Kodaiji Temple in Japan has a new addition. It is not a new statue or an ancient artifact on display. Instead, it is a robot priestess that recently gave its first speech. The humanoid robot is named Mindar and is made largely of aluminum with silicon hands and face. Its first speech was on the…

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is financing a new organization designed to bring all the world’s religions together. “The organization hopes to prevent conflict through interfaith dialogue,” writes Spencer Kimball for the German news site Deutsche Welle.  “The foreign ministers of Austria, Saudi Arabia and Spain signed the founding treaty of a new international organization designed…

Three hundred nuns from the Druk Gawa Khilwa Buddhist nunnery near Kathmandu are learning kung fu from the masters of Nepal’s Drukpa monastery. In a break with centuries of tradition, others from as far away as the Himachal Pradesh area of India have traveled to the monastery seeking not only to learn self-defense, but to become kung fu instructors…

With a Muslim insurgency threatening to destabilize Thailand’s south, armed soldiers have begun shadowing the area’s Buddhist monks as they make their daily rounds begging for alms. “With its barbed wire, sandbag bunker and armed guard, Wat Lak Muang in Thailand’s strife-torn deep south looks more like a military outpost than a typical Buddhist temple,”…

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