Apologies for cross-posting.
Dear Colleagues,
I am happy to invite you to the Tenth Annual Mahavir Jayanti Lecture at FIU. The lecture, “Beyond Religious Toleration: The Jain Haribhadra's Engagements with Religious Others,” will be delivered by Dr. Anil Mundra (Rutgers University-New Brunswick). It is an in-person event that will be live-streamed as a webinar. Please register here.
Time: 7pm EDT, Friday, April 7, 2023
Location: SASC 100, MMC, FIU
Webinar: https://www.facebook.com/fiusipa/
Beyond Religious Toleration: The Jain Haribhadra's Engagements with Religious Others
Jainism is sometimes touted as the tolerant religion par excellence. Meanwhile, many political theorists have urged moving beyond mere toleration, which can imply condescension or aloofness. In this presentation, Dr. Mundra will argue that the Śvetāmbara scholar-monk Haribhadrasūri personifies a Jain tradition of robust engagement with other religious ideas that avoids many of the hazards of toleration as typically understood in modern democratic liberalism.
Guest Speaker: Dr. Anil Mundra is the Alka Siddhartha Dalal Postdoctoral Fellow in the study of Jainism at Rutgers University. His work examines how Jain philosophers and others deal with religious diversity and disagreement. His doctoral dissertation, "No Identity Without Diversity: Haribhadrasūri's Anekāntavāda as a Jain Response to Doctrinal Difference," focuses on how the classical Jain theory of non-one-sidedness allows an influential Śvetāmbara Jain scholar-monk to intervene in philosophical debates and define a Jain identity within them. He aims to bring such classical discourses into conversation with contemporary philosophical concerns, showing how each can enrich and strengthen the other. He received his PhD from the Divinity School of the University of Chicago in 2022, where he also completed his MA and BA. Before coming to Rutgers, he taught at the College of the Holy Cross, Brandeis University, and Loyola Marymount University.
Best wishes,
Aleksandra (Sasha) Restifo
Assistant Professor
Bhagwan Mahavir Professorship in Jain Studies
Department of Religious Studies
Florida International University