This two-volume work presents a comprehensive survey of all the ways people celebrate religious life around the globe. Religious Celebrations is an alphabetically organized encyclopedia that covers more than 800 celebratory occasions from all of the world's major religious communities as well as many of the minor faith traditions. The encyclopedia provides a complete reference tool for examining the myriad ways people worldwide celebrate their religious lives across religious boundaries, providing information on numerous celebratory activities never before covered in a reference work. Offering the most comprehensive coverage of religious holidays ever assembled, this two-volume book covers festivals, commemorations, holidays, and annual religious gatherings all over the world, with special attention paid to the celebrations in larger countries. Entries written by distinguished researchers and specialists on different religious communities capture the unique intensity of each event, be it fasting or feasting, frenzied activity or the universal cessation of work, a huge gathering of the faithful en masse or a small family-centered event. The work spotlights celebrations that currently exist without overlooking now-abandoned celebrations that still impact the modern world.

Dehejia has tried to create a place within the main frame of culture and philosophy of Indian art for a legitimate analytic theory called despair. Dehejia's effort creates a space for the modern within Indian classicism by negotiating the philosophy of despair in classical terms. As a result the basic schism that has grown in recent years between the philosophy and history of modern art on the one hand and the philosophy and history of traditional arts is today cloder to being breached.

Volume 2 of this memoir picks up where Volume 1 left off with the author on her way to the Krishnamurti Educational Center in Alresford, England, about 60 miles southwest of London, to live and study in this spiritual community. As she turns from the external journey of her youth and young adulthood to an inward psychic journey, devastating and sublime in its revelations, we witness the author’s continued quest to explode her natural sexual Shakti Energy into an influential and artful feminine wisdom. From mid-life to cronehood, we wonder at the unfolding of a relationship of chaos and love, at her embracing of celibacy, join her in the darkness of unknowingness, and journey into the hidden influence of the patriarchy. We cheer as she meets the challenges of attaining her bona fides as a Process Work therapist and delight in witnessing her heart opening during three months volunteering at an orphanage in India. Further, we follow the author’s growing psychological and emotional maturity through sorceric maneuvers and psychedelic medicine work. Her journey culminates in an unexpected relationship with a tantric partner that, through their united body energies, leads to a vast, formidable, and sustained opening to sublime joy and connection with the very fabric of life. In this and the previously published volume, the author unashamedly exemplifies a pathway through conventional, societal, and familial limits to the hidden spiritual truths behind women’s sexuality and truth-telling. These two books are nothing less than a call for women in every walk of life to dare to embrace their personal stories, family lineage, intimate relationships, motherhood, and sexual energies with wonder and curiosity and courageously tell their stories. The author proposes that this vital ownership and declaration by women of their full feminine wisdom and power is the key to reshaping our society and sustaining the beauty and plentitude of planet Earth so she can sustain us.

How was the post-modernist project contested, subverted and assimilated in India? This book offers a personal account and an intellectual history of its reception and response. Tracing independent India’s engagement with Western critical theory, Paranjape outlines both its past and ‘post’. The book explores the discursive trajectories of post-modernism, post-colonialism, post-Marxism, post-nationalism, post-feminism, post-secularism — the relations that mediate them — as well as interprets, in the light of these discussions, core tenets of Indian philosophical thought. Paranjape argues that India’s response to the modernist project is neither submission, willing or reluctant, nor repudiation, intentional or forced; rather India’s ‘modernity’ is ‘unauthorized’, different, subversive, alter-native and alter-modern. The book makes the case for a new integrative hermeneutics, the idea of the indigenous ‘critical vernacular’, and presents a radical shift in the understanding of svaraj (beyond decolonisation and nationalism) to express transformations at both personal and political levels. A key intervention in Indian critical theory, this volume will interest researchers and scholars of literature, philosophy, political theory, culture studies and postcolonial studies.

An exploration of the Siva Sutras which describe the creative principle behind the universe and how it manifests to human consciousness.