BY RICHA KARMARKAR
NEW YORK (RNS) — At a Sunday morning service on Sunday (Feb. 4), a priest gave a sermon, a choir sang devotional hymns and a congregation bowed heads in a joint prayer.
It was a typical Sunday for these faithful New Yorkers. Yet rather than a church, this service took place at a spiritual home meant for believers under any name, from Christians to Hindus to self-professed “truth-seekers.”
The Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Center of New York, built for the revered Indian monastic who brought the interfaith teachings of Vedantic Hinduism to America and his guru, is the gathering place for devotees of his philosophy, which accepts every faith as a “valid means for its own followers to realize the Truth.”
“Swami Vivekananda redeemed religion for us,” said Swami Yuktatmananda, a monk of the Ramakrishna Order and the current spiritual head of the center, in his sermon. “He made religion
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