Western Jesuit Scholars in India

Book excerpt: 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