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A number of converts to Buddhism report paranormal experiences. Their accounts describe psychic abilities like clairvoyance and precognition, out-of-body experiences, near-death experiences, and encounters with other beings such as ghosts …
Guest: Douglas Osto
Date: 8/1/2024
This autobiography--Hindu and Catholic, Priest and Scholar: A Love Story (Bloomsbury, 2024)--traces Francis X. Clooney's intellectual and spiritual journey from middle-class American Catholicism to a lifelong study of Hinduism. Clooney …
Guest: Francis X. Clooney
Date: 7/25/2024
For some four hundred years, Hindus and Christians have been engaged in a public controversy about conversion and missionary proselytization, especially in India and the Hindu diaspora. Hindu Mission, Christian Mission: Soundings in …
Guest: Reid B. Locklin
Date: 7/18/2024
Saving the Dead: Tibetan Funerary Rituals in the Tradition of the Sarvardurgatipariśodhana Tantra (WSTB, 2024) explores Tibetan funerary manuals based on the Sarvadurgatipariśodhana Tantra (SDP), focusing on the writings of the Sa skya …
Guest: Rory Lindsay
Date: 7/11/2024
According to Vālmīki's Sanskrit Rāmāyaṇa (early centuries CE), Śambūka was practicing severe acts of austerity to enter heaven. In engaging in these acts as a Śūdra, Śambūka was in violation of class- and caste-based societal norms …
Guest: Aaron Sherraden
Date: 7/4/2024
The contributions to Visnu-Narayana: Changing Forms and the Becoming of a Deity in Indian Religious Traditions (Austrian Academy of Sciences Press, 2023) deal with the complex history of the Indian deity Visnu-Narayana. This conception of …
Guest: Marcus Schmucker
Date: 6/6/2024
In The Metaphysics of Meditation: Sri Aurobindo and Adi-Sakara on the Isa Upanisad (Bloombury, 2024), Stephen Phillips focuses on one of the most important poems about meditation in world literature, as understood by two of the greatest …
Guest: Stephen Phillips
Date: 5/23/2024
Devotional Visualities: Seeing Bhakti in Indic Material Cultures (Bloomsbury, 2023) is the first to focus on material visualities of bhakti imagery that inspire, shape, convey, and expand both the visual practices of devotional …
Guest: Karen Pechilis and Amy-Ruth Holt
Date: 5/9/2024
Contemplative Studies and Jainism: Meditation, Prayer, and Veneration (Routledge, 2023) is one of the first wide-ranging academic surveys of the major types and categories of Jain praxis. It covers a breadth of scholarly viewpoints that …
Guest: Cogen Bohanec and Rita D. Sherma
Date: 4/25/2024
Professor Gavin Flood of Oxford University discusses new insights on tantra to be released in an upcoming publication stemming from his Continuing Studies teaching at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies. Flood's online Tantra course is …
Guest: Gavin Flood
Date: 4/10/2024