Tag: world religions
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Teachers Day
The Duke of Sheh asked Tsze-lu about Confucius, and Tsze-lu did not answer him. The Master said, “Why did you not say to him, ‘He is simply a man, who in his eager pursuit of knowledge forgets his food, who in the joy of its attainment forgets his sorrows, and who does not perceive that…
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Not the Best Argument Against Abrahamicism
Hughes, Aaron W. Abrahamic Religions: On the Uses and Abuses of History. Oxford University Press, 2012. [An Installment of the “Read Me” Project.] I agreed with this book as soon as I heard about it. According to the description on the website, the author, Aaron W. Hughes, argues that the notion of the “Abrahamic religions”…
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Most of the World Christianity
Pachuau, Lalsangkima. World Christianity: A Historical and Theological Introduction. Abingdon Press, 2018. [An Installment of the “Read Me” Project.] Most North American Christians today don’t know enough about “world Christianity.” For that matter, most of us North American Christians have never even heard the term “world Christianity.” It’s likely to make Christians in the United…
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The Good Kind of Envy?
Taylor, Barbara Brown. Holy Envy: Finding God in the Faith of Others. HarperCollins, 2019. [An Installment of the “Read Me” Project.] I read an excerpt from Holy Envy in the Christian Century and thought “I’d like to read that book,” even though I didn’t agree with Barbara Brown Taylor about original sin. A couple of…
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Lamin Sanneh on World Christianity
Lamin Sanneh. Whose Religion is Christianity? The Gospel Beyond the West. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003. Christianity is not identical to western imperialism. So says Lamin Sanneh, in Whose Religion is Christianity? The Gospel Beyond the West (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003). Christianity is not even necessarily the ideological tool of 19th century colonialism. It is not…
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Thoughts on a definition of idolatry
Something caught my attention in Guthrie’s definition of idolatry as “giving absolute loyalty to something that is only a creature rather than the Creator.”1 It occurred to me that the definition provides a good opening for arguing that the practices of Hindu puja, that are so involved with representations of the many, many, many gods…
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Thinking about the Mahabharata
I have been thinking about the Mahabharata. Not because I am an expert. I finally acquired the new-ish huge-for-an-abridgement English translation of this epic sacred text by John D. Smith, but haven’t read it. I have read the Bhagavad-Gita, but my knowledge of that is still mostly superficial, honestly. I know the outline of the…
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The Gita is not the “Hindu Bible”
One of the pitfalls of the “world religions approach” is students’ understandable tendency to want to fit everything into a paradigm they already know. Understandable, because the approach itself developed on the foundation of 19th century scholars’ and colonialists’ efforts to do exactly the same thing: to locate the religious structures that corresponded to the…
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Reading for World Religions
This [delightful, but massive] book1 has been on my shelf for at least five years – long past the time it was withdrawn from the Indian market, according to one commentator because it “wasn’t boring enough.” I have managed to read the introduction and chapter one more than once. But it has always gotten set…
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Getting Ready for World Religions
The small liberal arts university where I occasionally teach offers courses in “World Religions.” The discipline of Religious Studies questions the “world religions approach” these days, for good reasons, along with the very idea of “religion” as separate from things like “society” or “culture” or “knowledge,” but the courses are staples of the curriculum. So…
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Another Outline for “Western Religions”
I keep trying to organize the material in the introduction to the “western” world religions class I sometimes teach in a way that allows us to cover off the religion trivia/jeopardy questions (In “All About Abe” for $100: “Judaism, Christianity, and Islam” buzz “What are the Abrahamic religions?”) and still think about more general organizing…
Matters of Interpretation 