God at Play: Lila in Hindu and Christian Traditions - Couverture souple

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 1531510094 ISBN 13 : 9781531510091

Editeur : Fordham University Press, 2025

Synopsis

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 compassion. God 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 humour, 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 20th 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.

A propos du livre

À propos des auteurs

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).

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).

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.

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).

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).

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Fordham University Press
• Date d'édition: 2025
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 1531510094
• ISBN 13: 9781531510091
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 320
• Éditeur: Soars Daniel
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible