Religion and Society

This book is an interpretive analysis of the role of icons (images) of the Jina (the perfected, liberated, and enlightened teachers) in Jainism. The book places different interpretive frames around the icon to understand some of the many ways that Jina icons have functioned in Jainism. Most of these frames are iconophilic narratives to account for and defend the origin, presence, and history of the Jina icons. There are also iconoclastic critiques of icons as idols that depict the introduction and worship of icons as a corruption of original Jainism. The Jain narratives include cosmological depictions of the universe, “mythical” accounts from Jain narrative history, and “historical” accounts located within India. Interpretation of the frames involves comparative discussions of materials from Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity, and Islam. It also involves comparative analysis of scripture and mandalas. The book fits within the growing field of scholarship on images and icons in the world's religious traditions.

In contemporary Western culture, the word “fetus” introduces either a political subject or a literal, medicalized entity. Neither of these frameworks gives sufficient credit to the vast array of literary and oral traditions emerging from religious cultures around the world that see within the fetus a symbol, a metaphor, an imagination. The editors maintain that the fetus has been hijacked by two dominant and powerful modes’the political and the medical’and the potential of the fetus as symbol to serve as a gateway to imagination has been reduced as a result. This volume grows out of the acknowledgment of the fact that, throughout much of human history and across most of the world’s cultures, when the fetus was imagined, it enjoyed a much wider range of symbolic and cultural subjectivities, often contributing possibilities of inclusivity, emergence, liminality, and transformation. The purpose of this book is to restore the nuance of fetal symbolism and liberate it from the stultifying parameters of the abortion/embryonic stem cell debate, giving it room once again to function as a symbol of greater and more complex human emotions, dilemmas, and aspirations.

The myth of religious violence is the pervasive secularist idea that there is something called “religion,” endemic to all human cultures and eras, that has a tendency to promote violence because it is essentially prone to absolutism, divisiveness, and irrationality. Religion must therefore be separated from “secular” phenomena like politics for the sake of peace. This book argues that the myth of religious violence is a piece of Western folklore that underwrites Western violence. The book shows that religion is not a universal and transhistorical phenomenon. Religious-secular and religion-politics distinctions are modern Western inventions. The book shows that what counts as religious or secular in any context corresponds to how power is arranged. The myth of religious violence helps to construct a religious Other, prone to fanaticism, to contrast with the rational, peace-making, secular subject. In domestic politics, the myth underwrites the triumph of the state over the church in the early modern period and the nation-state’s subsequent monopoly on its citizens’ willingness to sacrifice and kill. In foreign policy, the myth of religious violence reinforces the superiority of Western social orders to nonsecular—especially Muslim—social orders. Their violence is seen as fanatical; our violence is seen as rational and peace making. In academic, government, and journalistic sources, the book shows how the myth of religious violence is used to justify U.S. diplomatic and military actions, including the Iraq War. Peace depends on recognition that so-called secular ideologies and institutions can be just as prone to absolutism, divisiveness, and irrationality.