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Book Review: Gods In America: Religious Pluralism In The United States., Chad M. Bauman

Journal of Hindu-Christian Studies

Book review of, Gods in America: Religious Pluralism in the United States. by Charles L. Cohen and Ronald L. Numbers, eds.

Book Review: Anthony Demello: The Happy Wanderer., Roselle M. Gonsalves

Journal of Hindu-Christian Studies

Book review of, Anthony deMello: The Happy Wanderer. by Bill deMello.

Book Review: The Divine Body In History: A Comparative Study Of The Symbolism Of Time And Embodiment In St. Augustine And Rāmānuja., Jon P. Sydnor

Journal of Hindu-Christian Studies

Book review of, The Divine Body in History: A Comparative Study of the Symbolism of Time and Embodiment in St. Augustine and Rāmānuja. by Ankur Barua.

Book Review: Hindu-Christian Epistolary Self-Disclosures: ‘Malabarian Correspondence’ Between German Pietist Missionaries And South Indian Hindus (1712-1714)., James Ponniah

Journal of Hindu-Christian Studies

Book review of, Hindu-Christian Epistolary Self-Disclosures: ‘Malabarian Correspondence’ between German Pietist Missionaries and South Indian Hindus (1712-1714). by Daniel Jeyaraj and Richard Fox Young.

Book Review: Hindu-Catholic Encounters In Goa: Religion, Colonialism, And Modernity, P. J. Johnston

Journal of Hindu-Christian Studies

A book review of Hindu-Catholic Encounters in Goa: Religion, Colonialism, and Modernity, by Alexander Henn.

Angels And Gods: A (Radically) Orthodox Experiment, Daniel P. Sheridan

Journal of Hindu-Christian Studies

This is the third in a series of orthodox Catholic theological experiments that I am conducting within the theology of relationship of Catholic faith to other religions. Each experiment attempts to ask a positive, existential question of one of the world religions about the reality of one of their reality assertions. Catholic orthodox theologies have almost always answered these questions in the negative, but in my tentative and provisional judgment the negative answers may be unnecessary. To re-ask the questions using the “eyes of faith,”1 the full weight and depth of orthodoxy must be brought to bear, not as a …

Violence Against Christians In India: A Critical Discourse Analysis Of Two Indian English Newspapers, Clemens Cavallin, Julia Kuhlin

Journal of Hindu-Christian Studies

During recent decades violence against Christians in India has increased significantly. In spite of this development the issue has received relatively little scholarly attention. Likewise, despite the massive transformation of the newspaper business, which has made contemporary India one of the largest newspaper markets in the world, only few studies have been done on the news coverage of religious minorities in India. In this article, we aim to contribute to both these areas of research. Using a critical discourse analysis, we examine the everyday representation of violence and harassment against Christians in the two largest English daily newspapers in India, …

Between And Beyond Canons: Mirabai And Hadewijch In Relation To Scripture And The Self, Holly Hillgardner

Journal of Hindu-Christian Studies

Mirabai, a sixteenth century bhakta, wrote passionate songs of her desire for God. Burning for him, she employed the genre of viraha-bhakti, a mystical eroticism of longing from the Vaiṣṇava tradition, as she begged for him to “[c]ome and extinguish the fire of separation.” Hadewijch, a thirteenth-century Beguine from low-country Europe, wrote poems, letters, and prose that tell of her longing to become Love itself—to be “God with God.” Despite their myriad differences across traditions, miles, and years, Hadewijch and Mirabai can each be said to practice love-longing as her primary contemplative mode.

Interiority And Connectivity: A Brief Comparative Study On The Relation Of Scripture And Contemplation In Bridal Mysticism And Krishna Bhakti, Graham M. Schweig

Journal of Hindu-Christian Studies

In this study I bring two disparate traditions together which have painted portraits of divinity as a divine lover and supreme beloved. One tradition is from sixteenth century Europe and the other from sixteenth century India. My focus here is on the function of contemplative experience and vision in relation to the scriptural depictions and descriptions of divine love within both Carmelite Catholicism and Caitanya Vaishnavism through the developed visions in the sixteenth century works of Saint John of the Cross and Krishnadāsa Kaviraja Goswami, respectively.

Inter-Religious Contexts And Comparative Theology In The Thought Of Evelyn Underhill: Symbolic Narratives Of Mysticism And The Songs Of Kabīr, Michael Stoeber

Journal of Hindu-Christian Studies

Evelyn Underhill (1875-1941) regards mysticism as the core of religion. All religions include various dimensions: scripture/ mythology, doctrine/ philosophy, ethics/ law, social/institutional features, ritual, material aspects, and personal and communal experience. For Underhill, personal religious experience inspires and influences the development of these other aspects of religion—the heart of which is mysticism. Underhill asserts: “The mystics are the pioneers of the spiritual world” (4); “Mysticism is the art of union with Reality”.

Christians And Vedic Sacrifice: Comparing Communitarian Sacrificial Soteriologies, Christopher Denny

Journal of Hindu-Christian Studies

Can there be a constructive Christian appropriation of understandings of religious sacrifice from another religious tradition? As far back as the first-century letter to the Hebrews, Christians defined the efficacy of Jesus Christ’s sacrifice over and against previous sacrifices in the Temple in Jerusalem, and in subsequent centuries have argued that Christ’s sacrifice is an unrepeatable historical act manifesting God’s favor to human beings. Unless Christian theologians are willing to take the path of liberal pluralism and concede that the sacrifice offered through Jesus of Nazareth is one species within a genus of soteriological possibilities, an epiphenomenon of an underlying …

Mysticism In Patañjali’S Yoga Sūtras And In Carl Jung’S Psychology, Harold Coward

Journal of Hindu-Christian Studies

In this article we will examine the understandings of mysticism as offered by Patañjali’s Yoga Sūtras I:41-51 and Carl Jung’s Western psychology. For our purposes, mysticism is not to be understood as something “misty,” vague or emotional (to list but three current misinterpretations). Rather, as understood by the great mystics of all religious traditions, mysticism is experienced as something like sensory perception – only more direct and more vivid! In Patañjali’s Yoga, for example, mysticism is a case of intuition or supersensuous perception (pratibhā) from which distorting emotions have been purged by disciplined meditation. While Western philosophers such as Bertrand …

Author’S Response: Cognitive Science, History-Centrism And The Future Of Hindu Studies, Rajiv Malhotra

Journal of Hindu-Christian Studies

I thank all three responders to my books for their careful and detailed consideration of my work. I will address the following concerns that they raise:

• their challenge to my claim that the dharmic traditions are more in tune with modern cognitive science than the Abrahamic ones are

• their challenge to my claim that history-centrism in the Abrahamic faiths is an important point of difference

• their claim that I ignore how historical forces influence dharma

• their claim against a coherent Hindu philosophy and unity

• Brian Pennington’s tension with the reality that the academy seeks to …

The Pitfalls Of Trying To Be Different, Brian K. Pennington

Journal of Hindu-Christian Studies

For more than a decade Rajiv Malhotra has been known to the study of South Asian religion as a vigorous critic of the practices and frameworks that academics have employed to represent India to the West. Those who know him from his no-holds-barred online articles or by his unflinching confrontation with established scholars at academic meetings may be pleased by the rather different tone of Being Different: An Indian Challenge to Western Universalism, Malhotra’s latest attempt to intervene in the academic study of the religious traditions of the South Asian subcontinent. Whereas Malhotra has achieved much of his renown through …

Book Review: "Piety And Responsibility: Patterns Of Unity In Karl Rahner, Karl Barth And Vedanta Desika," John N. Sheveland, Reid B. Locklin

Journal of Hindu-Christian Studies

A review of John N. Sheveland's "Piety and Responsibility: Patterns of Unity in Karl Rahner, Karl Barth and Vedanta Desika" by Reid B. Locklin.

Book Review: "Ramanuja And Schleiermacher: Toward A Constructive Comparative Theology," Jon Paul Sydnor, Sucharita Adluri

Journal of Hindu-Christian Studies

A review of Jon Paul Sydnor's "Ramanuja and Schleiermacher: Toward a Constructive Comparative Theology" by Sucharita Adluri.

Announcement: Best Book In Hindu-Christian Studies

Journal of Hindu-Christian Studies

THE Society for Hindu-Christian Studies announces Dualities: A Theology of Difference (Westminster John Knox Press, 2010) by Michelle Voss Roberts as the winner of its award, “Best Book in Hindu-Christian Studies-- Theology and Philosophy (2008-2011).”

Viewpoint: Reflections On Ludic Dimensions In Hindu-Christian Scholarship, Kenneth R. Valpey

Journal of Hindu-Christian Studies

AS scholars committed to explore and illuminate the varied regions of thought and practice, text and image, or prescription and custom circumscribed by the rather curious samāsa “Hindu-Christian,” we may do well to pay more thoughtful attention to ludic features of the landscape. Several decades ago Johan Huizinga counted the inclination to play to be so definitive of being human as to merit reference to our species as homo ludens. Happily, some attention is already being given to this in the area of South Asian religion, as Selva Raj and Corinne Dempsey have shown with their edited volume, Sacred Play: …

Toward A Fusion Of Theological Horizons: Constructivist Reflections And Responses To The Question Of Theism In The Yoga Sutra, Graham M. Schweig

Journal of Hindu-Christian Studies

IT is important to explore and disclose how--perhaps even why--we are going to speak about Christian and Yogic theism before conducting an exploration on theism in comparative relation between the two traditions. In this kind of discussion, it is inevitable that working definitions of key terms be provided, particular terms that will be clarified and offered to facilitate the discussion. In this study, I examine and draw from the particular studies of three scholars in the field who address the relationship between Christianity and Yoga in order to illuminate the dialectical tension between a resistence toward and the persistence of …

Yoga's 'A-Theistic'-Theism: A New Way Of Thinking About God, Gerald J. Larson

Journal of Hindu-Christian Studies

I want to begin with two intriguing quotations. The first is a passage quoted by John Cottingham in his book, The Spiritual Dimension, in which he mentions what C. S. Pierce calls “abductive inference,” or “inference to the best explanation.” The passage is from Simon Blackburn’s book, Think.

The Malleability Of Yoga: A Response To Christian And Hindu Opponents Of The Popularization Of Yoga, Andrea R. Jain

Journal of Hindu-Christian Studies

FOR over three thousand years, people have attached divergent meanings and functions to yoga. Its history has been characterized by moments of continuity, but also by divergence and change. This applies as much to precolonial yoga systems as to modern ones. All of this evidences yoga’s malleability (literally, the capacity to be bent into new shapes without breaking) in the hands of human beings.

Recent Articles Of Interest 2011

Journal of Hindu-Christian Studies

A listing of recently published articles of interest to the Society.

Book Review: "The Rhythm Of Being: The Gifford Lectures", Michael Mclaughlin

Journal of Hindu-Christian Studies

A review of The Rhythm of Being: The Gifford Lectures by Raimon Panikkar.

Book Review: "Comparative Theology And The Problem Of Religious Rivalry", Jon Paul Sydnor

Journal of Hindu-Christian Studies

A review of Comparative Theology and the Problem of Religious Rivalry by Hugh Nicholson.

Book Review: "The New Comparative Theology: Interreligious Insights From The Next Generation", Edward T. Ulrich

Journal of Hindu-Christian Studies

A review of The New Comparative Theology: Interreligious Insights from the Next Generation edited by Francis X. Clooney.

Book Review: "Three Hundred Verses Of Bhartrhari", Francis X. Clooney

Journal of Hindu-Christian Studies

A review of Three Hundred Verses of Bhartrhari by Rev. Dr-Dr. Jacob Kattackal.

Dualities And Women's Wisdom In Hinduism: Voss Roberts On Lallesvari Of Kashmir, Lance Nelson

Journal of Hindu-Christian Studies

The stereotype of the dualist West versus the nondualist East has far outlived whatever usefulness it may have had. As one who has been concerned with this issue in my own work, I am happy to see Michelle Voss Roberts addressing it methodically and effectively n her Dualities: A Theology of Difference. She gives us in this book a multi-leveled study that advances this discussion dramatically on a number of interconnected fronts, both theological and ethical, encompassing wide-ranging feminist, ecological, and social justice concerns. I find myself in enthusiastic agreement with much that she writes. In what follows I …

Suffering Savior - A Hindu Vaisnava Perspective, K.R. Sundararajan

Journal of Hindu-Christian Studies

My interest in inter-religious dialogue goes back tot he late sixties when I was a research student working on a doctoral dissertation on "The Doctrine of Incarnation in Hinduism and Christianity" and continued when I became a lecturer in Hindu Studies at the very first department of Religious Studies in India at Punjabi University in Patiala. From there I was brought to the Harvard Center for the Study of World Religions as a Fellow by Professor John Carman to take courses in Christian Studies at the Harvard Divinity School for three years from 1970 to 1973. It was a period …

"He Is Our Master": Jesus In The Thought Of Swami Prabhupada, Ravi M. Gupta

Journal of Hindu-Christian Studies

"Now that steam, electricity, and the printing press have brought into closer communication the different races that inhabit the earth, and have expanded the minds of men, tending to dispel the illusion that God Almighty especially favours any particular people, it is time to proclaim to the world, that if a messenger of God appeared in Judea about nineteen hundred years ago, it is no less true that a messenger from the same God appeared in the quiet town of Navadweep (popularly known as Nadia) in Bengal, some fifteen centuries later. The former is known by the name of Jesus …

A World Filled With Grace: Conceptualizing The Divine In Hindu Devotionalism And Karl Rahner, Ankur Barua

Journal of Hindu-Christian Studies

In recent decades, a substantial body of scholarly work in the field of Hindu-Christian studies has been produced, which has not only done much to dispel earlier stereotypes of Hindu life-worlds as steeped in 'pantheism', 'world-negation' and the like, but also urged Christian thinkers to reflect on their own foundational beliefs through Hindu motifs. A relatively unexplored theme remains that of whether, and in what ways, the divine reality can be conceptualized as 'gracious' in Hindu devotionalism, especially given that the Christian doctrine of 'grace is related to a constellation of other notions such as creation out of nothing, justification …