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Whereas many textbooks treat the subject of world religions in an apolitical way, as if each religion were a path for individuals seeking wisdom and not a discourse intimately connected with the exercise of power, James W. Laine treats religion and politics as halves of the same whole, tracing their relationship from the policies of Alexander the Great to the ideologies of modern Europe secularists, with stops in classical India, China, and the Islamic world. Meta-Religion is a groundbreaking text that brings power and politics to the fore of our understanding of world religions, placing religion at the center of world history. This synthetic approach is both transformative and enlightening as it presents a powerful model for thinking differently about what religion is and how it functions in the world. With images and maps to bring the narrative to life, Meta-Religion combines sophisticated scholarly critique with accessibility that students and scholar alike will appreciate

This article investigates the narrative constraints that led Kavindra Paramananda to include accounts of family feuds in his epic poem, the Sivabharata, even while the purpose of the text was to praise the Maharashtrian king Shivaji (d. 1680) as a great epic hero. Written at the time of the king's coronation and presumably under his direction, the Sivabharata may have taken the Mahabharata as a useful model for dealing with family conflict when aspects of such conflict were impossible to ignore. The essay also considers the effects of assumed narrative frames when modern scholars, like the author himself, challenge those assumptions.