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Religions
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Religious Texts and Interpretations
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Religious Texts and Interpretations

A special issue of Religions (ISSN 2077-1444).

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (20 November 2019) | Viewed by 12988

Special Issue Editor

Dr. Signe Cohen

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Department of Religious Studies, University of Missouri, Columbia, MO 65211, USA
Interests: Hinduism; Buddhism; South Asian religions; Sanskrit
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Vernon K. Robbins’ seminal book Exploring the Texture of Texts: A Guide to Socio-Rhetorical Interpretation (1996) called for scholars of sacred texts to pay more heed to the text’s different “textures”: its word choice, aesthetics, social and material context, its cultural orientations, the writer’s and readers’ biases, opinions, and preferences, as well as its “sacred texture” or its exploration of the relationship between humans and the divine. Contemporary scholarship on sacred texts is informed by this renewed attention to the text’s multiple “textures”, as well as more recent considerations of the role of the scholarly interpreter vis-à-vis the text (see Leela Gandhi’s crucial book Postcolonial Theory (1998) and Laurie L. Patton’s (2000) article “Fire, the Kali Yuga, and Textual Reading”).

This comparative volume attempts to outline a contemporary hermeneutic of sacred texts, with particular attention to innovative scholarship that challenges traditional modes of interpretation by reading texts “against the grain” or by pushing the very boundaries of the category of “religious texts” to include, for example, oral narratives, women’s songs, comic books, fantasy literature, or rap lyrics.

Prof. Dr. Signe Cohen
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Religions is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1800 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • hermenutics
  • text
  • textual intepretation

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Published Papers (3 papers)

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Research

12 pages, 258 KiB  
Article
Time in the Upaniṣads
by Signe Cohen
Religions 2020, 11(2), 60; https://doi.org/10.3390/rel11020060 - 28 Jan 2020
Cited by 3 | Viewed by 2925
Abstract
The Upaniṣads (ca. 800 BCE) were composed during a transitional time period in Hinduism when Vedic ritual and cosmogonic ideas began to give way to new worldviews. The intriguing Upaniṣadic notions of time have received little attention in the scholarly literature compared to [...] Read more.
The Upaniṣads (ca. 800 BCE) were composed during a transitional time period in Hinduism when Vedic ritual and cosmogonic ideas began to give way to new worldviews. The intriguing Upaniṣadic notions of time have received little attention in the scholarly literature compared to the elaborate models of cyclical time that develop in later texts. I propose, however, that the Upaniṣads represent a seminal reorientation in Hindu conceptions of time. We still find an older view of time in the Upaniṣads as something that marks the rhythms of the ritual year, but later Upaniṣadic texts begin to explore entirely new ways of thinking about time. I propose that the movement away from the more integrated view of the material and immaterial as one reality in the Vedas towards a radical dualism between the spiritual and the material in later Hindu thought informs many of the new ideas of time that emerge in the Upaniṣads, including that of time as an abstract construct. The authors of the Upaniṣads investigate—and ultimately reject—the notion of time itself as the cause of the visible world, ponder the idea that time is something that is created by a divine being in order to structure the world, speculate that time may be a mere intellectual construct, and postulate that the highest reality may be situated in a realm that is outside of time altogether. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Religious Texts and Interpretations)
18 pages, 228 KiB  
Article
Living the Bhagavad Gita at Gandhi’s Ashrams
by Karline McLain
Religions 2019, 10(11), 619; https://doi.org/10.3390/rel10110619 - 8 Nov 2019
Cited by 3 | Viewed by 4980
Abstract
The Bhagavad Gita is a philosophical Hindu scripture in which the god Krishna imparts lessons to the warrior prince Arjuna about sacred duty (dharma) and the path to spiritual liberation (moksha). This classical scripture has had a long and [...] Read more.
The Bhagavad Gita is a philosophical Hindu scripture in which the god Krishna imparts lessons to the warrior prince Arjuna about sacred duty (dharma) and the path to spiritual liberation (moksha). This classical scripture has had a long and active interpretive life, and by the 19th century it had come to be regarded as a core text, if not the core text, of Hinduism. During the colonial period, interpretations of the Bhagavad Gita considered the relevance of Krishna’s lessons to Arjuna in the context of British colonial rule. While some Indians read a call to arms into their interpretation of this scripture and urged their fellow Indians to rise up in armed resistance, Gandhi famously read a nonviolent message into it. This article argues that equally as important as Gandhi’s hermeneutics of nonviolence is his commitment to enacting the lessons of the Bhagavad Gita as he interpreted them in the daily life of his intentional communities. When explored through the lens of daily life in these intentional communities (which Gandhi called ashrams), we see that Gandhi’s interpretation of the Bhagavad Gita emphasized not just nonviolence but also disciplined action, including self-sacrifice for the greater good. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Religious Texts and Interpretations)
20 pages, 463 KiB  
Article
Adhiyajña: Towards a Performance Grammar of the Vedas
by Caley Charles Smith
Religions 2019, 10(6), 394; https://doi.org/10.3390/rel10060394 - 21 Jun 2019
Cited by 5 | Viewed by 4513
Abstract
Recent scholarship has challenged the anachronistic projection of the modern category of the poem onto premodern texts. This article attempts to theorize how one might construct an alternative to modern conceptualizations of “the poem” that more closely appropriates the conceptualization of textuality in [...] Read more.
Recent scholarship has challenged the anachronistic projection of the modern category of the poem onto premodern texts. This article attempts to theorize how one might construct an alternative to modern conceptualizations of “the poem” that more closely appropriates the conceptualization of textuality in the Rigveda, an anthology of 1028 sūktas “well-spoken (texts)” that represents the oldest religious literature in South Asia. In order to understand what these texts are and what they were expected to do, this article examines the techniques by which the Rigveda refers to itself, to its performer, to its audience, and to the occasion of its performance. In so doing, this article theorizes a “performance grammar” comprising three axes of textual self-reference (spatial, temporal, and personal); these axes of reference constitute a scene of performance populated by rhetorically constructed speakers and listeners. This performance narrative, called here the adhiyajña level, frames the mythological narratives of the text. By examining the relationship between mythological narrative and performance narrative, we can better understand the purpose of performing a text and thus what kind of an entity Rigvedic “texts” really are. While this article proposes a rubric specifically for the Rigvedic context, its principles can be adapted to other premodern texts in order to better understand the performance context they presuppose. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Religious Texts and Interpretations)
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