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from religious practice, and while it necessarily enters into a critical, intelligent relationship to the materials of the compared traditions, both the familiar and the new, its achievement of this relationship is a continually provisional and practical arrangement in which the comparativist engages in activitiestheoretical, practical, interpretive, personal, communalwhich are shaped in negotiation with the comparable activities of the communities which are being studied and compared.
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As a practical endeavor, comparison occurs in time, over time; it takes time. Were we to abolish the temporal nature of comparison as a practical discourse, we would lose a crucial factor which makes available to us the significance of the practice we undertake when we perform comparisons.5 Unlike the (scientific) practice of model-making, an understanding which subsists in the temporality of practice remains attentive to and participant in that shifting set of relationships and procedures, the tensions between the said and implicit, the ordered and disordered, which constitutes practical life. It focuses, as Pierre Bourdieu puts it, on practices' "temporal structure, direction, and rhythm [which are] constitutive of their meaning."6 |
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Committed to the reinterpretation and rewriting of theology after Advaita, this book is also committed to highlighting, taking into account and taking advantage of the time it takes to work through an unfamiliar body of texts, with all the gradually cumulative effects that process has on one's practical (re)organization of previously and newly familiar concepts and commitments. The writing of this book, and by extension its proper reading, are significant as activities one learns from, not merely on the grounds of the conclusions thereby possibly generated. As Chapter 4 indicates in regard to Advaita, the value of patient reading is realized primarily within the person engaged in its practice, and by extension within a community of, or in dialogue with, such persons. Though here too distances may be usefully preserved, the transformation of the comparativistand her or his resistance to transformationin the acts of reading and writing are therefore necessary topics of analysis in a comparative project which takes practice seriously.7 |
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