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cautiously, even reluctantly. Instead it seeks more modestly to inscribe reflection on such issues within the specific boundaries of one particular case study, in order to illuminate the universal from a studiously and stubbornly particular stance. |
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In this chapter I introduce the chief features and topics which require balancing in the interplay of the specific and the general, the engagement in an "other," and reappraisal of one's "home" tradition: comparative theology (section II), the theory of practice (III), and Advaita Vedanta (IV). In the light of those components taken together, I conclude by previewing the rest of the book as a commitment to the practice of reading and the important tensions that derive from a permanent commitment to that practice and a recognition of the understanding that is derived from it (V). |
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Since every issue taken up in this book will be filtered through the concerns of comparative theology, it is important to describe this project and to distinguish it from the related endeavors of theology, Indology, and the study of religion in its various forms.
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1. Calling Comparison "Theological" |
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The kind of comparison in which I engage bears with it a set of particularly theological problems. Theology, to characterize it in a non-technical fashion, is distinct from the study of religion (with which it overlaps in many of its procedures) because theology is an inquiry carried on by believers who allow their belief to remain an explicit and influential factor in their research, analysis and writing. Believing theologians are (usually) members of believing communities, and have those communities as their primary audiences, whether or not the bulk of their writing is addressed to them. With their communities, they believe in some transcendent (perhaps supernatural) reality, the possibility of and (usually fact of) a normative revelation, and in the need to make practical decisions and life choices which |
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