Order ID | 53563633773 |
Type | Essay |
Writer Level | Masters |
Style | APA |
Sources/References | 4 |
Perfect Number of Pages to Order | 5-10 Pages |
Theology and Religious Pluralism Assignment
In 6 pages (double spaced) ANSWER THREE of the following FOUR questions (3 of
4), based on class readings, discussions, and lectures.
1. Religious pluralism is a central problem for contemporary theology. While world
religions advance competing truth claims, there is a great need for tolerance and
respect between them. In different ways, Swami Vivekananda and Leslie Newbigin
both address issues of religious pluralism. Compare and contrast their approaches.
How do Newbigin and Vivekananda, respectively, talk about religious pluralism?
Where do they overlap, and what are the key differences?
What is your assessment? What are the key strengths and limitations of each
approach? Which do you find more compelling?
2. James Cone and Delores Williams offer two different contextual theological
visions; Delores Williams both builds upon and critiques James Cone’s Black
theology of liberation. Compare and contrast their theological approaches to
liberation.
What are the distinctive elements of each theological vision?
What are the key differences, and what are the practical implications of those
differences?
Which do you find more compelling, and why?
3. Both Elizabeth Johnson and Kate Bowler offer critiques of traditional approaches
to theodicy. Theodicy is the theological problem of reconciling belief in a good God
with the presence of evil and/or suffering. More generally, many philosophies give an
account explaining or justifying the existence of evil and/or suffering (e.g., Social
Darwinism). How does Johnson and/or Bowler challenge these explanations?
Identify one theodicy you have seen offered in the world today, and briefly describe
the argument in a general way.
Explore how Johnson and/or Bowler might critique this idea.
What is your assessment? What are the critical issues involved, and where does
your chosen theodicy fall short? What would a more adequate response look like?
4. In different ways John Thatamanil and Gloria Anzaldúa both challenges how we
think about religion and identity. Compare and contrast their approaches.
What are the key elements of each author’s challenge to religion as a category of
identity?
What are points of connection/similarity, and what are key differences?
What is your assessment? What are key questions or problems raised by this
comparison? Which do you find more compelling, and why?
Swami Vivekananda’s Speech at World Parliament of Religion, Chicago
Response To Welcome
Sisters and Brothers of America, it fills my heart with joy unspeakable to rise in
response to the warm and cordial welcome which you have given us. I thank you in
the name of the most ancient order of monks in the world; I thank you in the name of
the mother of religions; and I thank you in the name of millions and millions of Hindu
people of all classes and sects.
My thanks, also, to some of the speakers on this platform who, referring to the
delegates from the Orient, have told you that these men from far-off nations may well
claim the honour of bearing to different lands the idea of toleration. I am proud to
belong to a religion which has taught the world both tolerance and universal
acceptance.
We believe not only in universal toleration, but we accept all religions as true. I am
proud to belong to a nation which has sheltered the persecuted and the refugees of
all religions and all nations of the earth. I am proud to tell you that we have gathered
in our bosom the purest remnant of the Israelites, who came to Southern India and
took refuge with us in the very year in which their holy temple was shattered to
pieces by Roman tyranny.
I am proud to belong to the religion which has sheltered and is still fostering remnant
Zoroastrian nation. I will quote to you, brethren, a few lines from a hymn which I
remember to have repeated from my earliest boyhood, which is every day repeated
by millions of human beings:
"As the different streams having their sources in different places all mingle their
water in the sea, so, O Lord, the different paths which men take through different
tendencies, various though they appear, crooked or straight, all lead to Thee."
The present convention, which is one of the most august assemblies ever held, is in
itself a vindication, a declaration to the world of the wonderful doctrine preached in
the Gita: "Whosoever comes to Me, through whatsoever form, I reach him; all men
are struggling through paths which in the end lead to me."
Sectarianism, bigotry, and its horrible descendant, fanaticism, have long possessed
this beautiful earth. They have filled the earth with violence, drenched it often and
often with human blood, destroyed civilisation and sent whole nations to despair.
Had it not been for these horrible demons, human society would be far more
advanced than it is now.
But their time is come; and I fervently hope that the bell that tolled this morning in
honour of this convention may be the death-knell of all fanaticism, of all persecutions
with the sword or with the pen, and of all uncharitable feelings between persons
wending their way to the same goal.
Why We Disagree 15 Sep 1893
I will tell you a little story. You have heard the eloquent speaker who has just finished
say, "Let us cease from abusing each other," and he was very sorry that there
should be always so much variance.
But I think I should tell you a story which would illustrate the cause of this variance. A
frog lived in a well. It had lived there for a long time. It was born there and brought up
there, and yet was a little, small frog. Of course, the evolutionists were not there then
to tell us
whether the frog lost its eyes or not, but, for our story's sake, we must take it for
granted that it had its eyes, and that it every day cleansed the water of all the worms
and bacilli that lived in it with an energy that would do credit to our modern
bacteriologists. In this way it went on and became a little sleek and fat. Well, one day
another frog that lived in the sea came and fell into the well.
"Where are you from?" "I am from the sea." "The sea! How big is that? Is it as big as
my well?" and he took a leap from one side of the well to the other. "My friend," said
the frog of the sea, "how do you compare the sea with your little well?" Then the frog
took another leap and asked, "Is your sea so big?" "What nonsense you speak, to
compare the sea with your well!" "Well, then," said the frog of the well, "nothing can
be bigger than my well; there can be nothing bigger than this; this fellow is a liar, so
turn him out."
That has been the difficulty all the while.
I am a Hindu. I am sitting in my own little well and thinking that the whole world is my
little well. The Christian sits in his little well and thinks the whole world is his well.
The Mohammedan sits in his little well and thinks that is the whole world. I have to
thank you of America for the great attempt you are making to break down the
barriers of this little world of ours, and hope that, in the future, the Lord will help you
to accomplish your purpose.
Paper on Hinduism Read at the Parliament on 19th September, 1893
Three religions now stand in the world which have come down to us from time
prehistoric–Hinduism, Zoroastrianism and Judaism. They have all received
tremendous shocks and all of them prove by their survival their internal strength.
But while Judaism failed to absorb Christianity and was driven out of its place of birth
by its all-conquering daughter, and a handful of Parsees is all that remains to tell the
tale of their grand religion,
sect after sect arose in India and seemed to shake the religion of the Vedas to its
very foundations, but like the waters of the seashore in a tremendous earthquake it
receded only for a while, only to return in an all-absorbing flood, a thousand times
more vigorous, and when the tumult of the rush was over, these sects were all
sucked in, absorbed, and assimilated into the immense body of the mother faith.
From the high spiritual flights of the Vedanta philosophy, of which the latest
discoveries of science seem like echoes, to the low ideas of idolatry with its
multifarious mythology, the agnosticism of the Buddhists, and the atheism of the
Jains, each and all have a place in the Hindu's religion.
Where then, the question arises, where is the common centre to which all these
widely diverging radii converge? Where is the common basis upon which all these
seemingly hopeless contradictions rest? And this is the question I shall attempt to
answer.
The Hindus have received their religion through revelation, the Vedas. They hold that
the Vedas are without beginning and without end. It may sound ludicrous to this
audience, how a
book can be without beginning or end. But by the Vedas no books are meant. They
mean the accumulated treasury of spiritual laws discovered by different persons in
different times. Just as the law of gravitation existed before its discovery, and would
exist if all humanity forgot it, so is it with the laws that govern the spiritual world.
The moral, ethical, and spiritual relations between soul and soul and between
individual spirits and the Father of all spirits, were there before their discovery, and
would remain even if we forgot them.
The discoverers of these laws are called Rishis, and we honour them as perfected
beings. I am glad to tell this audience that some of the very greatest of them were
women. Here it may be said that these laws as laws may be without end, but they
must have had a beginning. The Vedas teach us that creation is without beginning or
end.
Science is said to have proved that the sum total of cosmic energy is always the
same. Then, if there was a time when nothing existed, where was all this manifested
energy?
Some say it was in a potential form in God. In that case God is sometimes potential
and sometimes kinetic, which would make Him mutable. Everything mutable is a
compound, and everything compound must undergo that change which is called
destruction. So, God would die, which is absurd. Therefore, there never was a time
when there was no creation.
If I may be allowed to use a simile, creation and creator are two lines, without
beginning and without end, running parallel to each other. God is the ever-active
providence, by whose power systems after systems are being evolved out of chaos,
made to run for a time and again destroyed.
This is what the Brahmin boy repeats every day: "The sun and the moon, the Lord
created like the suns and moons of previous cycles." And this agrees with modern
science.
Here I stand and if I shut my eyes, and try to conceive my existence, "I", "I", "I", what
is the idea before me? The idea of a body. Am I, then, nothing but a combination of
material substances? The Vedas declare, "No". I am a spirit living in a body. I am not
the body. The body will die, but I shall not die.
Here am I in this body; it will fall, but I shall go on living. I had also a past. The soul
was not created, for creation means a combination which means a certain future
dissolution. If then the soul was created, it must die. Some are born happy, enjoy
perfect health, with beautiful body, mental vigour and all wants supplied.
Others are born miserable, some are without hands or feet, others again are idiots
and only drag on a wretched existence. Why, if they are all created, why does a just
and merciful God create one happy and another unhappy, why is He so partial? Nor
would it mend matters in the least to hold that those who are miserable in this life will
be happy in a future one.
Why should a man be miserable even here in the reign of a just and merciful God? In
the second place, the idea of a creator God does not explain the anomaly, but simply
expresses the cruel fiat of an all-powerful being. There must have been causes,
then, before his birth, to make a man miserable or happy and those were his past
actions.
Are not all the tendencies of the mind and the body accounted for by inherited
aptitude? Here are two parallel lines of existence–one of the minds, the other of
matter. If matter and its transformations answer for all that we have, there is no
necessity for supposing the existence of a soul.
But it cannot be proved that thought has been evolved out of matter, and if a
philosophical monism is inevitable, spiritual monism is certainly logical and no less
desirable than a materialistic monism; but neither of these is necessary here.
We cannot deny that bodies acquire certain tendencies from heredity, but those
tendencies only mean the physical configuration, through which a peculiar mind
alone can act in a peculiar way. There are other tendencies peculiar to a soul caused
by its past actions. And a
soul with a certain tendency would by the laws of affinity take birth in a body which is
the fittest instrument for the display of that tendency. This is in accord with science
wants to explain everything by habit, and habit is got through repetitions. So
repetitions are necessary to explain the natural habits of a new-born soul. And since
they were not obtained in this present life, they must have come down from past
lives.
There is another suggestion. Taking all these for granted, now is it that I do not
remember anything of my past life? This can be easily explained I am now speaking
English. It is not my mother tongue, in fact no words of my mother tongue are now
present in my consciousness; mut let me try to bring them up, and they rush in.
That shows that consciousness is only the surface of the mental ocean, and within
its depths are stored up all our experiences. Try and struggle, they would come up
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