During our trip to India (May 5-22), I was able to keep up with world news a bit through reading an English language newspaper published in Bangalore, the city in south India where our group spent several days working alongside an Indian pastor and his family and congregation.

The newspaper includes a regular column written by SRI SRI Ravi Shankar, a popular spiritual leader whose Art of Living Foundation, according to its website, “offers programs to uncover the strength, peace, and joy that lie at the core of every human being,” and “seeks to help build a global society that is free of stress, violence, and misery – and full of service, wisdom, and celebration.”

On May 12, Ravi Shankar’s column, “The Concept of the Evil,” focused on the differences between Eastern and Western religious traditions’ approaches to dealing with evil:

In Eastern culture and religions, the deeply ingrained view is that it is God’s job to deal with evil. It is not the job of the individual. All that an individual has to do is to pray.… One needs only to pray and deities will take care of the evil…. Click to continue »