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. Remarkably, the pairing of these texts is grounded not in a general theory of religion, but in an engagement with two unexpected sources: the theopoetics, theodramatics, and theology of the 20th-century Catholic theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar, and the intensely perceived and written poetry of Pulitzer Prize winner Jorie Graham. How we read and write on religious matters is transformed by this rare combination of voices in what is surely a unique and important contribution to comparative studies and religious hermeneutics.
"An unquenchable longing and passion of the lover in God's absence is observed, even intensely felt by the reader, when Clooney juxtaposes passages of the Song of Solomon with parallel passages of the Tiruvaymoli, or the Holy Word. The effect of this is as powerful as it is poignant: the reader not only observes lovers within these two traditions desperately seeking their divine beloved, but the r
Christopher Newport University
"Francis Clooney, S.J.'s His Hiding Place is Darkness takes us into an entirely different world of experience and expression of divine absence in a biblical and in a Hindu sacred text . . . [I]t is beautifully written in a style flowing with the texts he reads."
America Magazine: The National Catholic Review
"In his latest book His Hiding Place Is Darkness: A Hindu-Catholic Theopoetics of Divine Absence, Francis X. Clooney takes his comparative work in exciting new directions. The book marks a continuation of Clooney's significant contributions toward developing comparative theology as a robust and active subfield in religious studies, and Clooney's extended exposition on the theme of 'divine absence'
