Monday Morning Greetings 2026 #28 – Deities: The HONEY that Attracts Indian Hindus

The title comes from an interview someone sent to me from the Easy Bhakti podcast by Chandrashekar Acharya dasa.[1] He was interviewing Yasodeva dasa, a successful preacher at Penn State University in State College, Pennsylvania. In the interview Yasodeva coined the term that I have used for the title of this post. Yasodeva’s presentation was thoughtful. I liked some of his ideas, but the interview was brief. Perhaps he didn’t have time to fully refine his conceptions. For this week’s Greetings, I will briefly summarize and support his idea and then comment where I am not in agreement, or at least feel the presentation needs to be refined. Yasodeva started his interview with a radical suggestion: For ISKCON to be successful, it must move the Deities out of the temple and make some practical arrangement elsewhere where the devotees can worship Them and take darśana. The Deity attracts Indian Hindus, he argued. When the congregation of ISKCON becomes predominantly Indian, it becomes…