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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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Week in Religion, Sunday Edition

…oncos games this season. Which prompts the question, is football its own religion? Does the black church keep black women single? Julia Roberts has become a “practicing Hindu” after spending time in India shooting her latest film. Meanwhile, the U.S. Postal Service will issue a stamp commemorating Mother Theresa on August 26th, what would have been her 100th birthday….

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

…lar, the knowledge of the early Islamic world, especially as it is used to promote proper behavior, remains in the anecdotal, atomized form, and should only be put into narrative history by those qualified to do so, the educated, religious elite. The first attempt to write a full narrative biography of Muhammad was begun toward the end of the first Islamic century and completed shortly after the centenary of Muhammad’s death (632 C.E.). The author…

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How to Meet Muslims: A (Cinematic) Primer

…wn Planet Probably a third of the world’s Muslims live in or come from the Indian subcontinent, such as this writer, descended from the steamy plains of the Punjab but raised in gelid New England. And South Asia’s a part of the world we never stop hearing about. Of course, most of this attention is directed to Pakistan, so let’s start there.  In Silent Waters, we follow a young man from a small village impressed by the Islamist message coming from…

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Two Women and a Mosque: A Convert Community Grows in Panama City

…s. Throughout the twentieth century, Panama received Muslims from Lebanon, India, Pakistan, and West Indian countries such as Jamaica. Each group worked to establish their own religious institutions and the support systems necessary to flourish as religious minorities in a Catholic country. In the 1960s and 70s, Lebanese immigrants collected money from their growing business enterprises to create their own mosque, cemetery and Arabic school in Col…

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In Praise of Failure: Is Defining Religion Such a Good Idea?

…ecularist prejudices may suggest. Yoga in the West may have emigrated from India as a “religion,” but soon became something else as it took up residence with Occidental bourgeoisie in the suburbs. Yet, as recent protests against yoga classes in public schools by evangelicals in the United States witness, some Americans fear that Yoga’s non-Christian religious character lies hidden within it, ready to ensnare unsuspecting faithful. That yoga instru…

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It’s Not Yogaphobia, It’s Theology

…r). To take a somewhat parallel case, Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh has promoted an appreciation for Jesus, but not for the Christian theology writ large. After all, a Buddhist would rightly be critical of a system that posits a belief in an essential soul. But where some Catholic voices (and Protestant ones as well) go out of their way to disparage yoga, Thich Nhat Hanh never uses incendiary rhetoric to tell his audience not to become Christia…

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Religion is Not about Belief: Karen Armstrong’s The Case for God

…e religious, Armstrong explains: Religion as defined by the great sages of India, China, and the Middle East was not a notional activity but a practical one; it did not require belief in a set of doctrines but rather hard, disciplined work, without which any religious teaching remained opaque and incredible. The Ascent of Intellectual Orthodoxy For most of Western history, religion has been primarily a matter of orthopraxy, not orthodoxy. In fact,…

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How Robert Bellah (1927-2013) Changed the Study of Religion

…ovements were emerging in other traditions in other parts of the world. In India, for example, bhakti movements of social rebellion were erupting throughout the subcontinent, eschewing Brahmanical authority for the fellowship of devotees of a new breed of eclectic saints and teachers who could be outcastes, blind, female, or partly Muslim. Elsewhere in Asia, what has been called a “Protestant Buddhism” was appealing to the masses in the way that a…

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