This study sought to investigate the formulation, ideas and representations of religious tolerance under the “Enlightened Reformism”in luso-brazilian world, with the general hypothesis that the institutional reforms touching the Inquisition, Catholic Church and regular and secular catholic clergy created, albeit indirectly, conditions for a def…[Read more]

This chapter explores the roles of narrative in the development of knowledge about, and rationalization for, conditioning the human body in the classical Indian medical system of Ayurveda.

A study of pravṛtti and nivṛtti in the Sanskrit allegory, Jīvānandanam (“The Joy of Life”).

This paper will discuss some possible results of the developing dominance of electronically mediated communication on the practice of theology, focusing on ways digital communications allow, or encourage, us to develop once again features of theologising that were more prominent in earlier times. Peter Horsfield suggested that in some respects…[Read more]

In a number of places one hears biblical scholars dream of a new kind of commentary, a commentary with hypertext links and multimedia elements. This paper, though it ends with such dreams, is based on the experience of an ongoing project, begun in 1995, to discover the opportunities and constraints on such a commentary (Postmodern Bible – Amos).…[Read more]

Chapter on the history, texts, and practices of Zoroastrianism, with a detailed discussion of the history and contemporary practices of the Zoroastrian community in India, the Parsis.

An examination of the discursive interplay about politics, religion, and medicine in a 17th-18th cent. Sanskrit allegory, Jivanandanam (“The Joy of Life”).

A philological and ethnographic study of medical and astrological positions on gemstones in Sanskrit literature and contemporary North Indian society.

A study of storytelling as an explanatory model for health and illness in the classical Sanskrit literature of Ayurveda.

Originally presented at McMaster University in May 2005.

The re-evaluation of classical education (paideia) recurred throughout the Roman period, reaching a particularly fevered pitch during the late fourth century, as the empire became Christian. The political consequences of Christian learning become particularly clear in the debate between two learned, Latin-speaking Christians who translated Greek…[Read more]

In this essay, I reconsider early Christian conversion through the writings of Epiphanius of Salamis (d. 404 C.E.). Far from the notion of conversion as an interior movement of soul (familiar from Augustine, A.D. Nock, and William James), Epiphanius shows us a variety of conversions—from lay to clergy, from orthodox to heretic, and from Jew to C…[Read more]

Compared to more philosophical biblical interpreters such as Origen, Epiphanius of Salamis often appears to modern scholars as plodding, literalist, reactionary, meandering, and unsophisticated. In this article I argue that Epiphanius’s eclectic and seemingly disorganized treatment of the Bible actually draws on a common, imperial style of a…[Read more]

The most commonly employed framework for assessing the religion of the Nara period (710-784) remains the state Buddhism model (kokka Bukkyo ron 国家仏教論) advanced by Inoue Mitsusada 井上光貞 (1917-1983). While Inoue provided the most systematic and influential version of this thesis, this article traces its origins at least as far back as the Meiji peri…[Read more]

This article explores the notion of the Buddhist canon in seventh- and eighth-century Japan. It relies on scriptorium documents, temple records, and manuscripts of catalogs to argue that there was no single Buddhist canon in ancient Japan; each was created at a particular moment in a unique configuration to respond to the needs of the patron and…[Read more]

Recent discoveries and scholarship on Japanese Buddhist manuscripts have illuminated new areas of research and raised previously unexplored questions in Buddhist studies and East Asian religions. This article introduces some of the recent finds and approaches to these materials. It focuses on three sets of sources: scriptorium documents from an…[Read more]

This article introduces and translates the Scripture on Saving and Protecting Body and Life (Jiuhu shenming jing 救護身命經), a text likely composed in sixth-century China that claims to represent the words of the Buddha. The article traces the treatment of this text in Chinese catalogues, and analyzes its themes with regard to other works composed…[Read more]

Explaining what made ancient Greek law unusual, Michael Gagarin observes that most premodern legal cultures “wrote extensive sets (or codes) of laws for academic purposes or propaganda but these were not intended to be accessible to most members of the community and had relatively little effect on the actual operation of the legal system.” Thi…[Read more]