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In most mainstream traditions of Hinduism and Buddhism, women have for centuries largely been excluded from positions of religious and ritual leadership. However, as this volume shows, in an increasing number of late-20th-century and …
Guest: Ute Hüsken
Date: 2/2/2023
Twenty-first century life is increasingly governed by artificial intelligence (AI) technologies such as machine learning, big data analysis, facial recognition, and robotics. For decades, an ideology of apocalyptic progress and cosmic …
Guest: Robert M. Geraci
Date: 1/5/2023
In Human Being, Bodily Being: Phenomenology from Classical India (Oxford UP, 2021), Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad offers illuminating new perspectives on contemporary phenomenological theories of body and subjectivity, based on studies of …
Guest: Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad
Date: 12/1/2022
Ruth Vanita's book The Dharma of Justice in the Sanskrit Epics (Oxford UP, 2021) shows that many characters in the Sanskrit epics - men and women of all varnas and mixed-varna - discuss and criticize discrimination based on gender, varna, …
Guest: Ruth Vanita
Date: 11/17/2022
Michael Slouber's Early Tantric Medicine: Snakebite, Mantras, and Healing in the Garuda Tantras (Oxford UP, 2016) looks at a traditional medical system that flourished over 1,000 years ago in India. The volume brings to life this rich …
Guest: Michael Slouber
Date: 9/29/2022
Michael S. Allen's book The Ocean of Inquiry: Niscaldas and the Premodern Origins of Modern Hinduism (Oxford UP, 2022) focuses on a single remarkable work and its place within that history: "The Ocean of Inquiry," a vernacular compendium …
Guest: Michael S. Allen
Date: 9/15/2022
Today I talked to Patrick Olivelle about his book Grhastha: The Householder in Ancient Indian Religious Culture (Oxford UP, 2019). For scholars of ancient Indian religions, the wandering mendicants who left home and family for a celibate …
Guest: Patrick Olivelle
Date: 4/14/2022
Vivekananda, Swami Vivekananda's Vedantic Cosmopolitanism (Oxford UP, 2022) argues, is best understood as a cosmopolitan Vedantin who developed novel philosophical positions through creative dialectical engagement with both Indian and …
Guest: Ayon Maharaj
Date: 3/31/2022
Samuel Wright's A Time of Novelty: Logic, Emotion, and Intellectual Life in Early Modern India, 1500-1700 C.E. (Oxford UP, 2021) argues that a philosophical community emerges in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century India that crafts an …
Guest: Samuel Wright
Date: 3/17/2022
The first book on alcohol in pre-modern India, James McHugh's An Unholy Brew: Alcohol in Indian Religion and History (Oxford UP, 2021) uses a wide range of sources from the Vedas to the Kamasutra to explore intoxicating drinks and styles …
Guest: James McHugh
Date: 3/3/2022