Book Review: Seeing Through Texts: Doing Theology Among the Srivaisnavas of South India

A review of Francis X. Clooney\u27s Seeing Through Texts: Doing Theology Among the Srivaisnavas of South India

Viewpoint: Educational Activism: A post 9/11 reflection

On September 11, after doing some yoga, our nephew went to work. He was on the 105th floor of the World Trade Center, in the first building, when the plane hit the towers. Gopal was thirty two and loved music. In the months that followed, as our family grieves we are also trying to understand what is going on. Confronting hatred and violence which goes on in the name of religion, one becomes acutely sensitized to their linkage in particular religious traditions

Y51K and Still Counting: Some Hindu Views of Time

At the beginning of every religious ritual conducted in Hindu brahmanical modes, the officiating priest and those doing the ritual formally declare the co-ordinates of the land and the time in which the rite takes place. These words are part of the sankalpa or the declaration of intention to do the ritual. Such co-ordinates are in cosmic frameworks; the land is identified with one of the dvipas or islands in puranic cosmology and the timespan is given as a moment that occurs in a span of millions of years. The celebrant first announces the name of the kalpa (a span of 4320 million human years which is equal to one day in the life of the creator god Brahma) and then finetunes it to a shorter time period called the manavantara, a span of approximately 306,720,000 human years named after the primeval man called Vaivasvata. One then notes that this is first part of the kali yuga (this immediate cycle of 432,000 years). After these cosmic rotations of time, the person who is about to do the ritual also notes the calendrical details

Gender and Priesthood in the Hindu Traditions

In writing about Judaism, Norman Solomon has observed that the English language, which evolved in a very Christian atmosphere, is not value-neutral. Most scholars would agree that words are embedded in worldviews. To use a colloquial expression, they carry the baggage of social prejudices and articulate the perceptions on gender, race, religion, and age that have been part of popular culture at various time periods. It is not just that we project stereotypes on what we study, but we also use categories from our natal traditions to understand other cultures. At least initially we observe phenomena that our culture thinks of as important; later our observations and insights are processed through our language which almost always convey approximations at best. Concepts refracted through the lenses of other languages and cultures may take a life of their own; thus when systems of Buddhist meditation were explained in the Chinese language with words connected with Taoist literature, the Chan (and eventually Zen) forms of mediation evolved. As all of us know, issues such as monotheism or sacred books that have been traditionally thought of as central to the study of religion in the Judaeo-Christian traditions in the western modern world, or for that matter, the construction of religion itself, have proved problematic when projected on to other religious cultures

Sacred Land, Common Ground, Contested Territory: the Healing Mother of Velankanni Basilica and the Infant Jesus Shrine in Bangalore

The local tea stall blares the Tamil song as I walk in a street near the shrine of the Infant Jesus in Bangalore, in the state of Karnataka. The tune and words sound like any number of Tamil film songs I have heard. And, in fact, I do think it is a film song for it is not unusual in this genre of romantic music to refer to one\u27s lover in an hyperbolic way as a metaphoric god or goddess. But these words are followed by the name that tells me it is not film music- Come, O lord, and reside with happiness in my heart, Come O Yesu...