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The Sacred and the Dead: How an Iranian-Jewish Angeleno Discovered Her Tribe

…to me. I have never returned to Iran. Sometimes it saddens me that I know India, Thailand, and other countries better than the place of my birth. I have never smelled the air at the Caspian Sea or walked through the bustling streets of Tehran. I have spent my academic career documenting the stories of immigrant Iranians as a way mitigating the absence of a country that is a part of my life, my culture, the language that I speak, and the food that…

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What To Do When Fred Phelps Arrives in Your Neighborhood

…are not limited to hating “fags.” Wikipedia, for example, claims they hate India. And, Phelps’ church itself is pretty darn sure God Hates America (for a variety of reasons like American tolerance of “fags”). And yet, Westboro Baptist is pretty darn fond of the American Constitution since March 2, I suspect.   March 2, of course, was not the first—and certainly not the last—time the Supreme Court has taken or will take a position on picketing. In…

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Picasso’s Sacred Monster Eats Chicago: A Mystery Solved?

…ps the most widely-recognized iterations of the mythological beast are the Egyptian and the Greek sphinxes. The Egyptian sphinx typically has a man’s head and a feline body, and serves the benevolent purpose of protection. (It is worth noting that Hegel described the Egyptian religion of which the sphinx was a part as a religion of the riddle or enigma.) On the other hand, the nefarious Greek sphinx, like the one that tormented Oedipus, sports a w…

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Reactionary White Buddhists Have Joined The Fight Against Critical Race Theory

…da is to bring Buddhist perspectives to bear on questions facing the world today—a task of urgent importance in an era when public discourse is often clouded by divisive ideologies and partisan animosity.” One article title suggests that Buddhists should leave their politics at the temple door. On further reading, however, it’s clear that it’s not politics per se but rather a certain type of politics that aren’t welcome. To give a hint: as the aut…

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The Legacy of Bush, Gambler of Other People’s Fortunes, Is Still With Us

…where we are going again, is the hottest nuclear zone on earth: Pakistan, India, China, they all have the bomb. I do not rehearse all of this as a morality tale; Dostoevsky would have none of that. “Now, whether gain and profit are despicable things is another question. And I am not going to try to answer it here” (29). I do not say this simply to relive the past either. Just the opposite. I say all of this because it is a cautionary tale for the…

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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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Forced Cremation of Covid Dead in Sri Lanka Further Marginalizes Muslim Community

…vendors. There’s been similar anti-Muslim sentiment and disinformation in India as well. In previous pandemics, particularly Ebola, preparations of the dead were seen as a leading cause of viral spread. While care should certainly be taken with the handling of bodies that have passed from Covid, the risk of viral spread is limited, and cremation is not necessary. The continued practice of forced cremation represents a violation of human rights an…

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This Narrative of Death that is So Powerful Among Us

…a matter of fact, we’re seeing something of that with the sex selection in India and China, almost eugenic kind of selection. Walter: And the whole health care thing where rich people have access. That’s got to make a difference in longterm maintenance of genes and all that. Dan: That’s a trend that’s been accelerated, but it’s by no means a new one. I remember someone saying that we all have some royal blood in us because royalty tends to survive…

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Back to School at The First Public School In the Country To Require a World Religions Course

…differences between Sunni and Shia Muslims, to the Hindu values invoked by India’s BJP party, to Biblical allusions that saturate American political rhetoric, survey data shows Americans know almost nothing about religion. Religion scholars (including Diane Moore, Stephen Prothero, and myself) have suggested that change must begin in the schools. The establishment clause does not forbid teaching about religion from a non-devotional perspective and…

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Rope of God: The Aceh Tsunami—Four Years On

…7th-century treaty between one of the Sultans of Aceh and the British East India Company that guaranteed their independence as “proof” they were not part of the former Netherlands Indies or modern Indonesia. For more than a century, Dutch Christian colonials and Indonesian secular nationalists found it convenient to label the Acehenese as Islamic fanatics, extremists, terrorists—or by whatever term currently in vogue for demonizing Muslim resistan…

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