Archbishop of Canterbury Dr. Rowan Douglas Williams is hosting a dialogue with five Hindu swamis (ascetics) in Bangalore (India) on October 20. The aim is to “to engage in discussions for mutual understanding.”
The event is to be held at Whitefield Ecumenical Centre. The five Swamis are Tridandi Srimannarayana Ramanuja Chinna Jeeyar (Hyderabad), Sugunendra Theertha (Udupi), Harshanand (Bangalore), Shivamurthy Shivachary, Paramananda Bharati (Sringeri Math), Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad (United Kingdom).
I look forward to any transcript or audio-video recording.
Archbishop of Canterbury Dr. Rowan Douglas Williams is hosting a dialogue with five Witches (Wickens) in Dublin (Ireland) on January 25. The aim is to “to engage in discussions for mutual understanding.â€
The event is to be held at Covenside Ecumenical Centre. The five Witches are the White Witch (Narnia), the Wicked Witch of the West (United States), the Witch of Endor (Middle East), and two of three as yet unnamed witches understood to represent Scotland.
The event has two sessions titled “Visions of the Divine†and “Social Harmony.†It will be will be followed by public question-answer session, totaling dialogue about three and a half hours. “The Witches and the Archbishop will discuss the social values central to their respective traditions and ask how a pluralist society can encourage and protect true freedom of beliefâ€, according to a release by Kate Wharton from Lambeth Palace in London.
Endora, President of Universal Society of Witches says “The dialogue may help us vanquish the stereotypes, prejudices, caricatures, etc., passed on to us from previous generations. As dialogue brings us reciprocal enrichment, we shall be spiritually richer than before the contact.â€
2, good for him. Maybe he can do a black mass too.
Hinduism is a far higher spiritual path than the intellectual one which Rowan seems stuck on. Will this man ever have an unpublished thought? And can I have his frequent flier points, together with the ones Desmond Tutu has, since the latter says he’s retiring from the public eye?
#2- That’s kind of funny.
Still, It shows great humility and confidence that the Archbishop can treat Hindus with respect. I believe it will also help Indian Christians who are deeply persecuted in a couple states. Unlike those who would compare witchcraft with Hinduism, he seems to actually want to understand different faiths before either condemning or praising them.
[blockquote]”One may worship Shiva or Vishnu or Rama or Krishna or some other gods and goddesses or one may believe in the ‘Supreme Spirit’ or the ‘Indestructible Soul’ within each individual and still be called a good Hindu.”
(www.indiagov.org/culture/religion/hinduism.htm) – Discover India
In Hinduism the Supreme Being doesn’t sit in Heaven meting out rewards and punishments, but, instead, is present in all creatures. Rather than being a pantheistic religion, Hinduism is panentheistic — because god, as an everchanging Being, is present in everything.[/blockquote]
So which false god is the supposed Bishop of the one true God, as revealed in Scripture, going to dialogue with?
Let’s not be too hasty to prejudge what’s going on here. After all, the late Bishop Lesslie Newbigin, who did not compromise the uniqueness of Christ for the salvation of humanity in the least (one of the reasons that he ceased his activity at the highest levels of the World Council of Churches was the creeping, and then rampant pluralistic universalism that developed in that organization), early in his years as a missionary in South India held discussions and Bible studies in a Ramakrishnan Mission monastery and continued such conversations throughout his episcopate in Chennai (Madras). That’s being said, his task was not only one of dialogue but also of evangelism, to introduce his interlocutors to the true and living God in Jesus Christ. (Newbigin is also an example of that Christian evangelist who demonstrates great humility and confidence in treating believers in other religions with respect without compromising the scandalous particularity of the Gospel. We should pray for ++Rowan, that he does the same.
That’s being said, I think that helping Indian Christians (and other Christians there – remember the India-born Australian missionary who was burned to death with his sons by Hindu extremists in Orissa?) through this dialogue is something devoutly to be wished for, but I have my doubts about it. These sorts of high-level talks actually rarely filter down to the people at the grass-roots. (And I doubt the swamis involved have anything directly to do with the extremists in any event.)
Will the good archbishop have any discussions about the slaughter of Indian Christians by Hindu extremists? Will he talk about the roots of Hindu extremism and violence and how it can be addressed. I, for one, am amazed that those who won’t even disturb a cow have no problem with hacking to pieces and burning alive Christians.
#6 Br. Michael wrote:
[blockquote]So which false god is the supposed Bishop of the one true God, as revealed in Scripture, going to dialogue with?[/blockquote]
Actually, all of the Hindu dialogue partners would argue that they do indeed worship the True God.
Two of the Hindu dialogue partners come from two different theological traditions within the larger Vaishnava Tradition, in which the Lord is understood to be the Personal Divinity “Vishnu”, with Vishnu having taken many incarnations, or Avatars, over time.
Swami Chinna Jeeyar is a Vishishta-advaita Vaishnava. This Vaishnava tradition sees Lord Vishnu, the soul, and the cosmos as both “one” and “separate”, sort of like how an apple core, skin, and seeds are all “apple” but also separate entities.
Swami Theertha comes from the Dvaita Vaishnava tradition, in which Lord Vishnu, the soul, and the cosmos are seen as definitively separate from one another.
The Swami from the Sringeri Math is a follower of Advaita. Advaita argues that only Vishnu as Absolute Reality (which would include, but also go beyond, Vishnu as Personal Lord), is ultimately real; and all else (souls, cosmos) are real only up until the time that one realizes the utter Reality of Brahman.
Swami Harshanand of Bangalore seems to be the Swami Harshananda connected to the Ramakrishna movement. Sri Ramakrishna was a late 19th-century Saint who is believed by many to be an Avatar of Vishnu. Ramakrishna’s disciple, Swami Vivekananda, was the first to introduce Yoga into the U.S.
Ram-Prasad is a professor of comparative religion and philosophy in the U.K. I don’t think that he is a swami.
9, so did the priests of Baal.