Radio profile aired by The California Report as the second story in the 20Something series, May 25, 2012
SWEAS: The sun has yet to rise over her beige suburban house an hour east of Los Angeles. But Ajarat Bada is up, Quran in her lap, practicing her Arabic. Continue reading “Nigerian Student Finds Her Faith in Dialogue”
Published by The Washington Post, Huffington Post Religion, Religion News Service, May 25, 2012
Children are usually the primary complainers about Sunday school, but when Mudita Bahadur started looking for excuses not to take her children to the Hindu temple on Sunday, she knew she had to make a change.
“One, it’s dogmatic and two, it’s inconvenient,” she said of the Hindu classes held a 45-minute drive away from her home in Santa Monica, Calif.
Bahadur decided to take her children’s religious education into her own hands. For the past three years, she and other Indian parents have been teaching their children about religion in each other’s living rooms.
The do-it-yourself approach permits them to instill pride and progressive values in a traditional manner, the parents say. …
Published by The Washington Post, Huff Post Religion & Religion News Service, May 10, 2012
Even though she met her husband through an arranged marriage, Pooja Sindhwani considers herself a modern woman. She worked in interior design in her native India for four years, and she and her husband spent a year getting to know each other before their wedding. When she followed her husband to Houston, she wasn’t worried about adjusting to life in the United States.
“You feel you’re going to a country that offers opportunities,” Sindhwani said, “you expect that things will work out.”
Except when they don’t.
Unable to land a job in Houston, Sindhwani slipped into depression. Like thousands of Indian women, she was issued an H-4 “dependent spouse” visa that did not allow her to work. …
Read more on WashingtonPost.com
Published by The Washington Post, Huff Post Religion & Religion News Service, April 20, 2012
Kamna Mittal and her husband moved to the Bay Area soon after they were married in India in 2000. In addition to being in a new country, the couple were new to each other. Their marriage had been arranged.
“When you go for an arranged marriage,” she said, “it’s a total gamble.”
Now a mother of two, Mittal counts herself lucky that it worked out, but 12 years later, she wants to help Indian-American singles in the Bay Area meet directly.
Turns out even love can use a little help every now and then, and the age-old practice of arranged Hindu marriages is getting a 21st-century makeover. …
Originally published on GlobalPost.com RIGHTS blog, March 31, 2012
NEW DELHI — India has hosted the Dalai Lama and his Tibetan followers for 53 years, but new strains between the Tibetan refugees and their hosts became evident this week with the arrest of more than 250 activists ahead of Chinese President Hu Jintao’s visit to New Delhi.
Indian police also placed the entire Tibetan community in Delhi on house arrest, closing down the refugee camp Majnu Ka Tilla following the self-immolation of a 27-year-old Tibetan exile. Continue reading “Tibetan refugees fear India’s crackdown on activism”
Published by Religion Dispatches, March 28, 2012
DELHI—Shibayan Raha had worried that this would happen. At a protest against the upcoming visit of Chinese President Hu Jintao, a 27-year-old Tibetan exile lit himself on fire and ran past the podium before police and other activists could douse the flames. Continue reading “The Fire Next Time: Tibetan Protests Spread”
Published on NeonTommy.com, February 18, 2011
The small group studying the Bhagavad Gita at the Vedanta Society in Hollywood dissected just one four-line verse during their Sunday afternoon course, and much of the discussion centered on one word.
To Antoni Subirats, “clemencia,” as the Sanskrit word was translated into Spanish, implied a formal pardon from a king or a soldier. It was not a quality easy emulated today, in his opinion. The English translation, however, used “forbearance.” He turned to his follow classmates—two Indian Americans, a Mexican American, a Filipino man, and the Argentinean nun running the class—to explain what the English word meant.
“If we stick to the literal meaning of the word, we don’t go forward,” Indrajit Sarkar said, turning the conversation to forgiveness. The Gita is about a battle, he explained, but it can be applied to our spiritual lives as well. “I’m fighting a battle every day in my life.”
Sunday at 11 a.m. is known as the most segregated hour of the week, as races and language groups separate for their own religious services. Sister Jayanti’s bilingual Bhagavad Gita class, however, is a unique experiment in integrating the practice of Hinduism in the United States. The philosophically oriented Vedanta is both a help and a hindrance in that effort, but the Argentinean nun has founded that working across the lingual divide is a spiritual exercise in itself. …
Media critique for TRANS/MISSIONS, the site for the Knight Center for Media and Religion, February 13, 2012
Since President Barack Obama announced his contraception compromise on Friday, the coalition of religious conservatives that had united against the Health and Human Services mandate to cover contraception has begun to fall apart. Obama said that insurance companies rather than religiously affiliated institutions would be required to cover “objectional services.” Roman Catholic bishops in the U.S. question whether this would actually work, but in rejecting the compromise Friday night, they also called “for the rescission of the mandate altogether.” (Rocco Palmo has a “bulked up” explanation of the bishops’ position.) Continue reading “Catholics United? Take a Closer Look”
Megan Sweas 
Decolonizing Coverage: Religion, Celebrity and Kony 2012
Media critique for TRANS/MISSIONS, the site for the Knight Center for Media and Religion, March 26, 2012
After visiting a slum in Delhi, India with a young evangelical woman from Georgia, a friend and I got into a discussion about Americans working in the developing world. “Maybe I just don’t like NGOs,” he said, convinced that the efforts of not just evangelicals but all Westerners are tainted by a sense of cultural superiority. Continue reading “Decolonizing Coverage: Religion, Celebrity and Kony 2012” →