In the News: What Happened & What Now?
A round-up of recent religion news.
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Tag: tibet
In the News: Profiling, Prince, Peaceniks and more!
A round-up of recent religion news. Continue Reading →
In the News: Paris, Witches, the CNN Apocalypse, and more!
A round-up of recent religion and media stories in the news. Continue Reading →
In The World
By Natasja Sheriff From Tibet, Burma and India, the first of a weekly round-up of religion-related news from around the world. Continue Reading →
The Dalai Lama is Home
By Becky Rynor
I was looking for the chink in that unfailingly optimistic armor, a moment of emotion from the man who was forced by invading Chinese forces to flee his homeland of Tibet in 1959.
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In the World links, Unfinished Business edition
Nora Connor: In 2008 the Chinese government recognized the annual Qingming festival, or Tomb Sweeping Day, as a national holiday. Continue Reading →
Daily Links
Laura Larson writes at States of Formation about the business of making monsters:
Through political rhetoric and sensationalized reporting, “monster” has been branded – on the cheap – into the American narrative and its everyday parlance.
On Tebowing*:
Dangerous territory”? Seriously? Let’s start at the beginning. Whenever Tim Tebow takes a knee on the field and thanks God, he is engaging in a very conscious act of moral grandstanding. I write that with no judgment whatsoever. Tebow is saying, “Look at me,” just as surely as Deion Sanders doing the pigeon wing in the end zone was saying, “Look at me.” He is saying, “Look at me and gaze upon my prayerfulness,” and he is saying that because he is an evangelical Christian, and evangelical Christianity is a religion built on conspicuous faith. He is bearing witness, right there on the hashmarks. He is spiking the Gospel.
“Another Tibetan Nun Burns Herself to Death Over Repression of Religion”
“Outlining how to get away with bullying,” and calling it religious freedom.
It’s a worthy question: How does the USCCB influence lawmakers when their opinions are so outside even mainline Catholic thinking?
Bellah’s Huge Project: “Where did religion come from?”
*h/t Nora Connor Continue Reading →
His Holiness the Dalai Lama Goes to Washington
Amy Levin talks to Robert Barnett about HHDL’s visit.
Prayer flags and American flags are flying side by side as His Holiness the Dalai Lama (HHDL) continues his second week of the Kalachakra, a festival for “world peace,” from July 6-16 in our nation’s capital. The calendar of events began with a celebration of the Dalai Lama’s 76th birthday, followed each day by prayers, dances, daily teachings, and various rituals. The main highlight and most populated event of the festival was a historic “Talk for World Peace,” given by the Lama himself. Sharing the microphone with emcee Whoopi Goldberg, the Dalai Lama addressed as many as 20,000 people who made the pilgrimage to Capitol Hill for the three-hour outdoor event complete with chanting, dancing, and music in addition to the hour and a half speech.
While most Kalachakra attendees spent their $500 to consume priceless messages of inner peace, liberation, and selflessness, there was another mantra brewing – this one given to a different crowd of devotees. On Thursday, July 7th, Speaker of the House John Boehner (R) and former speaker Nancy Pelosi (D) welcomed His Holiness to Capitol Hill to advise the US on how to spread values of peace and democracy to various nations.
Meetings of good faith between HHDL and US public officials, including presidents, are quite a ritual, but something was different this time around – during this visit, the Dalai Lama no longer holds any formal political power. Just this past March, His Holiness announced his decision to “relinquish his last remaining political powers.” Continue Reading →
Happy 75th Birthday, Dalai Lama.
In Beijing, Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang at a regular news conference Tuesday remarked about the date: “I only remember two dates: March 8, 1951 and May 23, 1959, the liberation of the Tibetan serfs.”