(RNS) — As of Thursday (May 8), the Chicago Board of Education and New York’s David Lynch Foundation have agreed to settle a three-yearlong class-action lawsuit that alleged public high school students were forced to practice Hindu rituals through the guise of a meditation program.
The ‘Quiet Time’ initiative of the David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness-Based Education and World Peace — the late filmmaker’s project to bring Transcendental Meditation (TM) to “at-risk populations” around the world, including inner-city students and prison inmates — implemented a twice-daily 15-minute meditation session in five Chicago high schools between the years of 2015 and 2019 as part of a study designed to “decrease stress and the effects of trauma” for students living in high-crime neighborhoods.
Over 2,000 students participated in the study, which was co-run by the University of Chicago’s Urban Labs social and behavioral research initiative on community violence. The foundation argued TM’s form of mantra meditation — the silent repetition of one word or sound to enter a state of self-hypnosis — was completely non-religious. But plaintiffs argued the Sanskrit invocations of Hindu deities and an initiation puja, called a “ceremony of gratitude” by instr …
