Passionate Comparison: The Intensification of Affect in Interreligious Reading of Hindu and Christian Texts

Abstract

How do we learn from religious traditions other than our own? How are we to assess what happens when that learning leads to affirmation and empathy, and thereafter affects how one lives one's life? We can wonder whether there is coherence in what we learn, what we think, how we feel, and how we choose to act. Optimism is not necessarily justified since it may be that due to the strictures of logic and religious commitment, religious reasoning and affective religious engagement diverge and even work at cross purposes. What is obviously and powerfully felt may not translate into explanations that observers, including theologians and scholars of religion, can understand or affirm. Conversely, the emotionally engaged practitioner who learns, feels, and acts in accord with what is learned across religious boundaries may not know what to say about this engagement, and often may not have mastered the appropriate technical language by which to explain and justify complex and extraordinary emotional engagements.

Under Construction: Agape as Comparative Category and Christian Criterion of Hindu Truth

“…24 For Clooney, borrowing from literary theorist Charles Altieri, the transformation effected by loving surrender to God is ''adverbial,'' rather than ''adjectival'': it transforms the ''modality'' of our actions, even if the actions themselves remain much the same. 25 The shift from action to affect in these Hindu-Christian inquiries does more than question the priority of service and acts of compassion in agapic love; it can also shift our understanding of that love itself in subtle ways. Thus, out of his reading of Śrı # Veda# nta Deśika, Clooney retrieves the integral place of complaisance or ''deep pleasure'' in St. Francis de Sales's Treatise on the Love of God.…”

On Vulnerability: Probing the Ethical Dimensions of Comparative Theology

“…Clooney sees the religious text more as a subject speaking to the reader and challenging him. It is a poetic whole, constructed by its author to address, challenge, and interrupt the reader ( [39], p. 368). Gifted with an "excess of meaning," it has the capacity of intruding on the world of the reader that it intends to transform.…”

‘Forgiveness’ in Building Bridges With Muslims: An Intertextual Analysis of the Joseph's Narrative

“…In order to gain a better understanding of Islam as a Christian or a Jew, it is essential among others to examine the Qur'an in relation to the Old Testament or the Torah. 1 One of the promising texts involves the story of Joseph. The question to ask is, 'what does it mean to read Joseph's narration of forgiveness in the Muslim, Jewish, and Christian context for trilateral talks?'…”