Francis X. Clooney, S.J.

Cambridge MA Only recently did I blog on the passing of two venerable figures who helped us to live and think in our religiously diverse world Franz Josef Van Beeck and Kenneth Morgan and did not expect to add another such entry so soon But word reached me the other day that John Hick died on F

Cambridge MA This is Interfaith Awareness Week at Harvard as part of World Interfaith Harmony Week only in part by coincidence we have scheduled a rich variety of events at the Center for the Study of World Religions After the week is over I will reflect on some of what happened and I rsquo ve

Cambridge MA The other day someone asked me ldquo Is enlightenment compatible with Christian faith rdquo It was at an interreligious gathering where I had just spoken on my experience of encountering Hinduism in its various forms and surely my questioner was thinking of enlightenment as a dec

Cambridge Ma Readers of this blog will have noticed over the years that I have no inside connections in Rome or in the Vatican Most of what I know about such things I get by reading periodicals such as America blogs at this site and from the Jesuit grape vine I rsquo ve only been to Rome twice

Cambridge MA In a New York Times column entitled ldquo So Much Fun So Irrelevant rdquo on January 3 Thomas Friedman focused on the importance of the vast advances in global connectivity and the way what and how we know today is changing the quality of our lives All of this of course rather

Cambridge MA My last two posts – on the baby Krsna and baby Jesus and on a special poetic style in south India that praises God as an infant – have given examples of Indian literary and Hindu Christian religious resources that can be of value to Christians in the West in re-imagining the power

Cambridge MA I promised in my previous entry on the baby Jesus seen through Hindu eyes that I would return again this week to the theme of the newborn Christ seen and contemplated in light of insights drawn from the Indian Hindu context As I mentioned there we do not in some absolute sense ld

Cambridge MA The semester is finally ending and in a few days my grades will be submitted and ldquo Introduction to Hindu Ritual Theory rdquo safely behind me I hope now to add a few blogs this coming week in light of the quickly arriving of Christmas – a few somewhat random insights adn re

Cambridge MA Readers will recall that back in June I blogged on an essay on Beliefnet by Rajiv Malhotra on Spirit is not the same as Shakti or Kundalini I intended simply to call attention of American readers to this thoughtful post by a Hindu author The comments on my piece however in

Cambridge MA A few weeks ago there was a flurry of news around the rather sensational comments made by Fr Gabriele Amorth on the diabolical influence in both the Harry Potter series and in the practice of yoga See for instance the version given at UCA News a Catholic website in East Asia I d