MUMBAI, INDIA, June 10, 2018 (Mumbai Mirror): The state government has announced its plan to take over the Shani Shingnapur shrine and create a special legislation for the temple on the lines of the Mahalaxmi temple in Kolhapur. The proposal will soon be tabled before the state cabinet for approval. Speaking to Mirror, chief minister Devendra Fadnavis said, ”In the state Assembly, we had promised a law for transparency in the temple trust management. It’s a popular religious destination in India, so it requires facilities and management of that level.” However, spokesperson of the Shani Shingnapur trust, Anil Darandale, said that they were unaware of the new proposal.
After the state government takes over the temple, a chief officer will be appointed to look into its day-to-day administration. While the temple trust will have its own staff, the state will appoint its own chairperson, deputy chairperson and trustees. As part of the proposal — like the Siddhivinayak temple trust and the Shirdi Sai Sansthan trust – the Shani Shingnapur temple trust will have to report to the state law and judiciary department. While the principal secretary of law and judiciary department N. Jamadar did not comment on the government’s plan, a senior officer said, ”After the takeover, the government wants to have an Act to govern the temple. Not only will we build residential quarters for pilgrims, we will also develop the roads and provide infrastructure like the waiting hall for darshan. This will streamline facilities for pilgrims — especially on Saturdays when huge crowds throng the pilgrimage site.”
UNITED STATES, June 8, 2018 (New York Times, by Bettany Hughes): Vandalizing the Parthenon temple in Athens has been a tenacious tradition. Most famously, Lord Elgin appropriated the ”Elgin marbles” in 1801-5. But that was hardly the first example. In the Byzantine era, when the temple had been turned into a church, two bishops — Marinos and Theodosios — carved their names on its monumental columns. The Ottomans used the Parthenon as a gunpowder magazine, hence its pockmarked masonry — the result of an attack by Venetian forces in the 17th century. Now Catherine Nixey, a classics teacher turned writer and journalist, takes us back to earlier desecrations, the destruction of the premier artworks of antiquity by Christian zealots (from the Greek zelos — ardor, eager rivalry) in what she calls ”The Darkening Age.”
Using the mutilation of faces and arms on the Parthenon’s decoration as one of her many, thunderingly memorable case studies, Nixey makes the fundamental point that while we lionize Christian culture for preserving works of learning, sponsoring exquisite art and adhering to an ethos of ”love thy neighbor,” the early church was in fact a master of anti-intellectualism, iconoclasm and mortal prejudice. Nixey is transparent about the particularity of her motivation. The daughter of an ex-nun and an ex-monk, she spent her childhood filled with respect for the wonders of post-pagan Christian culture. But as a student of classics she found the scales — as it were — falling from her eyes.
Much more of this book review at ”source”.
Hindu society has been the meeting point as well as the melting pot of as many spiritual visions as the human psyche is capable of springing up spontaneously. It has been a willing and welcoming platform for as many seers, sages, saints and mystics as have responded to the deeper stirrings in the human soul. It has been a repository of as many metaphysical points of view as human reason can render in human language.
— Sita Ram Goel (1921-2003), Hindu renaissance thinker and writer, founder of Voice of India
