After the Second Vatican Council, there has been within the Indian Church a growing interest in and concern for whatever is of perennial value in Hinduism. Keeping this in mind, the present study aims at comparing and contrasting the teachings of the Bhagavad-Gita and the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius of Loyola on the process of spiritual liberation. It is striking that in these two books under investigation the process of spiritual liberation is interwoven with the vision of service, the knowledge of God and His ways, and the experience of the love of God. The study makes use of the comparative method which incorporates historical, exegetical and critical analyses of the relevant texts of the two sources.
What does it mean for rigorous thought about God to be guided by prayer? What do Ignatius of Loyola's Spiritual Exercises teach us about discernment? How can that discernment become a spiritual discipline which guides our choices throughout life? How can that discipline guide the theological choices we all make, including those of academic theologians? This book moves beyond the abstract notion that theology should be prayerful to bring theology together with a particular spiritual practice. It argues that the Spiritual Exercises are a system of prayerful discernment which already provide for reason to be used alongside an openness to all experience and all the ways that we can be guided by the Holy Spirit. This book provides a constructive interpretation of the Exercises as a path of prayerful discernment which can be used throughout life. It sees, in the Exercises, a way of active receptivity to all experience, treating all experience as worthy of attention but also approaching that experience with humility and caution. This book sees theology practiced in this way--as a discerning spiritual discipline--as more resistant to the challenges of modernity than theology which has been sundered from our spiritual life.
This book presents an early modern Jesuit attitude towards Hindu and Ethiopian strains of asceticism. The Jesuits’ descriptions of both the yogis and the Ethiopian renunciates were marked by ambivalence. While critical of these ascetics, the missionaries also pointed out admirable facets of their comportment. In both the Society of Jesus’ positive and negative impressions, there are glaring ethnocentric views that shift the spotlight onto the other’s flaws. Like many historical cases, these perceptions evolved into a sort of inverted mirror image of the self that revealed differences between the European Catholic and the native renunciate.
This book collects fifteen essays and book sections about the Jesuits in India written over a period of more than thirty years. Many of these pieces, unavailable for years, now appear together for the first time. The essays open a window on the 450-year Jesuit history in India, from Roberto de Nobili in the seventeenth century to the leading Jesuit scholars of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The volume looks back into this long missionary history, but Clooney’s eye is also on the question of relevance today: How ought interreligious learning take place in the twenty-first century? “Western Jesuit Scholars in India is a fascinating collection of studies of 17th-21st century Jesuit writings in and about classical India. By his methods and questions, Francis Clooney, Indologist and Jesuit theologian, exposes certain aporias and deficiencies latent in Indology. It concludes with a notable proposal of an interfaith sensibility.” Gérard Colas, Directeur de recherche émérité, Centre National de la Recherche scientifique, Paris “Francis X. Clooney’s Western Jesuit Scholars in India is that of a humanist. He is not only a studious and assiduous reader of texts in languages and intellectual idioms that few scholars are capable of untangling, but is also committed to finding deep human and spiritual connections, detecting the intellectual empathies and affinities that the Jesuit missionaries had labored to bring out in their writings over half a millennium. With a clear and engaging pen, impressive erudition, and intellectual humility before the truly difficult task, Clooney studies what is undoubtedly one of the most fascinating chapters in Jesuit intellectual history, the encounter with Indian philosophical and textual traditions. Seekers of knowledge and cultural understanding of all stripes will find in this book plenty of wisdom, some surprises, and a large historical canvas stretching from Italy to India and back, and beyond.” Ines G. Županov, Senior Fellow, Centre d’études de l’Inde et de l’Asie du Sud, CNRS, Paris
An exploration of the culture of public speaking in the Iberian world, which places the classical rhetorical tradition within the context of Iberian global expansion in Europe, the Americas, Asia and Africa between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries.
The present study makes use of the comparative method incorporating historical, exegetical and critical analysis of the important text and words of the Bhagavadgitia and St. John of the cross. In these two traditions the dynamism of spiritual growth in the process of God-realisation is compared and contrasted through an exhaustive study on God, man and the ways.
