When it comes to education, ISKCON has learned a lot.

In the sixties and seventies, when our society was but a tottering toddler itself, we had young children with an undeniable need: to be educated. Not even considering outside schools as an option, we began to teach them ourselves without first educating teachers.

A new tradition has been born from the desert floor like a phoenix, and the fire of devotion continues to burn as Krishna Camp once again descends on Burning Man 2008, the annual festival of all things alternative, creative, and progressive, which ensues this year, as always, from the Black Rock Desert in Nevada.

Detroit, Michigan (USA) - ISKCON devotee Saraswati Richardson will be one of three women featured on "The Secret Lives of Women," a reality television show on the Women's Entertainment cable network.  The episode with Saraswati, entitled "Extreme Beliefs," will air on  On August 19, 2008 at 10pm EST. 

Once again the Hindu festival of Rathayatra was celebrated in style by Leicester revelers, but with more chariots than before. Listen to find out what the festival is all about...

The annual Ratha Yatra chariot festival was bigger and better than in previous years with three sumptuously decorated chariots being wheeled from Leicester's Clocktower to Cossington Park in Belgrave.

Spritual food is the theme for this year’s annual Janmashtami festival at Bhaktivedanta Manor later this month.

The manor off Hilfield Lane in Aldenham, which boasts extensive grounds, will play host to the largest Krishna festival outside India when it stages the event on August 24 and 25.

In the late 1990s, a BBT conference handling questions from translators sparked a renewed interest in the history of Srila Prabhupada’s books.

To give satisfactory answers, BBT staff found they often had to go back to early manuscripts, Prabhupada’s dictated tapes, or original Sanskrit or Bengali texts.

Although the reaction to my newly published book on kirtan has been overwhelmingly positive, I have received several letters expressing an entirely predictable ISKCON concern. One letter in particular sums up the all-too-conservative reservation: “I love the new book but I wonder about ‘milk touched by the lips of a serpent.’ I refer, of course, to the non-ISKCON people represented in your book. Shouldn’t we only hear from authorized representatives who embody the mood of Lord Chaitanya?”

There comes a time in every writer's life for an office cleanup. A couple of weeks ago I took the plunge. Hoping to discover a few long-forgotten bits and pieces in the process, I sorted through twenty-six years of accumulated paperwork and files. I wasn't disappointed.

I knew I had many vegetarian recipes stored away, but the final count of over 3000 was indeed a pleasant surprise. Inside one dusty box, I found a collection of very old recipes that I had kept aside, perhaps for some future cookbook. I dug up a recipe for a hundred-year-old apple pie (actually the recipe was a hundred years old, not the pie), and a medieval Swedish cream fudge.

Aug 15, ENGLAND, UK (RELIGIOUS INTELLIGENCE) — In its survey analysis of religious freedom in Uzbekistan, Forum 18 News Service has found continuing violations by the state of freedom of thought, conscience and belief. Amongst many serious violations - which breach the country's international human rights commitments - non-state registered religious activity is a criminal offence, as is the sharing of beliefs and meetings for religious purposes in private homes.

Parents may legally home-school their children in California even if they lack a teaching credential, a state appellate court ruled Friday. The decision is a reversal of the court's earlier position, which effectively prohibited most home schooling and sparked fear throughout the state's estimated 166,000 home-schoolers.

Teachers in one part of the US state of Texas are to be allowed to carry concealed firearms when the new school term opens this month.

The school superintendent in Harrold district said the move was intended to protect staff and pupils should there be any gun attacks on its sole campus.

GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. -- Ernie Long believes he has been to hell. He can even narrow it down to a particular moment.

His mother was dying of cancer. As she lay on her death bed, he swiped her last $5 and the car keys from her purse, went out and got high. When he returned, she was dead.

KATHMANDU, Aug 12 (Reuters) - Religious authorities in Nepal have begun the search for a girl who could be as young as three or four to serve as the new Kumari, or the virgin "living goddess", in a centuries-old tradition.

Astrologers were consulting horoscopes of candidates from Buddhist Shakya families to replace the current Kumari, Preeti Shakya, who is 11 and should retire during the annual Hindu festival of Dasain in October, temple officials said.

Prof K Ramasubramanian of IIT-Bombay has some interesting news. His recently released two-volume translation of the Ganita-Yukti-Bhasa by Jyesthdeva points to the fact that some subsets of calculus existed in Indian manuscripts almost two centuries before Isaac Newton published his work. And that an Indian mathematician and astronomer Nilakantha Somayaji spoke, in parts, about a planetary model, credited to Tycho Brahe almost a century later.

Religious movements are historical, sociological, philosophical, and hopefully, divine phenomenon. They are also the sum total of the contributions, influence and sacrifices of many men and women, both big and small.

In the history yet to be written of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, (ISKCON) many persons will be noted for their contributions, both positive and negative, to this great social enterprise.

Alachua, Florida-Jahnavi Haggard, former Executive Director of Children of Krishna, a non-profit organization formed in 1996 to support second generation Krishna youth with grants for education and counseling, passed away on Saturday, August 9th, at the age of 36. She died at her home in Alachua, Florida, from a heart attack resulting from complications of her life-long struggle with diabetes.

Tattoos have been inked permanently into modern culture. Walk down any busy city street and you'll spot a vast number of tattooees, ranging all the way from the young female professional with a butterfly on her shoulder blade to the wild punk rocker with hardly any space left for his white skin to shine. For some reason, having an unremovable image of a two-headed dragon eating its own face sprawled across their chest until their dying breath is an idea that appeals to a lot of people. National Geographic News reported in April 2000 that fifteen per cent of Americans were tattooed. That's around forty million people.

Now, surely a Hare Krsna devotee would be the last person you'd expect to see among those forty million, right?