A review of the translation of Uttara Gita by Minati Kar published by the Ramakrishna Mission Institute of Culture, Kolkata, India. Though brief, the Uttara-gita clearly explains the nature of the Atman and the method to realize it,primarily through yoga. This book serves as a supplementary text to the Bhagavadgita. It is a text that inspires…[Read more]

Book Review Towards the Goal by Mrs Vandana Sarathy and Dr Rajeev Ramakrishna

Book Review The Western Construction of Religion: Myths, Knowledge, and Ideology by Daniel Dubuisson

Book Review The Truth Will Set You Free by Svami Purna

Søren Kierkegaard has left insightful and penetrating texts on the inner life. He gave context to contemplation on and surrender to God. The awareness of agency in a spiritual aspirant creates the obstacle of letting the grace flow freely into one. The lily of the field and the bird of the air breathe a freedom that the conscious agency of a…[Read more]

Book Review The Journal of Oriental Research, Madras, 2010–2012 Eds Dr V Kamesari, Dr K S Balasubramanian, and Dr T V Vasudeva

Book Review The Buddhist Dead: Practices, Discourses, Representations, Jacqueline I. Stone co-edited with Bryan J. Cuevas

Book Review The Brahma Kumaris as a Reflexive Tradition by John Wallis

Self Knowledge by Nome Book Review Prabuddha Bharata November 2010

Secularism and Religion in Multi-faith Societies: The Case of India by Ragini Sen, Wolfgang Wagner, and Caroline Howarth Book Review Prabuddha Bharata December 2015

In this book, Muthuraj Swamy discusses how conflicts are usually caused by factors other than religious factors at the grassroots level, and how dialogue is an elitist phenomenon that does not percolate to the grassroots, who do not need it in the first place.

Psychoanalysis and its father in the West, Sigmund Freud, have often been seen as the antitheses of religion and faith. This book seeks to dispel this misconception and place Freud and psychoanalysis as hopes to the faithful and the hedonist alike. Ethics and morality do not get compromised and unethical and immoral behaviour do not get free…[Read more]

St Teresa of Avila is one of the most studied and emulated Christian mystic. She is an extraordinary role model to be followed by a monastic religious, because she not only gives step-by-step instructions for the ‘interior’ life, but also guides life in a monastic community. She is one of the very few mystics who have recorded in detail their exp…[Read more]

Through this work, François Laruelle looks at non-philosophers from various angles. He seeks to look at them from a humane perspective and as ‘subjects of knowledge’ (25). He argues that ‘non-philosophy is a close relative of the spiritual but definitely not the spiritualist’ (26).

Religious leaders often come together for a statement of their respective beliefs seeking a false satisfaction that they are working for world peace by a disparate series of talks meant to only emphasize differences among faith traditions. This book is a welcome departure from such meaningless exercises and hopes to create a tradition of…[Read more]

Translating a Sanskrit text is a highly challenging task. The difficulty only gets compounded if it is a Vedic text, because the Vedas use a Sanskrit that is quite different from the Sanskrit used in other literature. To translate the Rig Veda into English requires great patience and great scholarship. Stephanie W. Jamison and Joel P. Brereton…[Read more]

Tensions among differing theoretical frameworks are often observed within the philosophy of religion, largely given disparate scientific, analytic, and continental approaches. New Models of Religious Understanding is a serious and timely reexamination of scientific and analytic perspectives, and questions the very need for these approaches. Edited…[Read more]

Galloway critically examines how François Laruelle’s non-standard philosophy subverts the digital question. Clarifying the philosophical nature of the digital concept, Galloway proceeds to show that non-standard philosophy is an attempt to come out of the authoritarian stance that traditional philosophy takes and to show that there could be a no…[Read more]

There are two kinds of academic writing, if we classify the work by the nature of the author’s expertise. The first one, the most prevalent, is the kind of writing that is born out of the scholarly work of the author and is primarily based on research and teaching experience. The second kind, comparatively harder to come by, is the writing of a s…[Read more]

Interreligious comparisons have been an interesting subject for both religious individuals and academics. The language of comparison has been contested by almost all who rely upon it, from some Western scholars who started such comparisons at the turn of the twentieth century, to phenomenologists and postmodernists. This range of disparate views…[Read more]