Journal of Rural Development

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Jesuit Spirituality and Gandhian Praxis:Embracing an Interfaith Dialogue that Does Environmental Justice in India


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1 Backchannels, Society for Social Studies of Science (4S), India
     

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Howard Thurman, the late Afro-American preacher cites in one of his lectures, “what Mr. Gandhi calls Truth and I call God are the same”. The deep influence that Gandhi had in a very brief encounter with Thurman and subsequently the impact Thurman had on the shaping of the civil rights movement in the US as a mentor for Martin Luther King Jr. is increasingly being realised in the USA (as Ashish Kothari points out in another article in this compilation). Gandhi always engaged and worked with religious groups across the boundaries of faith, deepening his own faith in the process. Religion was extremely important for Gandhi, whose famous quote on ‘religion and politics’ today may seem like clairvoyance or sorcery depending on ones’ influences and interpretations. He had very strong opinions about almost all religions and these religions in turn were influenced and deeply impacted by him. He saw in all of them an attempt to uplift human spirit and otherwise opined that, to try and estimate the merits of religion is unnecessary and even harmful. In this, he articulated a deeply cultural aspect of India that U.R. Ananthamurthy, the famous writer and thinker summarises, he states, that in the Indian culture, evil is constructed as another facet of divinity and everyone is accommodated.
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  • Jesuit Spirituality and Gandhian Praxis:Embracing an Interfaith Dialogue that Does Environmental Justice in India

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Authors

Joseph Satish Vedanayagam
Backchannels, Society for Social Studies of Science (4S), India

Abstract


Howard Thurman, the late Afro-American preacher cites in one of his lectures, “what Mr. Gandhi calls Truth and I call God are the same”. The deep influence that Gandhi had in a very brief encounter with Thurman and subsequently the impact Thurman had on the shaping of the civil rights movement in the US as a mentor for Martin Luther King Jr. is increasingly being realised in the USA (as Ashish Kothari points out in another article in this compilation). Gandhi always engaged and worked with religious groups across the boundaries of faith, deepening his own faith in the process. Religion was extremely important for Gandhi, whose famous quote on ‘religion and politics’ today may seem like clairvoyance or sorcery depending on ones’ influences and interpretations. He had very strong opinions about almost all religions and these religions in turn were influenced and deeply impacted by him. He saw in all of them an attempt to uplift human spirit and otherwise opined that, to try and estimate the merits of religion is unnecessary and even harmful. In this, he articulated a deeply cultural aspect of India that U.R. Ananthamurthy, the famous writer and thinker summarises, he states, that in the Indian culture, evil is constructed as another facet of divinity and everyone is accommodated.

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.25175/jrd%2F2019%2Fv38%2Fi3%2F147922