Ankur Barua

Revisiting the rationality of reincarnation talk

A survey of the key arguments that have been developed for and against the rationality of belief in reincarnation shows that often the central dispute is not over what the ‘data’ are but how to assess the ‘data’ from specific metaphysical–hermeneutical horizons. By examining some of these arguments formulated by Hindu thinkers as well as their critiques – from the perspectives of metaphysical naturalism and Christian theology – we argue that one of the reasons why these debates remain intractable is that the ‘theory’ is underdetermined by the ‘data’, so that more than one set of the latter can be regarded as adequate explanations of the former.

The God of the oppressed and the politics of resistance: Black and Dalit theologies of liberation

Theologians from the Black communities in the USA, South Africa and other places, and Dalit groups in India have struggled with a dialectic between the retrieval of subjectivity within political spaces inflected by ‘race’ and ‘caste’ and the opposition to these essentialist categorisations. On the one hand, their politics of resistance has been predicated on their specific Black or Dalit identities, while, on the other hand, the postulation of such identities has often been criticised for being essentialist and homogenising. It would seem, therefore, that such patterns of ‘theologies of liberation’ have to steer clear of the Scylla of a postmodern-style dissolution of subjectivities in which the Black or Dalit identities are effaced in a ‘raceless’ or ‘casteless’ amorphousness, and the Charybdis of ‘ontologizing’ the experiences of Blackness or Dalitness in a manner that may re-entrench these binaries that arguably cannot be fitted into the Christian eschatological vision of the reconciliation of humanity. In our analysis of some Black and Dalit theologies, we shall seek to illuminate the distinctive ways in which they assert hitherto repressed subjectivities, while seeking at the same time to avoid ontological dualisms between sections of humanity, now fractured along the lines of race and caste.

Christian Visions of Vedānta: The Spiritual Exercises of Bede Griffiths and Henri Le Saux

PRECIS:Various Roman Catholic figures during the last hundred years have engaged with vedāntic themes relating to self-enquiry. Two Benedictine pioneers of these spiritual exercises, Bede Griffiths and Henri Le Saux (Swami Abhishiktananda), elaborated and practiced these themes through which they sought to articulate visions of the divine presence within humanity. This essay discusses one central aspect of their “experiments with truth,” namely, their experiential and conceptual struggles to point toward the “trinitarian mystery” with the terminology of Advaita Vedānta.

Hindu Responses to Religious Diversity and the Nature of Post-Mortem Progress

This is the authors accepted manuscript. The final version is available at http://digitalcommons.butler.edu/jhcs/vol27/iss1/8/.

Ideas of Tolerance: Religious Exclusivism and Violence in Hindu–Christian Encounters

Abstract This article explores, through some historical vignettes, the question of whether there are necessary connections between the Christian worldview and religious aggression, whether in the form of brutal extermination of the religious others or more subtly of interpretive violence on their cultural traditions. The Hindu ‘pluralistic’ attitude towards the religions is often put forward as a paradigm of an open-minded acceptance of their diversity. However, varieties of Hindu ‘pluralism’ turn out, on closer inspection, to be based on specific criteria about the nature of human and divine reality, and collapse, in fact, to forms of ‘exclusivism’ which propose a certain event or experience as the paradigm through which human existence is to be interpreted. The crucial debate, then, is not so much between Christian ‘exclusivism’ versus Hindu ‘pluralism’ as over the basis for viewing religious diversity as encompassed by the divine purpose for humanity.

Metaphors of Temporality: Revisiting the “Timeless Hinduism” versus “Historical Christianity” Antithesis

One of the most frequently-made statements about Christianity concerns its “historical” character—its grounding in a set of episodes in the life of the Israelite people that culminated in the climactic Christ-event, an event that brought into sharper focus than before a redemptive process that has been going on since the beginning of times and will last till the end of times. The assertion of this central aspect of Christian self-understanding has often gone hand in hand with a statement of what the Hindu philosophical-religious traditions are alleged to have lacked, namely, a historical sense. It is charged that Hindu thinkers believed that individuals are chained to never-ending cycles that do not lead anywhere, with all sense of meaning or purpose thus drained from temporal existence.1 A clear statement of such a demarcation comes from Alan Richardson, who states, specifically in the European context, that “ ‘Christ being raised from the dead dieth no more; death hath no more dominion over him’ (Rom 6:9) … is the text which changed the outlook of European man upon history…. The European mind was freed by the proclamation of Gods saving act in history from the fatalistic theory of cyclical recurrence which had condemned Greek historiography to sterility.”2 The Christian faith is believed to have liberated humanity from the tortuous cosmological circles of eternal recurrence, once in the world of late antiquity when it was still a fledgling in the milieu of Hellenistic mystery cults and much later in colonial British India when it came into contact with the patterns of classical Hindu thought. It is almost as if as an appendix to Saint Augustines famous remark, “God did not create the world in time, but with time,”3 Christian theologians in his wake had added, “Therefore, Christianity did not come into the world in history, but with history.”