Outcry over Jesuit priest Stan
Swamy’s arrest tests Indian authorities’
anti-terror sweep
December 8, 2020
Swamy is among 16 writers and activists who have been arrested by the ruling BJP government for allegedly inciting caste-based violence.
NEW DELHI (RNS) — Faith has never been only sacramental for 83-year-old Jesuit priest the Rev. Stan Swamy, but, rather, it has been a conduit to empower the poor and marginalized. That stance, captured in his motto, “Faith that does justice,” has led to his arrest by the National Investigative Agency, India’s counterterrorism task force.
Faith leaders pair with health officials to save India’s largest slum from COVID-19
December 1, 2020
MUMBAI, India (RNS) — Dharavi, the vast slum at the center of India’s most populous city, is filled with rows of 1,000-square-foot homes separated by narrow lanes, often choked by residents coming and going or simply looking for relief from their crammed residences.
When the coronavirus arrived in Mumbai in March, this densely populated urban sprawl was considered the most vulnerable spot for the virus to spread. But Dharavi’s rate of infection, once at 80 cases a day, is now down to 11.
The Women Sustaining
Sufism—and an Activist—in Tunisia
October 28, 2020
Priyadarshini Sen reported from Tunisia as part of CRCC’s Global Project on Engaged Spirituality.
On a hilltop overlooking western Tunis, the whitewashed shrine of Syeda Manouba—a Sufi saint of the 13th century who defied tradition to become one of the early feminists of the Arab world—is a testament to Tunisia’s Sufi ancestry.
In India, A Catholic Priest
Is Healing Addicts With Yoga
October 28, 2020
NEW DELHI — When the lights come on, Father Joseph Pereira—propped up against a bookshelf laden with volumes on meditation— recites a serenity prayer. He then launches an hour-long zoom session to empower addicts through healing. When the focus shifts to the participants’ experiences of addiction intensified by the COVID-19 pandemic, the session transforms into an act of collective healing.
As Faith Leaders In India Shun Covid Dead,Sagai Nair Offers Last Rites
September 30, 2020
PUNE, India — Death does not scare Sagai Nair. She lowers the deceased into coffin boxes, carries them by foot to the graveyard with five other volunteers, uses a shovel to dig six feet inside the earth, and recites verses from the Bible for the grieving families.
After paying her last respects, she burns her protective gear, sanitizes herself, and prepares for the next burial. In the coronavirus hotspot of Pune, 47-year-old Nair is one of the few women offering last rites for the dead — a traditionally male-dominated role. Nair is Christian, but she is also laying to rest Muslims and low-caste Hindus.
A Catholic priest takes on interfaith fight against COVID-19 in a sacred Hindu city
September 21, 2020
VARANASI, India (RNS) — Wearing a lilac tunic with a coarse cotton towel around his neck, the Rev. Anand Mathew directed actors from his theater troupe recently in a village on the outskirts of this polyglot sacred city on the banks of the Ganges. The 61-year-old Catholic activist priest and playwright was staging an Indian mythological drama to explain COVID-19 to Varanasi’s poor, many of them Muslims and other religious minorities disproportionately affected by the virus.
In India, a Baul mystic is singing
COVID-19 advice to rural communities
September 10, 2020
NEW DELHI– Circled by gathering passersby on the outskirts of Shantiniketan—a university town 152 km north of Kolkata—Gautam Hazra Baul plucks his khamak, a stringed percussion instrument used by mystic minstrels in Bengal. A cascade of rhythms dispels the afternoon’s stillness around a small shack where tea in earthenware cups is passed around to bystanders.
India’s pioneering transgender
activist defends gains in pandemic
July 7, 2020
KOLKATA, India (RNS) — Well past midnight one day in late June, Ranjita Sinha, a transgender activist based in this city of nearly 15 million, arranged packets of rice, lentils, cooking oil, medicines and biscuits in her dimly lit drawing room. Fastening the packets with red paper hearts, she surveyed her pile of supplies.
Making his kitchen his pulpit, Indian priest highlights the pandemic’s hungry
May 21, 2020
MUMBAI, India (RNS) — From his kitchen in a suburb of North Mumbai, 50-year-old Catholic priest Warner D’Souza preaches across a kitchen counter laden with garden-fresh vegetables and finely ground spices for a one-pot meal. The minihomily is a prelude to an episode of his YouTube program, “Food for the Soul,” a series of lockdown lessons about food and spirituality.
The Moroccan School Training Women Imams To Combat Extremism
May 1, 2020
RABAT, Morocco — Wearing an embroidered loincloth (loincloth is usually worn by males, this is more like a sarong/long wrap skirt) with a matching head scarf, 31-year-old Kulibali Aminata from the Ivory Coast in West Africa says she is determined to champion girls’ education and fight misogyny. “Landing in Morocco was destiny,” said the Arabic teacher, recounting her journey up the coast from Côte d’Ivoire in West Africa to North Africa. “A friend told me about a training program in Morocco to help women and men become social and religious influencers, so I applied on an impulse.”
The Quiet Sufi Behind Morocco’s Push For Moderate Islam
March 16, 2020
MARRAKECH, Morocco — In the cavernous dining room of an artist-friend, Ahmed Toufiq quickly eats a fresh olive-speckled feta salad. But his pace slows as he peels the layers of an aromatic meat tagine slow-cooked in a clay pot.
“You see, you have to be patient,” says 76-year-old Toufiq, Morocco’s Minister of Religious Endowments and Islamic Affairs. He radiates the soul-searching quality of a Sufi mystic. “Just as the culinary flavors need savoring, so does the soul to reach its illumination.”
Woman Sufi saint inspires Badr Baabou, an LGBTQ activist in Tunisia
January 8, 2020
TUNIS, Tunisia (RNS) — Every month, 39-year-old Badr Baabou visits the whitewashed Sufi shrine of Aisha Al-Manoubya on the western side of Tunisia’s capital. With henna-smeared hands, Baabou circles the shrine to pay his respect to the 13th century Sufi saint whom many consider a pioneering feminist in Islam.
Hindu nationalists open self-styled religious courts as a rebuke to Sharia law
October 4, 2019
ALIGARH, India (RNS) — At her self-styled Hindu court in this city noted for its large Muslim minority, Pooja Shakun Pandey, a 37-year-old Hindu ascetic with a radical hate for Mohandas Gandhi, dispenses justice. Draped in a saffron sari, Pandey, who considers herself a disciple of Nathuram Godse, the assassin of Gandhi who shot him at point-blank range in 1948, chants mantras before a ritual fire on the grounds of the local headquarters of Hindu Mahasabha, India’s oldest right-wing Hindu Nationalist Party.
A school where Muslims and Hindus pray together stirs strife in divided India
September 11, 2019
ALIGARH, India (RNS) — Every morning at the Chacha Nehru School, 10-year-old Mahanand recites verses from the Quran to a roomful of his fellow students. He then walks over to a consecrated space for Hindus in the same room, and amid the lighting of ritual lamps for Hindu deities, chants Vedic mantras. Raised an orthodox Hindu in this city southeast of New Delhi, Mahanand believes both Hindu mantras and Islamic rituals are conduits to the same god.
These 24 Indian Villages Are Eliminating Caste Names To Fight Discrimination
August 20, 2019
JIND/HISAR, India — Drawing puffs of smoke from a brass-bottomed hookah at his village home in Barsola, about a four-hour drive north from Delhi, Satbir Pahalwan recounts the caste-based violence that rocked a nearby village nine years ago. “Eighteen houses of low-caste Dalits were set ablaze by an irate mob,” said Pahalwan, the head of Khera Khap, a community organization of 24 villages in the North Indian state of Haryana.