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

…of social mores, cultural productions, religious practices, and political codes. As the United States continues under the fraught leadership of Donald Trump, we find new iterations of the “Christian nation,” new connections and clashes between immigration bans, the religious right, and women’s rights. But if oppression relies on strange alliances, so does resistance. Sowing the seeds of liberation often entails looking back to the past and reaffi…

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SoulCycle Looks to Sell its Soul

…drives the money changers from the Temple. For centuries, many temples in India functioned like banks, making interest-bearing loans. Commercialized forms of penance helped inspire the Reformation in Europe. The landscape of American religion is often conceived of as a market in which churches and denominations compete for worshippers. Sales tactics influence evangelists, and companies use religion to push political agendas. Nevertheless, there’s…

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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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Trump’s Muslim Ban and the History of Stolen Citizenship in America

…e and Chinese Americans, as well as to scuttle the flow of immigrants from India and the Philippines who had been taking laborer jobs from poor whites. Indeed, over the past fifty years since the passage of the Civil Rights Act, citizenship for people of color has been under constant attack. Though many of these attempts at disenfranchisement fail, or are overturned by courts, there has been a concerted attempt to use bogeymen (such as minorities…

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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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“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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Trump May Be “a Big Fan of Hindu,” But Hindus Are Running—and Winning—as Democrats

…e large South Asian population in the district, which includes Hindus from India and the West Indies, Sikhs, and Muslims. Jois believes Democrats are ignoring Hindus and other religious minority groups at their own peril. “We all understand that politics works best when everyone’s voice is heard in the process. Yet for far too long, some of the largest-growing groups in New Jersey have been on the sidelines in politics,” he said. “That’s why our c…

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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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Trump, “Big Fan of Hindu,” To Force Thousands of Nepalis Back to Disaster Zone

…ith Indians, up to a third of the Hindu population in the U.S. is not from India and close to 40 percent of the Indian-American population is not Hindu. Nepal is one of three Hindu majority countries in the world, and in 2015, the country was impacted by a devastating earthquake. To accommodate survivors of the quake, the Obama Administration granted temporary protected status (TPS) to nearly 10,000 Nepalis, most of who are Hindu. Last month, the…

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