New Book Announcement: Engaged Jainism
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New Book Announcement: Engaged Jainism
Critical and Constructive Studies of Jain Social Engagement (Miller and Bohanec, SUNY 2025)
09/12/2025
Jains engage the world in both routine but also strikingly compelling ways. Our students are transformed through their engagements with Jain philosophy as well as with the Jain community itself. Scholars and Jains engage Jain philosophy with some of the most pressing issues of our time. And academic and Jain ways of knowing commonly experience productive, though often irreconcilable frictions during engagements between scholars and community members.
These are just some of the many ways Engaged Jainism: Critical and Constructive Studies of Jain Social Engagement, a book I have co-edited by my colleague Cogen Bohanec, investigates the meaning of “engaged.” Our volume, with contributions from scholars from around the world, carefully and critically theorizes, for the first time, the methods of the academic discipline of engaged Jain studies and its object, engaged Jainism.
The volume is a direct outcome of our 1st annual “Engaged Jain Studies Conference” at Arihanta Institute that I organized in 2023. Following the conference, I reached out to our participant scholars and proposed that we carefully edit and publish the conference papers in a volume that would be titled Engaged Jainism. Thanks to our contributors’ enthusiastic response (and hard work) and our reliable publishing partner, SUNY Press, we have now published the volume just two years later.
Engaged Jainism takes theoretical and methodological inspiration from Tsing's notion of "engaged universals" (2005), Broad's definition of "engaged scholars" (Broad 2016), and the transformative pedagogical practice of "engaged learning" (Miller 2019). It also finds foundations in the academic study of engaged Buddhism. As one might expect, the volume considers, as engaged Buddhism does, how Jain thought and praxis can be engaged with contemporary issues of pressing relevance for the betterment of society (e.g., environmentalism, climate change, animal rights, and social justice), while also nevertheless incorporating more recently developed critical methods inspired by scholars of engaged Buddhism.
Following the spirit of anekāntavāda, Engaged Jainism aims to be as multiperspectival as possible by identifying and including three inclusive methodological tendencies, which I frame as follows in my introduction to the volume.
The first is the “constructive-reproductive” model of engaged Jain studies (Miller 2025, 17), wherein Jains and some scholars alike reproduce emic Jain discourse selectively, constructively, and prescriptively toward challenges of social relevance. Those who follow this approach are akin to those Flügel once deemed the “Jain Theosophists” (Flügel 2005, 8).
Our volume also, nevertheless, takes into account important methodological lessons gleaned from the field of engaged Buddhism as it has matured over the past three decades. As some scholars have shown, it is important to pay critical attention to where we find particular instances of, and arguments for, social disengagement (Lele 2019; Jeffreys 2003, 271), as well as how religious practice becomes engaged with political, ethnic, nationalist, and other social phenomena, both in the past and present (Main and Lai 2013, 3; see also Fuller 2021; Brown 2023). To study these types of (dis)engagement, I identify the “critical-analytical” (Miller 2025, 22) methodological tendency of engaged Jain studies, which does not make constructive or prescriptive claims toward issues of contemporary relevance but rather produces critical historical, anthropological, and philological studies of the Jains. This model, as I show, has its historical roots in colonial Orientalist studies of, and engagements with, the Jain community.
Finally, some scholars work closely with the Jain community to constructively help them reduce violence in the world, using what I identify as the "critical-constructive" model of engaged Jain studies. However, these scholars still maintain a commitment to academic rigor. As “engaged scholars” (Broad 2016, 12) inspired by Jain thought and ethics, they attempt to help the Jain community and students at large to understand the many opportunities to reduce violence in our troubled world, though – and this is critical – using peer-reviewed, data-supported evidence. A germane example in the community today is the question as to whether or not Jains (or anyone) should consume dairy given its undeniable and unfathomable harms on the environment, climate, animals, and humans themselves (Miller and Dickstein 2021). Jains and scholars have debated this topic for decades, and advocates for eschewing dairy have presented scientific data and hard evidence of the harms of dairy to the Jain community repeatedly to try to convince their Jain counterparts to stop consuming dairy. This is but one example of what I identify as the “critical-constructive” model of engaged Jain studies (Miller 2025, 28). This model combines the methods of the previous two and is a model both “of” and “for” the Jains (see Cort 1990, 55).
As I demonstrate in the introduction to the volume in much more detail, these three methodological tendencies have and continue to comprise the primary ways that scholars in Jain studies (and the community members they work with) have studied the Jain tradition in the past and present (Miller 2025). Though some scholars may identify more strongly with one of the three methodological tendencies I identify in Engaged Jainism, there are also fluid boundaries between these tendencies and scholars often find themselves vacillating between them depending on who their audience is, what kind of project they are working on, and who they are working with (e.g. donors, other scholars, and/or community members).
My introduction to the volume elaborates on these methodological tendencies extensively. Engaged Jainism then proceeds to present 17 chapters from prominent new and senior scholars from around the world who showcase their approaches to engaged Jain studies using interdisciplinary approaches exhibiting varying degrees of the “constructive-reproductive,” “critical-analytical,” and “critical-constructive” methodological tendencies.
If you are interested in previewing each of our scholars' contributions, you can watch short video previews from each contributor here on our book web page. Engaged Jainism: Critical and Constructive Studies of Jain Social Engagement is available for pre-order from SUNY Press.
We anticipate that the volume will inspire further research and inquiry in the field of engaged Jain studies, and we look forward to discussing it with you. For those wishing to be trained in the methods of engaged Jain studies, Claremont School of Theology (CST) offers a fully online MA and PhD, where Arihanta Institute’s professors serve on the faculty and as academic advisors alongside our CST colleague, Professor Venu Mehta. To learn more, email study@arihantainstitute.org.
References
Broad, Garret. 2016. More Than Just Food: Food Justice and Community Change,
California Studies in Food and Culture. University of California Press.
Brown, Donna Lynn. 2023. “Beyond Queen and King: Democratizing ‘Engaged Buddhism.’” Journal of Buddhist Ethics 30:7–58.
Cort, John E. 1990. “Models of and for the Study of the Jains.” Method & Theory in the Study of Religion 2 (1): 42–71.
Flügel, Peter. 2005. “The Invention of Jainism: A Short History of Jaina Studies.” International Journal of Jain Studies 1 (1): 1–14.
Fuller, Paul. 2021. An Introduction to Engaged Buddhism. Bloomsbury.
Jeffreys, Derek S. 2003. “Does Buddhism Need Human Rights?” In Action Dharma: New Studies in Engaged Buddhism, edited by Christopher S. Queen, Charles S. Prebish, and Damien Keown. Routledge.
Lele, Amod. 2019. “Disengaged Buddhism.” Journal of Buddhist Ethics 26: 240–89.
Miller, Christopher Jain. 2025. "Conceptualizing ‘Engaged’ Jainism and the Field of ‘Engaged’ Jain Studies." In Engaged Jainism: Critical and Constructive Studies of Jain Social Engagement, edited by Christopher Jain Miller and Cogen Bohanec. Albany: SUNY Press.
Miller, Christopher Patrick. 2019. "Jainism, Yoga, and Ecology: A Course in Contemplative Practice for a World in Pain" Religions 10, no. 4: 232. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel10040232
Miller, Christopher Jain and Cogen Bohanec. 2025. Engaged Jainism: Critical and Constructive Studies of Jain Social Engagement. Albany: SUNY Press.
Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. 2005. Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.