Debating Yoga and Mindfulness in Public Schools is, at first glance, a scholarly and objective examination of secularized yoga and meditation in public schools and whether such curricula violate the First Amendment prohibition of religious establishment by government. However, the structure of Candy Gunther Brown’s arguments, the subtly biased portrayals of key individuals, the selective nature of factual disclosures, and the overall tone reveal a fixity of opinion that suggest this book is less about objective analysis and more about exhaustively re-litigating a court case in which Brown played a key role. The main thrust of her claim is that yoga and mindfulness indeed violate First Amendment protections because these embodied practices are indivisible from their original cultural contexts and “secularization…consists of more than subtracting religious language and adding scientific framing” (187).
The text focuses on the 2013 case Sedlock v. Baird, where two parents sued the Encinitas, California...
University of California Press