Religion Dispatches
…ually be taught to all the thousands of Tibetan monks and nuns in exile in India. In the pilot we just completed, several professors and graduate students taught life sciences, neurosciences, physics, math, and science philosophy to thirty-three monks and 5 nuns. Evolution was the first life sciences topic two of my co-teachers and I decided to focus on. For my section, the monks developed an experiment to test the hypothesis, a small piece of Dar…
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…elieve that homosexuality is (an) unnatural act that cannot be supported,” India’s current home minister and former president of the BJP, Rajnath Singh, said in 2013. Earlier this year, however, India’s supreme court said it will reexamine the ban on gay sex. Bermuda: Premier says he will vote for civil unions Premier Michael Dunkley urged voters to be on the “right side of history” when they cast their ballots in a June 23 referendum, reports the…
Read More…re. India: US Offers Asylum While Exporting Homophobia Speaking of aslyum, IndiaWest reported last week that an Indian gay couple who had been held for six months in Immigrations and Customs Enforcement detention facilities in El Paso, Texas, were granted asylum in December. Jagdish Kumar and Sukhwinder Sukhwinder left India in June 2012 and travelled by various means for a year through Dubai, Cyprus and several South and Central American countrie…
Read More…Shourie, journalist, occasional politician, and author of Missionaries in India, surveyed Indian Catholic missionary literature and concluded that it “sounds more like … the Pentagon, than like Jesus.” Moreover, just as critics of Muslims in America suggest that Islam is intolerant and therefore incompatible with American democracy, Indian authors such as these have criticized Christianity and its cousins for their claims that they alone possess…
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…. He had Muslims with him in the struggle in South Africa. He came back to India and had Muslims with him in the struggle for Indian independence, including Ghaffar Khan and many others I mention in the book. Unfortunately, even within South Asia, some of that has been obscured by the fact that his chief antagonist or counterpart was Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, who had a different vision for Indian Muslims than Gandhi and wanted…
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…ause, “We came here to tell you about the success story of conservatism in india—the defeat of the left liberal marxist radical Islamist cabal in India.” Perhaps sensitive to the significant religious differences between Hinduism and the ‘Judeo-Christian’ traditions championed at NatCon, Madhav suggested that his movement’s goal was not for “theocracy” but for a “restoration of India’s cultural-civilizational glory,” similar to the Ten Commandment…
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…oversy embroiled him from the mid-’90s because he loved, and painted from, India. Politically-minded Hindu partisans objected to his portrayal of women. He painted not just women but Hindu goddesses, and he painted them as they have been painted for centuries: unclad. But secular Indian courts allowed advocates for the Hindu right to bring a case against Husain. He was accused of causing harm to the sensibilities of others. He faced not one case b…
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…at to call it. “Female feticide” is a little different. Almost everyone in India uses it to refer to sex-selective abortion. To a Western feminist, it sounds quite jarring, because it echoes the kind of language that the American anti-abortion movement uses. Since there isn’t much of an anti-abortion movement in India, there’s less sensitivity about such rhetoric. Still, some people there worry that the campaign against sex-selective abortion coul…
Read More…earch the company before buying a stock: “Is the business run well? Are customers happy and sales increasing?” Which is actually good advice, if not strikingly original or particular to the bible. But Hyman also urges the investor to look for “oversold” or “overbought” stocks and to watch for “large volume spikes and steep declines.” In other words, Hyman advises the average investor to time the market—something that you will seldom hear from a re…
Read More…ther setback in the struggle for gay rights on the continent. Chad’s penal code is more than half a century old and does not explicitly mention homosexuality. But section 361 of a draft new code states the punishment for anyone who has sexual intercourse with someone of the same sex is 15 to 20 years in jail and a fine of 50,000-500,000 Central African francs (£60-£600), according to a document seen by Agence France-Presse. The cabinet claims that…
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