Devotional Visualities

This book is the first to focus on material visualities of bhakti imagery that inspire, shape, convey, and expand both the visual practices of devotional communities, as well as possibilities for extending the reach of devotion in society in new and often unexpected ways. Communities of interpreters of bhakti images discussed in this book include not only a number of distinctive Hindu bhakti groups, but also artisans, diaspora women, South Asian Sufis, businessmen, dancers, and filmmakers. This book's identification of devotional practices of looking, such as materializing memory, mirroring and immaterializing portraits, and shaping the return look, connect material and visual cultures as well as illustrate modes of established and experimental image usage. Bhakti is one of the most-studied aspects of Indic devotionalism on account of its expression through emotive poetry, song, and vivid hagiographies of saints. The diverse devotional visualities analyzed in this book meaningfully circulate bhakti images in past and present, generating their renewed relationship to contemporary concerns.

This book is the first to focus on material visualities that shape, convey and expand paths of devotional participation (bhakti) from across India, in the past and present. The book argues that a central focus on visuality is both at the heart of bhakti expression, and as an academic focus, it changes our understanding of bhakti's development and impact through analysis of material religion. As theorized in recent scholarship,`visuality' is an imaged materiality that shapes reality and does not just reflect it. Bhakti visualities, in their overlapping diversity and use of accessible technologies, provide us with ways of thinking about new and alternative histories of bhakti as distinct from, yet related to, our understanding of bhakti based on the predominance of textual studies. Bhakti is one of the most-studied aspects of Hinduism on account of its expression through emotive poetry, song and vivid hagiographies of saints, and this book shows that examining bhakti's visualities is crucial for understanding its wide and enduring influence on the field of religion and beyond.

A Companion to Families in the Greek and Roman Worlds draws from both established and current scholarship to offer a broad overview of the field, engage in contemporary debates, and pose stimulating questions about future development in the study of families. Provides up-to-date research on family structure from archaeology, art, social, cultural, and economic history Includes contributions from established and rising international scholars Features illustrations of families, children, slaves, and ritual life, along with maps and diagrams of sites and dwellings Honorable Mention for 2011 Single Volume Reference/Humanities & Social Sciences PROSE award granted by the Association of American Publishers

Explores the nature and function of bhakti or devotional involvement in religious practice in India in areas where it is seldom sought or where its existence has been doubted or even denied.

When Hindu devotional or bhakti traditions welcomed marginalized people-women, low castes, and Dalits-were they promoting social equality? In this book, Jon Keune deftly examines the root of this deceptively simple question. The modern formulation of the bhakti-caste question is what Dalit leader B. R. Ambedkar had in mind when he concluded that the saints promoted spiritual equality but did not transform society. While taking Ambedkar's judgment seriously, Jon Keune argues that, when viewed in the context of intellectual history and social practice, the bhakti-caste question is more complex. Shared Devotion, Shared Food explores how people in western India wrestled for centuries with two competing values: a theological vision that God welcomes all people, and the social hierarchy of the caste system. Keune examines the ways in which food and stories about food were important sites where this debate played out, particularly when people of high and low social status ate together. By studying Marathi manuscripts, nineteenth-century publications, plays, and films, Shared Devotion, Shared Food reveals how the question of caste, inclusivity, and equality was formulated in different ways over the course of three centuries, and it explores why social equality remains so elusive in practice.

Marty Glass lives with his wife Carol beyond the power and water lines in Humboldt County, California, relying on his 1965 pick-up truck "Old Brown" to take him the final two miles up a dirt road to his owner-built home. He has worked as a college English instructor, wharehouseman, and janitor. A devoted father of five children, loving husband and neighbor, he now teaches sixth grade in a rural elementary school, and plays jazz piano and cards. For the past thirty years, he has seriously practiced the religion of India, spending the long necessary hours meditating in "Marty's Cell," an old chicken coop reborn as an austere shrine. His spiritual practice is his real life. Marty's acclaimed book Yuga: An Anatomy of our Fate, was published by Sophia Perennis in 2001. He now gives us perhaps his most beautiful and thoughtful gift, reminding us that the world is woven of the infinite Love and Joy that is God, and showing us how, inspired by the Hindu tradition, that Love and Joy can be directly experienced as the heart of the universe and the heart of our hearts. We have it from Frithjof Schuon (The Transcendent Unity of Religions) and many others that the Vedanta appears among explicit doctrines as one of the most direct formulations possible of what makes the very essence of our spiritual reality. The work in hand can be read as a book-length unpacking of that accurate description. Reliable from beginning to end, it is distinctive among the innumerable renditions of the Vedanta in two ways. First, because its author is an accomplished wordsmith, he makes the Vedanta's profundities-which delve as deep as those of any philosophical theology-read like an open book; and second, because he has worked for thirty years to shape his life by those profundities, his vivid accounts of what he experienced along the way make his words jump off the page into the reader's heart. The book is inspiring. Huston Smith, author of Why Religion Matters, The World's Religions, etc.

This devotional book is intended as a spiritual resource for nurturing your soul. What is truly personal is also truly universal. Where you touch the Holy, it reaches to touch you, and your life will be transformed. If enough of us begin with our own spiritual disciplines, a whole community may be transformed, or a neighborhood or city or nation. --from the Preface In the first daily devotional guide for Unitarian Universalists since the nineteenth-century Day Unto Day (American Unitarian Association), John Morgan has discerningly compiled a unique collection of 365 devotions on prayer, forgiveness, suffering, compassion, social justice, Unitarian Universalist heritage, and many other topics. Mirroring the pluralism in our congregations, the contributions to this book come from many roots--Christian, Buddhist, mystic, Jewish, pagan, humanist, and agnostic.

In his time, Andrew Murray was alarmed by how few believers lived wholeheartedly for God and truly displayed to the world the abundant life promised by Jesus Christ. More than a century later, Christians are still living powerless, impoverished spiritual lives, and a media-savvy world dismisses the church as irrelevant. One of the most powerful voices of the nineteenth century, Murray speaks to today’s church from across the years, exhorting us to begin each day by seeking the living God, giving Him time every morning to reveal Himself anew. For this stunning new devotional, contemporary bestselling author Bruce Wilkinson presents 365 gems from the treasury of writings by Andrew Murray. Wilkinson introduces each month’s readings with an overview of the thematic approach for the coming devotions. Each month features the very best of Murray’s work centering on a different aspect of cultivating a deeper and richer spiritual life. Revive Your Spirit! Does the abundant Christian life you’re “supposed” to have feel more like a chore than reality? Impoverished and stale, is your spirit crying out for recharging? One of the most powerful voices of the last two hundred years, Andrew Murray wrote extensively about this age-old struggle. This treasury of 365 gems of biblical wisdom is presented here in contemporary English by bestselling author Bruce Wilkinson. Each day will lead you deeper into God’s presence. Your spirit is yearning for it. Don’t delay. Let these timeless secrets of a more meaningful spiritual life invigorate your soul.