Articles

The very idea that western civilisation, and the United States in particular, could have nurtured radical Islam remains absurd in many quarters. Indeed it is America that is seen as the bulwark against jihad. How then could the leader of the free world, the founder of modern democracy, the nation that epitomises freedom, that in [...]

Vedic knowledge impressed a German scholar so much that he sold his business consultancy firm in his country about 20 years ago to embark on a mission to spread the understanding of these ancient religious texts in India and the rest of the world. [...]

Forty years later, ca. 1965, Deendayal Upadhyaya adopted the promising term "Integral Humanism", in Hindi Ekatmata Manavavad or Ekatma Manavadarshan. This seemed to transcend the division of mankind in box-type nations. Moreover, unlike nationalism, it did not seem to have been borrowed from the West, in spite of appearances. In the 1930s, the French Catholic [...]

The foundational texts of Vedanta and MahAyAna, ask the practitioner to examine the nature of the arrow of time, and recognize how consciousness or ‘such-ness empty of all identifications’ underlies the changing tenses as a sort of ‘eternal present’. Past and Future, are thought to be sets of choices and possibilities respectively, and [...]

For once, the secularists have it right. The nationalism by which the Hindutva crowd swears, is a Western invention. Feelings for your home country are universal, and natives of India will need no prodding nor any foreign or native ideology to defend their country when necessary. [...]

In general, the Eastern understanding of time is very subtle, and perhaps is only matched by some of the most recent theories of modern science. That time is relative, is well recognized, and the fact that the scale of time need not be the same everywhere is acknowledged. The time of the Gods for example, [...]

An Australian lamb advertisement has been slammed for using a vegetarian religious figure to promote meat. The advert, which features Hindu deity Ganesha feasting on lamb at a barbecue with other gods, has been condemned by Hindu representatives as insensitive and disrespectful. [...]

A group of pagans has written to the Archbishop of Canterbury demanding two churches to make amends for those it says were stolen 1,300 years ago. The Odinist Fellowship, which represents 1,000 members of the pagan religion, wrote to the Church of England last month asking for two churches to be returned to make up [...]

In recent times such a criticism has often been made of the Bhagavad Gita, that it contains material that exhorts or exalts war, and worse, that it is a type of ‘war manual’ in the mode of the Chinese ‘Art of War’. But such a view can come only by a cursory reading, without reference to [...]

After recent legal action gave two sacred rivers in India the rights of "legal persons," the ruling was overturned, taking those rights away. This leaves the Ganges and Yamuna rivers vulnerable to pollution. [...]