•  47
    Traditionally, the problem of evil, in its various formulations, has been one of the strongest objections against perfect being theism. In the voluminous literature on this problem, the motif of evil has usually been discussed with respect to human flourishing. In recent decades more focused attention has been paid to animal suffering and the philosophical problems that such suffering poses for perfect being theists. However, this growing body of literature, in Anglo-American philosophical milie…Read more
  • with Outlaw Jr, Anne Waters, and Mario Wenning
    . 2015.
  •  6
    The devotional literatures across the Hindu bhakti traditions of medieval India are shaped by distinctive styles of affective responses to the divine reality. A theme which recurs in several layers of their songs is a theological dialectic between divine majesty and divine accessibility; the divine is not only simply transcendent in the sense of being a distant deity but is also immanently present in and through a range of human sensitivities, emotions, and affectivities. We will highlight the d…Read more
  •  19
    The Absolute of Advaita and the Spirit of Hegel: Situating Vedānta on the Horizons of British Idealisms
    Journal of the Indian Council of Philosophical Research 34 (1): 1-17. 2017.
    PurposeA significant volume of philosophical literature produced by Indian academic philosophers in the first half of the twentieth century can be placed under the rubric of ‘Śaṁkara and X’, where X is Hegel, or a German or a British philosopher who had commented on, elaborated or critiqued the Hegelian system. We will explore in this essay the philosophical significance of Hegel-influenced systems as an intellectual conduit for these Indo-European conceptual encounters, and highlight how for so…Read more
  •  32
    While Gandhi and Ambedkar hold similar standpoints on the relation between religious orderings of the world and shapes of social existence, they sharply diverge, on certain occasions, regarding the question of what the crucial terms ‘caste’ and varņa refer to, so that they often seem to be talking past each other. Gandhi sought to cut through various traditional forms of Hindu socio-religious practices and develop a Hinduism which is grounded in the values of universal peace, love and benevolenc…Read more
  •  19
    Encountering Violence in Hindu Universes
    Journal of Religion and Violence 5 (1): 49-78. 2017.
    A study of Hindu engagements with violence which have been structured by scriptural themes reveals that violence has been regulated, enacted, resisted, negated or denied in complex ways. Disputes based on Vedic orthodoxy were channeled, in classical India, through the mythical frameworks of gods clashing with demons, and later in the medieval centuries this template was extended to the Muslim foreigners who threatened the Brahmanical socio-religious orders. In the modern period, the electoral me…Read more
  •  7
    Do Brute Facts Need to Be Civilised? Universals in Classical Indian Philosophy and Contemporary Analytic Ontology
    Journal of the Indian Council of Philosophical Research 32 (1): 1-17. 2015.
    A vital point of dispute within both classical Indian thought and contemporary analytic ontology is the following: which facts are brute so that they are, so to speak, beyond any need of civilizing through logical transformations, conceptual revisions, or linguistic reformulations? In this article, we discuss certain strands of the debate in these fields with two central purposes in mind. Firstly, we shall argue that metaphysical debates are seemingly interminable partly because disputing partie…Read more
  •  12
    Symposium: ›What limits ought democratic pluralism impose on diversity within a cross-cultural context?
    with Outlaw Jr, Anne Waters, and Mario Wenning
    In Outlaw Jr, Barua Ankur, Waters Anne & Wenning Mario (eds.), , . pp. 109-186. 2015.
    n/a.
  •  5
    The book is a thematic study of Tagore's conceptual project of harmonizing the one and its many across several fields such as spirituality, aesthetics, social existence, and others.
  •  2
    Exploring Hindu philosophy
    Equinox Publishing. 2023.
    This introductory text points to some of the diverse tapestries of Hindu worldviews where scriptural revelation, logical argumentation, embodied affectivity, moral reasoning, and aesthetic cultivation constitute densely interwoven conceptual threads.
  •  10
    The Mystery of God and the Claim of Reason: Comparative Patterns in Hindu-Christian Theodicy
    International Journal of Hindu Studies 25 (3): 259-288. 2022.
    In a comparative study of karma theodicy and atonement theodicy, as developed by some Hindu and Christian theologians, this article argues that they present teleological visions where individuals become purged, purified, and perfected in and through their worldly suffering. A karma theodicy operates with the notion that there is some form of proportionality between past evil and present suffering, even if such correlations can only be traced by an enlightened sage or are known to the omniscient …Read more
  •  20
    This article explores some of the understandings of “science” that are often employed in the literature on “science and Eastern religions.” These understandings crucially shape the raging debates between the avid proponents and the keen detractors of the thesis that Eastern forms of spirituality are uniquely able to subsume the sciences into their metaphysical–axiological horizons. More specifically, the author discusses some of the proposed relations between “science” and “Eastern religions” by…Read more
  •  64
    The Problem of Criteria and the Necessity of Natural Theology
    Heythrop Journal 54 (2): 166-180. 2013.
    Most streams of Christianity have emphasized the unknowability of God, but they have also asserted that Christ is the criterion through whom we may have limited access to the depths of God, and through whose life and death we can formulate the doctrine of God as Triune. This standpoint, however, leads to certain complications regarding ‘translating’ the Christian message to adherents of other religious traditions, and in particular the question, ‘Why do you accept Christ as the criterion?’, is o…Read more
  •  45
    Myth as Metaphysics: The Christian Saviour and the Hindu Gods (review)
    Sophia 51 (3): 379-393. 2012.
    A distinction which is often rehearsed in some strands of Christian writing on the ‘Eastern’ religions, especially Hinduism, is that while they are full of ‘mythological’ fancies, Biblical faith is based on the solid rock of ‘historical’ truth. I argue that the sharp contours of this antithesis are softened when we consider two issues regarding the relation between ‘myth’ and ‘history’. First, the decades–long attempts to separate the ‘historical’ facts about Jesus Christ from the interpretive e…Read more
  •  101
    God’s Body at Work: Rāmānuja and Panentheism
    International Journal of Hindu Studies 14 (1): 1-30. 2010.
  •  37
    We shall examine some conceptual tensions in Hick’s ‘pluralism’ in the light of S. Radhakrishnan’s reformulation of classical Advaita. Hick himself often quoted Radhakrishnan’s translations from the Hindu scriptures in support of his own claims about divine ineffability, transformative experience and religious pluralism. However, while Hick developed these themes partly through an adaptation of Kantian epistemology, Radhakrishnan derived them ultimately from Śaṁkara, and these two distinctive po…Read more
  •  32
    Revisiting the rationality of reincarnation talk
    International Journal of Philosophy and Theology 76 (3): 218-231. 2015.
    A survey of the key arguments that have been developed for and against the rationality of belief in reincarnation shows that often the central dispute is not over what the ‘data’ are but how to assess the ‘data’ from specific metaphysical–hermeneutical horizons. By examining some of these arguments formulated by Hindu thinkers as well as their critiques – from the perspectives of metaphysical naturalism and Christian theology – we argue that one of the reasons why these debates remain intractabl…Read more