Arvind Sharma

McGill University | McGill · Religious Studies

Religious freedom is often expressed as the right to change one’s religion. Such a formulation seems to overlook the fact that the right to retain one’s religion is as crucial a component of religious freedom as to change it. Just as freedom of religion also means freedom from religion, similarly freedom for conversion should equally mean freedom f...

After the discussion of religion in the previous chapters, this chapter focuses on religious freedom and identifies the key human rights provisions in this respect, as contained in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. The wording of the provision in the ICCPR differs from that in Ar...

Christianity has been the most successful among the proselytizing religions. This chapter examines the arguments for and against Christian missions. It identifies the various models which have been used for Christian missionary activity such as the Chosen People Paradigm, the Jesus Only Paradigm, the Reconciliation Paradigm and the Multiple Belongi...

The religions do not share a singular concept of religion but rather have their own distinctive understanding of what the world entails. In the light of this, they arguably possess their own concept of religious freedom. This point is illustrated with evidence drawn from Primal Religions, Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, Judaism, Christian...

Religion is a word which gained currency in Western culture and was then applied by it to comparable phenomena around the world. As Western culture is closely associated with Christianity, the meaning of the word religion was shaped by Christian expectations regarding religion, namely, creedal affirmation, sacred-secular contrast, and exclusive mem...

The absence of agreed-upon criteria for determining what is religion makes it very difficult to define religion, although this has not stopped dictionaries or scholars from trying to define it. Modern scholarship tends the use of the concept of family resemblances, or prototype theory, to explain how a ramifying collection of phenomena associated w...

This chapter explores the paradox that while the First Amendment guarantees free exercise of religion, the native Americans in the United States were unable to avail of it. The historical and empirical evidence provided by their case seems to confirm the thesis of the book that the concept of religious freedom cannot be divorced from one’s concept...

World religions, as a category in the study of religion, could be further disaggregated into missionary religions and non-missionary religions. According to this classification Christianity, Islam and Buddhism are usually identified as missionary religions, and the rest as non-missionary religions. This chapter analyzes the implication of this clas...

Religious freedom possesses both a moral and a legal dimension. Legal cases involving the need to define religion tend to favour a subjective definition, as in the Amselem case in Canada, which is criticized by Katherine Young and Paul Nathanson, who speak in terms of religious, secular, and hybrid worldviews, which provokes the question: Is Commun...

World religions may not possess the modern formulation of “religious freedom” as found in Article 18 of the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights, but all of them contain features which could be positively connected with religious freedom. This holds for Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Each of these traditions...

The concept of religious freedom is elaborately analyzed in this chapter, after it has been documented in the previous one. Three semantic saliences of the word “freedom” are identified: (1) freedom of choice, (2) freedom from constraint and (3) increased opportunities, and the corresponding implications for religious freedom are also identified. S...

Just as the category of world religions can be subdivided into missionary and non-missionary religions, it can also be subdivided into Eastern and Western religions. According to this classification, the Western religions are Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (collectively known as the Abrahamic traditions) and the Eastern religions comprise the rel...

The concept of religious freedom is a staple of modern liberal and human rights discourse but that does not mean that its content is obvious. In fact it has been problematized in several ways, which are surveyed. The goal of the book is to problematize it in a new way: that the concept of religious freedom, cannot be divorced from one’s concept of...

This book adopts a conceptual approach to the issue of Hinduism and human rights in a cultural ethos in which they are perceived, at least initially, as antithetical, if not antagonistic to each other, perhaps even displaying an aversion to each other bordering on hostility. It offers a rich network of interrelated questions about human rights from...

Crazy in Love of God: Ramakrishna's Caritas Divina. By SilNarasingha P.. Selingsgrove, Pa.: Susquehanna University Press, 2009. 275 pp. $49.50 (paper). - Volume 69 Issue 4 - Arvind Sharma

Indian Secularism: A Social and Intellectual History. By TejaniShabnum. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008. xvii, 302 pp. $24.95 (paper). - Volume 68 Issue 4 - Arvind Sharma

This essay consists of three parts. In the first part, the implications of the application of the Western word “religion” to religious phenomena beyond the Western world are adumbrated. In the second part, the effect of the actual application of the English word religion in its Western connotation to the world of Indian religions is analyzed. In th...

The recent debate in the pages of Philosophy East and West has acquired a sharp focus with the following comment by Whitley Kaufman toward the end of his response to Monima Chadha and Nick Trakakis: Let me summarize my main concern about the karma/rebirth system this way. The great attraction of the karma system is its reassurance that we are compl...

I would like to offer some remarks on the role of ethics in Hindu-Christian dialogue. I shall argue that the presentations of their respective ethical positions by these traditions are often too flat, which is to say, not sufficiently nuanced so that each side enters into dialogue with an inadequate understanding of the other side. I shall then fur...

The emergence of Hinduism as a field of study in the Western academia coincides with the development of modern hermeneutics. Despite this coemergence, and the rich possibilities inherent in a dialectical encounter between the theories of modern and pre-modern hermeneutics and those of Hindu hermeneutical traditions, this potential has not been tapp...

Jīvanmukti or ‘living liberation’ has been identified as a distinguishing feature of Indian thought; or, upon drawing a narrower circle, of Hindu thought; and upon drawing an even narrower cocentric circle of Vedānta—of Advaita Vedānta. In some recent studies the cogency of its formulation within Advaita Vedānta has been questioned—but without refe...

The Bhagavadg?tā is a popular Hindu text containing eighteen chapters. It begins with the hero, Arjuna, showing a marked unwillingness to engage in combat on the eve of battle. He is finally persuaded to do so by Krishna, who is an incarnation of God. Krishna actually reveals himself as such to an amazed Arjuna in the eleventh chapter. The fact tha...

Mahatma Gandhi is well known for offering an allegorical interpretation of the Bhagavadgita, whereas the more usual understanding of it in Hindu circles tends to be literal. This raises the question: what factors led Mahatma Gandhi to espouse an allegorical interpretation of the Bhagavadgita? This paper concludes that Mahatma Gandhi preferred an al...

The two major theses argued for throughout the book are presented in the conclusion: (1) the concept of religion cannot be divorced from the concept of religion and (2) that Western and Asian concepts of religion generate somewhat different concepts of religious freedom, which need to be reconciled. Such a reconciliation would require constant nego...

Comments on: JRE Focus on The 50th Anniversary of the Universal Declaration ofHuman Rights, Journal of Religious Ethics 26.2 (Fall 1998) “Rethinking Human Rights: A Review Essay on Religion, Relativism, and Other Matters” by David Little, Journal of Religious Ethics 27.1 (Spring 1999)

The “hermeneutics of suspicion,” which has emerged in recent times as a lens for examining historical texts, is a hermeneutic which involves a fundamental philosophical reorientation. 1 Consciousness, which was once considered to be perceptually transparent in a Cartesian manner and linguistically transparent in a Wittgensteinian way, is now consid...

1. Introduction 2. "Difference Relates": Eclecticism Past and Present 3. Swami in Wonderland: Vivekananda's Eclectic Hermeneutics 4. What's the Connection? India's Eclectic Heritage 5. Varieties of Eclectic Experience: The Case of Colonial Bengal 6. My Own Private Bungalow: The Dynamics of Eclectic Home-Building 7. Conclusion Bibliography Index

Three doctrines have often been identified in the context of Hindu civilization as its distinctive markers: the doctrine of the varncombining dot belowas (or the doctrine of the four classes), the doctrine of āśramas (or the doctrine of the four stages of life), and the doctrine of the puruscombining dot belowārthas (or the doctrine of the four goa...

The third verse of ??? Upani?ad contains the expression ?tmahano jan??. Most scholars, following ?a?kara, take the word ?tmahan in the metaphorical sense of one who denies or disregards the ?tman. P. Thieme proposed in 1965 that it could and should be understood as referring to one who literally kills the ?tman. The present investigation suggests t...

Ramana Maharsi is one of the lesser lights of modern Indian thought but a major figure in the context of modern Advaitic thought in Hinduism. Modern Indian thought in general is distinguished by a robust confidence in the efficacy of effort as an expression of free will, a confidence it shares with the temper of the West in general and which it may...

The issue of free will versus fate can be analysed in three ways in relation to the Bhagavadgīā,: (1) by focusing on those verses of the Gita which address themselves to this question; (2) by focusing on the figure of Arjuna himself who, as will be shown, crystallizes around his person the issue of free will and fate; and (3) by focusing on the Kau...

Sometime after the famous fratricidal battle among the Bharatas known as the Mahābhārata war was over (on the eve of which the Bhagavadgītā had been revealed to Arjuna by Krŗşņa), Arjuna requested Krŗşņa… to repeat the instruction which had already been conveyed to him on ‘the holy field of Kurukşetra’ but which had gone out of his ‘degenerate mind...

The concept of relative deprivation is tested on available materials about why women in India became nuns within the first few centuries of the Buddhist movement. The sources are the many verses of religious poetry which have been preserved in the Theravada tradition as the Therigatha.