The Encyclopedia of World Religions

Upanishads S 461

and obligation to all persons, to be more important than particular nations or communities.

Pentecostal ( see E VANGELICAL C HRISTIANITY and P EN TECOSTALISM ) churches make much of personal conversion and expression. So in their own ways do S PIRITUALISM , N EW T HOUGHT , the N EW A GE MOVE MENT , and many other characteristic American movements that emphasize a subjective, mind and-feeling basis for religion. All these features have kept many Americans highly committed to religion and, so long as personal freedom is main tained, its institutions. Further reading: Catherine Albanese, America: Religions and Religion (Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth, 1981); Harold Bloom, The American Religion (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992); Andrew Greeley, The Denominational Society (Glenview, Ill.: Scott, Foresman, 1972). universalism The belief that all souls, how ever sinful, will eventually be saved. Within Prot estant C HRISTIANITY ( see P ROTESTANTISM ), this view had its first modern institutional expression in the 18th century. People affected by the liberal, rational attitudes of the Enlightenment looked again at traditional ideas and decided that eter nal damnation to hell was incompatible with a loving, fatherly G OD . In North America, worship groups were formed by those who had left other churches, or been expelled from them, because of their universalist persuasions. In 1790 they formed the Universalist Church of America in Philadelphia under the leadership of Hosea Bal lou (1771–1852). This denomination flourished in parts of the United States in the 19th century, largely in rural areas, but eventually declined. In 1961 the Universalist Church combined with the equally liberal American Unitarian Association ( see U NITARIANISM ) to form the Unitarian Univer salist Association. The term universalism is also used to refer to a general belief that there is validity in all religions, or that the universal religious impulse ought to be given priority over particular expressions of it in our understanding of religion. Ethically, it can mean regarding the needs of humanity as a whole,

Upanishads Sanskrit for “sit at the feet of”; the name given to more than a hundred separate texts that make up the last part of the V EDA , the most sacred of Hindu writings. Their most important themes are two notions central to H INDUISM , the self or ATMAN and the BRAHMAN or universal reality. The Upanishads are also known as the V EDANTA , Sanskrit for “the end of the Veda.” They preserve esoteric knowledge, originally shared with only selected groups of gifted students. Even tually these writings became the foundational texts for the most significant schools of orthodox Indian philosophy, the Vedanta schools. The Upanishads may be seen as records of con versations and discussions about the most basic questions of existence. To judge from the texts themselves, these discussions were not limited to priests but included both nobles for whom the priests performed RITUALS and prominent women. Given their origin, the texts cannot be expected to have a tight structure or a uniform perspective. As Vedic literature, the Upanishads were occa sioned by the performance of Vedic rituals. They stand in a tradition that sought to explain how Vedic SACRIFICES could affect the world and thus benefit the sponsor of the sacrifice. But most Upanishads have very little concern for the actual rituals them selves. They concentrate instead on the topics of the self and the world, or rather, the realities that underlie the self and the world that we consciously perceive, atman and brahman, respectively. The sages of the Upanishads use several differ ent methods in exploring these topics. They oper ate with a rich and complex series of classifications and draw numerous correlations between the self and the world. They also construct series in which each item presumably requires or depends upon the next; the eventual goal is to work back to what all items require. Another technique is to develop special interpretations of sacred formulae and syl lables. For example, the relatively brief Mandukya Upanishad contains reflections on the parts of the