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Catholicism in Dialogue Series Hinduism and Catholicism: Finding God in All Things

Prof. Francis X. Clooney, S.J.
Parkman Professor of Divinity
Professor of Comparative Theology
Director, The Center for the Study of World Religions
Harvard Divinity School

Lecture: Hinduism and Catholicism: Finding God in All Things

Thursday, 18 September 2014
7:00p.m.–9:00p.m.
4th Floor, Information Commons (IC)
Lake Shore Campus, LUC

Student Seminar (students only)

Friday, 19 September 2014
Time: TBA
Cuneo Hall, Room 417
Lake Shore Campus, LUC

The lecture on the 18th was open to the public and all are invited to attend. The student seminar on the 19th was by invitation only. If you have any questions about the seminar, please contact Dr. Bret Lewis (blewis1@luc.edu).

"The wisdom of the Ignatian tradition is beautifully enshrined in the insight of St. Ignatius Loyola that we seek God in all things and see God everywhere. In that way we learn how to serve God and our neighbor everywhere and at all times. From St. Ignatius on, mystics and poets and scholars, inspired by this ideal, have lived out the Ignatian ideal in service to others. Gerard Manley Hopkins expressed the ideal most simply: “Christ plays in ten thousand places, Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his To the Father through the features of men's faces.” Teilhard de Chardin spoke for many of us when he said that he “sought to teach how to see God everywhere, to see Him in all that is most hidden, most solid and most ultimate in the world.” In our times, the quest to see God in all things can be naturally extended to seeing God in the religious traditions around us. As Vatican II says, we can revere and welcome those other ways of conduct and of life, even when different from our own, that “by no means rarely reflect the radiance of that Truth enlightening all people.” Yet we can do even more: in a climate of true interreligious exchange, we can also learn from how saints and mystics in other traditions see God in all things, and can see us in light of their experience of God everywhere. In today’s world, God is offering us the grace to be seen by others in light of their vision of God in the world. In this lecture, I give the example of a Hindu tradition of south India, wherein the devotee is invited to see the divine—Krishna, Rama, Sita—everywhere and in all things. At a Jesuit university, we have nothing to fear when we find ourselves in the light of other faiths, other people’s vision of the world in God."

- Prof. Frank Clooney