Book Review: Divine Mother, Blessed Mother: Hindu Goddesses and the Virgin Mary

A review of Divine Mother, Blessed Mother: Hindu Goddesses and the Virgin Mary by Francis X. Clooney

Meeting \u27the Mother Who Takes Across\u27: Christian Encounters with the Fierce Goddesses of Hinduism

This essay revolves around a simple question: what does Hindu-Christian dialogue look like from the Christian side when the Hindu side is represented by Saktism? Or, how do Christians, whether Protestant or Catholic, react and what do they learn when the Hindus they encounter worship a supreme female divinity who is both compassionate and wrathful, whose cult is often associated with blood sacrifice, whose philosophical underpinnings tend to be monistic, and some of whose devotees have been involved in esoteric, often sexual Tantric rites? Where are the cross-overs, the bridges to understanding

Book Review: The Graceful Guru: Hindu Female Gurus in India and the United States

A review of The Graceful Guru: Hindu Female Gurus in India and the United States edited by Karen Pechilis

Viewpoint: What I See: Little Indias, Caste, and the Church in the West

Recently a New York Times article, From Untouchable to Businesswoman (July 22, 2010), carried the story of Kakuben Lalabhai Parmar, an illiterate Scheduled Caste woman from Gujarat who was selling her patchwork embroideries at New York\u27s posh Asia Society. Thanks to intervention in India twenty years ago from SEWA, the Self-Employed Women\u27s Association, she came out of seclusion in her house to participate in society, while helping to preserve the traditional handicrafts of her village. The result is a globe-trotting artisan-businesswoman who exchanges hugs with her clients, buys shampoos at CVS for her daughters back home in the village, and seems at ease in new environments

Encountering Kali ; in the margins, at the center, in the West

Encountering Kal¾ explores one of the most remarkable divinities the world has seen - the Hindu goddess Kal¾. She is simultaneously understood as a blood-thirsty warrior, a goddess of ritual possession, a Tantric sexual partner, and an all-loving, compassionate Mother. Popular and scholarly interest in her has been on the rise in the West in recent years. Responding to this phenomenon, this volume focuses on the complexities involved in interpreting Kal¾ in both her indigenous South Asian settings and her more recent Western incarnations. Using scriptural history, temple architecture, political violence, feminist and psychoanalytic criticism, autobiographical reflection, and the goddess's recent guises on the Internet, the contributors pose questions relevant to our understanding of Kal¾, as they illuminate the problems and promises inherent in every act of cross-cultural interpretation