"A Bengali Dalit religion called Matua emerged in the nineteenth century in East Bengal. It counts tens of millions of followers across the Bay of Bengal and the Indo–Bangladesh border. With the COVID-19 pandemic, Matua religious gatherings were shifted online. This paper asks what happened to mul
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tisensory and sonic-haptic religious engagements of the Matua community once ritual gatherings were transported to the cyberspace of digital media. Using data collected through remote ethnography and digital ethnography with the Matua community in 2020 and 2021, we suggest that the increased online visibility of the Matua community (1) contributed to reshaping Matua identity narratives as a global diasporic network, downplaying previous self-definitions of untouchability and displacement; (2) exacerbated inequalities along class and gender lines; and (3) shifted the sensoryscape of Matua ritual experiences, with important repercussions in the domains of embodiment, ritual authority and authenticity. As Matua experiences of increased online visibility clashed with their traditional aesthetics of resistance through shared sonic commingling, we argue, more broadly, that understandings of visibility must take into consideration culturally informed articulations of the senses and sense hierarchies, and how sensory ideology can manifest following the affordances of different media." (Abstract)
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"The contributions in the form of research articles and essays come from a variety of religious perspectives – Buddhist, Catholic, Muslim, Jain, Hindu, Protestant, Eastern Orthodox. Despite coming from different religious worldviews, the underlying message fundamentally affirms that promoting ecol
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ogical flourishing requires an approach that centers on both praxis and spirituality in order to prevent the task of caring for our common home to become simply a series of dry mechanical calculations, purely theoretical propositions, or clever policy enactments. Religions at their best inspire and infuse external acts that are consistent with authentic interior virtues ordered to the wellbeing of both humanity and the natural environment. In this respect, religions must undergo its own self-examination in order to adequately speak to the present context." (Page 176)
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"Originally published in 1977, The Hindu Religious Tradition provides a detailed exploration into the different doctrines regarding the nature of Religious Reality and the many paths of search for this Reality within the Hindu religion. The book discusses these differing doctrines from the point of
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view of their philosophical significance and their use in man's search for the divine in consideration of the traditional teaching that the divine is already in man and can be realised in direct experience. It provides a comprehensive account of this tradition through considering all aspects that are integral to it, and highlights that the profundity of this tradition lies in that it cannot be limited to the requirements of any one form of conceiving the divine." (Publisher description)
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"The communication dimension of Interreligious Dialogue has never been especially addressed and studied. Because of this the FABC Office of Social Communication organized the fifth Bishops' Institute for Social Communication (BISCOM V) in Bali, Indonesia from November 22 to 27, 2005 under the theme,
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Interreligious Dialogue As Communication. The theme was approached in four steps: First, we had an overview about Interreligious Dialogue from the Vatican and FABC perspective. This was followed in a second step by Interreligious Dialogue experiences from different Asian countries. Third, was a discussion of the use of modern means of communication for Interreligious Dialogue. And the fourth was an attempt to understand social communication in different Asian religions. The understanding of social communication follows the approach of Vatican II's Inter Mirifica, where this expression is proposed since the concern of the Church goes beyond mass media, audiovisual means, media of diffusion or other similar expressions. This understanding pertains to the communication of and in human society which includes all means and ways of communicating between people. Such an understanding is essential also for Interreligious Dialogue which very often happens between individuals and persons or smaller groups of people in many different ways - verbal and non-verbal, in action and in silence, through drama and dance." (Publisher description)
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"Many of the essays in this volume seek to interpret traditional Asian approaches to communication in the light of modern Western concepts. At one level, this might appear to compromise the integrity of the Asian approaches. However, it needs to be stressed that this is a calculated strategy on the
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part of the authors. The objective of the rediscovery of this terrain of Asian approaches to communication is to revitalize and expand the field of communication by drawing on these rich resources. In order to do this, one must first gain legitimacy for these approaches in the eyes of Western and Western-trained Asian communication scholars. It is for this reason that many of the authors in this volume have thought it fit to explicate Asian approaches in relation to Western concepts. This book, which addresses itself to the task of rediscovering a terrain for communication theory, consists of 13 essays. The opening essay argues for the compelling need to study Asian approaches to communication. It does this by pointing out how Asian approaches to the study of communication can supplement, enrich, and challenge Western approaches. It points out that the Asian approaches should no longer be ignored as they can prove to be extremely productive in widening the discourse of communication metatheory." (Introduction, page xii)
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