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Here's my article!! A week late but perky and full of information nonetheless. Please look past the lame title:

Rethinking Religious Terms

Warm showers are inviting, cold showers are harsh, but six a.m. showers are cruel. So strikes morning for Gurbinder Singh, a third-year medical student and Sikh at Ohio University.

“I wake up around six a.m., shower and pray for one hour from the holy book. There are five different prayers of about 60 pages that I go through in an hour,” said Singh in an email correspondence.

What deters him from hitting the snooze button and waking later for class? “Without my beliefs I would be lost in this world,” said Singh. “It helps me stay calm throughout the day, I am sharper when I meditate, and it helps me be a more pleasant person. Praying also helps me remember to do the right things. If I am in a situation where I can’t decide right from wrong, I go and read the teachings of our prophets to guide me to the right way.”

Perhaps such devotion is to be expected from a Sikh, which means “disciple” or “learner” in Punjabi, a language spoken in Pakistan and northwestern India. Sikhism is a sect of Hinduism founded in the 15th century whose followers denounce the traditions of Islam and Hinduism. To Sikhs all people are considered equal regardless of race, religion, or sex and women are welcome to take part in or to lead any ceremony.

A Sikh is “Any human being who faithfully believes in: one immortal being, ten gurus, from Guru Nanak Dev to Guru Gobind Singh, the Guru Granth Sahib, the utterances and teachings of the ten Gurus, the baptism bequeathed by the tenth Guru, and who does not owe allegiance to any other religion," states The Sikh Code of Conduct by Reht Maryada.

The amount of time spent in prayer and meditation is self-designated for Sikhs. “Some of my friends wake up earlier, two or three a.m., and pray for two or three hours, some don’t pray at all. It all depends on what one feels comfortable with and the solace that they need on that particular day,” said Singh.

“In the evening again I pray for 20 to 30 minutes, again a different prayer from the holy book. And then again before I go to bed I say a different prayer for five minutes. I usually read prayers from the holy book. Sometimes when I am stressed or worried about something I meditate, and by the end of a 30-minute session my worries and stresses dissolve.” Prayer can be a casual venture, as Sikhism doesn’t stipulate a certain setting.

Contrary to many religious zealots, Singh doesn’t spend the majority of his time with others of the same faith. “There are very few Sikhs at OU so I usually hang out with people of all different religions. Sometimes I watch the free movie in Baker with friends and I have always wanted to go watch plays in Blackburn auditorium, but studies have taken that opportunity away from me,” said Singh.

At Ohio University Sikhism may be weakly represented and virtually unknown in comparison to Western religions like Christianity and Judaism, but there are 25 million Sikhs worldwide, making it the fifth largest religious population.
According to Classics and World Religion professor Steve Hays, the term “non-Western” in regards to religion is purely arbitrary and historical.

“It will make no sense a hundred years from now to talk about Eastern and Western religions,” said Hays. “People may still do it just because it’s sort of in the historical record but it won’t really make sense. Traditional terminology has a certain life force about it. It sticks there and for a long time people just sort of adjust to it.”

Religions that arise in what has historically been called the Orient and therefore are commonly referred to as “non-Western” include Buddhism, Hinduism, Sikhism, Shintoism, and Daoism .

“In a world that’s increasingly intermixed and global, we really understand that China and India and so on for us aren’t even east – they’re east for Europe!” said Hays. “Back then that’s the way you’d get there is you’d go east. For us they’re west. I remember as a kid being disoriented by that and wondering why in the hell we talked about China as east instead of west.”

“International students bring these religious traditions with them so they’re essential to their representation on campus,” said Hays. “If it isn’t endemic, somebody has to bring it in.”

What should be a welcome addition to American culture, Sikhs are called to think of God at all times through a lifestyle of truth, virtue, and humility.

“I do not see any evil, all I see is God's will, and God's will is always for the betterment of us whether we are able to understand it or not,” said Singh.