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Neelima Shukla-Bhatt offers an illuminating study of Narsinha Mehta, one of the most renowned saint-poets of medieval India and the most celebrated bhakti (devotion) poet from Gujarat, and shows how the songs and sacred narratives associated with the saint-poet have been sculpted into a popular source of moral inspiration by performers and audiences.
This is the first book in English on Narsinha Mehta, a major figure among the saint-poets of medieval India and the most celebrated bhakti (devotion) poet from Gujarat, whose morning hymns and sacred biography provided a vital source of moral inspiration to Gandhi. It explores how the songs and sacred narratives associated with the saint-poet have been sculpted into a popular source of moral inspiration by performers and audiences.
Sacred Matters explores the lives of material objects in South Asian religions. Spanning a range of traditions including Hinduism, Islam, Jainism, Buddhism, and Christianity, the book demonstrates how sacred items influence and enliven the worlds of religious participants across South Asia and into the diaspora. Contributors examine a variety of objects to describe the ways sacred materials derive and confer meaning and efficacy, emerging from and giving shape to religious and nonreligious realms alike. Material forms of deity and divine power are considered along with commonplace ritual items, including images, clay pots, and camphor. The work also attends to materiality's complex role within the "materially suspicious" contexts of Islam, Theravada Buddhism, and Roman Catholicism. This engaging collection presents new frameworks for contemplating the ways in which historical, social, and sacred processes intertwine and collectively shape human and divine activity.
Claims of the miraculous are foundational to faith and skepticism, making and breaking religious careers and movements in their wake. Drawing on a variety of South Asian religious traditions-Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, Christianity-this book revolves around the theme of conundrum, demonstrating how miracles offer divine proof, tenacious embarrassment, and, in many cases, both. The contributors explore not only how modern miracles are conundrums themselves but also how they make conundrums out of assumed divides between scientific and supernatural realms, modernity and tradition, the West and the rest, and ethnographer and native. Book jacket.
Featuring chapters by an international team of leading scholars in the field, this is a comprehensive reference guide to Hindu Studies.
In the West Krishna is primarily known as the speaker of the Bhagavad Gita. But it is the stories of Krishna's childhood and his later exploits that have provided some of the most important and widespread sources of religious narrative in the Hindu religious landscape. This volume brings together new translations of representative samples of Krishna religious literature from a variety of genres -- classical, popular, regional, sectarian, poetic, literary, and philosophical.
Family Therapy: The Basics provides a clear and concise overview of the field of family therapy and its foundational models. This text explores the history, skills, and theories upon which family therapy rests, highlighting the main figures, concepts, ethical principles, and methods.Focusing on the breadth of the field, readers are provided answers to some of the most important questions for potential therapists: What are the primary skills family therapists use to help families change? How do family therapists incorporate aspects of diversity into their practice? What are the major models of family therapy practice? Where is the field of family therapy headed in the future? Family Therapy: The Basics is an ideal introduction for students exploring the field of psychotherapy and how a focus on the family and the use of various family therapy theories can help shift family organizations and relationships.
When Gandhi as a young lawyer in South Africa began fashioning the tenets of his political philosophy, he was absorbed by a seemingly unrelated enterprise: creating a newspaper, Indian Opinion. In Gandhi’s Printing Press Isabel Hofmeyr provides an account of how this footnote to a career shaped the man who would become the world-changing Mahatma.
Krishna's Mahabharatas: Devotional Retellings of an Epic Narrative is a comprehensive study of premodern regional Mahabharata retellings. This book argues that Vaishnavas (devotees of the Hindu god Vishnu and his various forms) throughout South Asia turned this epic about an apocalyptic, bloody war into works of ardent bhakti or "devotion" focused on the beloved Hindu deity Krishna. Examining over forty retellings in eleven different regional South Asian languages composed over a period of nine hundred years, it focuses on two particular Mahabharatas: Villiputturar's fifteenth-century Tamil Paratam and Sabalsingh Chauhan's seventeenth-century Bhasha (Old Hindi) Mahahbharat.
While Western Jain scholarship has focused on those texts and practices favoring male participation, the Jain community itself relies heavily on lay women's participation for religious education, the performance of key rituals, and the locus of religious knowledge. In this fieldwork-based study, Whitney Kelting attempts to reconcile these women's understanding of Jainism with the religion as presented in the existing scholarship. Jain women, she shows, both accept and rewrite the idealized roles received from religious texts, practices, and social expectation, according to which female religiosity is a symbol of Jain perfection. This volume describes these women's interpretations of their religion, not as folklore or popular religion, but as a theology that recreates Jainism in a form which honors their own participation.