By Richard S. Weiss..

Religion on the Margins of Colonialism. “In this book, I present a narrative of the emergence of modern Hinduism that challenges these conventional accounts. I do this through a close study of the writ- ings, teachings, and innovations of Ramalinga Swami (1823–1874). Ramalinga was a Shaiva leader who spoke and wrote in Tamil in a local setting, was marginal to colonial and Hindu institutional authority, was grounded in Hindu traditions, and did not engage the West in any visible way. I argue that Ramalinga’s teachings were modern because they displayed an acute awareness of challenges of the present, innovated in ways that addressed those challenges, were founded on a desire to transform the world in specific ways, and presaged later developments in Hindu traditions.”

UC Press. 2019. 222 pages.

St. James version. Needs no introduction or description. Probably the foundation of what is left of western thought.

Harrow and Heston Classic Reprint.

S. Giora Shoham.

S. Giora Shoham reveals the social, cultural and political mechanics of how anti-Semitism became the motivating ideology of the Third Reich and the Nazi movement. This ideology impelled an evil empire to murder some six million Jews and millions of other undesirables, viz., Slavs, Gypsies, Communist commissars, etc.
The book provides the most detailed and cogent answer yet to the often asked question: how is it possible for the “most civilized nation” possessing the highest technological and scientific skills to embark on a campaign of murder, rape, and robbery on a scale unprecedented in world history? Even more pertinent for the Jews has been the question: why were the Jews singled out for immediate massacre and then systematic destruction? No single compelling answer has been proffered in the past fifty years. Shoham explains, why the German social character and the Jewish social character were dramatically opposed, why the clash between them was inevitable given the right circumstances, and why the Holocaust was inevitable in Germany due to an incestuous relationship between Germans and Jews.

NY. Harrow and Heston Publishers. 2012.

By S. Giora Shoham.

This tantalizing book is based on the pioneering work of Claude Levi-Strauss, who postulated that myths are links between nature and culture. Shoham enlarges this concept and claims that myth in the form of a mythogene, the structural longings and experiences of the individual as projected onto mythology, links history and transcendence, the individual and society, and consciousness and energy-matter. The mythogenes are related to Shoham's personality theory, which, in essence, postulates that personality types can be taxonomized along a continuum with one pole having the Tantalic type, which aims to melt into the object, and the other pole having the Sisyphean type, which aims to overpower and control the object. This incredible tour-de-force that spans the great works of science, literature, philosophy, sociology and religion will shake you to the roots of your being. It is hard to come away from this book without asking, who am I, and have I really came that far? And what future is there?

NY. Harrow and Heston Publishers. 2012.

CONTAINS MARK-UP

By Emile Durkheim.

A Tour-de-Force of religious life, thoughtful and incisive, by the father of modern sociology. A must read for all students of sociology, not to mention theology, though many of his insights are a relevant today as they were in the early 20th century. The inventor of the phrase “the sacred and the profane” (1915) 563 pages.

George Allen & Unwin Ltd. 1915, 533 pages