For my entire adult life, I have been engaged in study of the Hindu traditions: most of my writing has been perched on the border between my own Catholic tradition and Hindu traditions, and so too my thirty-eight years of teaching have been almost entirely given over to Hindu-Christian themes or simply to the close reading of Hindu texts. As a Jesuit—baptized Francis Xavier, in honor of the first Jesuit to arrive in India in 1542—I also have been mindful of the long history of my religious order in India (hence my recent collection of essays, Western Jesuit Scholars in India) and the mixed history of our efforts to convert Hindus, refute Hindu beliefs, shape a truly Indian Christianity, and, of course, educate India's Hindu and Muslim populations in our many institutions of higher and secondary education. Implicated in this history as well are Catholic and Jesuit uncertainties toward...
Caste: The Origins of Our Discontent
Francis X. Clooney, SJ, is the Parkman Professor of Divinity at Harvard Divinity School and president-elect of the Catholic Theological Society of America. A fellow of the British Academy, his many books include Hindu God, Christian God; His Hiding Place Is Darkness: A Hindu-Catholic Theopoetics of Divine Absence; Learning Interreligiously; Comparative Theology: Deep Learning across Religious Borders; Beyond Compare; Seeing through Texts: Doing Theology among the Srivaisnavas of South India; Divine Mother, Blessed Mother: Hindu Goddesses and the Virgin Mary; and Theology after Vedanta.
Francis X. Clooney; Caste: The Origins of Our Discontent. Common Knowledge 1 May 2022; 28 (2): 296–297. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/0961754X-9809319
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