Francis X. Clooney - Böcker

Hindu God, Christian God offers an in-depth study of key themes common to the Hindu and Christian religious traditions. It redefines how we think about Hinduism, comparative study, and Christian theology. This book offers a bold new look at how the two traditions encounter one another, and how comparisons can be made between the two. Redefining theology as an interreligious, comparative, dialogical, and confessional practice open to people of all traditions, it invites not only Hindus and Christians, but also theologians from all religious traditions, to enter into conversation with one another.

The Virgin Mary has long been the object of both devotional and scholarly interest, and recent years have seen a proliferation of studies on Hindu goddess-worship traditions. Despite the parallels between the two, however, no one has yet undertaken a book-length comparison of these traditions. In Divine Mother, Blessed Mother, Francis Clooney offers the first extended comparative study of Hindu goddesses and the Virgin Mary. Clooney is almost unique in the field of Hindu studies as a Christian theologian with the linguistic and philosophical expertise necessary to produce sophisticated comparative analyses. Building on his previous work in comparative theology, he sheds new light not only on these individual traditions but also on the nature of gender and the divine.

Where Advaita Vedānta, sacred text, and comparative theology meet—truth emerges through the act of reading itself.What does it mean to read a sacred text so carefully that it changes the reader? In this ambitious and deeply learned work, Francis X. Clooney, S.J., offers an exploration of Advaita Vedānta not as a set of abstract doctrines, but as a disciplined practice of reading—one that forms truth, theology, and the theologian together within the texture of the text itself.Moving through the Upaniṣads, Śaṅkara’s commentaries, and the Uttara Mīmāṃsā Sūtras, Clooney reveals Advaita as a living, rigorously argued tradition in which meaning emerges through sustained engagement, debate, and commentary. Truth, he argues, is not grasped outside the text or prior to it, but arises after the text—through the transformative participation of a trained and desiring reader. By attending closely to textual structure, reasoning strategies, and interpretive practices, this book reorients how Advaita Vedānta is understood and studied.The final chapters extend this insight into a bold experiment in comparative theology, placing Advaita Vedānta and Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae into sustained conversation. Rejecting both superficial comparison and detached theory, Clooney models a form of theological "neighborliness" grounded in fidelity to texts and traditions. The result is a compelling vision of comparative theology as an educational, ethical, and spiritual practice—one that reshapes how truth, doctrine, and interreligious understanding are pursued today.

Examines texts and commentaries in the Tamil-language SArivastradition of South India; about the general issues of text, vision, and narrative that such texts raise, and about the implications of these for a particular style of comparative theology.Seeing through Texts invites us into the world of south Indian Hinduism through a study of 100 songs of the Tiruvāymoli, the great masterpiece of the ninth-century Hindu saint Saṭkōpan. These unique songs, dedicated to the Hindu god Viṣṇu/Kṛṣṇa, lead us through poetic and imaginative, philosophical and moral reflections on the nature of the self and the world, ancient myths and temple worship, and the mystical moods of longing, desire, and love in which one seeks, loses, and finds again the God who loves us first. The book is also a study of the interpretation of the Tiruvāymoli in the traditional Hindu Śrivaiṣṇava commentaries of the twelfth-fourteenth centuries, as well as a comparative theological study which explores the implication of the songs and their commentaries for readers from outside the Śrivaiṣṇava tradition.

His Hiding Place is Darkness explores the uncertainties of faith and love in a pluralistic age. In keeping with his conviction that studying multiple religious traditions intensifies rather than attenuates religious devotion, Francis Clooney's latest work of comparative theology seeks a way beyond today's religious and interreligious uncertainty by pairing a fresh reading of the absence of the beloved in the Biblical Song of Songs with a pioneering study of the same theme in the Holy Word of Mouth (9th century CE), a classic of Hindu mystical poetry rarely studied in the West.Remarkably, the pairing of these texts is grounded not in a general theory of religion, but in an engagement with two unexpected sources: the theopoetics, theodramatics, and theology of the 20th-century Catholic theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar, and the intensely perceived and written poetry of Pulitzer Prize winner Jorie Graham. How we read and write on religious matters is transformed by this rare combination of voices in what is surely a unique and important contribution to comparative studies and religious hermeneutics.

His Hiding Place is Darkness explores the uncertainties of faith and love in a pluralistic age. In keeping with his conviction that studying multiple religious traditions intensifies rather than attenuates religious devotion, Francis Clooney's latest work of comparative theology seeks a way beyond today's religious and interreligious uncertainty by pairing a fresh reading of the absence of the beloved in the Biblical Song of Songs with a pioneering study of the same theme in the Holy Word of Mouth (9th century CE), a classic of Hindu mystical poetry rarely studied in the West.Remarkably, the pairing of these texts is grounded not in a general theory of religion, but in an engagement with two unexpected sources: the theopoetics, theodramatics, and theology of the 20th-century Catholic theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar, and the intensely perceived and written poetry of Pulitzer Prize winner Jorie Graham. How we read and write on religious matters is transformed by this rare combination of voices in what is surely a unique and important contribution to comparative studies and religious hermeneutics.

We live in an era of unprecedented growth in knowledge. Never before has there been so great an availability of and access to information in both print and online. Yet as opportunities to educate ourselves have greatly increased, our time for reading has significantly diminished. And when we do read, we rarely have the patience to read in the slow, sustained fashion that great books require if we are to be truly transformed by them. In Reading the Hindu and Christian Classics, renowned Harvard Divinity School professor Francis Clooney argues that our increasing inability to read in a concerted manner is particularly notable in the realm of religion, where the proliferation of information detracts from the learning of practices that require slow and patient reading. Although awareness of the world’s many religions is at an all-time high, deep knowledge of the various traditions has suffered. Clooney challenges this trend by considering six classic Hindu and Christian texts dealing with ritual and law, catechesis and doctrine, and devotion and religious participation, showing how, in distinctive ways, such texts instruct, teach truth, and draw willing readers to participate in the realities they are learning. Through readings of these seminal scriptural and theological texts, he reveals the rewards of a more spiritually transformative mode of reading—and how individuals and communities can achieve it.

For a generation and more, the contribution of Christian theology to interreligious understanding has been a subject of debate. Some think of theological perspectives are of themselves inherently too narrow to support interreligious learning, and argue for an approach that is neutral or, on a more popular level, grounded simply open-minded direct experience. In response, comparative theology argues that theology, as faith seeking understanding, offers a vital perspective and a way of advancing interreligious dialogue, aided rather than hindered by commitments; theological perspectives can both complement and step beyond the study of religions by methods detached and merely neutral. Thus comparative theology has been successful in persuading many that interreligious learning from one faith perspective to another is both possible and worthwhile, and so the work of comparative theology has become more recognized and established globally. With this success there has come to the fore new challenges regarding method: How does one do comparative theological work in a way that is theologically grounded, genuinely open to learning from the other, sophisticated in pursuing comparisons, and fruitful on both the academic and practical levels? How To Do Comparative Theology therefore contributes to the maturation of method in the field of comparative theological studies, learning across religious borders, by bringing together essays drawing on different Christian traditions of learning, Judaism and Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism, the wisdom of senior scholars, and also insights from a younger generation of scholars who have studied theology and religion in new ways, and are more attuned to the language of the "spiritual but not religious." The essays in this volume show great diversity in method, and also—over and again and from many angles—coherence in intent, a commitment to one learning from the other, and a confidence that one's home tradition benefits from fair and unhampered learning from other and very different spiritual and religious traditions. It therefore shows the diversity and coherence of comparative theology as an emerging discipline today.

For a generation and more, the contribution of Christian theology to interreligious understanding has been a subject of debate. Some think of theological perspectives are of themselves inherently too narrow to support interreligious learning, and argue for an approach that is neutral or, on a more popular level, grounded simply open-minded direct experience. In response, comparative theology argues that theology, as faith seeking understanding, offers a vital perspective and a way of advancing interreligious dialogue, aided rather than hindered by commitments; theological perspectives can both complement and step beyond the study of religions by methods detached and merely neutral. Thus comparative theology has been successful in persuading many that interreligious learning from one faith perspective to another is both possible and worthwhile, and so the work of comparative theology has become more recognized and established globally. With this success there has come to the fore new challenges regarding method: How does one do comparative theological work in a way that is theologically grounded, genuinely open to learning from the other, sophisticated in pursuing comparisons, and fruitful on both the academic and practical levels? How To Do Comparative Theology therefore contributes to the maturation of method in the field of comparative theological studies, learning across religious borders, by bringing together essays drawing on different Christian traditions of learning, Judaism and Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism, the wisdom of senior scholars, and also insights from a younger generation of scholars who have studied theology and religion in new ways, and are more attuned to the language of the "spiritual but not religious." The essays in this volume show great diversity in method, and also—over and again and from many angles—coherence in intent, a commitment to one learning from the other, and a confidence that one's home tradition benefits from fair and unhampered learning from other and very different spiritual and religious traditions. It therefore shows the diversity and coherence of comparative theology as an emerging discipline today.

Drawing upon the author’s three decades of work in comparative theology, this is a pertinent and comprehensive introduction to the field, which offers a clear guide to the reader, enabling them to engage in comparative study. The author has three decades of experience of work in the field of comparative theology and is ideally placed to write this bookToday’s increasing religious diversity makes this a pertinent and timely publicationUnique in the depth of its introduction and explanation of the discipline of ‘comparative theology’Provides examples of how comparative theology works in the new global context of human religiosityDraws on examples specific to Hindu-Christian studies to show how it is possible to understand more deeply the wider diversity around us.Clearly guides the reader, enabling them to engage in comparative study

Drawing upon the author’s three decades of work in comparative theology, this is a pertinent and comprehensive introduction to the field, which offers a clear guide to the reader, enabling them to engage in comparative study. The author has three decades of experience of work in the field of comparative theology and is ideally placed to write this bookToday’s increasing religious diversity makes this a pertinent and timely publicationUnique in the depth of its introduction and explanation of the discipline of ‘comparative theology’Provides examples of how comparative theology works in the new global context of human religiosityDraws on examples specific to Hindu-Christian studies to show how it is possible to understand more deeply the wider diversity around us.Clearly guides the reader, enabling them to engage in comparative study