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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Fantastic Borderlands And Masonic Meta-Religion In Rudyard Kipling’S “The Man Who Would Be King”, Lucas Kwong
Fantastic Borderlands And Masonic Meta-Religion In Rudyard Kipling’S “The Man Who Would Be King”, Lucas Kwong
Publications and Research
This article examines Kipling’s The Man Who Would Be King” through the lens of Freemasonry’s interreligious ideology. In British India, members of “The Craft” offered what scholar James Laine calls a meta-religion, a fraternity whose emphasis on interreligious tolerance masks power relations between colonizers and colonized. When he became a Freemason, Kipling’s lifelong fascination with India’s religious diversity translated into enthusiasm for the sect’s unifying aspirations. In this context, “The Man Who Would Be King” stands out for how sharply it contests that enthusiasm. The story’s Masonic protagonists determine to find glory and riches in Kafiristan, a borderland region known …
Religious Studies Encyclopedism: A Recent History, Mark E. Eaton
Religious Studies Encyclopedism: A Recent History, Mark E. Eaton
Publications and Research
As academic reference librarians, we need to historically situate the reference sources we use within changing scholarly disciplines. Mircea Eliade’s Encyclopedia of Religion, for example, is an important text in religious studies, but it is not a neutral text. Rather, it clearly reflects certain intellectual commitments and discursive strategies that need to be situated within histories of scholarship. Failure on the part of librarians to contextualize the perspectives of a reference source is problematic, as it leaves the assumptions of the text unchallenged. More constructively, librarians need to problematize the agendas of reference sources, and make salient their discursive …