The Melting Heart

Religious Experience in Contemporary Tamil Saivism

Datos Bibliográficos

ID12542976
AutoresAlastair R McGlashan (Yahoo (United Kingdom), autor de correspondencia)
Año2010
Volumen25
Número2
Páginas189-202
Fecha de publicación2010-05-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessNo
TipoARTICLE
RevistaJournal of Contemporary Religion (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 1353-7903 • E-ISSN: 1469-9419
EditorialTaylor & Francis (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/13537901003750886
OpenAlexW2022540492
IdiomaEN
Referencias citadas11

This article compares the religious experience of the founding poet-saints of the Saivite bhakti movement in the Tamil country of the sixth to ninth centuries CE with that of contemporary Saivite devotees. The historical background of the bhakti tradition within Tamil Saivism is sketched, with a brief description of its spirituality. Material collected in interviews with Tamil-speaking Saivites is presented, including personal accounts of the origins of the interviewees’ religious faith and reports of their experience of God in their daily lives. This material is discussed in terms of Fowler's developmental stages of faith, with additional reference to other categorisations of religious motivation. It will be shown that the experience of the founding poet-saints is not entirely dead in contemporary Saivism, but that it is restricted to quite a small minority of devotees

Aesthetics · Art · Faith · Literature · Ninth · Religious experience · Sociology · Spirituality · Tamil · Theology · Education and Islamic Studies · Gender Studies · History · Medicine · Philosophy · Religion and Society Interactions · Religion, Spirituality, and Psychology · Religious studies