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Book Review: La Bible Et La Veda Comme Parole De Dieu: Un Essai En Theologie Comparée, Klaus Klostermaier Frsc

Journal of Hindu-Christian Studies

A review of La Bible et la Veda comme parole de Dieu: un essai en theologie comparée by George Chemparathy.

Book Review: Christ And Krishna: Where The Jordan Meets The Ganges, Kerry P. C. San Chirico

Journal of Hindu-Christian Studies

A review of Christ and Krishna: Where the Jordan Meets the Ganges by Steven J. Rosen.

Book Review: Journal Of Vaishnava Studies 20.2 (Spring 2012), Jon Paul Sydnor

Journal of Hindu-Christian Studies

A review of the anthology Journal of Vaishnava Studies 20.2 (Spring 2012) edited by Stephen J. Rosen and Graham M. Schweig.

Book Review: Public Hinduisms, George Pati

Journal of Hindu-Christian Studies

A review of Public Hinduisms edited by John Zavos, Pralay Kanungo, Deepa S. Reddy, Maya Warrier, and Raymond Brady Williams.

Book Review: Dalit Theology In The Twenty-First Century: Discordant Voices, Discerning Pathways, Michael Mclaughlin

Journal of Hindu-Christian Studies

A review of Dalit Theology in the Twenty-first Century: Discordant Voices, Discerning Pathways edited by Sathianathan Clarke, Deenabandhu Manchala, and Philip Vinod Peacock.

Book Review: Dalit Theology And Christian Anarchism, Reid B. Locklin

Journal of Hindu-Christian Studies

A review of Dalit Theology and Christian Anarchism by Keith Hebden.

Book Review: The Saint In The Banyan Tree: Christianity And Caste Society In India, Chad M. Bauman

Journal of Hindu-Christian Studies

A book review of The Saint in the Banyan Tree: Christianity and Caste Society in India by David Mosse.

Reports And News

Journal of Hindu-Christian Studies

Reports and news for the Society for Hindu-Christian Studies 2013 Annual General Meeting.

Viewpoint: Learning To Be Open To The “Other” At Tiruvannamalai, Edward T. Ulrich

Journal of Hindu-Christian Studies

People often tend to project aspects of themselves onto a foreign person or culture. They might see false reflections of themselves in the foreign culture, or instead they might see their own opposites. Also, there is sometimes a tendency to absorb the other party into one’s own self-understanding, to reduce the unknown into what is already known, absorbing it into a system. Theorists of crosscultural exchange like Raimundo Panikkar have argued that instead of projecting oneself into the other party or absorbing it into a system of one’s own devising that one should be open to something completely new and …

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”.

Sacred Orality, Sacred Dialogue: Walter J. Ong And The Practice Of Hindu-Christian Studies, Reid B. Locklin

Journal of Hindu-Christian Studies

THE genesis of this essay can be traced to two specific events from my own personal history. One summer, when I had just finished coursework in my doctoral program and was looking forward to my thesis, I took a retreat at Arsha Vidya Gurukulam, a Hindu ashram in the Pocono Mountains region of eastern Pennsylvania. Before one of the discourses that constituted the retreat, a lay devotee of the Arsha Vidya movement stood to offer a testimonial to the Gita Home Study Program, published by the ashram press. The study program itself is pretty simple: the text consists of sections …

Māyā, Āṇava Mala And Original Sin: A Comparative Study, Nathan Halloran Sj

Journal of Hindu-Christian Studies

“The longing for grace in Hinduism,” argues Bishop Sabapathy Kulandran, “springs more often from the desire to solve a metaphysical problem than from an agony tearing at one’s inmost being.” For this reason, a Hindu seeks liberation from a metaphysical situation, a feeling of impurity, rather than redemption from sin. Yet as Christian thinking on the doctrine of original sin has developed, it has more and more come to understand original sin as denoting first and foremost a cosmic reality, a metaphysical situation, in some ways very similar to the metaphysical impurity of the Śaiva Siddhānta notion of āṇava mala. …

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 …

Becoming Different: Why Education Is Required For Responding To Globalism Dharmically, Jonathan Edelmann

Journal of Hindu-Christian Studies

The content of this article is based on an invited presentation about Being Different: An Indian Challenge to Western Universalism by Rajiv Malhotra for the Society of Hindu-Christian Studies at the 2012 American Academy of Religion. I have taken into consideration some of Mr. Malhotra’s comments after the panel presentations, as well as a subsequent email exchange.

In Being Different Mr. Malhotra critiques Western thought from what he calls a “dharmic perspective,” something I was very glad to see and hope will inspire other such critiques. Much of my work has also sought to expose underlying and often unjustified assumptions …

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 …

Editor's Introduction, Bradley Malkovsky

Journal of Hindu-Christian Studies

Since its appearance in late 2011 Rajiv Malhotra’s Being Different: An Indian Challenge to Western Universalism (HarperCollins India) has provoked strong reactions among its readers, both within and outside the academy. Malhotra challenges what he calls Western scholarship’s “grand narrative” of religion with its self-serving presumption of the superiority of the Judaeo-Christian worldview over the “dharmic” perspective of the Indian religions, i.e. of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism.

The Traditional Roots Of Difference, Anantanand Rambachan

Journal of Hindu-Christian Studies

In Being Different: An Indian Challenge to Western Univeralism, Rajiv Malhotra, drawing from and building on earlier lines of argument offered by, among others, Sri Aurobindo and Richard Lannoy, attempts to identify crucial differences in the worldviews of what he refers to as the Judeo-Christian religions and Indian thought. These contrasts are presented with the aim of contesting the so-called universalism of the Judeo-Christian world-view and highlighting the value and even superiority of the Indian perspective. He identifies his method with the ancient practice of pūrvapakṣa that involves grasping the opponent’s view, refuting it and demonstrating the truth of one’s …

Table Of Contents

Journal of Hindu-Christian Studies

A list of the article contents in this issue.

He Shall Be Called A Nazorean: Intertextuality Without An Intertext?, James F. Mcgrath

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

Inexact quotations are a common phenomenon in Biblical intertextuality, and some suspected allusions are so fleeting and/or imprecise as to leave interpreters wondering whether an allusion was intended or not. But in at least one instance, Matthew 2:23, we have a reference to something unspecified prophets are supposed to have said, namely that “He shall be called a Nazorean,” which may not in fact have any intertext at all.

Hindu-Christian Conflict In India: Globalization, Conversion, And The Coterminal Castes And Tribes, Chad M. Bauman

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

While Hindu-Muslim violence in India has received a great deal of scholarly attention, Hindu-Christian violence has not. This article seeks to contribute to the analysis of Hindu-Christian violence, and to elucidate the curious alliance, in that violence, of largely upper-caste, anti-minority Hindu nationalists with lower-status groups, by analyzing both with reference to the varied processes of globalization. The article begins with a short review of the history of anti-Christian rhetoric in India, and then discusses and critiques a number of inadequately unicausal explanations of communal violence before arguing, with reference to the work of Mark Taylor, that only theories linking …

Revisiting The Mandaeans And The New Testament, James F. Mcgrath

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

The Mandaeans have been known to scholars for as long as there has been modern scholarship. Thanks to advances in technology, you can now find some of their ancient texts online, and videos of their baptismal rituals on YouTube. Yet as fascinating as the Mandaeans are, and as much as modern technologies can facilitate greater familiarity with them, the amount of attention that they receive is surprisingly sparse – although there are encouraging signs that that is at least beginning to change.

Review Of "Thinking Christ: Christology And Contemporary Critics", Brent A. R. Hege

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

A review of Thinking Christ: Christology and Contemporary Critics by Jane Barter Moulaison.

Theology, Politics, And Antimodernism In Nazi Germany: Problematizing Theological Rhetoric And Political Theology, Brent A. R. Hege

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

A review essay of:

Hitler’s Theology: A Study in Political Religion. By Rainer Bucher. Translated by Rebecca Pohl. Edited and with an introduction by Michael Hoelzl. London: Continuum, 2011. xx+140 pp. $120.00 Cloth, $34.95 Paper

Theological Tractates. By Erik Peterson. Edited, translated, and with an introduction by Michael J. Hollerich. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011. xxx + 256 pp. $75.00 Cloth, $24.95 Paper

Sacred Land, Common Ground, Contested Territory: The Healing Mother Of Velankanni Basilica And The Infant Jesus Shrine In Bangalore, Vasudha Narayanan

Journal of Hindu-Christian Studies

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's 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 …

Review Of The Sacrifice Of Jesus: Understanding Atonement Biblically, James F. Mcgrath

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

Article reviews the book "The Sacrifice of Jesus: Understanding Atonement Biblically," by Christian Eberhart.

Review Of The Evolution Of Adam: What The Bible Does And Doesn’T Say About Human Origins, James F. Mcgrath

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

Article reviews the book "The Evolution of Adam: What the Bible Does and Doesn’t Say about Human Origins," by Peter Enns.

Polemic, Redaction, And History In The Mandaean Book Of John: The Case Of The Lightworld Visitors To Jerusalem, James F. Mcgrath

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

It is unclear whether there is anything of historical usefulness that can be gleaned from the details of the depictions of figures such as John the Baptist, Miriai, and Jesus in the Mandaean Book of John. This does not mean, however, that the text cannot provide useful information about the history of the Mandaeans, and of their interactions with other religious communities. By analyzing the evidence for redaction in certain key sections, and by distinguishing between core elements and peripheral additions to the stories recorded in it, it is possible to draw conclusions about the tradition history of the material, …

Polemic, Redaction, And History In The Mandaean Book Of John: The Case Of The Lightworld Visitors To Jerusalem, James F. Mcgrath

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

It is unclear whether there is anything of historical usefulness that can be gleaned from the details of the depictions of figures such as John the Baptist, Miriai, and Jesus in the Mandaean Book of John. This does not mean, however, that the text cannot provide useful information about the history of the Mandaeans, and of their interactions with other religious communities. By analyzing the evidence for redaction in certain key sections, and by distinguishing between core elements and peripheral additions to the stories recorded in it, it is possible to draw conclusions about the tradition history of the material, …