Word: kerala
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
After 26 years as a nun, Jesme Raphael gave up her robes and walked out of the Congregation of the Mother of Carmel, the Catholic order in Kerala, India, that had been her home for three decades. Two years later, Raphael, now 53, has come out with her memoirs, Amen: An Autobiography of a Nun, cataloging lurid details of bullying, sexual abuse and homosexuality in the oldest Catholic women's order in the idyllic coastal state in southern India. Shocking as it is, the book is only the latest in a long series of accusations and scandals afflicting the Catholic...
...Since the book's release on Jan. 30, publishers DC Books have already sold all 3,000 copies, and a reprint has been ordered. The Catholic Church is miffed. "There is no dearth of antireligion people in Kerala society," said Stephen Alathara, deputy secretary of the Kerala Catholic Bishops Council. "They are using this for their antisocial, antichurch activities." In 1957 Kerala voted in the world's first democratically elected communist government, and it has been under communist rule since the last state elections...
...There has been no shortage of them in recent months. On Feb. 11, Sister Josephine, a nun in the Daughters of Mary congregation in Trivandrum, Kerala's state capital, was found dead in her room in an apparent suicide. Members of the congregation said the 38-year-old nun had been under treatment for depression. After news of the incident spread, a crowd gathered around the house and shouted slogans alleging that harassment had led Sister Josephine to kill herself. The police had to intervene, and an inquiry into the case was later ordered. Six months earlier...
...many see that message as extending to politicians. When controversial BJP leader Narendra Modi offered monetary compensation to all the families of security personnel killed in action in Mumbai, he was firmly rebuffed by the wife of the city's slain antiterrorism chief Hemant Karkare. When the state of Kerala's Chief Minister, a member of the Communist Party, went to pay his respects to the family of a fallen commando on Sunday, he was barred from entering the house by the soldier's father. These moments of anger convey a growing public sentiment that the security crisis demands...
...mythology, some of it involving the East. There was a German scholar who claimed in the 1940s that Jesus traveled the Silk Road, lived in India and may have visited a monastery in Lhasa where there were Buddhist texts. The church of St. Thomas in India's Kerala state is the only place where Christ is not pictured on a cross but in a meditative samadhi posture. I also researched that period in history for Jesus's religious context, political and cultural contexts, the Jewish sects at the time, the occupation by Rome. Then I went into incubation, meditation...