Michael Amaladoss is one of the leading Catholic intellectuals in India today, a respected writer and teacher, talented musician, and leader in shaping the Society of Jesus in India in the past decades. He is known globally for his writing on interreligious dialogue, Christian culture and religion in India and across Asia, and the cross-cultural learning required for distinctively Indian and Asian Christian theologies. He knows the seminaries and has worked with the bishops; he is quite familiar with the Christian ashram tradition and has been director of a Jesuit center for interreligious dialogue and research; he sees clearly the poverty and suffering of the Indian people, but cannot be narrowly defined as a Dalit or liberation theologian. By his teaching and body of writing, Amaladoss represents a distinctive and thoughtful path within Indian Catholicism.

All fifteen essays in the volume have been published before, often in journals hard to access outside of India. They are collected under two headings: “Rethinking Religious Pluralism: Opportunities and Challenges” and “Responding to Religious Pluralism.” Amaladoss wrote an introduction for the volume, and Jonathan Tan offers an insightful preface. In a brief afterword, Amaladoss reviews Pope Francis’ contribution to our understanding of dialogue, particularly his insistence that interreligious dialogue is essentially connected to the full range of social issues facing humanity today. We can therefore be grateful to Tan and to Orbis Books for making these essays available to us in this single book.

Amaladoss is a quietly bold thinker: “To accept religious pluralism is to acknowledge the diversity of divine manifestations in the religions, considered Gods by them. Since God is one, these can only be different manifestations of the one Absolute” (21). As he sees it, “Revelation and inspiration are not once-for-all events. They are a dimension of history,” a history that never supports a pristine separation of cultures or religions. Accordingly, alive to the signs of the times and aware that “God is an ever-present mystery in history,” we must forego the claim to be exclusive spokespersons for God, and rather on the lookout for God everywhere (43).

Such ideas have radical implications, but it is important to understand that Amaladoss came to this version of pluralism, not by theories arising in the modern West, but by honest accountability to his own spiritual genealogy. At several points he reflects on growing up in a Hindu environment and on how he has always felt that “Catholic” and “Hindu,” though different, cannot be kept neatly separate: “Hinduism is not an ‘other’ religion, as it is for the foreign missionary. It is the religion of my ancestors … God has spoken to my ancestors through [Hinduism]. It is part of my tradition. I have my roots in it” (203). He wants also to avoid both a shallow relativism and the notion of identities patched together: “I cannot have my feet in two boats at the same time. I will have to find a personal integration. I will have to see that the Christian and Hindu traditions interact within me and my community in a creative manner. I will then be not only an ‘Indian Christian,’ but a ‘Hindu-Christian,’ my main identity being Christian” (203–04). In these ways, he speaks too for many Indian Catholics likewise unable to leave Hinduism entirely outside their Christian identities. These essays cumulatively show us a distinctive manner of authentic Catholic identity and theology not merely derivative of the West.

Given such themes, many complexities arise, but Amaladoss does not burden his essays with jargon or heavy footnotes. He is unfailingly courteous, writing with a certain humility, ready to admit objections to his every proposal, without claiming to be beyond criticism. He has indeed been criticized. The fifteenth essay, “Interreligious Dialogue: Fifty Years after Vatican II: Challenges and Opportunities,” is his response to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which has investigated his writings more than once. In it he explains his positions as simply and clearly as possible, detailing their sources and the cultural/theological logic operative in them, in order to show their genuinely Catholic character. He pays particular attention to John Paul II's teachings on dialogue, which, he believes, stand the test of time.

Even if Western Catholic scholars (such as myself) try over a lifetime to “learn our way” into Hinduism so that it is no longer merely an “other” religion for us, our possibilities and problematics will always differ from those facing Indian Christians. In the end, though, a reflective reading of this volume will help us to think similarly closer to home, understanding better what it means to be “American” and “Catholic” at the same time.