Angles and Approaches
Challenging Religion: Krishnamurti's Influential Critique of Conventional Religion
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Hillary Rodrigues
Throughout his life, the Indian-born teacher, Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895-1986), who rejected his role as a Messiah for which he had been groomed by the Theosophical Society, offered a trenchant criticism of religious teachers and organizations. Krishnamurti's primary teaching was directed to the ending of human conflict, both personal and social, through the attainment of a pivotal psychological transformation in each individual. This liberation from the so-called "conditioned mind," would yield a quality of consciousness that was truly religious. Thus, Krishnamurti's teachings are not anti-religion, but contrary to religion's conventional expressions. In this paper, drawing upon extensive study and fieldwork observations and interviews, I offer a concise explanation of Krishnamurti's central message on religion and the religious mind, and discuss the challenges faced by the discipline of religious studies when attempting to categorize his approach and examine its influences. I suggest that he is a major influence in the modern nondual spirituality movement, which has loosely defined characteristics and global reach.
Madness, Holiness, and the Other: A 16th-Century Account of a Spanish Martyr in Jerusalem View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Michael Hammer
A 1581 pliego suelto (chapbook) in Madrid’s Biblioteca Nacional recounts the story of an unnamed Spanish woman had traveled to Jerusalem, where she suffered martyrdom. Although it purports to be a true account, the story is most likely a pious fiction. The unnamed woman is depicted as Christ figure: she preaches, heals, baptizes, makes enemies and meets her death at the same place, in a similar way and at the same time of year as Jesus. Like St. Ignatius of Loyola, she travels to the Holy Land without money, trusting in God. Like numerous martyrs, she actively courts death by fearlessly preaching to a hostile audience, and when offered the chance to save herself by converting to Islam, she refuses. The text closes by declaring her a credit to Spain, and a woman worth imitating. But while the author extols her virtues and all but calls her a saint, he never once names her. The simple goal of this paper is to situate this account in its historical context, together with its literary context of pilgrim narratives, hagiography, and martyrology, in order to tease out not only how a Spanish Christian writer perceived the Muslim other during a time of heightened tension, but also what it has to say about sanctity and insanity, about religious zeal, and about the lengths a zealot might go to in order to save souls.
The Kingdom of God and the Kingdom of Man in Joseph Ratzinger’s Eschatological Theology: Implications for Political Visions of Worldly Redemption View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Emmanuel Ojeifo
Joseph Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI) is one of the well known Roman Catholic theologians that have devoted considerable scholarly attention to the question of the relationship between secular political eschatologies and Christian eschatological hope. Drawing on eschatological discussions in Augustine’s City of God, Ratzinger’s approaches to eschatology has focused significantly on how understandings of the relationship between kingdom of God and the kingdom of Man shape approaches to political liberation in secular visions of worldly redemption. This paper adopts Ratzinger’s differentiation between the goals and orientations of these two kingdoms in enunciating how the search for hope on the secular horizontal plane cannot proceed without the recognition of the “guiding light” of the vertical dimension of eschatological hope. Without this recognition, politics and political liberation theologies will be overreaching themselves in ways that will ultimately lead to serious abuses of human freedom.
