Insights is an interview show featuring members of the ARC community. This week our guest is Shashank Rao, a Hindu theologian-in-progress whose theopoetic work centers on calligraphy and devotional poetry.

Shashank is currently a member of the Sadhana Coalition of Progressive Hindus, a group that seeks to build a progressive, grassroots movement in Hindu communities. His theological work and study centers on the recovery of Hindu resources as a foundation for social justice and meaning-making as a child of the diaspora, focusing particularly on the Asian-American community in a global context. His essays on Medium cover a variety of topics in Hindu theology, ranging from scriptural exegesis to focused explorations of concepts in Hindu traditions, to original works of devotional poetry in various languages. Utilizing a wide variety of traditional and contemporary resources, he seeks to probe the possibilities of Hindu and Asian diasporic religious contemplation.

More information about Shashank is available at https://medium.com/@shashankrao_84497

Insights is an interview show featuring members of the ARC community. This week our guest is Kythe Heller, a poet, scholar, and interdisciplinary artist.

Kythe is a poet, essayist, interdisciplinary artist and doctoral student in the Committee on the Study of Religion at Harvard University, with a secondary field in Critical Arts and Media Practice. Her interdisciplinary academic research draws upon traditional Islamic, Judeo-Christian, Buddhist, and Indigenous mystical training and intellectual traditions, aesthetic theory and practice, existential-phenomenological anthropology, contemporary political theory and social, environmental, and technological philosophies. A guiding question is: In what ways can our efforts become sites of evolution, sites of resistance, parts of an array of realizing new social and ecological relationships by considering how to use language and creative practice to radically change our way of being in the world?

More information about Kythe is available at kytheheller.com.

ARC Blog