Ancient Mohenjo-daro, Mohenjodaro. Philip Goldberg: Beatles in India: The Retreat That Reverberates Across the Universe. Forty five years ago, the Beatles were settling into the ashram of their new guru, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, in Rishikesh, India.
The news coverage was nonstop and global, as it had been six months earlier when the lads first met Maharishi and became public advocates for his Transcendental Meditation technique. It would have been easy at the time to dismiss the media frenzy as just another pop culture craze. But reporters knew this was different. Why would four young, bright, fun-loving youngsters, wealthy beyond imagining, able to go anywhere and do anything, choose to hunker down in an austere, vegetarian, non-air-conditioned compound in the Himalayan foothills and spend large chunks of time each day with their eyes closed? What is this meditation thing? Questions like those turned what might have been a brief media burst into a watershed moment in cultural history. The Beatles took to meditation like they had taken to Chuck Berry and Little Richard. The Eightfold Path.
Our Christian Earth: The astounding reach of the world’s largest religion, in charts and maps. Filipino Christians crowd into Manila's streets for the annual procession of the Feast of the Black Nazarene. (David Greedy -- Getty Images) Christmas is an official government holiday in the United States, one that coincides with a smaller and informal but well-known tradition: debating whether or not there is a "war on Christmas. " In this thinking, American Christians are obligated to "stand up and fight against this secular progressivism that wants to diminish the Christmas holiday," as prominent Fox News host Bill O'Reilly recently argued. "We have to start to fight back against these people. " This is often portrayed as a global fight; O'Reilly, in one of his books, suggested that the "war on Christmas" is part of an effort to "mold [the U.S.] in the image of Western Europe. " A very different picture emerges from a just-out Pew report, "The Global Religious Landscape.
" For simplicity's sake, let's examine what the visualizations of Pew's research show us. Source: Pew Whoa! With the "world's largest" gathering of atheists this weekend in Washington, D.C., the National Post's graphics department takes a look at how the world's religions break down. Studying religion - Studying religion. This unit will give you an opportunity to think about some of the key concepts and methods of the discipline of religious studies.
You will meet examples of different forms of religious practice and belief, mostly from Britain and India, and will compare the ways in which boundaries are drawn (or not drawn) between what is held to be ‘religious’ and ‘non-religious’ in two different societies. The aim of this unit is to explore three key questions: Why study religion? What is religion? How should religion be studied? The unit begins with a series of video clips on religion in Liverpool. This study unit is an adapted extract from the Open University course A103 An introduction to the Humanities, which is no longer taught by the University.