Paper
Dialogues with the Divine; Connecting Religious Ontologies through Sacred Music
presenters
Deepti Navaratna
Nationality: India
Residence: India
T. V. Raman Pai Chair Professor, School of Humanities, National Institute of Advanced Studies, India
Presence:Online
Anthropology, philology and history of world religions have informed comparative religious studies. Studying diversity of experiences within a religion has found more favor rather than the using world religions as models to study a meta-ontology or heuristic framework of religion itself. In short, comparativism, even for inter-faith diplomacy, has been less exploited across the globe. Can sacred music and text from world traditions be used to begin understanding religious ontologies of world religions. Can we mine sacred music as anthropological knowledge, and use them to create inter-faith dialogues between religions that can even transcend their imminent divides? This paper, explores the many common cognitive denominators such as empathy, devotion, divination, transcendence across major world religions to create inter-faith symbiosis of knowledge. Whether it is a Hebrew Piyut, a Hindi Kirtan or an English spiritual - the mindset of prayer is the same. Music is a shared language that allows access to a shared ancestry of emotions, intent and values that inform neuro-psycho-biology of many religious experiences across the globe. In the musical world, a Vedic Shloka can meet a Sufi chant, a Buddhist Sutra finds synergy of emotion with an African American gospel song. Divinity, being divine and finding the divine within are common themes in several religions, a comparative study of how gender, race, power and supernaturality are featured in the religious schema or world views can be useful. Sacred music can be a reliable, historically located, and dislocated at the same time in providing this information, which in turn can inform powerful use of music as an agent of inter-faith diplomacy. Conversely, it can explain how music can put two people in the same cognitive ‘space’ despite coming from disparate communities, separated in space, time and explicit religious dogmas.
Keywords:
Inter-faith Diplomacy, Comparative anthropology of religion