cult/new religious movements

When survival is the name of the game, how are White Male Heterosexual Conservative Christians going to rally the diminishing troops in a desperate bid to hold on to the power slipping from their hands?

A New Ager, a Jew, and Muslim walk into a church…

The top films for 2010—especially those up for this Sunday’s awards—leave most of the species-specific questions behind. Instead this year’s crop reflects anxieties (as well as promises) about who we are and who we might be becoming in and as humans, in our own skins—never mind the “prawns” or “Na’vi.” Questions provoked by this year’s films include those concerning the nature of our selves in connection and collision with our families, our larger social institutional entanglements, and our own bodies. The other key theme, effecting each of the others, had to do with the ways new media technology is inserting itself into our intimate lives, and changing our identities, both public and private.

The film admired by Jared Loughner defies categorization but ultimately offers a dark vision.

Recent studies of yoga reveal the formative influence of (wait for it) Buddhism, Jainism, Sufism, television, military calisthenics, Swedish gymnastics and the YMCA, as well as of radical Hindu nationalism, upon today’s postural yoga practice. There is no doubt that the Vedas, Upanishads, and folk traditions of India have been formative toward yoga: yoga is almost inseparable from them. Nevertheless to assert that yoga is essentially and primarily a Hindu practice means to ignore millennia of generative influence from other quarters. Worse still, it means to step blindly into a political fight for the heart of India that has simmered for over two hundred years.

You may find that it’s helpful to know something about a subject before you start talking about it.

It shouldn’t be surprising that the most sacred concerns of Americans are also some of the most contentious political issues of our day.

Evangelicals and fundamentalist Hindus come together in their denunciation of yoga.

The ancients were wise to life’s tragedies too. Some things do, apparently, go badly. (They could hardly think otherwise, living during that long period of history in which death was associated with the young, not the old.) So, their instruction was to ‘go with the flow’ even when that is hard to stomach. Theirs is not a relentless optimism, expecting everything, like Byrne’s. Rather, the Stoics advocated expecting nothing, but working at everything.

Sri Chinmoy wanted to win a Nobel prize, and to be more famous than the Dalai Lama or the Pope. Jayanti Tamm writes a book about what happens when a good guru goes bad.