College of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences

Abstract: This article explores the notion of immortality in Jaina philosophy by focusing on the problem of the persistence of the self. It considers the concept of persistence within the broader context of Jaina metaphysics and its specific application to living beings. The article analyses the relationship between the immaterial self and its material body to determine which aspects of living beings can be deemed immortal or persisting beyond death. It also investigates the state of liberation as an immortal condition. Drawing from the Tattvârtha-sūtra and four of its commentaries, the article demonstrates the complexity of the Jaina treatment of the issue of the self's persistence over time and its commitment to the doctrine of non-one-sidedness. It also shows that Jaina philosophers deal with this critical philosophical problem in a way that reflects their engagement with the intellectual debates of their time.

This essay will examine the contemporary issue of the television broadcasting of the sacred Gurbani from the Darbar Sahib to set the stage for understanding the historical context of the musical sessions (chauṅkīs) of devotional singing, followed by the process of decolonizing the musical performances in modern times, including religious aesthetics and sacred time and the processional chauṅkīs in the Darbar Sahib Complex. The continuous singing of the Guru’s hymns (Gurbani kirtan) resounds inside the Darbar Sahib (“the Divine Court”), popularly known as the Golden Temple of Amritsar. This special mode of worship consists of singing and listening to the hymns of the Guru Granth Sahib, the sacred scripture of the Sikhs. The heart of Sikh devotional experience lies in the performance of scriptural hymns in a congregational setting. Notably, different sessions of devotional singing go on day and night from 2.45 a.m. to 10.45 p.m. at the Golden Temple, following a celebrated tradition established more than four centuries ago by the Fifth Sikh Guru, Guru Arjan. Even during the four-hour period of cleaning the sanctum sanctorum at midnight, the devotees recite hymns from memory, thereby making the Darbar Sahib a unique place where vibrations of sacred sound reverberate continuously for twenty-four hours a day.

The French Mediterranean city of Marseille is typically imagined as a city of unparalleled multicultural diversity. Yet, this view overlooks how Marseillais residents of African, Arab, and Muslim origin are progressively driven out of their homes, since the 1990s, by urban renewal projects seeking to redevelop ‘unsightly’ working-class neighbourhoods downtown into upscale commercial zones. This article offers an account of a central paradox undergirding Marseille’s redevelopment: As working-class minority residents are expelled from downtown spaces, city authorities continue to mine them, as emblematic figures of Marseille’s multicultural diversity, for extractive cultural and economic capital to buttress the city’s cosmopolitan image.

Abstract: For all its transdisciplinarity, religious studies remains a field focused on boundaries, especially those between scholars and practitioners and between confessional and nonconfessional scholarship. The disciplinary use of the confessional in religious studies calls for a Foucauldian analysis that has not yet been central to our discussion of methods, despite important work on Foucault and religion from a number of prominent scholars. Disentangling the threads of the disciplinary and the confessional in religious studies and (re)articulating scholars’ often disjointed response to the uncanniness of the worlds beyond the human, I build on the critiques offered by scholars such as Masuzawa, Beliso-De Jesús, Driscoll and Miller, and Schaefer to argue for methodological numenism and an engaged, embodied study of religion as critical steps in the decolonization of the field.

The 7-2 decision of SCOTUS on 8 July 2020, favoring “The Little Sisters v. Pennsylvania” should remind us of the highly charged nature of so-called “religious liberty,” or “free exercise.” Central to the case was the issue of religious exemption from generally applicable laws. By an overwhelming majority, SCOTUS ruled that the Little Sisters were exempt from this provision of the ACA. I shall argue how one might frame a novel counter-argument against, at least, one class of religious exemptions. As one knows, the legal and political status of religious exemptions is amplified by religious passions, stirred through a long history of competing court decisions and legislation. For that reason alone, a full and proper treatment of religious exemption calls for a major investment of specialized intellectual effort. But I shall only be arguing that those outside the specialized legal discourse community may notice oddities escaping the attention of insiders. In such a spirit of an inquisitive outsider, I should offer these reflections.

Indonesia and Malaysia offer comparative perspectives concerning the relationship between loyalties to the Muslim umma, local ethnicity, and the modern nation-state, and how interpretations of the sharia and modern constitution, laws, politics, and policies intersect in multiple and changing ways. This article seeks to compare and contrast some of the contemporary discourses on sharia and citizenship as demonstrated by Indonesian and Malaysian scholars, politicians, and activists. Both Indonesian and Malaysian constitutions were born out of the modern notion of citizenship that recognizes religious diversity. On the one hand, the Constitution of Indonesia does not specify Islam as the state religion, but the government promotes official religions. On the other hand, the Constitution of Malaysia makes it explicit that Islam is the state religion while recognizing religious diversity. The Indonesian government does not conflate particular ethnicity with Islam, whereas Malaysia integrates Islam and Malay ethnicity amidst Malaysian religious and ethnic plurality. Both cases prevent us from categorizing each case as either an Islamic legal conservatism or a modern legal liberalism. These two cases resist the binary opposition between sharia conservatism deemed against citizenship and modern legal liberalism deemed against religious laws. There are ambiguities, contradictions, as well as compromises and integration between conflicting ideas and systems concerning Islam and citizenship.