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Abstract
The Grace of equality as opposed to Human
Rights as Secular Religion?
THE AUTHOR
urn:nbn:de:0276-2011-3044
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Keywords
equality, grace, personhood, secularism, European values.
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Israel, bridges by faith the gap between the and eternity. The promise of
the kingdom is the horizon of the future, which is explicitly hereandnow
not a vision of incremental progress, moral or technological.
Although a citizen belongs to the nationstate, as was until recently the
case in western Europe, Marcel Gauchet argues that today democracy
generates a narcissism that denies the very citizenship it originally
engendered.4 Subtract the patria and this leaves us with the recent
expression of a universal community, the abstract notion of humanity
characterized by shared human rights, fundamental and universal,
guaranteed supposedly by international law. In this world without
borders, the rule of law has become more virtual than real, indicating the
weakness of the state to enforce treaties outside its own borders. These
treaties and conventions invariably contain escape clauses allowing their
signatories to ignore them when necessary. In his book on human rights,
the lawyer Mourgeon warns that rights are drawn more from speculation
and illusion than from reality or efficacy () rights are easily conceived
and rarely found. The deficiency of state power is manifested in the
default of the judiciary because the devolution of rights make of the
person their virtual beneficiary, who cannot only accomplish their effect
use once the diverse complementary conditions are reunited for their
recognitionThey originate from the initiative, even the caprice of those in
power .5
Fundamental human rights express respect for and demand defence of the
individual person, but how is this done? Assembling a concept of humanity
on the basis of virtues selectively drawn from the JudeoChristian
tradition (mainly the Ten Commandments given on Sinai and the
Beatitudes), European political philosophers of the 18th century linked
human rights to citizenship, denying them any basis in revelation. Thus
were they repossessed, and then defended, by the new whole known as
the nationstate. To marginalize the transcendent social whole
represented by the Christian faith, God had to be ushered off stage through
respectful agnosticism. By separating the Church and State, the new
bourgeois social body enabled itself to replace the community of the
Church. It thereby participated in the political life of the nationstate, not
only proclaiming human rights but even enforcing them through its courts
of law.6 The legality of human rights became ever more essential, even
fundamental to the nation; the functioning of any state required that it
alone be identified with society. When, in the post-colonial world, tightly
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Simon Shama, Citizens. The Chronicle of the French Revolution (London, 1989).
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day. The dominant trend was holist, in the tradition of Rousseau who saw the nation
as an indvisible whole expressing the General Will (Ibid., pp. 4424).
Originally humanism was based on intellectual freedom and morality, but even there
the Christian message that one must sacrifice oneself to find oneself (Mt 16:24) goes
way beyond legal codes of human rights. Cf. the understanding of the word justice
(dikaiomata) in Psalm 119.
Yannoulatos, Facing the World, p. 75.
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apart from the law is revealed (Rom 3:21). St. Paul insists that Abrahams
faithful response to Gods call preceded his circumcision (Rom 4 passim).
However, it is only in Christ that the righteousness of God is fully revealed;
by faith in Christ, by His grace, we become filled with His faith in us,
making us righteous through cooperation with God. This is the new life
found in baptism and chrismation. How many citizens of todays Europe
understand something of this Christian concept of society?
(b) The search for equality of person in Europe today
In a recent report, Metropolitan Kyrill of Smolensk and Kaliningrad
(Moscow Patriarchate) evoked the need for historical reflection on this
issue.13 The threshold of the third millennium presented the inhabitants of
the European Union (EU) with a quasi return to the boundaries of the
Christian Church in 1054: the moment of schism between the Eastern
Orthodox and Western Catholic Church.14.
What changed since then? At the beginning of the second millennium, the
estrangement of the Holy Roman Empire from the Byzantine Empire had
taken the form of separation and occasional hostility (e.g. the fourth
Crusade, which sacked Constantinople in 1204). At the end of the
twentieth century, another kind of distrust is felt by Orthodox living in the
east half of Christendom. In this eastern part, the beginning of the third
millennium witnessed a fracture: the ravages of some 70 years of
communist domination ended in poverty and the importation of a new
kind of secularization from Western Europe. In the western part,
liberalization (i.e. the secularization of the public ethos away from
Christian revelation) has been accompanied by wealth. Capitalism long
since parted ways with the Protestant ethic. The current simplified and
reformed version of the EUs constitutional treaty deliberately distances
itself from any Christian heritage. Christians, both Orthodox and Catholic,
in Eastern Europe are being encouraged to reform their societies on this
Western European model. To them, this model is far from being an
obvious choice.
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14
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See, e.g., Jane Ellis, The Russian Orthodox Church: Triumphalism and Defensiveness
(London: 1996).
Paul Valadier, LEglise en procs. Catholicisme et socit moderne (Paris, 1987), p. 179.
Cf. Talal Asad, Genealgoies of Religion. Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity
and Islam (Baltimore, 1993); Formations of the Secular. Christianity, Islam, and
Modernity (Stanford, 2003).
Cf. Bernard Hring, Christian Renewal in a Changing World (Garden City, 1968), pp.
30436.
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25
26
Schama, Citizens.
Cf. James C. Scott, Seeing like a State. How certain schemes to improve the human
condition have failed (New Haven, 1998). David Graeber, Towards an Anthropological
Theory of Value. The false coin of our own dreams (New York, 2001).
Marcel Hnaff, Le prix de la vrit. Le don, largent, la philosophie (Paris, 2002), p. 296.
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John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory. Beyond Secular Reason (Oxford, 1990). The
most comprehensive recent exploration of philosophies of totality is by Christian
Godin (7 vols, Paris, 19972000).
Offensive des Religions (Manire de Voir No. 48), published by Le Monde Diplomatique,
NovemberDecember 1999, especially LEurope sanctifie de Jean Paul II by Jacques
Decornoy,.pp. 1012.
Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Society, in Encyclopaedia of Social and Cultural
Anthropology, eds Alan Barnard and Jonathan Spencer (London, 1996), pp. 51422.
Cf. Gauchet, La dmocratie contre elle-mme, pp. 126; 32685.
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33
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34
Cf. Stephen Headley, Durgas Mosque. Cosmology, Conversion and Community in central
Javanese Islam. (Singapore, 2003), chap. 12 and 14.
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tautological. At that point, we may admit that the rights do not tell us what
is human about them.
We then come to the question of the integrity of the human person, which
is essential for these fundamental rights to cohere and be universal. There
is a necessary relationship in this ethic between unity (of the human
person) and universality (of fundamental human rights); otherwise the
rights will remain largely unfulfilled.
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36
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39
John Zizioulas, Being as Communion. Studies in Personhood and the Church (New York,
1985).
Henri de Lubac, Le drame de lhumanisme athe (Paris, 1944).
Valadier, LEglise en procs, p. 111.
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41
42
John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock and Graham Ward, Introduction, in J. Milbank et al.
(eds), Radical Orthodoxoy. A new theology (London, 1999), p. 8.
Alexei V. Nesteruk, Light from the East (Minneapolis, 2003), p. 195.
Nicolas Afanassieff, LEglise du Saint Esprit (Paris, 1975).
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This excursus into the gospel of St. John (Jn 1318) is necessary to show
how mens prayer to their Creator is capable of setting into motion a
hierarchy of values that engages them with the grace of equality. In St.
Johns presentation of the Lords departure from this world, Christs
dialogue with his disciples is patterned on Psalms 4243 (As the doe longs
for running streams, so longs my soul for you, my God). The spirit of truth
and the grace of Gods coming into the human soul takes the form of a
dialogue with his disciples prolonged by a prayer to his Father. This is
what is known as Christs priests prayer (Jn 17) and indeed is a
sacramental moment for its prolongs that institution of meaning we call
the divine supper.
The Christian claim to participate in the life of God requires such an
excursion into the Bible. Other wise communion, exchange in all its diverse
forms, in daily life, about which we all know a great deal, would not have a
parallel communal work in the invisible kingdom anticipate by the
Eucharist. The ultimate example of Christs dialogue with humanity is his
parting words to his Apostles at the last supper (Jn 1417). There he
answers questions posed to him by Thomas, Philip, and Judas. The need of
the Apostles to remain in communion with Christ is answered when Jesus
teaches them how to continue to be close to him through their internal
conviction, their faith. In the dialogue between Christ and his disciples, one
can see how extensive the relationships between God and man become.
The relationships that human beings establish with the three persons of
the Holy Trinity involve them in a intra-Trinitarian communion. The
Apostles, through their interaction with Christ, lay the foundation for a
Christian life to which the word society is truly, fully applicable. And it is
this profound sociability that characterizes the bonds that bring believers
together.
In his farewell to his disciples (Jn 14:13), Christ begins by his asking them
to trust in the Father in whose house there are many rooms which Jesus is
going ahead to prepare for them. He says that, by telling them what will
happen to him before it takes place, he hopes they might believe in him
(verse 29). Christ does what his Father commands so it is that the world
knows that he loves the Father. Christ through is passion will pas through
the collective horror of the human condition so that men might be freed
from death. The Church is the locus of that bond between God and man,
not by political enforcement (e.g. the power of imprisonment and capital
punishment), but by a loving hierarchy linking us to the one who revealed
to mortals that we have a future and an eternal end: I will come to you
again. I will take you to myself and where I am you may be also. Christ, by
these words, is encompassing his disciples to participate in the
relationship which he holds with his Father. The Beatitudes are built on
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just such a dimension: God becomes known to man as the creator of the
world and also the one who is to come again, the one who will prepare for
them a room in the kingdom.
It is Thomas among the disciples who poses the first question (Jn 14:5):
Lord, we do not know where you are going and how can we know the
way?. To this, Christ replies, I am the way, the truth and the life If you
had known me, you would have known my Father also (14:6). To this
Philip retorts, Lord, show us the Father. Again Christ presents the
paternity of the Father as an encompassing relationship: I am in the
Father and the Father is in me (). I do not speak on my own authority but
the Father who dwells in me does the works (14:10).
It is this relationship that is the value; the contextual subordination of man
to God has a value superior to any other notion of ranking, for He who
believes in me will also do the works I do (14:12). Christ is the servant of
God, of his Fathers creatures: Whatever you ask in my name, I will do it,
that the Father may be glorified in the Son (14:12). Human notions of
equality and inequality are surpassed here in the selfabasement, the
kenosis of the Son of God. Herein lies the grace of equality, that is to say
Christ taking on of the human condition in his incarnation. The hierarchy
of Creatorcreature is thereby subject to an inversion; the Word of God is
incarnate in the servant of the Lord, a creature whose purpose is deliver
mankinds salvation through an indescribable death and descent into hell.
The bond that links persons to persons was initiated by the bond to
human beings forged by God their creator.
Christ is leaving his disciples together after the last supper. Pending their
seeing Christ again, the world is rejoicing and the Apostles are weeping
over the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth. The moment is indeed critical,
judgmental, because, as Christ dies on the cross, he puts a distance
between himself and the world. Crucifying Word of God leads to a great
silence. I shall not talk to you any longer but the world must know that I
love the Father () come let us go now (Jn 14:3031). At this point, Christ
says, I came from the Father and have come into the world and now I
leave the world to go to the Father (16:28).
Judas, not the Iscariot, questions his Lord over this return and asks
whether Christ plans to show himself only to his disciples and not to the
world. This question is critical to the revelation of God to man. The coming
of God in the Messiah reveals the love of the Father (Jn 14:223). It is said
to occur if the disciples are able to keep Christs words. This exchange of
love is triadic, as when Christ says that any one who loves him and keeps
his words will be loved by the Father and then they will both come and
make their home in that person. Christ now tells the disciples of his
departure so that when it happens they will not be afraid (14:27) nor feel
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abandoned like orphans. Indeed, Christs returning to his Father should fill
the disciples with joy for the Father is greater than I.
Unless I go, the Advocate will not come to you: through these exchanges
between the Apostles and Christ, the Father is presented in the third
person, until suddenly (Jn 17) Jesus raises his eyes to heaven and speaks
to his Father, at which point he speaks of the disciples in the third person.
The dialogue has moved elsewhere: onto a higher level encompassing the
earlier dialogue between Christ and his disciples into one between Christ
and his Father. The grace of equality consists in precisely this capacity of
uplifting from one level to another by a broader and higher
contextualization of our prayer to God. In short, when God incarnated
humanity in His son, He made our humanity into a family of brothers and
sisters.
Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of Modern Times, trans. R.M. Wallace (Cambridge,
MA, 1983).
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Bruno Karsenti, Lhomme total (Paris, 1997). A few exceptions to this exist, such as
Simon Frank, The Spiritual Foundations of Society (Ohio, 1987).
Gilles Kepel, Fitna. Guerre au coeur de lislam (Paris, 2004).
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My kingship is not of this world (Jn 18:36) is often cited because the
awareness of transcendence makes it possible for Christians to survive
under any sort of government, even the harshest. The kingship that Christ
had proposed in the territory of his kingdom was radically other. Having
one Lord and a common faith is the basis of Christian fraternity, as St. Paul
wrote to the Galatians: For as many of you as were baptized into Christ
have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave
nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ
Jesus (Gal 3:278).
These fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of
God () in whom you are also built into it for a dwelling place of God and
the Spirit (Eph 2:1822) divided themselves, by the end of the Middle
Ages, into warring nation states where national identities mattered more
than any shared faith. Agnostic affirmation of the declaration of
fundamental human rights (whose bicentennial France celebrated in
1989) was an effort to compensate for this loss of human solidarity. The
basis of this new fraternity, liberty, and equality, was attributed to the
individual citizen; it became a kind of sociological barrier erected as part
of the boundaries between nationstates that did and did not grant these
kinds of rights. But in the Church, those who died in the faith, the martyrs
of all countries, are seen as seeking another homeland.
The Christian revolution in social space, the creation of the Church of God
on earth, could not have been more novel in the context of the eastern end
of Mediterranean, but it had to appropriate the vocabulary of the times in
which Jesus of Nazareth appeared. The key to this revelation was not
equality but grace. Why was this term so crucial? Hnaff has shown how
Plato had the intuition that reciprocal needs were not sufficient to unite
the members of the Greek citystate.46 As the influence of the clan (gen)
declined, the bonding force devolved to grace (charis) in order to unite
the citizens in the worship of beauty that transcends them all and is given
to all. According to Hnaff, this collective gift was the civic link. The notion
of charis developed significantly with the advent of the Judeo-Christian
notion of alliance (berith in Hebrew) in which grace (hn in Hebrew) is an
un-repayable gift from the totally beyond, from God.
Citing Claveros study on the Catholic ethic and the spirit of noncapitalism,47 Hnaff shows that Catholic theologians in sixteenth- and
seventeenth-century Spain believed that it is Gods grace which
characterizes all social relations. That is natural in the sense of being
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willed by Gods love for those whom He has created: There is community
among men only because there exists between them the same type of
relations God has established towards them.48 For Clavero, this is typified
by the generous reciprocity captured by the Renaissance term antidwra
(a gift in return). It escaped Claveros attention that the same term in
Byzantine Greek during that period designated the sharing of blessed
bread by the faithful after having partaken of the communion in the Body
of Christ at the altar.
Sections 1 and 3 of this paper provided a glimpse of the genealogy of the
separation of Christianity from the current social ethos of Western Europe.
In what ways can we distinguish between the Christian understanding of
witness/martyrdom and the agnostic non-transcendental witness (which
also often leads to martyrdom) of defenders of fundamental human rights?
These distinctions are useful without attempting to prove that one ethos is
better than the other. Indeed, it is Christ himself who says that there is no
greater love than to give ones life for another. My purpose here is to
uncover in the light of the Gospels the nature of the gift of ones life for
anothers and what enables a person to make such a gift. It is herein that
one finds the grace of equality.
Christ tells his disciples (Jn 14) that he has overcome the world. To be part
of that victory, the Apostle James insists that whoever wishes to be a
friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God (Jas 4:4). Animated by
the conviction that we brought nothing into the world, and we cannot take
anything out of the world (1 Tim 6:7), and because they see that the form
of this world is passing away (1 Cor 7:31), Christians can afford to admit
that the whole world is in the power of the evil one (1 Jn 5:19). Thus, all
that is pure, true, and beautiful in the world is passing towards the
heavenly kingdom. This implies that we travel light: Owe no one anything,
except to love one another (Rom 13:8). Likewise, He who says he is in the
light and hates his brother is in the darkness still (1 Jn 2:9). The
experience of martyrdom expresses the love of God through ones love of
those for whom one makes such a great sacrifice.
The Christians attempts to protect the fundamental rights of others is
rooted in Christs faith in us. One is imitating, in the sense of reproducing,
Gods confidence in His creation, in all mankind. There can be no greater
universalism than that of Gods bond of love with each and every person
He has created. When atheistic humanists campaign about crimes against
humanity while refusing any theistic vision of totality, they paradoxically
aspire to the Christian's breadth of vision, a revelation of the
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The decline of religious belief in public space and institutions has been
said to indicate a liberation of belief from the structures provided by
religious institutions, rather than an end to belief itself. Whether this
generalization holds or not, Shmuel Eisenstadt said in 1984 that
secularization cannot be subsumed into a narrative of multiple
modernities. A sociologist like Peter Burger long considered secularization
to be processes by which sectors of society and culture are removed from
the domination of religious institutions and symbols.53 Now secularization
is taken as the differentiation between the secular sphere, political norms,
and religious institutions, rather than as a decline in religious belief. Peter
van der Veer, stepping off from de Tocquevilles dichotomy of the spirit of
liberty and the spirit of religion,54 says modernity makes it impossible to
separate religious fanaticism and secular emancipation.
With reference to the Indian subcontinent, Assayag has argued that
worldwide these new freedoms and servitudes lead to unprecedented
forms of peace and violence.55 The human rights movement participates in
this unravelling by trying to use the remote control of media exposure to
protect people under inhumane regimes. The extent to which such
exposure educates consciences is a moot point, because it is almost
impossible not to have a political slant on the abuses that determines
those one chooses to highlight and protest against. This is the acme of
relativism.
Juridical confrontation between the viewpoints of participants in a trial
may well momentarily rank values as higher or lower, but as soon as these
are evaluated or situated differentially, such a hierarchy is relativized. In a
2003 colloquium in Sofia, Jacques Derrida highlighted the difficulty of
finding a basis for a legal or political ethic outside of the onto-theological
traditional foundations of the both the State and philosophy. Sovereignty
is as invasive as political power is indivisible; it is an inevitable
totalisation, encompassing the irreducible transcendence of the other. Is
this appropriate? Derridas wellknown interest in deconstruction stems
in part from a need for displacement, the opening provided by difference;
this would lead to a full exercise of law without referring to sovereignty, a
sort of politics outside of and beyond the state.56 Derrida qualifies the
quest as a search for the future, the unrepresentable, which he describes
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Peter Berger, The Sacred Canopy. Element of a Sociological Theory of Religion (Garden
City, 1967); P. Berger, The National Interest, 46 (Winter 1996/97).
Peter van der Veer, Imperial Encounters: Religion and Modernity in India and Britain
(Princeton, NJ, 2001).
Jackie Assayag, Spectral Secularism. Religion, Politics and Democracy in India, in
Archives Europennes de Sociologie, 44/3 (2004): 327.
Jacques Derrida, La voix de Jacques Derrida, in Diviniatio, 19 (2004): 223.
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The horror of the difficulty is subsumed for Derrida in the difference between the two
Greek verbs: thamazein (which means astonishment as a disposition of the
philosophical mind faced with totality) and traumazein (which means stupefaction
when faced with events whose character does not allow any total apprehension).
Richard Kearney, Transfiguring God, in Graham Ward (ed.), Postmodern Theology
(Oxford, 2001), pp. 36993, here p. 371.
Headley, Durgas Mosque.
Ernst Troeltsch, The Social Teaching of the Christian Church (Louisville, 1957), pp.
53-54.
Tomoko Masuzawa, From Theology to World Religion: Ernst Troeltsch and the
Making of Religiongeschichte, in Tim Jensen and Mikael Rothstein (eds), Secular
Theories of Religion. Current Perspectives (Copenhagen, 2000), pp. 161, 164.
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religions came into being as a substitute for, and a solution to, the
particular difficulty that confounded Christianity, namely imperial Europe
claimed Christianity for itself at the end of the nineteenth century.62
By any calculation, political history has not favored the Orthodox East
since its separation from the Roman West in 1054; certainly, the
communist shadow over the 20th century continued the trend. But now
Orthodox conservatism in matters of religion can be considered a social
asset. The context of an economic and political backwater is not enough to
explain the Orthodox capacity to conserve a faithfulness to Christian
revelation. On the contrary, it is the Christian tradition itself that presents
a whole way of life (ethos) for man, a life in the Spirit as conveyed by
Christs words. This renewal of human life is clearly marked as finite in
space and time by its personalism. Such a communion of human beings is
found only in the Church, only in communion between God and His
creatures. Christs Church has turned out to be sui generis.
The universe once existed, and can continue to exist, without humanity. To
become part of human history, however, means to enter into a life process
that is essential to the natural universe. This process can be viewed as a
cosmic liturgy, cherishing human life as Godgiven. Such a hierarchy of
values is not a societal ethic, but an experience of the fullness of life itself, a
life without end. It is this truth that makes one free: the truth that a man
born into the world bearing the image and resemblance of his Creator is
not born in vain; the truth that God always protects mankind by His Cross.
Evaluative indifference has been used for promoting a religious tolerance
premised on individuality, but the crucial values of fundamental human
rights, volens nolens, revert to a higher level. They are, as it were,
suspended on the presence of God in our world. The denial of this higher
level explains some of the difficulty in exporting secularization from
Western Europe or the United States. T.M. Madan coined a phrase that he
used in the title of his recent book: modern myths, locked minds.63 In the
postmodern world, we have reached the end of the myth of the
Enlightenment. It is up to Christians now to illumine platforms of
fundamental human rights with the warmth and courage that arise from
the resurrection of life over death, the keystone of our hierarchy of values.
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63
Charles F. Keyes, Laurence Kendall and Helen Hardacre (eds), Asian Visions of
Authority. Religion and the Modern States of East and Southeast Asia (Honolulu, 1994).
T.M. Madan, Modern Myths, Locked Minds. Secularism and Fundamentalism in India
(Oxford, 1997).
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