AdminThe first lecturer to teach the first ever university course on Sikhism in the UK was featured amongst the 1,148 British citizens conferred with the Queen’s New Year’s Honours, A senior lecturer in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at the University of Birmingham, Dr. Jhutti-Johal has been honoured with the Order of the […]
The first lecturer to teach the first ever university course on Sikhism in the UK was featured amongst the 1,148 British citizens conferred with the Queen’s New Year’s Honours,
A senior lecturer in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at the University of Birmingham, Dr. Jhutti-Johal has been honoured with the Order of the British Empire (OBE) for her services to higher education, faith communities and the voluntary sector.
Armed with a D. Phil from the prestigious Oxford University, Dr. Jhutti-Johal has been teaching the history and culture of Sikhism to undergraduate, graduate and post-graduate students in the University of Birmingham. It is the first university in the UK to have a course on Sikhism.
For this honour, Dr Jhutti-Johal gives credit to the “leap of faith” her parents took and supported her decision to pursue anthropology.
She said “I had to travel to Punjab for my research on Sikhism. I want my work to bring together people of all faith communities because I have found that there basic values of all religions are love, kindness, compassion and tolerance. We need to find ways to live peacefully with everyone,” she adds.
One of her students who, despite being from a non-Sikh background, has espoused the tenets of Sikhism very well in his work in the local government sector. “Despite being a non-Sikh my student has strong belief in the message of Guru Nanak: naam japna (meditation), kirt karna (hard work) and wand chhakna (sharing with the community).
Now people of the area have high respect for Sikh doing charity work for the homeless in the area where he work,” Dr Jhutti-Johal mentions with pride while talking about her student.
Apart from her academic pursuits, Dr Jhutti-Johal sits on the board of the European Society for Intercultural Theology and Interreligious Studies.
Source- SBS.com
Thought for the Dy BBC 23 -11 -23. The Today programme’s almost weekly and sometimes daily reporting or discussion of “violence against women and girls” as opposed to “violence” has created, whether intended or not, the impression that violence against men and boys is not important. As the ONS data shows, schoolboys are two and half times as likely to be victims of violent assault than schoolgirls; and the constant reference to ‘women and girls’ is not only insulting to those boys who are harmed but also their parents. This insidious drip feed is likely also to be counterproductive, in making those boys with a tendency to violence resent girls that they may feel to be privileged.
I had thought that the Today programme had reached its nadir when, on the day that the Metropolitan Police reported that 19 boys (subsequently updated to 20) and zero girls had been murdered in London in the preceding 12 months, the programme’s Guest Editor presented what was effectively a special edition on violence against women and girls.
The programme on 23rd November however hit a new low. Having failed to report on the 60th anniversary of the ending of the conscription of every teenage boy (but no teenage girl) into the British armed forces; arguably the single biggest incidence of sex discrimination in the 20th C, the programme managed to spend 5 whole minutes on the 60th anniversary of the fictional Doctor Who. This was then followed by the most inappropriate and insensitive “Thought for the Day”. The speaker not only pontificated on “violence against women and girls” but chose to expound upon “attacks on women and girls in armed conflict”, and she desired “a world where women can lead lives free from fear”. The overwhelming number of those harmed in armed conflict are men and boys; 99.95% of the UK service personal who died fighting for their country whom we have recently commemorated were male. Cleary this lady feels that only half the population deserve “a life free from fear”. To broadcast this ‘Thought’ at a time when millions of boys and men are prevented from leaving their home countries; when hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, of male civilians, young and middle aged men, boys as young as 16, and even disabled men are being forcibly conscripted into the armed forces in Russia and the Ukraine, thousands of them being killed, whilst millions of their female compatriots are being welcomed across Europe as ‘refugees’ is not only in appalling bad taste, but ironically in direct conflict with the speaker’s own claim that “no one should suffer harm and all are part of creation”. To broadcast this ‘Thought’ on the same day that it is announced that in exchange for Hamas hostages Israel will be releasing adult women convicted of attempted murder and attempted suicide bombing, whilst holding hundreds of teenage boys and young men who have been convicted of nothing in ‘administrative detention’, is truly disgraceful.