It was when a mode of community-formation that I have called confessional nationalism became suitable for the competitive pursuit of global resources that doctrinal differences became salient.

Where American environmentalists were hypocritical, driving thousands of miles in a polluting automobile to enjoy “unspoilt wilderness,” men like Chandi Prasad Bhatt integrated their lives with their work.

emergence of Islam in the circulatory socioreligious context of this region, albeit at a later point, is John Wansbrough’s aptly titled The Sectarian Milieu. Wansbrough makes a strong claim that the doctrines of Islam evolved from debates with Jews and Jewish Christians. In the sectarian milieu of hardly distinguishable religious groups – including

One of the cardinal values in dharma is non-injury to all beings, or ahimsa, a universalization from one’s experience of pain to others.

Ricoeur gives us a useful way to imagine new modes of relating the sacred to rationality.

Hayden White expresses what I believe is a sympathetic critique of Ricoeur’s ideas.

However, the conceptualization and larger implications of foregrounding circulatory histories over linear and bounded national or civilizational histories are yet to be elaborated, and my early chapters represent a preliminary effort in this direction.

We recognize Max Weber’s concept of the penetration of the Protestant ethic into capitalist practice and Carl Schmitt’s concept of confessional principles shaping the nation as prime instances of traffic.

But if the Chinese case escaped both these developments, it suppressed and continues to deal with another type of problem: a vertical division –state and elites versus popular religiosities – rather than a lateral competition in the realm of transcendence and faith in the modern transition.