Of all the world's religious traditions, none has been more closely scrutinized for its fis- sures than "Hinduism." Put simply, it is now fashionable to argue that there is no such thing.
Two prominent scholars, Wilfred Cantwell Smith and Robert E. Frykenberg, have been instrumental in establishing the idea that it was not just the history of Hindu- ism that was invented by outsiders but its very identity. It is worth looking at the work of Smith and Frykenberg to see whether the idea...
"But it isn't a Hedgehog, and it isn't a Tortoise" [said the young Painted Jaguar]. "It's a little bit of both, and I don't know its proper name."
"Nonsense!" said Mother Jaguar. "Everything has its proper name. I should call it 'Armadillo' till I found out the real one. And I should leave it alone."
-Rudyard Kipling, "The Beginning of the Arma- dillos," in Just So Stories (1902).
ipling is one of the most den of being White Men is what hobbles...
t was an amazing spectacle, and
one could have witnessed it almost
anywhere in India. In 1989, from
every comer of the country Hindus
set off on pilgrimages-which in it-
self would not have been so un- usual, except that every person clutched in one hand a single brick. If all those bricks were laid side by side and on top of each other, they would have made an incredible edifice, which was exactly the intention. The thousands of Hindus were on their way to Ayodhya in northem India w...
ACKGROUND BOOKS
INDUISM AND THE FATE OF INDIA
enturies ago, when Muslims classified the
nonbelievers under their rule, they used "people of the Book" to distinguish Christians and Jews from Hindus. That distinction re-mains useful, and any consideration of Hindu- ism must first confront the problem of what I might call the "booking" of Hinduism, the slow solidification of a fluid religious tradition into ink and paper, print on page. This transforma- tion from oral tradi...
Suddenly, with the collapse of communism, Karl Marx is out, Adam Smith is in. But the Adam Smith we know, the author of The Wealth of Nations (1776) and the apostle of supposedly bare- knuckled capitalism, is only half the real man. In this essay, Charles L. Griswold, Jr. describes the efforts of this erudite Scot- tish professor of moral philosophy to imagine how liberal soci- eties could devote themselves to both the pursuit of wealth and the creation of virtuous citizens. As the world rushes...
Chester E. Finn, JK
"Christine borrows $850 for one year from the Friendly Finance Company. If she pays 12%simple interest on the loan, what will be the total amount that Christine repays?"
hat is not the sort of ques-
tion that ought to stump
many people. Yet accord-
ing to the National Assess-
ment of Educational
Progress, in 1988 only six percent of the nation's 1 lth graders were able to solve mathematical problems at this moderate level of difficulty. Six out of 100. After...
"Christine borrows $850 for one year from the Friendly Finance Company. If she pays 12% simple interest on the loan, what will be the total amount that Christine repays?"
n the front lawn of Al-
exandria, Virginia's T.C.
Williams High School,
where I have been teach-
ing English for the past
20 years, there is a large sign from the U.S. Department of Educa- tion proclaiming us "one of the outstanding high schools in America." The sign has been there since 1984, when then-Secretary of Education Terrell Bell drove across the Potomac River to present us with one of the Reagan administration's first Excel- lence in Education awards.
Nine months earlier, B...
GRO BOOKS
or all the nation's earnest intentions and
policy gyrations during the last decade, the United States has barely budged out of its deep scholastic hole.
Just wait, the optimists say. Wait for stan- dardized tests to reflect reforms already in place. Or wait for new reforms. Or wait for Washington and the rest of the country to get really serious (i.e. to pile even more billions upon the billions already added to American education). To which remarkably few skeptics respon...
Malise Ruthven
ate one evening in May United States, with investments amounting 1989, in the narrow, cob- to billions. Its clean-cut, youthful mission- bled streets of La Paz, Bo-aries in their white shirts and black ties livia, two Mormon mission- seem as representative of American values aries were shot and killed as the executives of Citibank and other three terrorists in a yel- American institutions that have been at-low Volkswagen. In a handwritten state- tacked by guerrillas. Nor is this...