This week Hindus across London and the rest of the world have been celebrating Diwali, the festival of lights!

As a result, our latest #RedeemerRecommends is a blog from Joe Carter, which is a summary of the Hindu faith, and is incredibly helpful if you’re a Christian trying to learn more about how to connect with those from different religious backgrounds.

If this blog interests you, then why not sign up to our event on Saturday - ‘Discovering Jesus through Asian Eyes’, as we seek to equip ourselves as Christians to better reach our friends, neighbours and colleagues who come from different cultural and religious backgrounds.

You can read the beginning of the blog, and find a link to the whole thing below…

This week more than a billion Hindus across the globe are celebrating Diwali. The five-day religious observance, which is also celebrated by followers of Sikh and Jain faiths, is the biggest holiday of the year in India, the country with the largest population of Hindus.

Here are nine things you should know about Hinduism.

1. Although Hinduism is often treated as a single religion, it is more accurate to describe it as a family of religions that share common beliefs and characteristics. Some scholars claim that early Hinduism originated around 5500 BC, making it one of the world’s oldest religions. The term Hindu was first used by the Persians, dating back to the 6th century BC, to describe the people living beyond the Indus River. For more than a thousand years the label had no specific religious connotation. In the early 19th century, though, the term Hinduism was coined by British writers to refer to the family of Vedic religious traditions. Some modern Hindus prefer the name “Vedic religion” or sanatana dharma (“eternal law”) rather than the label Hinduism.