tikkun magazine and the Network of Spiritual Progressives ran a full page ad in the New York Times. The ad, signed by Dr. Cornel West, Sister Joan Chittister, and 2800 others, urges President-Elect Obama to: 1.) Call for an immediate cease-fire in Gaza when he is sworn in as president, and 2.) Convene an Internationa…
Read More…n ideological question whose complexities are explored in Jain’s excellent new book. The Christian yogaphobia that Jain criticizes tends to assume that yoga is essentially Hindu, that Hinduism is essentially monistic, and that this monism undermines a Christian’s commitment to salvation in Jesus Christ. Therefore, to put the matter bluntly, yoga leads to hell. This yogaphobia also relies on stereotypes of an exotic India that threatens a supposedl…
Read More
…a in the United States and beyond took up the topic as well; from Texas to India and back to New Hampshire, the notion that college major and religiosity are linked seemed to require attention. A lot of attention. Of course, all this probably resulted from the well-executed press release issued by the University of Michigan, where the co-authors work. Here’s how the press release opened: College students who major in the social sciences and humani…
Read More
…thoritative reports, the group does acknowledge that regions in Africa and India with extremely dense populations are most at risk to massive suffering. The Catholic Church has studied and worked on issues of protecting the poor from climate change disaster for at least the last ten years. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) is one of four members of the National Religious Partnership for the Environment (NRPE), which also includes th…
Read More
…around the world, but when he first wrote “Civil Religion,” it was a bold new idea and an innovative way of thinking. This was when I first knew Bellah, in Berkeley in the late 1960s, when I was a graduate student and later his colleague in the religious studies program. I saw how influential Bellah was on generations of graduate students—not only in sociology but also in religious studies. During those days he frequently reigned over the religio…
Read More
…he sciences alone which could speak about God. In the age of Descartes and Newton, science became the master of theology; scientific rationalism was what Newton called the “fundamental religion.” Theological assertions were imbued with certainty and necessity: “Theology was not only becoming aridly theoretical,” but it was also “in danger of becoming idolatrous.” The keys to the church had been handed over to the science lab, or so it seemed. Apop…
Read More
…bi and his wife—Gavriel and Rivkah Holtzberg—were Orthodox Jews, people I knew and recognized in a way the newspapers didn’t, even if I had never met them or heard their names before yesterday. “A Jewish center,” the reports put it, unsure at first how to characterize it, to explain what Brooklyn Jews were doing in Mumbai. Today, a photo finally appeared of the couple, performing a wedding a few months ago, in India. They looked like any one of my…
Read More
…f this will take decades to play out, well beyond the blink of an American news cycle. Iraq is broken into rival groups of warlords, sectarian militias, local gangs, foreign terrorists, political and ethnic factions, a struggling government, and a deeply corrupted and sectarian police force. The Sunnis are appalled that a Western invader paved the way to a Shiite government allied with Iran. They are deeply opposed to the new Constitution. They wa…
Read More