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?
Animal Abuse in Modern Yoga Gastropolitics
Sacrilegious Episode 04: Kathryn Lofton
Kathryn Lofton, Religious Studies scholar and Dean of Humanities at Yale University, joins Gary in this freewheeling but religion-focused episode of Sacrilegious. In under 60 minutes they tackle a variety of topics, including Bob Dylan and Beyoncé; religious literacy and canon wars; public scholarship and the pandemics, all with an eye on the shifting power dynamics driving academic and public understandings of “religion.”
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?
Sacrilegious Episode 03: Who?
Who on earth studies religion? What are the forces that motivate someone to take up religion as a calling–not in terms of faith, but in terms of teaching and study? This episode explores some of the answers with reference to the host of Sacrilegious, Gary Laderman, who shares some of his perspectives and experiences on coming to the study of religion, being saved by education, and what he hopes to achieve in this enterprise.
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.
Sacrilegious Episode 02: What?
What the hell is religion? In this episode Laderman explores the questions and problems around defining religion.
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 […]