Religion Dispatches
…as an admittedly checkered but often positive history. The immigrants from India, Pakistan, Brazil, and Ireland I talked with while writing this book are potential partners on all sides of the political spectrum. They ultimately care much more about the bread and butter issues like family, community, and jobs that most of us care about. Anything you had to leave out? Lots. It’s impossible to capture the complexity of people’s everyday lived religi…
Read More…ld born in 2008 in Bolivia and another child that died in 2006 in Chennai, India. As for the Dajjal, hadith describe him as being blind in his right eye—not a cyclops. Of course this rumor is no more absurd than the American obsession with the antichrist, which has equated Proctor & Gamble, Ronald Reagan, and even Monster energy drinks with the Beast described in Revelation. Prior to reports of the birth of the false prophet, there were unconfirme…
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…on protecting the traditional family organized by churches. From Barbados Today: Reisman charged that the new comprehensive sex education programme being taught in American schools, if implemented here, would lead to drug and alcohol abuse, and a number of other ills, including higher rates of sexuality transmitted diseases, because children were being introduced to sexual perversions in order to turn them into little sexual deviants. The paper q…
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…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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…the world’s Muslims live in democracies: Mali, Turkey, Lebanon, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Malaysia, and Indonesia, among other countries, with 700 million Muslims; more than half the planetary total. Other millions of Muslims live in majority non-Muslim dictatorships, such as Russia and China. But the best proof of Islam’s allergy to liberty is found in democratic Senegal. Independent in 1960, this 90%-Muslim country proceeded to elect a Presi…
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…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…
Read More…government—particularly foreign aid and arms—did not directly intervene to promote the narrative of global Christian victimhood. However, under Trump, foreign policy—particularly foreign aid—is increasingly being shaped in a pro-evangelical way. It shouldn’t surprise anyone given Pence’s constant affirmations of being a Christian first, while Pompeo has openly embraced a hardline Christian worldview that maligns non-Christians. Pompeo and Pence al…
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…nya, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, and South Africa in Africa; and, China, India, Indonesia, South Korea, and the Philippines in Asia. Each study in the project addresses the extent to which evangelicalism, a religious movement based on biblical orthodoxy, has helped or hindered the inauguration 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 co…
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…use. Slater’s Family Watch International (FWI) has been deeply involved in promoting abstinence-and fidelity-only initiatives in Uganda and has praised Nigeria—where same-sex couples can face up to 14 years in prison or stoning at the hands of Sharia courts—as “a strong role model” for other regional governments “on how to hold on to their family values despite intense international pressure.” The Human Rights Campaign has reported that FWI’s annu…
Read More…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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