11 December 2013
New Book Received: His Hiding Place Is Darkness: A Hindu-Catholic Theopoetics of Divine Absence. By Francis X. Clooney, S.J., Stanford University Press, 2013; 208 Pages. Price $85.00, ISBN 978-0-80477-680-6
His Hiding Place is Darkness explores the uncertainties of faith and love in a pluralistic age. In keeping with his conviction that studying multiple religious traditions intensifies rather than attenuates religious devotion, Francis Clooney's latest work of comparative theology seeks a way beyond today's religious and interreligious uncertainty by pairing a fresh reading of the absence of the beloved in the Biblical Song of Songs with a pioneering study of the same theme in the Holy Word of Mouth (9th century CE), a classic of Hindu mystical poetry rarely studied in the West.
