Talk:Brahma Kumaris

No

• Anything published by brahmakumaris.org or Om Mandali, Pharmacy Printing Press or B.K. Raja Yoga Center for the Brahma Kumaris World Spiritual University ought to be treated as flatly unreliable.
• Hodgkinson, again, ought to be treated as flatly unreliable. She had no academic expertise whatsoever and as far as I remember, what prompted her very-apolegetic portrayal of the movement was her husband veering away with the BKs into celibacy.

Meh

• Encyclopedia entries —— be it the Routledge Encyclopedia of New Religious Movements or else — ought to be sparingly used.
• Whaling's Understanding the Brahma Kumaris (Dunedin University Press; 2012) is a primer aimed at undergraduates. A merrily sympathetic treatment, in what is one of the two academic monographs on the subject, it is quite flawed.
• Manderson and Tomlinson are anthropologists by training; the latter, particularly of practiced religion. So, I have not much qualms with using Brahma Kumaris: Purity and the Globalization of Faith (Springer; 2012) but we ought not depend on it for reconstructing the curious history of Brahmakumaris (BK).
• Tamasin Ramsay's thesis from Monash University.

Yes

• Publications by John Walliss, esp. The Brahma Kumaris as a Reflexive Tradition: Responding to Late Modernity (Motilal Banarsidass; 2007).
• Prem Chowdhury's masterly Marriage, Sexuality and the Female 'Ascetic': Understanding a Hindu Sect (EPW; 1996).
• Publications by Lawrence A. Babb.
• Ramsay's article in Handbook of Hinduism in Europe.

TrangaBellam (talk) 08:57, 24 July 2024 (UTC)

Not sure of the basis of all this. The Routledge Encyclopedia is a neutral and reliable source, for example. BK's own publications can be used, per policy, only for basic facts about the organisation: on plain matters like its staff, structures, and buildings it is a reliable source. Chiswick Chap (talk) 17:51, 20 April 2026 (UTC)