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Names: Clooney, Francis X. (Francis Xavier), 1950- honouree. | Takacs, Axel M. Oaks, editor. | Kimmel, Joseph L., editor.
Title: The Wiley Blackwell companion to comparative theology : a festschrift in honor of Francis X. Clooney, SJ / edited by Axel M. Oaks Takacs, Joseph L. Kimmel.
Description: Hoboken, NJ, USA : Wiley-Blackwell, 2024. | Series: The Wiley Blackwell companions to religion | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2023010337 (print) | LCCN 2023010338 (ebook) | ISBN 9781394160570 (hardback) | ISBN 9781394160594 (adobe pdf) | ISBN 9781394160587 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Religion–Study and teaching. | Clooney, Francis X. (Francis Xavier), 1950—Knowledge and learning.
Set in 9.5/12pt Photina MT Std by Straive, Pondicherry, India
Part II The spirituality, Vocation, and Formation of the Comparative
8 “The One Who Prays Is a (Comparative) Theologian”: The Spirituality of Francis X. Clooney’s Comparative Method 79
Christopher Conway
9 Settling the Seer: “Deep Learning” and the Yoga of Slowness
Michelle Bentsman
10 Comparative Theology Embodied: The Mentorship, Methodology, and Ministry of Francis X. Clooney
Katie Mahowski Mylroie
11 Performance and Engagement: Reconsidering Religious Experience in Contemporary Comparative Theology
Reid B. Locklin
12 A Fowlerian Perspective on the Faith of the Comparativist
Erik Ranstrom
13 Comparative Theology as Process Not Conclusion: Francis Clooney on the Proper Formation of Comparative Theological Readers
John J. Thatamanil
14 Comparing Jesuits: Roberto de Nobili, Henri de Lubac, and Francis X. Clooney
James Fredericks
15 Francis X. Clooney, SJ: Jesuit, Scholar, Missionary
Christian S. Krokus
16 The Ignatian Tradition and the Intellectual Virtues of a Comparative Theologian 162 Peng Yin
17 Wonder Grasps Anything: Punctuation and Patristic Theology in the Early Colonial Philippines
Maria Cecilia Holt
18 The Interpretation of Scripture in the Comparative Theology of Francis X. Clooney
Leo D. Lefebure
19 “Good Dark Love Birds, Will You Help?”: Comparative Reflections on Clooney’s His Hiding Place Is Darkness
Kimberley C. Patton
20 “Paradoxology”: The Srīvaisnava Art of Praising Visnu
Vasudha Narayanan
21 Hymns on Mary in Hindu–Muslim–Christian Dialogue
Klaus von Stosch
22 Mary and Motherhood – A Comparatively Informed Reconsideration
Mara Brecht
23 Transformational Liberation in the Age of COVID-19: A Comparative Theology of “the Good Woman”
Tracy Sayuki Tiemeier
24 And the Angels Wept: How Jewish and Hindu Narratives May Enrich Each Other
Arvind Sharma
25 Modification, Emanation, and Parinama-Vada in Medieval Theistic Vedanta and Kabbalah
Ithamar Theodor
26 Advancing the Ritual-Liturgical Turn in Comparative Theology: Good Friday as a Case Study
Daniel Joslyn-Siemiatkoski
27 Creative Fidelity in Expanding the Canon
Scott Steinkerchner, OP and Martin Badenhorst, OP
28 Slow Reading of Beautiful Writing: Calligraphy as Vehicle for Comparative Theology
Lucinda Mosher
29 Joy in the Earth: A Christian Cosmology Based on Agapic Nondualism
Jon Paul Sydnor
30 Perceiving Divinity, Cultivating Wonder: A Christian–Islamic Comparative Theological Essay on Balthasar’s Gestalt
Axel M. Oaks Takacs
31 Paradoxes of Desire in St John of the Cross and Solomon ibn Gabirol: Thinking with Poetry in Comparative Theology
Luis Manuel Girón-Negrón
32 Locating the Self in the Study of Religion: Francis Clooney and the Experiment of Hindu–Christian Studies
Jonathan Edelmann
33 Learning Interreligiously as Public Theology: Limits and Possibilities for Institutional Leaders
Michelle Voss Roberts
34 Comparative Theology and Public Theology: In Search of a Responsible Theology Today
Albertus Bagus Laksana
35 God Meets Us There: Prison as True Home for the Christian Comparative Theologian
Mark J. Edwards
Marianne Moyaert 37 Asking an Unusual Question of Kabir and Kazi Nazrul Islam
Rachel Fell McDermott
38 Comparative Theology avant la lettre? A Muslim “Deep Reading” of the Rāmāyana in Early Modern South Asia
Shankar Nair
39 Creativity and Resistance in Comparative Theology: Lessons from Eighteenth-Century Korea
Won-Jae Hur
40 In Praise of Artisans: Ramon Marti, Georges Anawati, and the Importance of Languages
Wilhelmus Valkenberg
41 Lectio Divina and Comparative Reading in the History of Christian–Muslim Encounters
Rita George-Tvrtkovic
42 Vicarious Voyage: What Difference Does Comparative Theology Make for Theology?
S. Mark Heim
43 Is There or Shall We Need a “Home” for Comparative Theologies? A Ru (Confucian) Response to Francis X. Clooney
Bin Song
44 Comparative Theology After Clooney
Hugh Nicholson
List of Contributors
Martin Badenhorst, OP, STL, St. Augustine College of South Africa. Martin lectures in Scripture, ecumenism, and interreligious dialogue. His special interest is in the development of the canon in the Second Temple Period.
Michelle Bentsman, MDiv, Harvard University. Michelle is a doctoral candidate in comparative religion specializing in song healing rituals. Her primary traditions of study and practice are Judaism, Hinduism, and indigenous Amazonian Shipibo.
Mara Brecht, PhD, Loyola University Chicago. Mara is a Catholic theologian and a feminist. Her primary research interest is in Christian faith formation in various contexts of diversity including religious, racial, and philosophical.
John B. Carman, PhD, served as the director of the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard Divinity School from 1973 to 1989 and is the emeritus Parkman Professor of Divinity at HDS. His scholarly focus has included Hindu traditions, comparative theology, and Christianity in South Asia.
Bennett DiDente Comerford recently completed his PhD in the Committee on the Study of Religion at Harvard University.
Christopher Conway, PhD, College of Saint Benedict and Saint John’s University. Chris is a comparative theologian focusing on spirituality and devotion in Hindu and Christian traditions.
Catherine Cornille, PhD. Catherine is a professor of comparative theology at Boston College where she holds the Newton College Alumnae Chair of Western Culture. She is the founding editor of the series Christian Commentaries on Non-Christian Sacred Texts.
Jonathan Edelmann, PhD, University of Florida. Jonathan is an assistant professor in the Department of Religion. He has published in the areas of Hindu studies, Indology, and science and religion.
Mark J. Edwards, PhD, is a lecturer in religion at Princeton University, an adjunct professor at Princeton Theological Seminary and The College of New Jersey, and on staff at the Nassau Presbyterian Church in Princeton, New Jersey. He is the author of Christ Is Time: The Gospel According to Karl Barth (and the Red Hot Chili Peppers) (Cascade Books, 2022).
James Fredericks, PhD, Reverend, Loyola Marymount University. Jim is a specialist in Buddhist–Christian dialogue and comparative theology. He and Francis Clooney lived in Gerald Manley Hopkins Hall as graduate students at the University of Chicago.
Rita George-Tvrtković, PhD, Benedictine University. Rita is a Catholic historical theologian specializing in medieval and contemporary Muslim–Christian relations. She was appointed by Pope Francis to be a consultor for the Vatican’s Dicastery for Interreligious Dialogue.
Luis Manuel Girón-Negrón, PhD, Harvard University. Luis is a historian of religions and a comparative literature scholar with expertise on the cultural archives of Jews, Christians, and Muslims in medieval and early modern Iberia.
William A. Graham, PhD, is the Murray A. Albertson Professor of Middle Eastern Studies and University Distinguished Service Professor, emeritus, at Harvard University, and he served as the dean of Harvard Divinity School from 2002 to 2012. His scholarly focus has been Islamic and comparative religious studies.
Ruben L.F. Habito, DLittC, STL, Perkins School of Theology, Southern Methodist University. Ruben teaches interfaith studies, comparative theology, and spirituality, and serves as guiding teacher of the Maria Kannon Zen Center, Dallas, Texas. He previously taught Buddhist philosophy at Sophia University in Tokyo, Japan.
S. Mark Heim, PhD, is the Samuel Abbot Professor of Christian Theology at Andover Newton Seminary at Yale Divinity School. He has written extensively on theology and religious pluralism. His books include Salvations: Truth and Difference in Religion (Orbis Books, 1995), Saved From Sacrifice: A Theology of the Cross (Eerdmans, 2006), and Crucified Wisdom: Christ and the Bodhisattva in Theological Reflection (Fordham University Press, 2018).
Maria Cecilia Holt, ThD, Harvard Divinity School. Maria has been active in the preservation and promotion of the works of James Purdy and Anne Blonstein. From 2015 to 2019 she assisted James Purdy’s literary executor, John Uecker, in the fulfillment of Purdy’s desire to have his ashes buried by the grave of Dame Edith Sitwell. As part of Holt’s explorations of kairos and grief, Holt has worked with experimental playwrights, translators, and directors at, among others, the Alexandrinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg, Russia (2021), and the Grand National Theatre in Groningen, Netherlands (2023). Holt is currently involved in a collaborative project in comparative literature based at the University of Copenhagen.
Won-Jae Hur, PhD, is an assistant professor of comparative theology in the Theology Department at Xavier University. His research focuses on Indo-Tibetan Buddhist–Christian comparative theology, theology of bodies, and theories and practices of contemplation.
Daniel Joslyn-Siemiatkoski, PhD, Boston College. Dan is an Anglican comparative theologian specializing in Jewish–Christian comparative theology. He is the Kraft Family Professor and director of the Center for Christian-Jewish Learning at Boston College.
Joseph L. Kimmel, PhD, Harvard University and Boston College. Joseph recently completed his PhD at Harvard University (Study of Religion). His scholarly interests reside at the intersection of early Christianity, Indo-Tibetan Buddhism, comparative religion/theology, and posthumanism. He is currently a part-time faculty member at Boston College and serves as an Episcopal priest.
Christian S. Krokus, PhD, University of Scranton. Krokus is a professor in the Department of Theology/Religious Studies, where he teaches and writes about Catholic–Muslim comparative theology and spirituality.
Albertus Bagus Laksana, SJ, PhD, Sanata Dharma University. Laksana is a Jesuit priest and theologian, currently serving as president of Sanata Dharma University in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. He received his PhD in comparative theology from Boston College (2011) with a focus on Muslim–Christian encounters.
Leo D. Lefebure, PhD, Georgetown University. Lefebure is the inaugural holder of the Matteo Ricci, SJ, Chair of Theology at Georgetown University and the author of the award-winning Transforming Interreligious Relations: Catholic Responses to Religious Pluralism in the United States (Orbis Books, 2020). He is the past president of the Society for Buddhist-Christian Studies, a research fellow of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and a trustee emeritus of the Council for a Parliament of the World’s Religions.
Nougoutna Norbert Litoing, MA, Harvard University. A Jesuit priest from Cameroon, Nougoutna is completing a PhD in the study of religion at Harvard University in the field of comparative theology, researching on Muslim and Catholic pilgrimage practices in Senegal.
Reid B. Locklin, PhD, University of Toronto. Reid is an associate professor of Christianity and culture at St. Michael’s College and the Department for the Study of Religion, University of Toronto. He publishes on contemporary comparative theology, the nondualist Hindu tradition of Advaita Vedanta, and the scholarship of teaching and learning.
Katie Mahowski Mylroie, PhD candidate, Boston College. Katie is a Catholic comparative theologian working with Hindu and Christian liberation theologies, particularly in the intersection of ecological and feminist analyses.
Rachel Fell McDermott, Phd, is a professor of Asian and Middle Eastern cultures at Barnard College. Her research interests focus on Bengal. She has published extensively on the Hindu goddess-centered religious traditions from that part of the subcontinent and is now involved in a research project on Kazi Nazrul Islam, both the “rebel poet” of India and the national poet of Bangladesh.
Lucinda Mosher, ThD, Hartford International University for Religion and Peace. Lucinda is an Episcopal moral and comparative theologian who has authored or edited some twenty books on multireligious concerns. She is also the senior editor of the Journal of Interreligious Studies and the rapporteur for the Building Bridges Seminar.
Marianne Moyaert, PhD, Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies, KU Leuven. Marianne is a Catholic comparative theologian and interreligious studies scholar specializing in Christian–Jewish relations. She has a special interest in the material and ritual dimensions of interreligious relations. She is also the editor-in-chief of the Brill series, Currents of Encounter.
Shankar Nair, PhD, University of Virginia. Nair’s general field of interest is the religious and intellectual history of South Asia, including broader traditions of Sufism and Islamic philosophy, Qur’anic exegesis, and Hindu philosophy and theology. His research centers on Muslim–Hindu interactions and the encounter between Arabic, Sanskrit, and Persian intellectual cultures in early modern (Mughal) South Asia.
Vasudha Narayanan, PhD, is Distinguished Professor, Department of Religion, at the University of Florida and a past president of the American Academy of Religion. She is the author or editor of several books and numerous articles, chapters in books, and encyclopedia entries. Her research has been supported by grants and fellowships from many organizations, including the Center for Khmer Studies, the American Council of Learned Societies, the John Simon Guggenheim
Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Institute of Indian Studies/ Smithsonian, and the Social Science Research Council. She is currently working on the Hindu traditions in the United States and on a book focusing on the importance of the churning of the ocean of milk story in Cambodia. She was recently elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Hugh Nicholson, PhD, is a professor of comparative religion at Loyola University, Chicago. He is the author of Comparative Theology and the Problem of Religious Rivalry (Oxford University Press, 2011), The Spirit of Contradiction in Christianity and Buddhism (Oxford University Press, 2016), and Buddhism, Cognitive Science, and the Doctrine of Selflessness: A Revolution in Our Self-Conception (Routledge, 2023).
Kimberley C. Patton, PhD, is a professor of the comparative and historical study of religion at Harvard Divinity School. Her research focuses on the religions, archaeology, and material cultures of the ancient Mediterranean. Additionally, her work engages the challenges of the comparative study of religious themes across cultures. She and her colleague in comparative theology, Francis X. Clooney, SJ, co-chair the doctoral program in comparative studies in the Committee on the Study of Religion at Harvard University. Her book Religion of the Gods: Ritual, Paradox, and Reflexivity (Oxford University Press, 2009) won the 2010 American Academy of Religion Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion in the Analytical-Descriptive Studies category. Her most recent book is the edited volume Gemini and the Sacred: Twins and Twinship in Religion and Mythology (Bloomsbury Academic, 2023).
Erik Ranstrom, PhD, Fairfield University. Erik’s current research interests are moving toward the intersection of contemplative studies and theological reflection in dialogue with psychological and recovery perspectives. He has also published on the thoughts of Raimon Panikkar.
Pravina Rodrigues, PhD, Jesuit School of Theology of Santa Clara University. Pravina is a Hindu–Christian comparative theologian and interreligious studies scholar. She specializes in theology and ethics, Śākta studies, yoga, ecowomanism, and sustainability. She is the associate editor of the Journal of Dharma Studies (Springer) and the assistant editor of a 34-chapter volume at the intersection of ecology and religion titled Religion and Sustainability: Interreligious Resources, Interdisciplinary Responses (Springer, 2022).
Arvind Sharma, PhD, McGill University. Arvind is the Birks Professor of Comparative Religion in the School of Religious Studies at McGill University, where he has taught for over 35 years. He has published extensively in the fields of comparative religion, Indian religions, and women in religion.
Jason W. Smith, ThD, Mercer University. Smith is an assistant professor of religion at Mercer University in Macon, Georgia. His research focuses on the relationship between religion and literature in Tamil-speaking South India.
Bin Song, PhD, Washington College. Bin works on Asian and comparative philosophy, religion, and philosophy. He is the past president of the North American Paul Tillich Society and the co-chair of the Confucian Traditions Unit at the American Academy of Religion.
Scott Steinkerchner, PhD, OP. Scott is a comparative theologian and Catholic systematician who works across disparate thought systems. He is particularly interested in metaphysical questions within Tibetan Buddhism and Catholic Christianity.
Jon Paul Sydnor, PhD, Emmanuel College, Boston. Jon Paul is a progressive Christian theologian. He is currently developing a systematic theology based on agapic nondualism, utilizing Hindu and Buddhist thought to inform a liberating social Trinitarianism.
Axel M. Oaks Takacs, ThD, Molloy University. Axel is a Catholic comparative theologian with expertise in Islamic studies and interreligious studies. He specializes in Arabic and Persian classical and postclassical Islamic intellectual, poetic, and commentarial traditions. His research focuses on theological aesthetics, theopoetics, and theologies of the imagination and revelation. In addition, he teaches in the areas of religious pluralism, Islamophobia, race and religion, and historical and contemporary Catholic theologies of Islam. He is also the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Interreligious Studies
John J. Thatamanil, PhD, is a professor of theology and world religions at Union Theological Seminary, New York. He is the author, most recently, of Circling the Elephant: A Comparative Theology of Religious Diversity (Fordham University Press, 2020).
Ithamar Theodor, PhD, Zefat Academic College. Theodor is an associate professor of Hindu studies at Zefat Academic College, Safed, Israel. His publications include Exploring the Bhagavad Gītā: Philosophy, Structure and Meaning (Routledge, 2010), Brahman and Dao: Comparative Studies in Indian and Chinese Philosophy and Religion (Lexington Books, 2014), The “Fifth Veda” in Hinduism: Philosophy, Poetry and Devotion in the Bhāgavata Purāna (Bloomsbury Academic, 2016), Dharma and Halacha: Comparative Studies in Hindu–Jewish Philosophy and Religion (Lexington Books, 2018), and The Bhagavad-Gītā: A Critical Introduction (Routledge, 2021).
Tracy Sayuki Tiemeier, PhD, Loyola Marymount University. Tracy is a comparative theologian who focuses on gender in Asian and Asian American theology and (inter)religious contexts. She is also the Catholic co-chair of the Los Angeles Hindu-Catholic Dialogue.
Wilhelmus Valkenberg, PhD, The Catholic University of America, Washington DC. Pim studied theology and religious studies in the Netherlands. He specializes in Christian–Muslim dialogue and comparative theology.
Klaus von Stosch, ThD, Bonn University. Klaus is Schlegel Professor for Catholic systematic theology and head of the International Center for Comparative Theology and Social Issues. His areas of research include comparative theology, faith and reason, problem of evil, Christian theology responsive to Islam (especially Christology), and theology of the Trinity.
Michelle Voss Roberts, PhD, Emmanuel College, Toronto School of Theology. Michelle is a comparative theologian who works in Christian and Hindu traditions. Her teaching and research explore how the particularities of embodiment – such as gender, racialization, dis/ability, and culture – matter religiously.
Peng Yin, PhD, is an assistant professor of ethics at Boston University School of Theology. He is completing a manuscript tentatively entitled Persisting in the Good: Thomas Aquinas and Classical Chinese Ethics.
Preface
It is a privilege for us to join in this large volume of tributes to our friend and colleague, Francis X. Clooney, SJ. All the contributors are in some sense colleagues in scholarship. The two of us have also been Clooney’s institutional colleagues at Harvard Divinity School (HDS), each in a distinctive way. John Carman was Clooney’s predecessor as Parkman Professor of Divinity and as director of the Center for the Study of World Religions (CSWR); he also shares Clooney’s interest in Christian exploration of the Srivaishnava tradition. Bill Graham was the HDS dean who initiated the invitation to Clooney to join the Divinity Faculty and later asked him to serve as director of the CSWR; his specialization and interests are different from Clooney’s, but he, like John, shares with him a commitment to comparative studies in the history of religion.
Francis Clooney’s contributions in his time at Harvard Divinity School have been many, not least his resolute devotion to serious interfaith engagement in his scholarship and teaching. As a teacher he has inspired a new generation of HDS graduate students by his own work and its challenge to engage in comparative theological thinking. His deft hand with textual analysis and comparison has been an earmark of his classes every term that he has taught Harvard students. His commitment to dealing honestly and openly with Indian scholars in exploring Srivaishnava texts and thought has kept him returning to India when not teaching so as to remain in direct contact and conversation with these scholars.
As director of the CSWR for seven years, Clooney devoted himself to continuing and building on its first half-century of comparative programs and training as the sole dedicated research center located primarily at the Divinity School. His organizing of sessions bringing outstanding outside scholars to interact with and inspire Harvard students and faculty was notable, as were special initiatives such as his sponsorship of substantial evening discussions of new publications by his Harvard colleagues with scholars both inside and outside the university. His tenure was further marked by his welcoming of interested HDS colleagues to occupy offices in the CSWR and especially by his attentiveness to involving students in the life and scholarly activity of the center.
It is unusual at HDS to have a professor who continues and expands the scholarly interests of his predecessor in an endowed chair, but as John Carman’s successor in the Parkman chair, Clooney has done just that, notably in his focus on both Tamil and Sanskrit texts, his work on the Srivaishnava tradition, and his comparative theological concerns.
Clooney’s scholarship can be seen to fall into three general areas. In the first, he has contributed to the modern study of Vedic ritual, to the understanding of the most influential interpretation of the Upanishads (Sankara’s Advaita Vedanta), and to the theistic interpretation of both the Vedanta and Vaishnava temple rituals. This work has required the reading of both Sanskrit and Tamil texts as well as works in the mixed language of Manipravalam.
Clooney’s second area of scholarship is smaller, but it is an important link to the third. This is a review of the studies of Indian culture and religion by Jesuit missionaries, especially the pioneer missionary Roberto de Nobili, who adopted the lifestyle of a Hindu ascetic. While Clooney is not a proselytizer, he has honored the scholarly work of those who were, and his own Indological path has included a Jesuit lifestyle and a Catholic pastoral vocation.
Clooney’s third area of scholarship is what has attracted the interest and admiration of most of those contributing to this volume. He has developed and encouraged a new form of comparative theology. It is based on the parallel reading of Hindu and Roman Catholic texts, and it challenges the increasing secularization of cross-cultural religious studies in Western scholarship. His comparisons began with his own intuitive connections between Christian commentaries on the Song of Songs and Tamil Vaishnava commentaries on the poetry of the Alvars in which the usually male poet takes the female role of lover-worshiper of Lord Vishnu. For the last decade or more, Clooney has spent much time and effort encouraging many scholars with various religious backgrounds and interests to develop their own comparative theologies. A common feature is the great respect accorded to the other tradition being studied, including its approach to its own history.
We are happy to join our colleagues in recognizing Francis Clooney’s multiple scholarly achievements and their ongoing influence. The many contributions in this large volume are all clear testimonies to those achievements and to their influence.
John B. Carman and William A. Graham
Acknowledgments
The editors would like to thank the contributing authors of this Festschrift for their eager participation in this project, along with the staff at Wiley Blackwell for their exemplary efforts over many months to bring this volume to fruition.
Introduction
Axel M. Oaks Takacs and Joseph L. Kimmel
When the sincere disciple enters under obedience of the shaykh, keeping his company and learning his manners, a spiritual state flows from within the shaykh to within the disciple, like one lamp lighting another. The speech of the shaykh inspires the interior of the disciple, so that the shaykh’s words become the treasury of spiritual states. The state is transferred from the shaykh to the disciple by keeping company and by hearing speech.
Shihāb al-Dīn Abū Hafs ʿUmar al-Suhrawardī (d. 1234) (ʿAwārif al-Maʿārif, Vol. 1, p. 252)
Francis X. Clooney, SJ, and the Discipline of Comparative Theology
Ascribed to a highly influential, thirteenth-century Persian Sufi, this quote concerns the relationship between the disciple and the teacher (shaykh) in the specific context of Sufism. In this tradition, the inculcation of Islamic spiritual and embodied disciplines and knowledges guides the wayfarer toward greater taqwā, that is, greater consciousness and cognizance of God, along a series of mystical stations (maqām) punctuated by spiritual states (hāl). In practice, Suhrawardī is underscoring the consensus opinion among many Sufis in the Islamic classical and postclassical period, namely, that rarely can the wayfarer successfully travel the spiritual path (t arīqa) without the guidance of someone who has journeyed along it already.1 More generally, this passage demonstrates how experience and knowledge are passed on from one to another, “like one lamp lighting another.”
Francis X. Clooney, SJ, would likely not consent to being likened to a Sufi shaykh, of course. Indeed, doing so decontextualizes conceptions of Sufi authority. However, the analogy Suhrawardī employs can be extended to the relationship between Clooney, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the discipline of comparative theology along with the various scholars (theologians, scholars of religion, South Asian studies scholars, and more) who have learned from him and his innovative and deeply attentive scholarship. His teaching, scholarship, and mentorship throughout the past 50 years have lit many candles, from St. Xavier’s High School in Kathmandu (where he taught English for his Jesuit regency) to Harvard Divinity School (HDS) in Cambridge, Massachusetts (where he remains the Parkman Professor of Divinity and Professor of Comparative Theology).
From 1973 to 2023, Clooney has kept the company of students, scholars, and parishioners. After earning his BA from Fordham, his MDiv from Weston School of Theology, and his PhD in South Asian Languages and Civilizations from the University of Chicago, Clooney began his university teaching career at Boston College before moving over to HDS; he likewise served as academic director of the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies (Oxford University) and the director of the Center for the Study of World Religions (HDS). At these various institutions, he mentored dozens of doctoral students as either primary dissertation adviser or reader for projects concerning comparative theology, theology of religions, South Asian studies, Indology, Hindu studies, and comparative religion, and advised still more master’s degree students. Moreover, let us not forget that he has also served as a parish priest throughout his career and is currently an associate priest at Our Lady of Sorrows Church in Sharon, Massachusetts, where he no doubt offers pastoral guidance shaped by his deep learning in the Catholic faith in conversation with other religious traditions.
However, it is the discipline of comparative theology – and specifically confessional comparative theology (Cornille 2020, p. 18) – where Clooney’s impact and lasting legacy is most strongly felt. When he began teaching at the Theology Department of Boston College in 1984, Clooney recounts how some were still of the position that the disciplines of theology and the study of religion were sharply distinct in their focus and even stood in opposition to one another. Yet, he considered himself “both a theologian and a scholar of Hinduism” (Clooney 2010b, p. 19); he was doing Catholic theology through a “double learning” (p. 19) with the classical Hindu traditions. His work was theological and comparative. While there are many scholars and disciplinary trends related to comparative theology or offering methods and goals differing from Clooney’s style of confessional comparative theology (meta-confessional comparative theology comes to mind; Cornille 2020, p. 25), nearly all engage his scholarship either constructively or critically. Hence, we can safely say that Clooney’s place in the history of theology, comparative theology, and the study of religion has been securely established for generations to come.
For decades scholars have preceded “the discipline of comparative theology” with the qualifiers, “the burgeoning” or “the emerging” or “the young.” However, we can confidently aver, with S. Mark Heim in his “Comparative Theology at Twenty-Five: The End of the Beginning,” that comparative theology “has grown to have a distinct status within both theological and religious studies scholarship” and that “the questions and the substance of comparative theology have become a permanent feature of theology itself” (Heim 2019, p. 180). Indeed, many hundreds of articles about comparative theology or doing comparative theology have been published in journals dedicated to the study of religion, such as, inter alia, the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, to ones dedicated to theology, such as Modern Theology and Theological Studies, and to those straddling both fields, such as Buddhist–Christian Studies, Journal of Hindu–Christian Studies, Islam and Christian–Muslim Relations, Interreligious Studies and Intercultural Theology, and Journal of Interreligious Studies. The number of books dedicated to comparative theology is likewise impressive, too many to list here. Indeed, we no longer need to precede “comparative theology” with adjectives denoting its infancy; the discipline is thoroughly in its adulthood, or at least in its adolescence (Moreland 2022), as it continues to grow in creative ways.
Within the discipline of theology, be it narrowly Catholic, broadly Christian, or generally of any religious tradition, it is becoming increasingly difficult to justify doing theology while restricting oneself to a single discursive religious tradition, however defined. Within the Christian traditions, the integration of comparative theology into systematics, theological ethics, constructive theology, fundamental theology, and other branches, as well as into the various contextual and liberation theologies, is becoming a disciplinary imperative. This is the case even if it remains a messy task and even if the discipline is at times marginalized from ecclesial or other religious communities and their institutions. Furthermore, we are at a point in the study of religion and interreligious
studies where we can unequivocally state that all religious traditions have been interreligious and intercultural; religious communities and indigenous societies, theologians (of the elite), and the subaltern (of lived religion) have always – if only implicitly – been comparative thinkers, if not theologians (Takacs 2022). Whether it is hybridity and syncretism, or the mestiza/nepantla theory of Gloria Anzaldúa, or Homi Bhabha’s Third Space, or Mikhail Bakhtin’s proposal that all sociocultural and linguistic structures are a product of syncretism, or Kathryn Tanner’s Theories of Culture (1997) – we must ask ourselves, “when has theology ever not been interreligious and intercultural, and thus comparative theology?” Today’s comparative theologians are arguably performing explicitly what their predecessors – and human societies generally – have historically done implicitly.
This historical fact does not take away from the originality of Clooney’s comparative theology, a discipline that in the context of late twentieth-century Euro-American theology was certainly innovative and challenging. Indeed, arguments placing the discipline within the larger histories of theology and the study of religion – and within “the older comparative theology” – are often in response to the critiques comparative theology faced at its inception. In effect, some theologians argued (and some still do) that the discipline ignores the boundaries of tradition and is therefore outside of tradition. But the retort is simple: tradition has always been in interreligious and intercultural conversation, and boundaries have always been porous. To imagine otherwise is to reject how human societies and religious and cultural traditions mutually shape each other. Nonetheless, the discipline continues to receive other forms of critique and sometimes sharp censure. In a recent volume comprising seven essays from a colloquium that took place at the Faculty of Protestant Theology of the University of Geneva (Chalamet et al. 2021), Clooney (2021, pp. 113–175) responds directly to the perduring critiques of comparative theology, namely, that it is elite (and ignores lived religion), hegemonic in reading non-Christian religious traditions, apolitical and thus void of practical theological conclusions, not sufficiently theological, too subjective, ineffective in shaping confessional theology, lacking a unifying method and goal, and unclear of its relationship to theology of religions. Indeed, it is one of the few places – perhaps the only – in which one can find nearly all of Clooney’s systematic rebuttals to these critiques in a single publication (of course, he has responded piecemeal in his many articles throughout his career). These critiques inadvertently suggest that comparative theology is an accepted field of academic study precisely because many of the critiques can be applied to academic theology tout court.
Other scholars (many of whom are comparative theologians themselves and included in this volume) have critiqued the discipline generally – sometimes Clooney’s work specifically – from a postcolonial/decolonial and post-Holocaust perspective. Essays in the 2010 volume edited by Clooney, The New Comparative Theology: Interreligious Insights from the Next Generation, uncover the supersessionist, hegemonic, Orientalist, and colonial residue of comparative theology. In that volume, Nicholson, Joslyn-Siemiatkoski, Voss Roberts, and Sayuki Tiemeier, inter alia, sharpen the discipline of comparative theology through constructive critique. Elsewhere, Judith Gruber offers a more direct postcolonial critique of comparative theology (Gruber 2016) by noting how exercises in comparative theology often occlude hybridity and syncretism – common features among all religious traditions – by assuming fixed, reified boundaries between religions. Most recently, Sayuki Tiemeier has critically assessed the field in “White Christian Privilege and the Decolonization of Comparative Theology”: “Western academic comparative theology reinforces White Christian supremacy rather than subverting it. A full-scale decolonization of the field is necessary” (Sayuki Tiemeier 2021, p. 86). Drawing from An Yountae’s decolonial theory of religion and AfroCaribbean decolonial thinkers such as Édouard Glissant, Sayuki Tiemeier rightfully critiques Western comparative theology, but does not lose hope entirely. Comparative theology must “confront its colonial history and ongoing coloniality, self-divest and abandon its colonial self to the
abyss, align with the comparative cosmopolitical theology of colonized, creolized peoples, and commit to new ways of being in the world that prioritize relational solidarity and justice” (Sayuki Tiemeier 2021, p. 89). It must be noted that her critiques stand for any theology that privileges elite, White, Western voices over those of the subaltern. While comparative theology is surely past infancy, it still needs to be decolonized like all theological disciplines.
There are too many publications to address in this introduction and Paul Hedges summarizes many of the critiques with a question: “whether comparative theology is a subaltern voice or does it give space for subaltern voices, or is it simply a vehicle for main/malestream discourse and rhetoric?” (Hedges 2017, p. 22). Indeed, comparative theology may be “enmeshed in hegemonic and apologetic identity politics” (Cornille 2020, p. 67; emphasis added), but it is not essentially so. From a Christian perspective, Clooney’s innovative, confessional comparative theology remains promising because it has embedded within it the tools and mechanisms interreligiously and interculturally to redraw the boundaries of Christian identity and tradition through the careful study of non-Christian knowledges, themselves deposits of challenging truths. Sayuki Tiemeier herself notes the strengths of Clooney’s comparative theology even while she critiques it from a decolonial perspective: it attends to particularity and difference and resists constructive conclusions that merely “consume and instrumentalize others” (Sayuki Tiemeier 2021, p. 91). It does this while being attentive to the ways in which the Christian tradition has always been relational, dynamic, and mutable vis-à-vis local and global religious and cultural traditions – historically and presently (Takacs 2022). By incorporating a liberating praxis into exercises in comparative theology, the discipline becomes an ally in the work of liberation with the oppressed and marginalized. This is but one example of how comparative theologians have taken Clooney’s method and critically expanded and adjusted it in ways Clooney may not have anticipated, but surely would not contest (he would likely even be pleased with these new directions).
Institutionally, comparative theology has been integrated into many departments of theology and religious studies, divinity schools, and seminaries, along with their majors, minors, and graduate-level degrees from masters to doctoral. There is, of course, the original PhD program in comparative theology offered by the Department of Theology at Boston College. Alongside the other four areas of specialization, graduate students there can also minor in comparative theology. They have also integrated comparative theology into their undergraduate programming, from major to minor and the core in theology. Many other North American and European graduate programs in theology/religious studies now offer comparative theology as an area of specialization and/or require multireligious explorations of critical theological questions: Notre Dame, Georgetown, many of the Loyolas, Catholic University of America, the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, Emmanuel College of Victoria University (Toronto), Harvard Divinity School, Drew Theological School, Claremont School of Theology, Hartford International University for Religion and Peace, Duquesne University, and others, including several programs and faculties in Europe, such as Germany’s University of Bonn (International Center for Comparative Theology and Social Issues) and University of Paderborn (Center for Comparative Theology and Cultural Studies), Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam’s Faculty of Religion and Theology (which has a chair in comparative theology and hermeneutics of interreligious dialogue), KU Leuven’s Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies (which now hosts a comparative theology chair), inter alia.2 While it is true that most of these institutions are Catholic or Protestant, there is an increasing number of non-Christian theologians doing the work of comparative theology. We should continue to work for Christian institutional support of non-Christian confessional scholars and scholar-practitioners in their departments and schools. To that end, though, many faculty job listings now include “comparative theology” as a requirement or one area in which the posting is seeking to hire. Once
again, the integration of comparative theology into the academy is evident. Clooney and the Boston College program in comparative theology granted PhDs to many comparative theologians in the 1990s and 2000s; they, in turn, joined other institutions across the North American academy, and Clooney’s “deep learning across religious borders” spread, from teacher to disciple, now another teacher to other students, “like one lamp lighting another.”
Comparative Theology and Theological Scholarship and Education
Clooney was the 2022–2023 president of the Catholic Theological Society of America and so had the honor to set the theme for the 2022 Annual Convention: “Thinking Catholic Interreligiously.”
Consequently, many – if not most – papers across all program units were generally drawing from multiple religious traditions or were specifically exercises in comparative theology. The fruit of doing theology interreligiously was evident, and so we encourage readers to peruse the CTSA proceedings for that year (Brown 2022). However, it was the team plenary by Mara Brecht, Reid B. Locklin, and Stephanie Wong that skillfully offered the “state” of the discipline in this third decade of the twenty-first century: “Comparative Theology: Present Experience, Remembered Pasts, Imagined Futures.” They write, “the task we set for ourselves in this essay – as a collaborative effort of Gen X and Millennial theologians – is to think together about the question of generational change in comparative and interreligious theology in the Catholic Church” (Brecht et al. 2022, p. 43). Their essay is too rich and complex to summarize here. We bring attention to it only because, once again, despite sharp critiques leveled against comparative theology – or perhaps precisely because of these sharp critiques that in turn inspire constructive reimaginings – the discipline shaped by Clooney is blending with all theological discourses. It is becoming increasingly difficult to do theology without at least some attention given to the discourses and communities of nonChristian religious traditions.
Theologians must therefore bring together the discipline of comparative theology with what Christine Hong (2021) describes as the decolonial futuring of theological education and scholarship. Her book is not about comparative theology, but it certainly offers insights for a continued creative reimagining of the discipline. Hong sharply critiques Euro-American Christian models of learning that prioritize mastery and competency in theological education and scholarship. In Hong’s view, these learning aims discipline students into being colonial masters themselves, seeking at worst the control, classification, and subjugation of peoples, cultures, traditions, and religions, and at best their appropriation. To subvert these colonial models and imagine something new, she suggests “intercultural and interreligious intelligence” as an aim for theological education and scholarship. She defines this intelligence as an intellectual posture of curiosity, imagination, justice-oriented critical thinking, and humble modesty that nonetheless requires interreligious and intercultural proficiency and literacy as a baseline. Hong attends critically and constructively to the decolonial future of theological education and scholarship, and thus it need not be reproduced here. We bring it up only because Clooney’s comparative theology, marked by vulnerability and humility while remaining intellectually sharp, has the tools and mechanisms to incorporate this decolonial intelligence; indeed, Clooney often speaks of his style of comparative theology in terms of an intellectual and spiritual posture similar to Hong’s. The directions into which comparative theologians are taking the discipline underscore this potential. But perhaps we can say more: many theologians in general are beginning to seek what we can creatively define (extending Hong’s constructive intervention) as comparative theological intelligence and proficiency and sharing it in the classroom and in their scholarship.
Comparative Theology and the Study of religion
What is the place of comparative theology relative to the academic study of religion? Here, we prescind from the discipline of critical religion (CR), a methodological school that claims, “religion as an analytic category results in reification and naturalization and is unduly normative” (Watts and Mosurinjohn 2022, p. 317) and therefore must be abandoned. CR scholars are not interested in defining religion, explaining what religion does, or how religion may or may not function positively or negatively in local and global histories and present-day societies. Rather, CR attends to “the effects of designating certain things as religion” (McCutcheon 2015, p. 131). In other words, CR merely studies how humans, societies, and communities deploy the category of “religion” and historicizes all uses of the term. According to CR, then, theologians and even many scholars of religion are not critical enough (as CR defines “critical”) because they implicitly or explicitly propose normative claims and are therefore ideological in their pursuits.
However, late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century trends in the study of religion question the usefulness of such narrow conceptions of “criticality.” The academic study of religion – while being a scholarly enterprise that seeks objectivity – nonetheless has ideological and even normative claims and values. Yet, it remains “critical” in the broader sense, namely, analyzing discourses in terms of knowledge and power to uncover how authority functions, how discourses variously benefit or harm certain groups and shape structures and institutions, and how historical genealogies of these discourses shape present-day ideas and structures. Trends in, inter alia, feminist, Black studies, queer, subaltern, Indigenous, Africana, Chicana, and Asian approaches to the study of religion attend to lived religion and embodiment in ways that not only critique but also construct theoretical and methodological interventions for the coloniality of White, Euro-American models in the study of religion; they even speak to sociopolitical solutions for injustice, inequity, and inequality. Indeed, this reads very closely to constructive, contextual, and liberation theologies. Here we see how comparative theology is perhaps running parallel to, if not crisscrossing, the study of religion understood in this way. Some scholars critique and reject this affinity, others support and affirm it, and others simply analyze it to understand better the purpose and function of each discipline. Often, where one falls on this spectrum depends on how one defines theology and the study of religion. We cannot list the many articles in the last decade from the Journal of the American Academy of Religion debating the shared genealogies of theology and the study of religion. Instead, we will attend to one recent publication that underscores the thick – if not tense –relationship between these disciplines. Shankar Nair’s Translating Wisdom: Hindu–Muslim Intellectual Interactions in Early Modern South Asia is selected for this purpose for two reasons. First, the book is an excellent example of how we can learn from the historical interactions among religious traditions and communities, as well as from the intellectual projects of historical figures, to craft novel theories and methods for the study of religion – and, if one is so inclined, comparative theologies – related to the exploration of interreligious engagement. Second, Nair studied with Clooney and, in our view at least, one can therefore see sparks of the latter’s comparative theology in the former’s study of South Asian religious and intellectual life.
Nair studies the Jūg Bāsisht, which was translated in the late sixteenth century by a Hindu–Muslim team of scholars working together to craft “a novel vocabulary with which to express Hindu Sanskrit philosophical ideas in an Islamic Persian idiom” (Nair 2020, p. 1). Nair demonstrates how the confluence of Hindu Sanskrit and Islamic Persian and Arabic traditions come together in the context of the Mughal “translation movement” – using this particular text as a case study – to produce something new: “a cosmopolitan, interreligious lexicon in the Persian language” (Nair 2020, p. 2). We skip the details of Nair’s fascinating and intellectually rigorous study
and instead jump to the conclusion, which offers sharp insights for – and critique of – the EuroAmerican academic study of religion. Nair engages very recent scholarship on the role and purpose of the study of religion, including its theories and methods, to make a case for “taking religion seriously” not in the style of critical religion, but rather in a way that allows the likes of his early modern scholars, such as Madhusūdana (fl. ca. 1600), Muhibb Allāh (d. 1648), Mīr Findiriskī (d. 1641), and the unnamed translation team, “to … find themselves on the ‘theory’ side of the enterprise” (Nair 2020, p. 178). That is, these discourses are not just objects of study for the scholar of religion, but should be sources of new theories and methods for the study of religion.
[R]ather than rejecting out of hand the idea that there is something to learn from such historical precedents [as the case study of the Jūg Bāsisht], I would encourage the study of religion today, bearing [in mind] the admonitions [Nair details in this section], to be willing to try to think with (rather than simply about) this historical case study of encounter between two disparate religiophilosophical traditions. In order to facilitate similar cross-civilizational learning within the contemporary academy, we would do well to reflect on the processes through which the translation team found the words and the means to put their respective intellectual traditions into a certain conversation with one another. (Nair 2020, pp. 182–183)
Nair is speaking of the limits not merely of critical religion, but of a study of religion that continuously marks us (modern/postmodern, Western scholars) as the theorists and them (nonmodern, non-Western thinkers – or “religious people”) as the subjects of study (see also Chakrabarty 2000). Surely, for example, the theories and methods of Hindus and Muslims participating in cross-cultural/cross-civilizational and interreligious conversation – and doing so relatively successfully – have something to add to the conversation about what is religion, how it functions, the meaning and value of intergroup relations, the nature of “tradition,” comparative theologies, and so on. In his conclusion, Nair paints a future picture in which the study of religion welcomes both confessional, non-Western scholars and also nonmodern thinkers (through careful textual study) to contribute to the theories and methods of the study of religion. He then adds,
[If not the study of religion,] perhaps theology would be a more hospitable disciplinary home for such developments to take place: I would certainly welcome the development if insights from this study might take on a life within the realm of theological inquiries, though I must leave such explorations to other scholars better trained within that discipline. (Nair 2020, p. 183)
Indeed, this is just what comparative theology – which is often a contextual theology – is doing, at least from a Christian perspective: taking the theological claims of non-Christian and/or nonmodern religious thinkers seriously enough to challenge, shape, subvert, and construct a more liberating Christian theology. Scholars of religion are likewise drawing from traditions of lived religion, subaltern communities, feminist approaches, indigenous lifeways, Queer experiences, and so on, to shape the direction of the discipline critically by rendering it less implicitly (or explicitly!) White, male, cis-heteronormative, and Christian. The goals of (decolonizing) comparative theology and the decolonial approach to the study of religion mesh and flow together.
We are not arguing that the goals, methods, theories, and audiences of the study of religion and of comparative theology are the same. To the contrary, confessional comparative theology à la Clooney speaks to a different audience and has different goals in mind; in addition, its theories and methods are notably distinct. As Moreland (2022) reminds us, Clooney’s comparative theology –and those of many other confessional comparative theologians – maintain or at least strive to maintain their ecclesial moorings and commitments. Their disciplinary framework is thus
different than the study of religion’s. Rather, we are suggesting that the global, decolonial, interreligious, and intercultural directions each are taking can be mutually beneficial. Given the interreligious and intercultural context of the world, it behooves the study of religion – with careful caution – to welcome rigorous, carefully contextualized exercises in comparative theology into its discourses, just as comparative theologians have greatly benefited from rigorous, critical approaches to the study of religion. How might departments of religion benefit from diversifying their faculty and scholarship by taking confessional approaches to the study of religion seriously, so long as they are not exclusionary and hegemonic? It is the hope of this Festschrift’s editors that the diverse chapters of this volume – some of which are written by scholars of religion and not theologians – might offer potential starting points in this endeavor.
other Introductory Texts
We note for readers the many monographs and edited volumes (and a few major articles) introducing the discipline of comparative theology. Here, we exclude exercises in comparative theology and restrict ourselves to publications concerning theories, methods, and aims of the discipline. Scholarship presenting and critiquing Clooney’s comparative theology began to appear in a more consistent manner around 2010 with the publication of a volume he edited: The New Comparative Theology: Interreligious Insights from the Next Generation (Clooney 2010a). This volume coincided with the publication of his own introduction to the discipline: Comparative Theology: Deep Learning Across Religious Borders (Clooney 2010b). Hugh Nicholson approached comparative theology within the context of the study of religion from the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries in his Comparative Theology and the Problem of Religious Rivalry (Nicholson 2011). In 2014, Marianne Moyaert published In Response to the Religious Other: Ricoeur and the Fragility of Interreligious Encounters, which, while not a book explicitly about comparative theology, attends to Ricoeur’s philosophy of religion, hermeneutical anthropology, and ethical hermeneutics, and concludes by exploring Clooney’s comparative theology as a concrete, disciplinary manifestation of Ricoeur’s hospitable spirit and vulnerable hermeneutics. Later, she published an argument proposing comparative theology as Catholic theology: “Theology Today: Comparative Theology as a Catholic Theological Approach” (Moyaert 2015). By now the discipline had migrated to the European academy and Clooney coedited a special issue of Religions with John Berthrong: European Perspectives on the New Comparative Theology (Clooney and Berthrong 2014), a product of the fiveyear, European research project led by Norbert Hintersteiner (2015), Translating God(s): Comparative Theology in Europe (https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/249264/reporting). While necessarily passing over many other publications, by 2015 comparative theology was being integrated within the discipline of theology and critically examined from the perspective of the academic study of religion, both in Europe and North America.
From 2016 to 2019, a flurry of publications emerged that expanded and critically responded to the discipline. Michelle Voss Roberts edited a volume aiming to further embed comparative theology into systematic and constructive theological projects: Comparing Faithfully: Insights for Systematic Theological Reflection (Voss Roberts 2016). That same year Mara Brecht and Reid Locklin coedited a volume on pedagogy and teaching strategies for comparative theology in classrooms comprising students who were religiously disaffiliated, hybrid, or “spiritual but not religious” – in other words, decisively not representing fixed, reified religious identities/traditions: Comparative Theology in the Millennial Classroom: Hybrid Identities, Negotiated Boundaries (Brecht and Locklin 2016). Paul Hedges later released a useful examination of comparative theology that offered both an overview of previous studies and original, critical insights into the discipline’s
origins and hermeneutics and how it engaged religion, gender, and the subaltern: Comparative Theology: A Critical and Methodological Perspective (Hedges 2017). Dialogue among European and North American scholars continued with the publication of How To Do Comparative Theology, a volume coedited by Clooney and Klaus von Stosch in 2018. All these publications invited Mark Heim to publish his aforementioned “Comparative Theology at Twenty-Five: The End of the Beginning” (Heim 2019).
Two major works have appeared between 2020 and the publication of this Festschrift honoring Francis X. Clooney. The first major work is Catherine Cornille’s Meaning and Method in Comparative Theology (2020), which provides a comprehensive overview of the field of comparative theology in two major ways: first by surveying the full breadth of comparative theological scholarship and thereby offering a detailed assessment of the present state of the field, and second through her analysis and discussion of the challenges faced perennially by comparative theologians. In terms of the latter, such challenges include the relationship between comparative theology and theology of religions, hermeneutical difficulties raised by comparative theology (e.g., issues of syncretism and hegemony), and comparative theology’s relationship to both confessional and “metaconfessional” theologies. In her essay, “Comparative Theology: A Wellness Checkup” (2022), Anna Bonta Moreland critically and constructively reviews this book alongside Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen’s Doing the Work of Comparative Theology: A Primer for Christians (2020), John J. Thatamanil’s Circling the Elephant: A Comparative Theology of Religious Diversity (2020), and a volume edited by Cornille, Atonement and Comparative Theology: The Cross in Dialogue with Other Religions (2021). While she still describes comparative theology as a “young discipline” (Moreland 2022, p. 121), she considers this perhaps a virtue with concomitant risks. Comparative theology is both integrated in theological disciplines and is marginalized: “It might be that Comparative Theology belongs on the corners of Christianity, as it trespasses borders and challenges its center. It is a risky place for a field to be, but the risk is unavoidable” (p. 129). Moreland notes how Cornille includes confessional comparative theology and meta-confessional (or transreligious) theology within the umbrella of comparative theology generally, thereby underscoring the multiple pathways that the discipline is taking. On the one hand, for Moreland (a Catholic theologian with ecclesial commitments), when comparative theology abandons ecclesial moorings, the discipline becomes difficult to distinguish from the study of religion or becomes even newly “anchor[ed] in progressive political values of the West, ones that would be foreign to most religious believers around the globe” (2022, p. 130). This is an arguable, though valuable, criticism; quite a few contributors to this volume would challenge this thesis, some would agree, and nearly all would at least engage it critically and constructively. On the other hand, she concludes with a note of hope and promise: “Comparative Theology might be a perpetual teenager – tugged by the possibilities of conversion, of multiple religious belonging, of moving outside of one’s ecclesial community. The restlessness of the discipline makes it creative” (p. 130). With this we wholeheartedly agree.
The second major work, published in 2022, is the multiyear project, A Companion to Comparative Theology, edited primarily by Pim Valkenberg with Marianne Moyaert, Kristin Johnston Largen, James Fredericks, and Bede Benjamin Bidlack. The volume offers a systematic introduction and critical survey of comparative theology in 32 chapters under seven parts: Comparative Theology before 1985, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Chinese Religion, and New Perspectives in Comparative Theology. An impressive array of scholars contributed to this volume with clear guidance from the editors, and it is thus a necessary feature of any comparative theologian’s reading list. What all the above texts betray, however, is a predominantly Christian – and in many cases Catholic – perspective and grounding of comparative theology. This remains largely the case for this volume, with a few notable exceptions (Ithamar Theodor, Michelle Bentsman, Pravina
Rodrigues, Arvind Sharma, Bin Song, Vasudha Narayanan, and Shankar Nair). On the one hand, the parochial nature of confessional comparative theology is unsurprising given that it is a discipline that emerged from Catholic systematic and constructive theological engagement with nonChristian religious traditions. On the other hand, we hope for a future in which non-Christian scholar-practitioners (i.e., “theologians” in the broadest sense of the term) offer their own meaning and method for comparative theology.
Even if the above publications represented the actual number of texts published over the past dozen years (and it does not!), it is apparent that Clooney – to recall the epigraph opening this introduction – has inspired many scholars, has granted a treasury of theological wisdom, and has lit hundreds of candles. His mentoring and corpus have ignited flames of theological and religious studies scholarship whose glow will shine for generations.
Content
As editors, we did not seek to reproduce the contributions of these publications. Rather, we invited scholars to reflect on any aspect of comparative theology and its related disciplines (i.e., comparative religion, comparative literature, theology of religions, and of course theology in general, including comparative theology in relation to Islamic, Hindu, Buddhist, Ruist, Jewish, and other non-Christian traditions). More importantly, however, we asked authors to engage Clooney’s comparative theology, his style and method, and his corpus, in a way that honors his incredible contributions to the theological and religious studies academy. In so doing, we gave authors relatively free rein in choosing subjects for their chapters. After receiving authors’ respective abstracts, we then organized their contributions into the seven parts of this Festschrift. Specifically, Part I (Theories and Methods in Comparative Theology) examines specific methodological facets of comparative theological analysis, including such issues as doing comparison without texts (i.e., based on oral accounts), comparing without endorsing religious relativism, and the role of “inner sense” (i.e., intuition, imagination) in the comparative process. Part II (The Spirituality, Vocation, and Formation of the Comparative Theologian) explores selected intellectual and spiritual disciplines (e.g., slow reading, comparative study as “prayer”) which shape the comparative theologian. In a more focused manner, Part III (Comparative Theology and the Society of Jesus) centers on the particularly Ignatian dimensions of comparative theology, including the interreligious work of Jesuits stretching back to Roberto de Nobili and the specifically Ignatian aspects of the “intellectual virtues” espoused in Clooney’s oeuvre. Part IV (Expanding on Francis X. Clooney’s Corpus) then builds on Clooney’s comparative achievements by highlighting their applicability to proximate fields like scriptural interpretation, feminist theology, and even personal devotional relationships with the Divine. Part V (Exercises in Comparative Theology) features several focused comparative studies which apply comparative methodologies in analyzing specific Hindu, Jewish, Christian, and Islamic texts and traditions. Part VI (Comparative Theology Beyond the Discipline) expands comparative theology beyond its standard focus on texts to consider its relevance for such venues as postsecondary theological pedagogy, public theology, and prison ministry. Finally, Part VII (The Past, Present, and Future of Comparative Theology) examines the practice of comparative theology in diverse contexts across time, from examples of learning across religious borders in eighteenth-century Korea to the application of Clooney’s comparative methods to traditions (e.g., Ruism [Confucianism]) in which it is rarely utilized. The volume then concludes with a final chapter which considers the dependency of comparative theology on particular institutional, intellectual, and theological prerequisites, along with the future of comparative theology as these supports inevitably change.
Conclusion
To return to the quotation with which we opened this introduction, by “keeping company” with Francis Clooney, “hearing [his] speech,” and, to add a third, reading his seminal texts, Clooney’s students, colleagues, and readers have benefited tremendously from his “light.” Clooney has undoubtedly served as a beacon for many by illuminating a path forward and toward the “deep learning across religious borders” to which he has dedicated so much of his professional life. It is the sincere hope of the editors of this Festschrift that this volume, in commemorating Clooney’s remarkable career, may add one more light to the path. While the exact future of “Comparative Theology After Clooney,” the title of this volume’s final chapter, remains yet unknown, the formative legacy of Clooney’s comparative theology shines with clear and enduring brilliance.
notes
1 This conviction is, of course, evident in other traditions as well, such as Buddhist and Hindu ones in which the role of the guru is considered absolutely essential to the disciple’s spiritual progress.
2 In the European context, we commend the research project carried out by Norbert Hintersteiner, Translating God(s): Comparative Theology in Europe (2015), which explores the “transatlantic transfer and reception [of Anglo-American comparative theology] in Europe.” Dr. Hintersteiner is based in the University of Münster (Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster). See https://cordis.europa.eu/ project/id/249264/reporting.
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