Sakta Method for Comparative Theology
A Śākta Method for Comparative Theology: Upside-Down, Inside-Out offers the world’s first Śākta thealogy of religions and a Śākta anti-method, method, and a-method for comparative theology. For Śāktas, the thread of religious diversity is part of the rich tapestry of cosmological, topographical, environmental, and bio-diversity, which is the Goddess’ collective (samaṣṭi) and individuated (vyaṣṭi) forms. Śākta religious diversity is complex, layered, and paradoxical, allowing ontological similarities, ontological differences, and irreducibility. A Śākta thealogy of religious diversity transcends humans and the borders of religion, politics, society, and speciesism. It is panentheist in that it reveres the material and the spiritual equally since they are knotted and inseparable. As “anti-method,” for comparative theology, Śākta thealogy inverts the standard hypertextual approach to doing comparative theology. As “anti-method,” it proposes engaging theological activities based on the view of the body-mind-sense complex as non-hierarchical and entrenched in a tangled, mutually conditioned world. As “method,” it employs the bodies’ auditory, gestural, and haptic interfaces to create vibrotactile feedback that takes interlocutors beyond conventional, conditioned reality and toward Oneness. Finally, as “a-method,” Śākta thealogy offers an inverted way of being and acting in the world that transcends putting the body-mind-sense complex to work by using the metaphor of the upside-down aśvattha tree in the Bhagavad Gītā.
Pravina Rodrigues is adjunct faculty at the Starr King School for the Ministry, and is postdoctoral fellow at the Jesuit School of Theology of Santa Clara University.