Religion Dispatches
…t. Even University of Colorado professor Lorelai Biernacki is cited by the New York Times, attributing not only yoga but meditation itself to Hinduism. Yoga’s Birth Certificate(s) Unfortunately Shukla’s claim falls apart under scrutiny. While the Take Yoga Back movement positions itself against the secularization and de-Hinduization of yoga, it can also be seen as an answer to one of the most fruitful decades in yoga research to date. A corpus of…
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…cessarily puts on their “docu-series”). I’m no curmudgeon here. I want the world of sisters introduced to a new generation of young women who don’t know nearly enough about what happens beyond the habit. But I want it to be done right. Here are some of the things that made me skeptical in episode one. REALITY: Nuns are made in 6 weeks! The show introduces the five women by saying that at the end of six weeks of convent working and living “they wil…
Read More…, with very little foundation in Supreme Court jurisprudence. But with the new ruling on the table — which directly contradicted the sodomy ruling on several key points— it is instead being asked to reconcile two wildly divergent opinions of its own justices. HRC called the decision a “landmark ruling” and noted: Part of the judgment also notes that India should “Repeal all laws that criminalize consensual sexual activity among persons of the sam…
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…-Up Shabbat—a kind of mobile, ritual-infused restaurant—that Shults ran in New York. Maybe the most significant player here is Reboot, a nonprofit that creates unconventional Jewish programming, including an iPhone app designed to help people disconnect and unwind on Friday afternoons. The organization has a simple, ten-principle Sabbath Manifesto that’s “designed to slow down lives in an increasingly hectic world” by giving people a “provisional…
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…. Like all other human groups, evangelicals circulate knowledge by telling stories—and their stories don’t only come from the Bible, but also from popular fiction. Literary critics generally shy away from the evangelical fiction that’s been published since the 1970s, partly because we English professors regard it as too popular; it lacks artistry and its generally conservative theology is, I think, embarrassing to some scholars of faith. Fortunate…
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…eate in her role at Harvard. Now it turns out the credentials cited in her New York Times profile were falsified. “Ah!” we cry with glee. “She did not actually graduate from Duke Divinity School!” As if attending divinity school, at Duke or elsewhere, would have solved the problem. Here, in the words of DDS Dean Richard Hays, from a letter to the community: Ms. MacBain, who has recently been appointed the Director of an organization called the Hum…
Read More…ren that Jews are descended from swine and apes, pigs and monkeys.” As the New York Times noted, Adelson’s charges are “staples of the far right” and “deeply offensive to Palestinians.” They ought to be offensive to Israelis as well, but Adelson is doing his best to spread the message through Israel HaYom (Israel Today), a free tabloid that is the country’s must-read news outlet. Adelson told reporters at the Jerusalem gathering that he does not d…
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…o lack some key details; Savannah Jacobson of Slate.com has criticized the New York Times for amplifying the voices and overstating the charitable efforts of anti-choice activists; and RD’s Mary E. Hunt has called out the Catholic bishops who, after a post-Dobbs victory lap, released a statement touting their work to support pregnant people. My own bullshit detector has picked up a few trends among these “compassionate” anti-abortion types, starti…
Read More…makers “have pressures on them, political, cultural, from the church.” The New York Times’ Jim Yardley took an look at divisions over the legislation in Italy, an outlier among western nations in lacking legal recognition for same sex couples, partly because, Yardley writes, “of the lingering influence of the Roman Catholic Church.” In the past, the Catholic Church would probably have played a major role in opposing the legislation (as happened in…
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…the Middle East. The article calls Lebanon the “exception that proves the rule.” Pink News covers reports that Egyptian police are using Grindr to hunt gay men. Cayman Islands: US Christian activist keynoting anti-gay rally Cayman News Service reports that David Gibbs III, a “conservative Christian lawyer from the United States who has suggested that legalizing gay marriage would lead to a catalogue of social ills will be one of three guest speak…
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