Francis X. Clooney, S.J., is the Parkman Professor of Divinity at Harvard University, and one of the 21st century’s leading scholars of Hindu-Christian comparative studies. In his latest offering, Clooney maps the terrain of a field he has surveyed, explored and inhabited for more than three decades by providing a concise historical overview of Hindu-Christian encounters from the 16th century to the present day, and outlining what he sees as the future contours of these engagements as an academic discipline.The volume was originally (2015) delivered in India and Cambridge as part of the prestigious ‘Teape’ lectures, thus making Clooney’s survey an example in its own right of the kind of comparative study he sets out to describe. Named after Revd William Marshall Teape (1882-1944) who instituted the lecture series in honour of his onetime mentor Brooke Foss Westcott (1825-1901), the Teape lectures have been exploring the relationship between Christian and Hindu thought since their inception in 1955.Westcott himself was the Regius Professor of Divinity at Cambridge, Bishop of Durham and one of the founders of the (Anglican) Cambridge Mission to India (now known as the Cambridge-Delhi Christian Partnership) in 1877. In 1881, the Mission led to the establishment of what would become one of Delhi University’s most prestigious institutions – St Stephen’s College. Indeed, Clooney’s book can be seen partly as an exploration of the sort of cross-cultural learning and rich inter-religious encounter (in this case, Hindu-Christian) which Westcott had in mind when he dreamed of ‘a new Alexandria’ on the banks of the Yamuna.Francis X. Clooney, S.J. The Future of Hindu-Christian Studies: A Theological InquiryRoutledge, 2017The hundred or so pages of The Future of Hindu-Christian Studies fall into three parts: a history of Roman Catholic (and, more specifically, Jesuit) engagements with Hinduism; some Indian/Hindu responses to Western/Christian thought; and a brief survey of the contemporary academic scene.In the first section, Clooney takes a number of his Jesuit forebears as pioneering examples of early Hindu-Christian comparative study. Starting with Roberto De Nobili (1579-1656) and working up to Gaston-Laurent Coeurdoux (1691-1779), Clooney’s sympathetic treatment of these figures invites us to see their mix of faith and learning as an inspirational, if imperfect, model for Hindu-Christian studies today.Thus, while someone like De Nobili was a classic missionary in some senses, who tended to measure Indian culture and Hindu theology against Western Christian truth, he was also a pioneer in terms of the depth of his scholarship and adaptation to the customs and mores of his new home. Indeed, Clooney sees the tensions and ambiguities of this period as illustrative of many of the challenges inherent to Hindu-Christian studies more broadly – not least, the tendency for these encounters to be an elitist enterprise out of touch with wider faith communities (whether Hindu or Christian), and, in particular, the imbalance that has historically characterised these engagements, such that they have often been more of a Christian-Hindu monologue than genuine cases of reciprocal learning and openness.Clooney then moves into the 19th and early 20th centuries, when comparative studies started to become more narrowly focused on the intellectual encounter between Roman Catholic philosophical theology as exemplified in the metaphysics of Thomas Aquinas and the (Advaita) Vedānta traditions of Hinduism.In particular, Clooney shows how the attempts of the Bengali Hindu-Catholic, Brahmabandhab Upadhyay (1861-1907), to formulate a distinctively ‘Indian Christianity’ which would seek to expound the Gospel message via the metaphysical resources of Vedāntins like Śaṅkara, became influential for a whole generation of Jesuit theologians interested in the project of an indigenous or inculturated Christianity. Figures like William Wallace (1863-1922), Georges Dandoy (1882-1962), Pierre Johanns (1882-1955) and Richard De Smet (1916-95) thus combined the highest standards of Indological and theological scholarship with their lived experiences of Hindu lifeforms, and became known collectively as the ‘Calcutta school’.Throughout the 20th century, as the numbers of foreign Jesuits in India declined, Indian Jesuits like F. X. D’Sa, Mariasusai Dhavamony, and Ignatius Puthiadam took up this mantle, but they tended to shift the focus gradually away from metaphysical foundations and conversions towards inter-religious ‘dialogue’ and a growing engagement with liberation and Dalit theology.In the second section of his book, Clooney turns the tables and looks at how (and why) some Hindus have, in fact, studied Christianity. The fact that this part of the story only really begins in earnest in the 19th century is no coincidence since it reflects the one-sidedness that has historically characterised the encounters. Indeed, Clooney points out that ‘Hindu-Christian’ studies have never been exactly symmetrical because Hindus and Christians have not faced exactly the same problems or assumed the same priorities. At best, Hindus have often been on the back foot because of an agenda historically set by a Christian West; at worst, Hindu-Christian studies can appear as a euphemism for a residual tool of empire or instrument of evangelisation.Francis ClooneyNevertheless, scholars like A. Govindacharya (1860-1940) and B.N. Seal (1864-1938) were convinced that the West could re-learn a sense of spiritual holism from the East if it once again became open to absorbing other cultures (as it had in earlier centuries). Some of the most eminent mid-20th-century Indian intellectuals – such as K.C. Bhattacharyya (1875-1949) and S. Radhakrishnan (1888-1975) – comfortably operated in cosmopolitan thought-worlds that crossed some previously held rigid ‘East-West’ divide, but they were also often critical of a certain Indian popular and academic over-willingness to represent and imitate Western modes of thinking, and an ignorance or forgetfulness of India’s own ancient intellectual traditions.It is interesting to note, therefore, that by the end of the 20th century, Indian scholars like B.K. Matilal (1935-91), K.S. Murty (1924-2011) and Arvind Sharma began to present Indic philosophical and theological traditions to the West from professorial positions at some of the most prestigious universities in the English-speaking world.Finally, Clooney offers a positive assessment of the current status of Hindu-Christian studies as an academic discipline, pointing to its presence at international gatherings of scholars such as the American Academy of Religion, as well as its visibility in a number of distinguished academic publications like the Journal of Hindu-Christian Studies. In addition to his own work, Clooney specifically mentions Martin Ganeri, Ankur Barua, Jonathan Edelmann, Michelle Voss Roberts and Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad as contemporary practitioners of ‘Hindu-Christian’ studies – scholars whose own backgrounds and research interests reflect the diversity which Clooney hopes will keep the discipline fresh and relevant.Running throughout Clooney’s fascinating historical account is his conceptual argument that ‘Hindu-Christian studies’ ought to be seen as a distinctively theological study – in other words, as ‘a kind of inter-religious theology’ (p.4) or ‘faith seeking understanding’. He wants to thus steer a path between “a faith enclosed upon itself or immune to the benefits and challenges of inquiry, but also from any mode of reasoning that merely distances itself from faith, religious community, and religious practice” (p.4).This means moving beyond either a purely historical study of Hindu-Christian relations or merely sociological exchanges (important and worthy as these are) to an intellectual and spiritual exercise which is comparative and theological in that it is both deeply grounded in a particular tradition and deeply open to learning across religious borders.As he clearly demonstrates in this book, the field of Hindu-Christian studies is both blessed and burdened with a relatively long, mixed ancestry and while some readers will want to question Clooney’s emphasis on the theological (rather than, say, the anthropological or sociological) aspects of Hindu-Christian engagements, and may also find his focus on Roman Catholic (Jesuit) figures too narrow, they will nevertheless find here a thoroughly readable account of a series of fascinating historical interactions. This book is also a rousing clarion call for the continued relevance of Hindu-Christian studies conceived as “…deep learning grounded in both heart and mind, and performed by Christians learning Hinduism, ideally alongside Hindus learning Christianity.”Daniel J. Soars is a doctoral student at the Faculty of Divinity, Clare College, University of Cambridge, UK.