John Stratton Hawley

John Stratton Hawley—informally Jack—is the Claire Tow Professor of Religion Emeritus at Barnard College, Columbia University. He has written or edited more than a score of books on Hinduism and the comparative study of religion.

Current Projects

God’s Vacation: Religious Retreat in a Godforsaken Age

God’s Vacation is a personal ethnographic study of three religious retreats. They inhabit three separate continents with three very different histories: deeply Protestant America, deeply Hindu India, and Johann Sebastian Bach’s Germany. The book’s title has a double meaning. On the one hand it refers to places away from the mainstream where the Divine comes alive for the precious time you’re there. On the other it refers to the secular age so many of us inhabit, from which God and the Gods seem so definitively to have fled. Each of our “God’s vacations,” however vibrant, is also deeply marked by the threats and voids of our times. Here is an invitation to look out, look back, and perhaps even look again.

Beautifully Blind: Surdas in Art at Udaipur

A remarkable explosion of illustrated manuscript pages pegged to the Sursagar (Sur’s Ocean)—some 150 are extant—emerged in a single place, Udaipur, from 1660 to 1730. The poet himself is depicted on almost every page, displaying the blindness that by then was universally ascribed to him. He is able to “see” Krishna’s magical, musical presence without being perceived as an intruder.

Who were the painters, the patrons, the viewers, and why did this sudden burst of Surdas paintings occur? In Beautifully Blind I hope to provide less-than-blind answers—and in any case, to transmit the paintings and their poems.