To many outside India, Hinduism is envisioned as the foundation of an ideal, all-embracing society. Yet this is far from the truth. Though historically the practice of Hinduism does promote the idea of an inclusive and tolerant way of life, in the pa...

Though it has been nearly two decades since the fall of Communism in the former Soviet Union and the accompanying disintegration of the Soviet state, a strange aspect of the current cultural situation in Russia and in the other former republics of th...

Located on the west coast of India along the Arabian Sea, Goa officially became an Indian state in 1987 after nearly 500 years of Portuguese rule. This conflict of cultures is captured by Indian photographer Prabuddha Dasgupta in "The Edge of Faith"....

Croatian writer Slavenka Drakulic here presents an unorthodox, imaginative take on the transition from Communism to capitalism in the former Soviet Union. Three characters – a dog, an underdog, and a cat – offer the reader narratives that reflect on...

Jerzy Grotowski (1933-1999) was a Polish stage director, theatrical theorist, and founder and director of the small but influential Polish Laboratory Theatre. Most of Grotowski's theater-making took place in this and similar small theaters and studio...

In "Rebels, Wives, Saints", acclaimed scholar Tanika Sarkar continues her revolutionary scholarship on women, religion, and nationhood in colonial Bengal. The colonial universe Sarkar describes in "Rebels, Wives, Saints" centers around symbols of wom...

Though the recent election of American President Barack Obama and his signing of the executive order to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay signals a considerable shift away from the policies of the Bush era, the lessons to be learned from the war on...

November 9, 2009 will mark 20 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the monumental event that signaled the beginning of the end of Communism in the former Soviet Union. Yet, why was this collapse of Communism considered final, but the many failure...

Part of an ongoing series published in cooperation with the "Index on Censorship" that deals with religion and free expression, "The Jewish Case" is distinctive in several ways. To begin with, even calling Judaism a religion is problematic. The bread...

During the cold-war years, Western Christians basked in a sense that they were living on the right side of the ideological divide, harboring humane values, freedom, democracy and the right to irrationality, belief and non-belief. The atheist Communis...