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Gift allows CSWR to host ‘Hindu View of Life’ lectures

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The Center for the Study of World Religions (CSWR) at Harvard Divinity School announced today that it will soon host a new annual lecture focused on the value of the Hindu view of life.

The CSWR’s new “Hindu View of Life Annual Lecture” aims to constructively address the current urgent issues of our time from a perspective informed by insights and values arising from Hindu traditions, both of India and of Hinduism globally.

The lecture’s inaugural years are made possible by a generous gift given by Akhil Gupta, who was chairman of Blackstone India, and is a fellow in Harvard’s Advanced Leadership Program.

Francis X. Clooney, the director of CSWR, expressed his own appreciation for the gift, another in the center’s growing list of annual funded lectures.

“Mr. Gupta’s gift,” Clooney said, “enables the center, and all of Harvard, to engage Hinduism more fully, with a focus that speaks to the all-important integration of learned traditions and ways of life.”

The lessons of Hinduism’s core tenets are as relevant for the modern world, Gupta said, as they were in ancient times, appealing “to a wide cross section of people, from the very scientifically oriented to those with a devotional bent of mind.”

In fitting with CSWR’s mission of examining the historical and contemporary interrelationships among religions, the lecture may also include attention to the Hindu view of pluralism and the religious traditions of the world.