In thirteenth-century Maharashtra, a new vernacular literature emerged to challenge the hegemony of Sanskrit, a language largely restricted to men of high caste. In a vivid and accessible idiom, this ...new Marathi literature inaugurated a public debate over the ethics of social difference grounded in the idiom of everyday life. The arguments of vernacular intellectuals pushed the question of social inclusion into ever-wider social realms, spearheading the development of a nascent premodern public sphere that valorized the quotidian world in sociopolitical terms.
The Quotidian Revolutionexamines this pivotal moment of vernacularization in Indian literature, religion, and public life by investigating courtly donative Marathi inscriptions alongside the first extant texts of Marathi literature: theLilacaritra(1278) and theJñanesvari(1290). Novetzke revisits the influence ofChakradhar(c. 1194), the founder of the Mahanubhav religion, andJnandev(c. 1271), who became a major figure of the Varkari religion, to observe how these avant-garde and worldly elites pursued a radical intervention into the social questions and ethics of the age. Drawing on political anthropology and contemporary theories of social justice, religion, and the public sphere,The Quotidian Revolutionexplores the specific circumstances of this new discourse oriented around everyday life and its lasting legacy: widening the space of public debate in a way that presages key aspects of Indian modernity and democracy.
The diversity of race, language, class, and culture is a wealth; basically, it is a beautiful gift in this life. However, the reality is precesely the social conflict among the society. This article ...explores the issue of diversity contained in al Qur’an. Some of the key themes included: diversity as sunnatullah, diversity in unity, religious and ethnic diversity, and diversity of professions. Al Qur’an has mentioned several groups of religious believers and provided guidance association order among religious believers. Religious diversity certainly makes Muslim necessitates acknowledging and respecting other religion save Islam. Al Qur’an has mentioned also a variety of occupations based on interests, talents, expertise, and particular skills. The fragmentation and understanding diversity have caused by egoism and truth claiming of each group and individual, but no one has knowledge covering everything from different sides or corners. Above all knowledge is the Almighty owner off all knowledge. With feeling most true someone or group tends to feel the best and have the right to insult any others. That is the base of the dispute and spiritual decline. Mukmin has to preserve the noble character in association, and keep away from bad manner. Among mukmin must love each other and maintain good manners. Finally, this study is intended to promote the establishment of harmony, peace and happiness of living together.
The thesis advanced in this work is that the model of a secret or esoteric group is fruitful for studying various movements and groups in the Greco–Roman world. This is worked out in the extremely ...interesting case of the Essenes and the Qumran covenanters, for which we have available not only outsider descriptions but also the very documents that embody at least part of their secret teachings. This approach to analysis is not intended to supplant the sect/normative pattern for describing Ancient Judaism, but to supplement it, adding a very fruitful unexplored dimension to the analysis of ancient Jewish society. By attributing, in the footsteps of Georg Simmel, and more recently L. Hazelrigg, the organization and dynamic of secret societies to the need to guard the secret knowledge, it provides ways of understanding the organization and practice of the Qumran covenanters Essene sect, which were previously unperceived. Having established the theoretical framework, having shown that such groups existed in both non-Jewish and Jewish society in the Greco–Roman world, the book then proceeds to analyze in detail the working out of this dynamic in the cases of the Therapeutae and the Essenes, supplementing this with investigation of whether there is evidence for this same dynamic elsewhere in Second Temple Jewish society. Moreover, this analysis bears on the overall “fit” of these groups in the society of the period, so richly endowed with names of and evidence for different groups in that society.
This volume aims to foster interaction between scholars in the subfields of Islamic and Buddhist studies by increasing understanding of the circulation and localization of religious texts, ...institutional models, and ritual practices across Asia and beyond. Buddhist and Islamic Orders in Southern Asia scrutinizes religious orders (here referring to Sufi ?ar?qas and Buddhist monastic and other ritual lineages) that enabled far-flung local communities to be recognized and engaged as part of a broader world of co-religionists, while presenting their traditions and human representatives as attractive and authoritative to new devotees. Contributors to the volume direct their attention toward analogous developments mutually illuminating for both fields of study, drawing readers' attention to the fact that networked persons were not always strongly institutionalized and often moved through Southern Asia and developed local bases without the oversight of complex corporate organizations.
In Practicing Safe Sects F. LeRon Shults provides scientific and philosophical resources for having “the talk” about religious reproduction: where do gods come from – and what are the costs of ...bearing them in our culturally pluralistic, ecologically fragile environment?; Readership: All interested in the promotion of peaceful and healthy societies, and anyone concerned with the role of religion in fostering superstition and segregation.
The phrase "Christian politics" evokes two meanings: political relations between denominations in one direction, and the contributions of Christian churches to debates about the governing of society. ...The contributors to this volume address Christian politics in both senses and argue that Christianity is always and inevitably political in the Pacific Islands. Drawing on ethnographic and historical research in Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, and Fiji, the authors argue that Christianity and politics have redefined each other in much of Oceania in ways that make the two categories inseparable at any level of analysis. The individual chapters vividly illuminate the ways in which Christian politics operate across a wide scale, from interpersonal relations to national and global interconnections.
Focusing on the intricate presence of a Japanese new religion (Sekai Kyûseikyô) in the densely populated and primarily Christian environment of Kinshasa (DR Congo), this ethnographic study offers a ...practitioner-orientated perspective to create a localised picture of religious globalization. Guided by an aesthetic approach to religion, the study moves beyond a focus limited to text and offers insights into the role of religious objects, spiritual technologies and aesthetic repertoires in the production and politics of difference. The boundaries between non-Christian religious minorities and the largely Christian public sphere involve fears and suspicion of 'magic' and 'occult sciences'.
By the twentieth century, science had become so important that religious traditions had to respond to it. Emerging religions, still led by a living founder to guide them, responded with a clarity and ...focus that illuminates other larger, more established religions' understandings of science. The Hare Krishnas, the Unification Church, and Heaven's Gate each found distinct ways to incorporate major findings of modern American science, understanding it as central to their wider theological and social agendas. In tracing the development of these new religious movements' viewpoints on science during each movement's founding period, we can discern how their views on science were crafted over time. These NRMs shed light on how religious groups - new, old, alternative, or mainstream - could respond to the tremendous growth of power and prestige of science in late twentieth-century America.In this engrossing book, Zeller carefully shows that religious groups had several methods of creatively responding to science, and that the often-assumed conflict-based model of science vs. religion must be replaced by a more nuanced understanding of how religions operate in our modern scientific world.
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