God at Play : Līlā in Hindu and Christian Traditions / Sucharita Adluri, Ankur Barua, Sucharita Adluri, Ankur Barua, Stephen R.L. Clark, Francis X. Clooney, Rachel Fell McDermott, Jessica Frazier, Bernard McGinn, Douglas Hedley, Srilata Raman, Daniel Soars, Daniel Tolan, Peter Tyler, Dominic White, Daniel Soars, Michelle Voss, Michelle Voss.

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God at Play : Līlā in Hindu and Christian Traditions / Sucharita Adluri, Ankur Barua, Sucharita Adluri, Ankur Barua, Stephen R.L. Clark, Francis X. Clooney, Rachel Fell McDermott, Jessica Frazier, Bernard McGinn, Douglas Hedley, Srilata Raman, Daniel Soars, Daniel Tolan, Peter Tyler, Dominic White, Daniel Soars, Michelle Voss, Michelle Voss.

9781531510114

New York, NY Fordham University Press, [2025]

©2025

English

In English.

1 online resource

The first comparative treatment of the topic of līlā in Hindu and Christian traditions, this volume explores what it means to consider divine and human action under the categories of play, wit, drama, grace, and compassionGod at Play presents a theological exploration of the multifaceted motif of līlā across diverse Hindu and Christian landscapes and its wide-ranging connections to divine and human creativity. Given its ubiquity in Hindu theologies and life-forms, līlā offers a rich comparative framework for exploring certain ways of understanding divine and human action as expressed in Hindu and Christian sacred texts, philosophical theology, and ritual practices.Though līlā is often interpreted simply as "play," the essays in this volume reflect a far richer semantic and conceptual field, ranging from spontaneity and gratuitousness, through joy and humor, to mercy and compassion. By focusing on the different contexts in which līlā is found in Hindu traditions and resisting any uniform translation of the term, the contributors to this volume avoid the risk of using predominantly western or Christian categories to understand the Hindu other. The volume thus explores how līlā functions in a variety of distinctive philosophical, theological, and devotional ways across Hindu traditions, and listens for echoes in Christian understandings of the gratuitousness of the created order in relation to God.God at Play is a genuine experiment in deep learning across traditions. Each chapter reflects on what is learned by taking līlā as the category of comparison and invites the reader to think about what these conversations add, confirm, or change in relation to earlier twentieth-century scholarship on play-not least, in terms of what difference it might make to understand human life as an imitation and a participation in the divine life of a playful deity.

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Soars Daniel : Daniel Soars teaches in the Divinity Department at Eton College and is book reviews editor for the Journal of Hindu-Christian Studies. Recent publications include a co-edited volume titled Hindu-Christian Dual Belonging (Routledge, 2022) and a monograph titled The World and God Are Not-Two: A Hindu Christian Conversation (Fordham, 2023).Voss Michelle : Michelle Voss is Professor of Theology at Emmanuel College in the Toronto School of Theology. She is a scholar of comparative theology, with a particular focus on Christian and Hindu contexts, and has also written widely about aesthetics, gender, and embodiment. Recent works include Body Parts: A Theological Anthropology (Fortress, 2017) and The Handbook of Hindu-Christian Relations, which she edited with Chad Bauman (Routledge, 2020).Adluri Sucharita : Sucharita Adluri is a scholar of South Asian religions and Professor in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Cleveland State University. She has written a monograph titled Textual Authority in Classical Indian Thought: Ramanuja and the Vishnu Purana (Routledge, 2014). Her recent publications focus on religious reading and commentary in Vedānta traditions.Barua Ankur : Ankur Barua is Senior Lecturer in Hindu Studies at the Faculty of Divinity, University of Cambridge. He researches various aspects of Vedāntic Hindu worldviews in premodern and contemporary South Asia. Recent publications include The Hindu Self and Its Muslim Neighbors: Contested Borderlines on Bengali Landscapes (Lexington Books, 2022); and Exploring Hindu Philosophy (Equinox, 2023).Clark Stephen R.L. : Stephen R.L. Clark is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Liverpool, and Honorary Research Fellow in Theology and Religious Studies at the University of Bristol. His principal recent works include Plotinus: Myth, Metaphor and Philosophical Practice (University of Chicago, 2016); Cities and Thrones and Powers: Towards a Plotinian Politics (Angelico Press, 2022); and How the Worlds Became: Philosophy and the Oldest Stories (Angelico Press, 2023).Clooney Francis X. : Francis X. Clooney, SJ, is Parkman Professor of Divinity and Professor of Comparative Theology at the Harvard Divinity School. His primary areas of Indological scholarship are theological commentarial writings in the Sanskrit and Tamil traditions of Hindu India. Recent publications include Reading the Hindu and Christian Classics: Why and How It Matters (University of Virginia Press, 2019) and his memoir, Hindu and Catholic, Priest and Scholar: A Love Story (T&T Clark/Bloomsbury, 2024).McDermott Rachel Fell : Rachel Fell McDermott is Professor in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Cultures, Barnard College, Columbia University. She is the author and editor of several books on Hindu Goddess traditions, and she is also keenly interested in Comparative Theology. Her most recent book, co-authored with Daniel Polish, is A Hindu-Jewish Conversation: Root Traditions in Dialogue (Lexington, 2024). Her current project engages Hindu-Muslim relations in Bengal and Bangladesh.Frazier Jessica : Jessica Frazier is Lecturer in the Study of Religion at the University of Oxford and a member of the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies. Her research explores key philosophical themes across cultures, from Indian classical theories of Being to twentieth-century phenomenology. Her publications include Hindu Worldviews: Theories of Self, Ritual and Divinity (Bloomsbury, 2016), and Categorisation in Indian Philosophy: Thinking Inside the Box (Ashgate, 2014).McGinn Bernard : Bernard McGinn is the Naomi Shenstone Donnelley Professor Emeritus at the Divinity School of the University of Chicago where he taught for thirty-four years before retiring in 2003. He has written extensively on patristic and medieval theology, especially the history of spirituality and mysticism.Hedley Douglas : Douglas Hedley is Professor of the Philosophy of Religion at the University of Cambridge, and Director of the Cambridge Centre for the Study of Platonism. As well as a monograph on Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Coleridge, Philosophy, and Religion: Aids to Reflection and the Mirror of the Spirit (Cambridge University Press, 2000), Hedley has written a three-volume work on the religious imagination: Living Forms of the Imagination (T&T Clark, 2008); Sacrifice Imagined: Violence, Atonement, and the Sacred (Continuum, 2011); and The Iconic Imagination (Bloomsbury, 2016). He has held visiting professorships in France, Germany, the USA, Canada, and India.Raman Srilata : Srilata Raman is Professor of Hinduism at the University of Toronto. Her areas of interest are Tamil and Sanskrit Vaiṣṇava and Śaiva intellectual formations from the late medieval to the early colonial period, including the emergence of nineteenth-century socioreligious reform and colonial sainthood. Her publications include the monographs Self-Surrender to God in Śrīvaiṣṇavism (Routledge, 2007) and The Transformation of Tamil Religion (Routledge, 2023).Soars Daniel : Daniel Soars teaches in the Divinity Department at Eton College and is book reviews editor for the Journal of Hindu-Christian Studies. Recent publications include a co-edited volume titled Hindu-Christian Dual Belonging (Routledge, 2022) and a monograph titled The World and God Are Not-Two: A Hindu Christian Conversation (Fordham, 2023).Tolan Daniel : Daniel J. Tolan is a Fellow at The Polonsky Academy for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences at The Van Leer Jerusalem Institute. He received his MPhil and PhD from the University of Cambridge's Faculty of Divinity as a member of Clare College, and his publications can be found in the Harvard Theological Review, Vigiliae Christianae, The International Journal of the Platonic Tradition, and Studia Patristica.Tyler Peter : Peter Tyler is Professor of Pastoral Theology and Spirituality and Director of the Centre for Initiatives in Spirituality and Reconciliation (InSpiRe) at St Mary's University, Twickenham, London. A registered psychotherapist in private practice, he has contributed extensively to the current dialogue between psychology and theology. Latest publications include The Living Philosophy of Edith Stein (Bloomsbury, 2023) and John of the Cross: Carmel, Desire and Transformation (Routledge, 2024).White Dominic : Dominic White OP, a Dominican friar, is a Fellow of Blackfriars Hall, Oxford, a Research Fellow of the Margaret Beaufort Institute of Theology, Cambridge, and Prior of Blackfriars Priory, Oxford. His publications include The Lost Knowledge of Christ: Christian Cosmology, Contemporary Spiritualities and the Arts (Liturgical Press, 2015), and How Do I Look? Theology in the Age of the Selfie (SCM, 2020). He is a composer, and co-founder of the Friends of Sophia group.Michelle Voss (Afterword By) Michelle Voss is Professor of Theology at Emmanuel College in the Toronto School of Theology. She is a scholar of comparative theology, with a particular focus on Christian and Hindu contexts, and has also written widely about aesthetics, gender, and embodiment. Recent works include Body Parts: A Theological Anthropology (Fortress, 2017) and The Handbook of Hindu-Christian Relations, which she edited with Chad Bauman (Routledge, 2020).Daniel Soars (Edited By) Daniel Soars teaches in the Divinity Department at Eton College and is book reviews editor for the Journal of Hindu-Christian Studies. Recent publications include a co-edited volume titled Hindu-Christian Dual Belonging (Routledge, 2022) and a monograph titled The World and God Are Not-Two: A Hindu Christian Conversation (Fordham, 2023).

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