André Henry People love it when we’re snarky about white people and racism online. But I’m trying to talk about anti-racism, specifically about nonviolent struggle, the kind that King was talking about in his final days.
“It Doesn’t Have to Be This Way”: An Interview with André Henry
The Abuse of Yoga and Proposition YSB: Herd Immunity for Troubling Times
Patrick McCartney What precisely does a Yogic way of life consist of? How might evidence-based policy be generated? From what evidence are these policies derived?
My Dad Died While I Was Teaching Death and Dying
Gary Laderman In addition to all these peculiar and profound circumstances, I also watched and assisted in my dad’s death while teaching “Death and Dying” in the spring of 2021, simultaneously professing about data and history and comparisons to students, while learning in the real world that I know nothing, that I am a child in a world of wonders and mystery, and misery.
Animal Abuse in Modern Yoga Gastropolitics
Jonathan Dickstein Scholars have expressed that “‘abuse’ extends beyond individual yoga communities and is often performed through unacknowledged race, gender, and class privilege.” But what about unacknowledged species privilege?
The Painful Process of Awakening: Harm and Healing in the Healthy Happy Holy Kundalini Yoga Community
Nirinjan Khalsa-Baker How does a community of practitioners, who have spent the past 50 years dedicated to spreading the light, move toward healing when there is so much darkness in the shadow?
How the Model of Money Laundering Can Help Us Understand Abuse within 3HO
Philip Deslippe If someone was sincere in their devotion, does it really matter if the object of that devotion was not exactly what it was supposed to be?
The Labyrinth of Molestation and Denial
Chuck Rosenthal Because you don’t start having sex with someone at thirteen and just stop at nineteen. You don’t just walk away. You carry it inside and live with it, hide it, go back to it, ignore it, fail to ignore it; you live with shame; you try to normalize what happened.
The Presence of One Man Rule in FLDS Mormonism: Contextualizing an American Religion that Became Synonymous with Abuse
Cristina Rosetti Warren Jeffs did not emerge in a vacuum. Rather, he is part of a larger history of both internal religious struggle and outside persecution that created a landscape where Jeffs succeeded at making rape a matter of doctrine.
Clericalism as a Cultural Pattern: Aiding and Abetting Abuse
Clericalism as a Cultural Pattern: Aiding and Abetting Abuse Michael Horan Clericalism, like racism or sexism, festers within cultures and inside individual imaginations. Clericalism is based on social location in the Catholic church’s cultural system for both worship and governance, a system developed a millennium ago. Theologian Paul Lakeland asserts that all isms at their root are moved by a belief in the lesser humanity of the oppressed group. You know when you are adversely affected by an ism, but you hardly notice it if the ism benefits you. Just as sexism or racism privileges men over women and whites […]
Manufacturing Consent: Creating Hierarchies in the Guru-Disciple Relationship
Manufacturing Consent: Creating Hierarchies in the Guru-Disciple Relationship Amanda Lucia Sexual abuse happens across the globe and in nearly every environment. Recognizing this, religion scholar Andrea Jain argues that focusing on a specific religious context can be distracting and detrimental to tackling what is a global and ubiquitous problem. She writes, “The appeal to the dangers of guru charisma and devotion as an explanation for sexual violence pulls our attention away from larger social structures and norms that cultivate a dominant global culture of sexual violence … and lends itself to an orientalist stereotype of South Asians, their religions, and […]