ISKCON NewsThe News Agency of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness

At 8:45pm on May 1st, the doors of Rutgers Student Center opened, and over six hundred students poured into the Center’s large multipurpose hall. Their excitement was palpable through the hum of conversation.

This year there were some real improvements not only in the restaurant, but in the Palace Lodge rooms and the new New Vrindaban Welcome Center as well.

As the appearance day of Lord Nrsimha, one of Krishna's main incarnation is approaching, ISKCON's Deity Worship Ministry has interviewed deity-worship expert Jananivas Das about the preparations in Mayapur, West Bengal, India.

This year marks the 22nd Annual Prabhupada Festival at the New Dwaraka temple in Los Angeles, California, USA. The Prabhupada Festival was founded with the purpose of allowing everyone and anyone to come together to hear about and glorify His Divine Grace A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Srila Prabhupada – The Founder-Acharya of ISKCON.

When Hungarian radical right-wingers rallied against a Jewish conference in Budapest in early May, a well-known Protestant pastor hid behind the stage while his wife stepped up to the podium to denounce Jews and Israel.

Geza Vermes, a religious scholar who argued that Jesus as a historical figure could be understood only through the Jewish tradition from which he emerged, and who helped expand that understanding through his widely read English translations of the Dead Sea Scrolls, died on May 8 in Oxford, England. He was 88.

If we grasp the full scope of our existence, we can understand the significance of each event that we struggle through. Since most of us lack such vision, we need to develop faith that Lord Krishna arranges everything for our ultimate benefit, even if at present we cannot understand how.

Although ISKCON guru Tamal Krishna Goswami passed away in 2002 at the age of fifty six, his mother Lore Garrick—affectionately known to devotees as “Mother Lore” or to TKG disciples as “Grandma”—outlived him by eleven years. Her life was a fascinating one.

The Rev. Morris G. Henderson wasn’t sure what do with a vacant city block of land behind his Baptist Church in Richmond, VA (USA). The church had purchased the plots, but didn’t have the funding to build a planned family life center. Then, he had a vision.

When dining out, not all secrets are meant to be kept — at least that's partly the intent with the "secret" restaurant trend. Unmarked entrances, unadvertised contact information, and word-of-mouth marketing are typical attributes of this deliberately cryptic experience.

More than twenty scholars and practitioners, ten each from the Islamic and the Vaishnava Hindu traditions, spent a day together at a park-like retreat center just outside of Washington, D.C. on Saturday April 13 for an in depth discussion of “Sacred Aesthetics.”

“Religion is the opium of the masses” is the argument often used by atheists to dismiss religion without addressing the substantial issues it addresses. Though many atheists have used this quote, its most well-known proponent is Karl Marx: “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.”

The library of ISKCON’s Bhaktivedanta Research Centre (BRC) in Kolkata, West Bengal, India has been acquiring rare and precious Gaudiya Vaishnava works since it opened in June 2009. And this year it added one of its most exciting acquisitions yet to its existing library of 15,000 works.