Today, most intellectuals agree that (a) Christianity has profoundly influenced western culture; (b) members from different cultures experience many aspects of the world differently; (c) the empirical and theoretical study of both culture and religion emerged within the West. The present study argues that these truisms have implications for the conceptualization of religion and culture. More specifically, the thesis is that non-western cultures and religions differ from the descriptions prevalent in the West, and it is also explained why this has been the case. The author proposes novel analyses of religion, the Roman 'religio', the construction of 'religions' in India, and the nature of cultural differences. Religion is important to the West because the constitution and the identity of western culture is tied to the dynamic of Christianity as a religion.

This book provides novel analyses of religion, the Roman 'religio', the construction of 'religions' in India and the nature of cultural differences. It also shows how the dynamic of Christianity as a religion has brought forth the western culture.

Investigating the phenomena of technology, science, technique, and mass communication, Piyush Mathur contends that the enterprise of science communication may be misleading vis-à-vis technology—if in part because it frequently coextends with a flawed, but dominant, notion of science that presumptuously implicates technology anyway. Grappling with what authentically constitutes science and the prospective effects of its realization on a global future of mass communication, Mathur explores how various technological forms play specifically into ecologically sensitive mass communication. The result is an eco-communicative theory of technology that includes its classification based upon a set of qualitative principles and a profile of the notion of development. On the whole, though, Technological Forms and Ecological Communication: A Theoretical Heuristic brings the fields of philosophy and history of science, philosophy and sociology of technology, communication studies, and development studies into conversation with one another.

This volume brings together a collection of essays by contemporary thinker and social scientist S.N. Balagangadhara which develop an alternative theoretical framework for a comparative study of Western and Asian cultures. These essays illustrate how ‘decolonisation of social sciences’ is a cognitive task and offer novel hypotheses about human beings and society. They demonstrate the implications of cultural difference in the study of domains such as psychology, political theory, ethics, religion, sociology, translation, law, Indology, and philosophy. The book addresses new questions in the study of Western and Indian culture and social sciences, and discusses themes like selfless morality and the moral self; knowledge and action; critical representations of Indian traditions and classical literature; law, religion and culture; translation and interpretations; and varna and social systems. Part of the Critical Humanities Across Cultures series, this interdisciplinary volume will be an essential read for scholars and researchers of philosophy, philosophy of science, ethics, religious studies, postcolonial studies, sociology and social anthropology, cultural studies, literature, comparative studies and Global South studies.

This book presents a radical analysis of postcolonial studies as a discipline and modern India as a domain of study. It discusses wide variety of issues such as different definitions of culture, colonialism, secularism, and orientalist discourse.