Reading Time: 8 minutes Where I live, Navidad and Semana Santa are significant religious affairs, times when the hustle and bustle of city life eases for a month and a week respectively: to observe Catholic customs, to be with family, or simply to travel to nearby towns and farms. One side effect, though, is the impact of reduced foot […]
Hinduism
Posted inHistory
Fascism in India: The role of Nazis in Hindu nationalism
Reading Time: 8 minutes When writing on Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s role in Hindu extremism, I committed the cardinal sin of not defining a key term: fascism. This was a conscious choice, because I’ve written before on how quickly we mire ourselves in political word games. Better to start with the government figure that Western media keeps centering, as […]
Posted inHistory
Fascism in India: Who’s ‘in charge’ of 1.4 billion?
Reading Time: 9 minutes There’s something fascinating, if also disturbing, about Western incuriosity around the world’s largest democracy. 1.4 billion of our world’s 7.8 live in India, a country a third the size of the US, which has under a quarter of India’s population. How can the fortunes of so many mean so little? Nevertheless, India exists in the […]
Posted inReligion
How Hindu religious rituals harm the environment
Reading Time: 5 minutes If you believe God created this planet, shouldn’t you do everything in your power to protect it?
You would think so, but law professor Jay Wexler finds that the connection between religion and the environment is very weak in his new book When God Isn’t Green: A World-Wide Journey to Places Where Religious Practice and Environmentalism Collide (Beacon Press, 2016):
In the excerpt below, Wexler discusses how two time-honored Hindu rituals create more problems than they solve:
Posted inGeneral
When Religious Rituals Turn Deadly
Reading Time: 4 minutes If the people who attended these festivals were obeying the will of God, as they believed, why didn’t he protect them?
Posted inNews
Top Hindu: Don't use sacred imagery for 'mercantile greed'
Reading Time: 2 minutes The job of being President of the Universal Society of Hinduism (USofH) entails – among other important things – admonishing companies for messing with Hindu deities. And US-based Rajan Zed, above, who heads the USofH, is a nothing if not a world champion admonisher. Earlier this year he had a right go at Amazon for […]
Posted inNews
This Indian man believes that President Donald Trump is God
Reading Time: < 1 minute Bussa Krishna, a resident of Konne village in Telangana, India, worships Donald Trump – so much so that he lies prostrate in front of the narcissist’s image and even has a little shrine built for the President inside his home. He chants Trump’s name, meditates and even has some womenfolk praying along with him at […]
Posted inNews
Indian 'godman' jailed for life for rape of teenage devotee
Reading Time: 2 minutes Millionaire Hindu guru Asaram Bapu, a sexual abstinence advocate, was today (Wednesday) jailed for life for raping a teenage female devotee at his ashram near Rajasthan city in 2013. According to this report, the sentence was handed down by judge Madhusudan Sharma at a special court convened in Jodhpur Central Jail. Known throughout India and […]
Posted inNews
Indian cartoonist who 'hurt Hindu feelings' faces charges
Reading Time: 3 minutes The Hyderabad police have registered a case against Swathi Vadlamudi, a journalist working for an English daily, for a cartoon she created in response to high profile rape cases in India. According to this report, after Vadlamudi posted the cartoon on her Facebook page, an official complaint was lodged against her on Monday by Hindu […]
Posted inNews
Girl, eight, was gang-raped in a Hindu temple then murdered
Reading Time: 3 minutes In what is thought to have been a brutal act of intimation against Muslims in Kashmir, Ashifa Bano, above, was kidnapped and taken to a Hindu temple near Jammu city where she was allegedly gang-raped and and later murdered by a gang including four police officers. The victim, according to the BBC, belonged to a […]