Expanding and Refining Christian Interpretations of Rāmānuja

In the last century there has been a remarkable expansion of studies of Rāmānuja by scholars outside the Śrīvaiṣṇava community. This paper concentrates on the contributions of some Christian scholars. Many of the earlier studies focused on Rāmānuja’s opposition to Śaṇkara’s interpretation of the Vedanta, with Roman Catholic scholars tending to favor Śaṇkara and Protestant scholars Rāmānuja. The Belgian Jesuit Pierre Johanns argued for a Christian reinterpretation of the Vedanta that would merge the truths in the different Hindu schools, giving primary importance to Śaṇkara, but modifying the Hindu teaching through the distinctive Christian doctrine of “creation out of nothing.” Later his fellow Jesuit Richard De Smet reaffirmed the primary value of Śaṇkara’s own genuine teachings for Christian theology. Current studies represented in this issue affirm the positive value for Christian theology of Rāmānuja’s version of the Vedanta. Christian studies continue to expand their treatment of Rāmānuja, examining not just his great commentary on the Vedanta Sutras but also all the other writings that his community ascribes to him. In addition, some scholars are looking at the devotional traditions before and after him, especially the hymns of the Tamil poet-saints, composed before, and the commentaries on those hymns, written in the first centuries after him. Such expansion of Christian interpretation requires greater interpretation among scholars, both Christian and Hindu. Christian learning from another religious position begins with noticing something similar though not the same as that in their own religion. Thus far, in the case of Rāmānuja, there is no agreement as to which similarities are more significant and how they relate to some specific version of Christian theology. There may be instances of partial convergence where it is impossible for a Christian either to affirm or deny the truth of Rāmānuja’s teaching. Here it may be important to recognize what is often considered an aesthetic judgment: appreciation. One example is a later Śrīvaiṣṇava estimate of Rāmānuja himself, that he fulfilled the “prophecy” of the poet-saint Nammalvar, being the one who initiated the end of our age of darkness and the return of the golden age

Book Review: Hindu-Christian Dialogue: Perspectives and Encounters

A review of Dr. Harold Coward\u27s Hindu-Christian Dialogue: Perspectives and Encounters

Renaissance theories of vision

A collection of essays by leading art and architectural historians which examine treatises and works of art produced throughout Europe during the Renaissance in order to understand how artists and writers conceived of processes of vision and perception, and how those conceptions influenced the works of art. Keywords: Renaissance, vision, perception, optics, Plato (Meno, Republic, Symposium, Timaeus), Aristotle (De anima, Metaphysics, Nicomachean Ethics, Physics), Plotinus (Enneads), Saint Augustine (De Civitate Dei), Ibn Sina (Avicenna, Liber canonis), Ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen, De Aspectibus), Ibn Sahl, Marsilio Ficino (De amore, Theologia Platonica), Nicholas of Cusa (On Conjecture, On Learned Ignorance, On the Vision of God), Leon Battista Alberti (De pictura), Gian Paolo Lomazzo (Trattato della pittura), Gregorio Comanini (Il Figino), John Davies (Nosce Teipsum, Orchestra), René Descartes (Optics), Samuel van Hoogstraten, George Berkeley (A New Theory of Vision), Florence, Rome, Venice, England, Austria, Netherlands, Fra Angelico (Annunciation, Lamentation, Lamentation Over the Dead Christ), Donatello (Chellini Madonna, Coronation of the Virgin, Crucifix, Piot Madonna), Leonardo da Vinci (Last Supper, Notebooks, Treatise on Painting, Two Views of the Skull, Uffizi Annunciation, Vitruvian Man), Filippino Lippi (Delphic Sibyl), Giovanni Bellini (Agony in the Garden, Coronation of the Virgin), Raphael (Disputa, Holy Family, Jurisprudence, Madonna di Foligno, Parnassus, School of Athens, Sistine Madonna), Parmigianino (Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror), Titian (Assunta, Salome), Bronzino (Pygmalion and Galatea), Johannes Gumpp (Self Portrait), Rembrandt van Rijn (Bathsheba at Her Bath, Jeremiah Lamenting the Destruction of Jerusalem, The Jewish Bride, Lucretia, The Night Watch, Salome, Self Portrait, The Syndics, Titus, A Woman Bathing), Svetlana Alpers (The Art of Describing, Rembrandt’s Enterprise, The Vexations of Art), Thomas Aquinas (Summa Theologica, Commentary on the Sentences), Roger Bacon, Francesco Barozzi, Celeste Brusati (Artifice and Illusion), Norman Bryson (Looking at the Overlooked, Vision and Painting), Baldessare Castiglione (Libro del cortegiano), catoptrics, dioptrics, extramission, intromission, Benvenuto Cellini (Perseus), Giovanni Chellini, Antonio Correggio (Assumption of the Virgin), Georges Didi-Huberman (Fra Angelico), Samuel Edgerton (The Heritage of Giotto’s Geometry), Euclid (Elements of Geometry, Optica), Kamāl al-Dīn al-Fārisī (The Revision of Optics), Giovan Ambrogio Figino, Fra Bartolommeo, Fra Filippo Lippi (Annunciation), Piero della Francesca (De prospectiva pingendi), Galileo (Sidereus Nuncius), Galleria degli Uffizi, Galleria Doria Pamphili, Lorenzo Ghiberti (Commentaries), Domenico Ghirlandaio (Annunciation), Giles of Viterbo, Giorgione (Adoration of the Shepherds), Herbert Grabes (The Mutable Glass), Anthony Grafton (Leon Battista Alberti), Martin Heidegger (Poetry, Language, Thought), Edmund Husserl, Cristiaan Huygens, Immanuel Kant (Critique of Pure Reason), Martin Kemp (The Science of Art), Johannes Kepler, Alkindi (De Aspectibus), Murray Krieger (Ekphrasis), Diogenes Laertius (On the Lives of Philosophers), John Locke, Andrea Mantegna (Friedsam Madonna, St. Sebastion, Trivulzio Altarpiece), Giambattista Marino (La galeria), Masaccio (Tribute Money, Trinity), Museo San Marco, Narcissus, Neoplatonism, Agrippa von Nettesheim (De occulta philosophia), Erwin Panofsky, Platonic Academy, Pliny the Elder, Proclus (Commentary on the First Book of Euclid’s Elements), Ptolemy, Pythagoras, Peter Paul Rubens (Judith with the Head of Holofernes), William Shakespeare (The Rape of Lucrece, Venus and Adonis), Stanza della Segnatura, Giorgio Vasari (Vite), Vatican, Diego Velázquez (The Spinners), Johannes Vermeer (The Artist in His Studio, Girl with a Pearl Earring, View of Delft), Ernst van de Wetering (Rembrandt), Joost van den Vondel, Erasmus Witelo (Perspectivae), Heinrich Wölfflin (Principles of Art History

Cloning crops in a CELSS via tissue culture: Prospects and problems

Micropropagation is currently used to clone fruits, nuts, and vegetables and involves controlling the outgrowth in vitro of basal, axillary, or adventitious buds. Following clonal multiplication, shoots are divided and rooted. This process has greatly reduced space and energy requirements in greenhouses and field nurseries and has increased multiplication rates by greater than 20 fold for some vegetatively propagated crops and breeding lines. Cereal and legume crops can also be cloned by tissue culture through somatic embryogenesis. Somatic embryos can be used to produce 'synthetic seed', which can tolerate desiccation and germinate upon rehydration. Synthetic seed of hybrid wheat, rice, soybean and other crops could be produced in a controlled ecological life support system. Thus, yield advantages of hybreds over inbreds (10 to 20 percent) could be exploited without having to provide additional facilities and energy for parental-line and hybrid seed nurseries

The Dilemma of Diversity and the Boon of Understanding

I want us to reflect on our religious diversity, and on the increasing religious diversity in North America, which Professor Diana Eck and her team of research students are now documenting and interpreting in the Pluralism Project

Protestant Bible Translations in India: An Unrecognized Dialogue?

During my first visit to Kyoto in the spring of 1980, I was given the privilege of attending a meeting of the committee of scholars supervising one of the two series of translations of Shinran Shonin\u27s works now appearing in English. Except for Dr. Minor Rogers, an American scholar of Shin Buddhism, and myself, all the other participants were Shin Buddhists belonging to the Western Temple branch of Shinran\u27s followers. Dr. Dennis Hirota, who has contributed several of the draft translations, is Japanese American. The rest of the group were Japanese. The procedure used by committee to review a draft, line by line, and sometimes word by word, reminded me of many Christian projects of Bible translation and revision

Loving God as a Devoted Servant

These three papers explore important facets of a central topic in comparing Hindu and Christian traditions: human love of God, which is related to the even broader topic of divine love for human beings. I had hoped that each of the authors would make some connections with the other two papers and thereby contribute to one or more imaginary dialogues. Since they have not done so, I shall try to link the aspects of Western and Indian traditions on which they touch, giving particular attention to the one explicitly comparative paper, that by Martin Ganeri