Interpreting Devotion

Interpreting Devotion PDF Author: Karen Pechilis
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136507051
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 271

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Book Description
Devotion is a category of expression in many of the world’s religious traditions. This book looks at issues involved in academically interpreting religious devotion, as well as exploring the interpretations of religious devotion made by a sixth century poet, a twelfth century biographer, and present-day festival publics. The book focuses on the female poet-saint Kāraikkāl Ammaiyār, whose poetry is devotional in nature. It discusses the biography written on the poet six centuries after her lifetime, and suggests ways of interpreting Kāraikkāl Ammaiyār’s poetry without using the categories and events promoted by her biographer, in order to engage her own thoughts as they are communicated through the poetry attributed to her. In the same way that the biographer made the poet ‘speak’ to his present day, the book looks at how festivals held today make both the poetry and the biography relevant to the present day. By discussing how poetry, story and festival provide distinctive yet overlapping interpretations of the saint, this book reveals the selections and priorities of interpreters in the making of a living tradition. It is an accessible contribution to students and scholars of religion, Indian history and women’s studies.

Interpreting Devotion

Interpreting Devotion PDF Author: Karen Pechilis
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136507051
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 271

Get Book Here

Book Description
Devotion is a category of expression in many of the world’s religious traditions. This book looks at issues involved in academically interpreting religious devotion, as well as exploring the interpretations of religious devotion made by a sixth century poet, a twelfth century biographer, and present-day festival publics. The book focuses on the female poet-saint Kāraikkāl Ammaiyār, whose poetry is devotional in nature. It discusses the biography written on the poet six centuries after her lifetime, and suggests ways of interpreting Kāraikkāl Ammaiyār’s poetry without using the categories and events promoted by her biographer, in order to engage her own thoughts as they are communicated through the poetry attributed to her. In the same way that the biographer made the poet ‘speak’ to his present day, the book looks at how festivals held today make both the poetry and the biography relevant to the present day. By discussing how poetry, story and festival provide distinctive yet overlapping interpretations of the saint, this book reveals the selections and priorities of interpreters in the making of a living tradition. It is an accessible contribution to students and scholars of religion, Indian history and women’s studies.

The Bloomsbury Companion to Hindu Studies

The Bloomsbury Companion to Hindu Studies PDF Author: Jessica Frazier
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 147256717X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 465

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Book Description
Originally published as The Continuum Companion to Hindu Studies, this Companion offers the definitive guide to Hinduism and study in this area. Now available in paperback, The Bloomsbury Companion to Hindu Studies covers all the most pressing and important themes and categories in the field - areas that have continued to attract interest historically as well as topics that have emerged more recently as active areas of research. Specially commissioned essays from an international team of experts reveal where important work continues to be done in the field and, valuably, how the various topics intersect through detailed reading paths. Featuring a series of indispensible research tools, including a detailed list of resources, chronology and diagrams summarizing content, this is the essential tool for anyone working in Hindu Studies.

Religious Reading and Everyday Lives in Devotional Hinduism

Religious Reading and Everyday Lives in Devotional Hinduism PDF Author: EMILIA. BACHRACH
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197648592
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
Religious texts are not stable objects, passed down unchanged through generations. The way in which religious communities receive their scriptures changes over time and in different social contexts. This book considers religious reading through a study of the Pushtimarg, a Hindu community whose devotional practices and community identity have developed in close relationship with Vārtā Sāhitya (Chronicle Literature), a genre of Hindi prose hagiography written during the 17th century. Through hagiographies that narrate the relationships between the deity Krishna and the Pushtimarg's early leaders and their disciples, these hagiographies provide community history, theology, vicarious epiphany, and models of devotion. While steeped in the social world of early-modern north India, these texts have continued to be immensely popular among generations of modern devotees, whose techniques of reading and exegesis allow them to maintain the narratives as primary guides for devotional living in Gujarat-the western state of India where the Pushtimarg thrives today. Combining ethnographic fieldwork with close readings of Hindi and Gujarati texts, the book examines how members of the community engage with the hagiographies through recitation and dialogue in temples and homes, through commentary and translation in print publications and on the Internet, and even through debates in courts of law. The book argues that these acts of reading inform and are informed by both intimate negotiations of the family and the self, and also by politically potent disputes over matters such as temple governance. By studying the texts themselves, as well as the social contexts of their reading, Religious Reading and Everyday Lives in Devotional Hinduism provides a distinct example of how changing class, regional, and gender identities continue to shape interpretations of a scriptural canon, and how, in turn, these interpretations influence ongoing projects of self and community fashioning.

Signs of Devotion

Signs of Devotion PDF Author: Virginia Blanton
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271047984
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 370

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Book Description


Transgressive Devotion

Transgressive Devotion PDF Author: Natalie Wigg-Stevenson
Publisher: SCM Press
ISBN: 033405947X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 150

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Book Description
Academic theology is in need of a new genre. In "Transgressive Devotion" Natalie Wigg-Stevenson articulates a theological vision of that genre as performance art. She argues that theology done as performance art stops trying to describe who God is, and starts trying to make God appear. Recognising that the act of studying theology or practicing ministry is always a performance, where the boundaries between what we see, feel, experience and learn are not just blurred but potentially invisible, Wigg-Stevenson brings together ethnographic theological fieldwork, historical and contemporary Christian theological traditions, and performance artworks themselves. A daring vision of theology which will energise anybody feeling ‘boxed in’ by the discipline, Transgressive Devotion blurs borders between orthodoxy, heterodoxy and heresy to reveal how the very act of doing theology makes God and humanity vulnerable to each other. This is theology which is a liturgy of Divine incantation. In other words: this is theology which is also prayer.

Interpreting Jesus

Interpreting Jesus PDF Author: Gerald O'Collins
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1592440762
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 231

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Book Description
Interpreting Jesus draws on traditional teaching and the best scripture scholarship to construct a Christology which centers on the crucifixion and the resurrection of Jesus. The aim is to explore and clarify what Christian belief in the risen Jesus as Son of God and Savior of the world originally meant and now continues to mean. Special features include an excursus on the theological implications of the Shroud of Turin and a return to a theme which contemporary Christology has widely neglected, the blood of Jesus and its redemptive symbolism. The book ends by linking belief in Jesus with the non-Christian world. Father O'Collins has previously written many articles and shorter works on Jesus Christ. This Christology represents a mature climax of those earlier publications.

Devotional Visualities

Devotional Visualities PDF Author: Karen Pechilis
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350214205
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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Book Description
This book is the first to focus on material visualities of bhakti imagery that inspire, shape, convey, and expand both the visual practices of devotional communities, as well as possibilities for extending the reach of devotion in society in new and often unexpected ways. Communities of interpreters of bhakti images discussed in this book include not only a number of distinctive Hindu bhakti groups, but also artisans, diaspora women, South Asian Sufis, businessmen, dancers, and filmmakers. This book's identification of devotional practices of looking, such as materializing memory, mirroring and immaterializing portraits, and shaping the return look, connect material and visual cultures as well as illustrate modes of established and experimental image usage. Bhakti is one of the most-studied aspects of Indic devotionalism on account of its expression through emotive poetry, song, and vivid hagiographies of saints. The diverse devotional visualities analyzed in this book meaningfully circulate bhakti images in past and present, generating their renewed relationship to contemporary concerns.

Interpreting Jesus

Interpreting Jesus PDF Author: Gerald O'Collins SJ
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1725201429
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 230

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Book Description
Interpreting Jesus draws on traditional teaching and the best scripture scholarship to construct a Christology which centers on the crucifixion and the resurrection of Jesus. The aim is to explore and clarify what Christian belief in the risen Jesus as Son of God and Savior of the world originally meant and now continues to mean. Special features include an excursus on the theological implications of the Shroud of Turin and a return to a theme which contemporary Christology has widely neglected, the blood of Jesus and its redemptive symbolism. The book ends by linking belief in Jesus with the non-Christian world. Father O'Collins has previously written many articles and shorter works on Jesus Christ. This Christology represents a mature climax of those earlier publications.

Indian Thought and Western Theism

Indian Thought and Western Theism PDF Author: Martin Ganeri
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317551664
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 203

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Book Description
The encounter between the West and India in the modern period has also been an encounter between Western modernity and the traditions of classical Indian thought. This book is the study of one aspect this encounter, that between Western scholasticism and one classical Indian tradition of religious thought and practice: the Vedānta. In the modern period there have been many attempts to relate Western theistic traditions to classical Indian accounts of ultimate reality and the world. Parallels have usually been drawn with modern forms of Western philosophy or modern trends in theism. Modern Indological studies have continued to make substantial use of Western terms and concepts to describe and analyse Indian thought. A much-neglected area of study has been the relationship between Western scholastic theology and classical Indian thought. This book challenges existing parallels with modern philosophy of religion and forms of theism. It argues instead that there is an affinity between scholasticism and classical Indian traditions. It considers the thought of Rāmānuja (traditional dates 1017-1137 CE), who developed an influential theist and realist form of Vedānta, and considers how this relates to that of the most influential of Western scholastics, Thomas Aquinas (1224/5-1274 CE). Within what remain very different traditions we can see similar methods of enquiry, as well as common questions and concerns in their accounts of ultimate reality and of the world. Arguing that there is indeed an affinity between the Western scholastic tradition and that of classical Indian thought, and suggesting a reversal of the tendencies of earlier interpretations, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of Asian religion, Hinduism and Indian philosophy.

A Woman's Ramayana

A Woman's Ramayana PDF Author: Mandakranta Bose
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 113507125X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 166

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Book Description
The Rāmāyana, an ancient epic of India, with audiences across vast stretches of time and geography, continues to influence numberless readers socially and morally through its many re-tellings. Made available in English for the first time, the 16th century version presented here is by Candrāvatī, a woman poet from Bengal. It is a highly individual rendition as a tale told from a woman's point of view which, instead of celebrating masculine heroism, laments the suffering of women caught in the play of male ego. This book presents a translation and commentary on the text, with an extensive introduction that scrutinizes its social and cultural context and correlates its literary identity with its ideological implications. Taken together, the narrative and the critical study offered here expand the understanding both of the history of women’s self-expression in India and the cultural potency of the epic tale. The book is of interest equally to students and researchers of South Asian narratives, Rāmāyana studies and gender issues.