Professor Francis X. Clooney, S. J. talks below about his journey from New York City to Kathmandu, "thinking big" in his teaching and courses, and why HDS is an exciting place for comparative theology and Hindu studies.
You can also watch a video of Professor Clooney discussing his favorite book, Gitanjali, which is a collection of poems by Rabindranath Tagore. In the video, Clooney talks about the personal significance of the book, reads selected poems, and touches on why they are particularly meaningful.
Welcome to Faculty Focus, a special podcast series from Harvard Divinity School, where we speak with HDS professors about their courses and research interests. I’m Jonathan Beasley.
Today’s guest is Francis X. Clooney, S. J. Professor Clooney is the Parkman Professor of Divinity and Professor of Comparative Theology here at Harvard Divinity School. His primary areas of Indological scholarship are theological commentarial writings in the Sanskrit and Tamil traditions of Hindu India. He is also a leading figure globally in the field of comparative theology. Professor Clooney is a Roman Catholic priest and serves regularly in a Catholic parish on weekends. He is also currently the president of the Catholic Theological Society of America.
Thanks for listening and joining us today. Let’s jump right into the interview.
Jonathan Beasley: As a Jesuit priest, as a member of the Society of Jesus, and the current president of the Catholic Theological society of America, how did you become interested in the field of Hindu studies?
Francis Clooney: When I was a young Jesuit, a long time ago, part of our training was to do some teaching between philosophy and theology study. So, despite the fact of growing up in New York City, Catholic boy, Catholic schools, and so on like that, I had an opportunity to do something different and go somewhere else. And so despite my New York roots, I decided to go far away and consider different possibilities, different parts of the world.
To cut a long story short, I thought of India. I was taken with Mahatma Gandhi and Mother Teresa. Couldn't get a visa to India at that time and place in the early '70s, so I went to Kathmandu, Nepal, up there in the mountains and the view of Mount Everest. The King had invited the Jesuits to set up a school.
And getting there in 1973, I suddenly found myself at 22 years old in the classroom teaching boys who were all Hindu and Buddhist. And there, in that almost like a Shangri-La kingdom in the mountains, finding that I had so much to learn about their religions and their traditions. And the necessity of every teacher, how can I survive in the classroom from day to day? I started bringing into class Buddhist texts and Hindu texts, and we'd read Buddha stories, stories of Krishna, and so on like that in the classroom, which captivated me. And I found that teaching boys, who were Hindu and Buddhist, and opening these texts with them was exciting.
And then going with them to the Buddhist stupa, the shrine, or to the Hindu temple, celebrating the festivals and so on, awakened me to this very large world of Asia, of Hinduism, and Buddhism. And I think, perhaps, due to my background in Roman Catholicism, I was instinctively attracted to the Hindu side, with all the sacramentality, the signs, and symbols, the smells, and bells of Hindu tradition. And so by 1975, when I finished my two years in Kathmandu, pretty much sold on the fact that however I was going to be as a Catholic priest, Catholic theologian, Jesuit, I wanted this openness to other religions, and Hinduism in particular, to be part of my life and my work, and it has been ever since.
JB: Before we get back to that a little bit later, I want to fast forward to today and to talk about your latest book, which is Reading the Hindu and Christian Classics: Why and How It Matters. Could you talk more about the impetus for writing that book?
FC: This book was based on lectures I gave at the University of Virginia back in 2017 for the Richard lectures. And I think, when I was thinking of what to do for those lectures and what the allergic issues of the day were that I could talk to and wanted to talk about, I was confronted with the double reality that on the one hand, it seemed that more than ever before in human history, we have the ability to find—we get access to—we read the text of other religious traditions.
Enormous bodies of materials have been translated into English. Even things not translated are available on the web, electronic files, and so on like that. So never before in human history have any human beings had the ability to learn so much from so many traditions in such breadth and depth, on the one hand.
On the other hand, it seems that my perception was, in the twenty-first century, that we are going faster and faster, that our attention spans are decreasing, and that learning to stop and slow down and benefit from this vast well of knowledge, the texts of traditions, and their contexts, and all that, we were losing the capacity to do that. And so more and more material is available and fewer and fewer of us having time to sit down and actually just read a book, read something in depth. And so the core issue in the lectures, as in the book, Reading the Hindu and Christian Classics, was really to try to get at this issue of what deep reading, slow reading is for, the transformative effect of spending a time with a book.
JB: Let's stay within the classroom. And I'm just wondering if you can talk about your course, “Introduction to Hindu Spiritual Care.” What do you cover in the course and who are the students that take this class? What is their vocational interest?
FC: So one of the exciting things going on at HDS today, of course, is the new imagination around the master of divinity program industry studies that we can truly open and expand the horizons of ministry training.
Yes, keep commitments in the Christian tradition, Jewish tradition, but also have commitments and make it possible for Muslims and Buddhists and Hindus to engage in ministerial study. And for many years now, the Buddhist monastic program and Buddhist Ministry Studies have been flourishing.
And so we know that the course is really part of an effort to make that possible for Hindu traditions as well, despite the fact of their complexity and their difference from Buddhist traditions. So, we've had the Buddhist monastics program. We had a number of monks, men and women, on campus in the last few years, mainly before COVID. And that worked out very well.
But the idea was also to offer a course that would be as it's titled, “Introduction to Hindu Spiritual Care,” both the theory and practice of engaging in ministry from a Hindu perspective. I team teach this course because I would not venture to teach it on my own, with Swami Tyagananda. And Swami Tyagananda is the very respected senior Swami of the Ramakrishna Vedanta society in Boston. And he is a wonderful person in spiritual care in ministry, Sunday services sermons, teaching classes on the Harvard campus, MIT campus, BU campus, and so on.
He and I, and I've known him since maybe 30 years now, got together. And during COVID, we had an online course teaching this course for the first time. And this semester, we're doing it for the second time, mixing together some introductory material about Hinduism because we don't assume that everyone in the class knows a lot about Hinduism.
Some students are Hindu born of Indian parents, or are yoga practitioners, or have a guru, and others are simply interested in interfaith ministry. So, some starting points about learning from Hinduism, what is Hinduism about, reading a couple of great texts, the Ramayana and the Bhagavad Gita, and then plunging into conversations with expert practitioners.
So we had a very senior Professor of Hindu studies, Anantanand Rambachan, visited last week on Zoom. What's Hindu about Hindu studies? He's a great philosophical thinker. And we'll have future speakers from campus ministry, hospital ministry, hospice care, and so on, in dialogue with the students.
Now, who are the students? This semester, we have about 17 students in the class, and they range from one young man who's a Hindu priest, a practitioner who leads puja services and so on, and several others who are long time committed to Hindu teachers. And they have devotional contact with teachers.
Two others on the other end of the spectrum who are just interested—How can I think about ministry and spiritual care differently by learning from the Hindu traditions? And so we've, thus far, been very lucky to have wonderful conversations in the classroom. And great dialogues about the text, but also about the issues in ministry.
And I think as the course goes along, with these visitors on Zoom, it'll go deeper, and it will be even better at getting at what the ministry is about. So, it's the kind of course that has to be practiced. I think we're doing better than we did the first time. And probably when we do it a third time, it'll be even better, at least, so we hope.
JB: Let me also ask you about your other course, which is “Who Needs God? Rethinking God in Light of Hindu and Christian Theologies.” First of all, what a title that is. But in the course description, you say that issues covered are the meaning of God and knowledge of God, reasons to believe or not in God's existence, God's relationship to the world, humans, all living beings.
These are some of the biggest questions that exist in religion and personal faith. So, I'm wondering if you can take me inside the classroom and inside those conversations. What are they like, and what do you hope the students take away from the course?
FC: I think this was of course ventured, again, first time in COVID, and now, the second time, think big. I'm late enough in my career, I can think big and put something out there and say, let's talk about this, something of clear interest and clear importance, and take a deep breath and give it a try.
And so my perception was that in our culture, and we begin the course with some sociological data, Pew surveys, and so on, about the decline of organized religion in America today, people's changing, faith commitments, believing in God or not believing in God, changing beliefs about even what God would mean, people who famously believe in being spiritual, but not religious, or finding a private path in the context of this and honoring the fact of personal integrity, personal sincerity and commitment saying, what about God? And what about God with a capital G?
Does this language of a personal transcendent being who relates to the world still have some power and purchase? And having read in those first weeks, the sociological data, some substantive articles about why be a humanist or be an atheist, because I'm not trying to demonize anybody, but rather open up a conversation.
Say, what we need to do and what I personally can offer is to go back into the great traditions to which we belong and reopen the question of God having to realize that we don't actually know half the time what we're talking about or even what our own traditions have said.
So using my own Roman Catholic tradition, Christian tradition, and then using Hindu tradition to go into some classic texts with the God question is a living question.
So we just to sort of give you a brief example, we're just finishing a section of the course in which we read selected passages from the beginning of the Book of Genesis on creation, and God and Adam and Eve, the Book of Exodus and the Exodus from Egypt and the Sinai covenant, and the end of the Book of Job, where God comes in the whirlwind and confronts Job, who do you think you are?
Powerful texts, along with very ancient Rigvedic hymns, questioning the very nature of reality, whether there was nothing or something in the beginning, the cosmic person of whom the world is only a part. And then on Wednesday of this very week, we'll be reading a section of the Bhagavad Gita, which like the Book of Job, climaxes in an encounter where not Job and God, but the Warrior Arjuna ask the Lord Krishna, can I see you as you are, and has this overwhelming terrifying vision of the God whom everything is simply a small part.
So opening our imaginations, then we'll go to some medieval texts, St. Bonaventure on the Catholic side, a goddess text, the ocean of beauty attributed to Shankara on the Hindu side, visualizations of the divine and spiritual path.
And then more modern figures, the nineteenth-century Catholic saint, Saint Teresa of Lazio, a Carmelite, who has had this passionate Jesus attachment, the holy man, Ramakrishna, who is a goddess worshiper, but an ecstatic visionary of the unity of religions in the same time period, nineteenth century.
And closing the course in the one side with Mahatma Gandhi and his vision of God in practice, God in social justice with Dorothy Day, who may well be a Saint of the Catholic Church eventually, that you find God in the faces of the poor. You find God on the streets.
And both of them had their journeys from less faith and less God commitment to more and deeper as they went on in life. And in all of this, returning to the questions, what do we mean by God? Who is God? Who needs God?
But now, filtering it through these glimpses of these two long traditions. While finally, I would say, always reminding the class, we could do this with Islamic texts, we could do this with Jewish texts, Chinese texts, African texts. It's just that in one course, you can't do everything.
JB: Let’s take very short break before we rejoin Professor Clooney for the second half of our conversation. If you enjoy what you’re hearing, I encourage you to subscribe to Harvard Divinity School wherever you get your podcasts. And if you’re interested in learning more about Professor Clooney and his work, or you want to know more about HDS, our faculty, students, and degree programs, check us out on our website or follow us on social media @HarvardDivinity.
Now, let’s get back to my conversation with Professor Francis Clooney.
JB: For someone listening who is interested, perhaps, in pursuing Hindu studies, what makes Harvard Divinity School a good place to do that work?
FC: Well, Harvard is an incredibly rich and diverse university with unimaginable resources across campus. I mean, how many of our students, and indeed our faculty, we realize that we're only dipping slightly into this great ocean of possibilities at Harvard.
But in the field of Hindu studies, I think we have some exciting possibilities in the Divinity School. So, alongside Buddhist studies, I do courses, both the ones we just talked about, but also a series of great text courses—Bhagavad Gita, Yoga Sutras, Upanishads, and other such courses, where we can go in depth over a semester into one great text and its commentaries.
We just hired Swayam Bagaria, who works more in the modern context with anthropological ethnographic data, temples, temple society, legal matters, and lived religion in North India. So, in the Div School, that's what we have as possibilities.
And then you step off the Div School campus, and you have the Department of South Asian studies. And the South Asian department is brilliant and offering Sanskrit and Hindi and Tamil, Urdu, other languages, as well as courses on Indian philosophy, society, and religion.
And Diana Eck, our most famous senior professor, has one foot in the Div School and one foot in South Asia. Of course, popular, of course, is on pilgrimage, on temples, on India as a religious place. So, I think there are resources of that sort for some in-depth study.
And then you can go to the South Asia Institute, or the anthropology department, or other parts of the University for further courses that one might take, related to religion in South Asia, particularly if you want to start saying, well, Hinduism in relation to Islam, or Hinduism in relation to Buddhism, and Hinduism and Christianity.
All of these possibilities, fairly easily, our students can engage in a way that is not surpassed by other universities. It's a very good place for this kind of study.
JB: Many, many resources at Harvard across the disciplines. I wanted to ask you, you are one of the world's leading scholars of comparative theology. What is the state of the field? Is comparative theology continuing to evolve? Is it continuing to be an area of academic discipline that gets a lot of attention and gets a lot of interest from prospective students?
FC: I think so. For one thing, the course I just talked about, “Who Needs God,” is an instance of comparative theology. And what I mean by comparative theology, very simply, is taking the old familiar definition of theology as faith seeking understanding, but no longer limiting that to faith seeking understanding within one's own scriptures and one's own tradition, but saying with the same dispositions of faith and commitment to the intellectual crossing religious boundaries and learning from other traditions.
A metaphor, perhaps, of going forth, leaving the familiar ground, going to the other, and then coming back home again, the back and forth across the boundaries, is what I mean by comparative theology, which is distinguished from comparative religion, which is also a very rich in many possibilities in terms of the faith component and the community component within the practice component right out there in front. These are not left out as if they're not academic or something.
When I began to develop the courses of this sort, realizing I could not, in my own Christian tradition, or in studying Hindu traditions do this honestly or ably or faithfully without engaging the full life of traditions and admitting that faith is a part of it. I was sort of doing it out of necessity because all the texts I was reading—Hindu and Christian—were telling me, unless you take faith seriously, unless you think that faith can think, you're not going to learn from these traditions. It will be closed doors to you.
I thought I was sort of developing a new idea, comparative theology. Only afterwards that I learned that the term had first been used in Latin in 1699. And that there's a long tradition of trying to cross over. In some ages, competitively, we do comparative theological work and decide which tradition is the best and which ones are not the best.
But in our time, I think it's about believers and intellectuals and different traditions talking to one another, learning from one another, without giving up on their faith or on their understanding.
JB: That’s so interesting. I wanted to ask you, Professor Clooney, what is it that makes learning and studying at Harvard Divinity School unique or special in some way? What should prospective students know about that?
FC: Well, I think, every year, when we have a very, as usual, a successful admissions class and we have wonderful students coming to the campus, we just step back and look at the incredible diversity of the student body. And part of it is religious. So many different religious traditions coming to campus, people of different backgrounds, different cultures, different parts of the world showing up on campus.
But also students applicants and then first year students who come from different ages, 50, 60 years old and 22, 23 years old, people strictly academic backgrounds, people who have been in working for NGOs or have been lawyers, have been working in politics or other fields in incredible range. And people who are still staunchly committed to the religious traditions they were born into, and others who have been on journeys in which they visit and learn from different traditions, and now they happen to be this or that.
All of these students on campus, encountering a very diverse faculty. I mean, our faculty is incredibly diverse, both in terms of intellectual expertise, unrivaled in many fields, and also personal commitments. How individuals on the faculty have worked out matters of faith and understanding varies greatly.
And I think that kind of conversation ranging from the basic theory and method course to “Introduction to Ministry Studies” to all the courses that people like me teach, means you're predictable you're creating unpredictable situations in which you're getting together this professor and this incredible group of students to talk about a topic of expertise, but in a way that is not rigidly bound by certain expectations, either secular expectations about what counts as knowledge, or dogmatic religious expectations about right answers.
But without either the secular or the religious being a straitjacket, the ability—let's think in the classroom. And I told the students in the first class, who needs God? That your decision, maybe, at the end of this course, I don't need God.
Or the case for God is not necessarily robust. Or, you may find that it's much different than you thought it was. Or may finish the course by saying, I've still not decided on this, but I know a lot more of the ground than the questions.
I think HDS is a place where there's no compulsion to either deepen one particular form of faith or to give up on faith and move on to something else, but rather the ambiguity and the ambivalence is built into this rich mix of people. And we can be talking and thinking to one another across generations, leaving it open ended for as long as it needs to be open ended for individuals on their personal paths and their intellectual lives.
JB: That's something I've thought a lot about, but have never been able to articulate quite as beautifully as that, so thank you for that. I just want to finish here and just noticing our time is done. But just on a personal note, are you working on another book project or what's sort of next for you if anything at this point?
FC: I'm, first of all, trying to survive the year as Catholic Theological Society of America President, which has things come up every day, almost. And it's all wonderful, but I'm doing it. The two things I'm working on very, very briefly, one, I'm doing a translation of early Tamil religious poetry, possibly for the Murty Library at Harvard University Press publishes.
I'm working on these translations and getting through the rough draft of them. And so it'll take another year or more before I get it in good form to show the press. But reading this poetry closely with its traditional commentaries is always a wonderful thing. And I try to do two or three verses a day, and then keep at it. And eventually, I'll have it all done.
The other is I'm old enough at this point in my life to look back retrospectively. So, I'm writing an intellectual memoir, my kind of autobiography. Not that I have this very sensational life and I haven't done anything very interesting or very scandalous, I'm just an ordinary person.
But I decided, why have I, as a Catholic priest and a Jesuit, why have I studied Hinduism for 50 years? Why am I still a priest going to the parish on Sunday? Why am I a professor at Harvard? How do all these pieces fit together and how to talk about the borderlines between faith and practice, between being Christian and being Hindu, where this understanding goes.
So, I have a sabbatical in second semester, and I hope to finish this project and send it off to the press. But that's my current one. And I'm hoping that when I've done that, then I'll know better who I am, so that I can figure out what the next big book after that will be.
JB: Let me when that happens, please. Professor Clooney, thank you for your time.
FC: You're welcome. Happy to be here. And thank you for allowing this interview. Happy to be with you.
JB: Thanks again to Professor Clooney for giving us an inside look at his teaching and research interests. This is the fourth interview in our Faculty Focus podcast series. Don’t forget to subscribe to Harvard Divinity School if you haven’t already so that you never miss a future episode. And visit us on our website or follow us on social media if you’re interested in learning more about HDS, our faculty, and the student experience.
Until next time…