Oh, the wonders of the modern world! I'm teaching a section of Theorizing Religion on the World's Congress of Religions of 1893, and tried - on a whim - to see if the proceedings were available for sale. Indeed! $15 + pph later, the impressive tome below was mine, with the text of every speech delivered, and pictures of each speaker. (Above are speakers from South Asia - historians now see the contributions of Vivekananda and Dharmapala as the Congress' most influential.) More, there are pictures illustrating the world of religions of the time, old and new. But, unsurprisingly, the Congress was less pluralistic than it seemed, or
pluralistic only as a step on the way to asserting Protestant superiority, as the inclusion of odd pictures like the
Buddhist and Aztec Idols below suggests. In a way the Congress volume's design makes this clear. The cover seems open to East as well as West: Columbia is garlanded with a ribbon which says
Buddhism Shintoism Brahmanism on one side,
Judaism Christianity Mohammedanism on the other. But after you've finished the book and put it
on your shelf, the spine tells a different story: tablets of the Law on clouds and a cross rise above a barely visible star and crescent, and the religions of Asia have vanished entirely! Case closed, I guess!
Oh, the wonders of the modern world! I'm teaching a section of Theorizing Religion on the World's Congress of Religions of 1893, and tried - on a whim - to see if the proceedings were available for sale. Indeed! $15 + pph later, the impressive tome below was mine, with the text of every speech delivered, and pictures of each speaker. (Above are speakers from South Asia - historians now see the contributions of Vivekananda and Dharmapala as the Congress' most influential.) More, there are pictures illustrating the world of religions of the time, old and new. But, unsurprisingly, the Congress was less pluralistic than it seemed, or 
pluralistic only as a step on the way to asserting Protestant superiority, as the inclusion of odd pictures like the Buddhist and Aztec Idols below suggests. In a way the Congress volume's design makes this clear. The cover seems open to East as well as West: Columbia is garlanded with a ribbon which says Buddhism Shintoism Brahmanism on one side, Judaism Christianity Mohammedanism on the other. But after you've finished the book and put it 
on your shelf, the spine tells a different story: tablets of the Law on clouds and a cross rise above a barely visible star and crescent, and the religions of Asia have vanished entirely! Case closed, I guess!
