Richard Holloway— As with many useful words, symbol comes from Greek. It means to bring together things that had come apart, the way you might glue the bits of a broken plate together. Then a symbol became an object that stood for or represented something else. It still had the idea of
Bernd Brunner— History often rewards great breakthroughs but ignores the preparatory steps that made those achievements possible. The Apollo program, for instance, has been documented in great detail and still receives ample attention, but what of the extraordinary labors that led to that summit? How was flight to the moon
Today, we are very proud to publish an important new book – Tamara Sears’s Worldly Gurus and Spiritual Kings: Architecture and Asceticism in Medieval India, the first full-length study of the matha, or Hindu monastery, which developed in India at the turn of the first millennium. In the course of
One morning in 19th-century India, the followers of Sri Ramakrishna were gathered for breakfast. Ramakrishna, a mystic and spiritual teacher, had died the preceding year, and a monastic order had been established with his followers continuing in their devout practice. One devotee, the future Swami Vivekanada, began to “playfully imitate”
“Thus a ruler can imprison a person’s body, but the spirit is incapable of being imprisoned. It was this spiritual leverage that Gandhi fastened on to, and we fasten on to in Gandhi. It was with this power that Gandhi faced the might of an empire.” There are hundreds of