Keynote Details

Francis X. Clooney, S.J., joined the Harvard Divinity School faculty in 2005, where he is the Parkman Professor of Divinity and Professor of Comparative Theology. After earning his doctorate in South Asian Languages and Civilizations (University of Chicago, 1984), he taught at Boston College for 21 years before coming to Harvard. From 2010 to 2017, he was the Director of the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard.

His primary areas of Indological scholarship are theological commentarial writings in the Sanskrit and Tamil traditions of Hindu India. He is also a leading figure globally in the developing field of comparative theology, a discipline distinguished by attentiveness to the dynamics of theological learning deepened through the study of traditions other than one’s own. He has also written on the Jesuit missionary tradition, particularly in India, on the early Jesuit pan-Asian discourse on reincarnation, and on the dynamics of dialogue and interreligious learning in the contemporary world.

Clooney is the author of numerous articles and books, including Thinking Ritually: Retrieving the Purva Mimamsa of Jaimini (Vienna, 1990), Theology after Vedanta: An Experiment in Comparative Theology (State University of New York Press, 1993), Comparative Theology: Deep Learning across Religious Borders (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), and His Hiding Place Is Darkness: A Hindu-Catholic Theopoetics of Divine Absence (Stanford University Press, 2013). His translation of the Hindu theologian Ramanuja’s Manual of Daily Worship (Nityagrantham) appeared in the International Journal of Hindu Studies in 2020. 

His most recent books include Reading the Hindu and Christian Classics: Why and How It Matters (University of Virgina Press, 2019), Western Jesuit Scholars in India: Tracing Their Paths, Reassessing Their Goals (Brill, 2020), and most recently, St. Joseph in South India: Poetry, Mission and Theology in Costanzo Gioseffo Beschi's Tempavani (Vienna, 2022). 

His memoir, Hindu and Catholic, Priest and Scholar: A Love Story appeared in 2024, published by T&T Clark/Bloomsbury. An interview about the memoir appeared in October 2024 in the Harvard Divinity Bulletin, with Bulletin Editor Wendy McDowell, and can be found here. 

A feschrift in his honor was published by Wiley Blackwell in 2023.

He is currently working on a new translation of the first four ālvārs, Vaiṣṇava poet saints of Tamil Nadu, and a small book on the future of interfaith studies. 

In July 2010 he was elected a Fellow of the British Academy and has served as a Professorial Research Fellow at the Australian Catholic University. During 2022-23 he was the President of the Catholic Theological Society of America. His most recent honorary doctorates are two: September 2023, the University of Scranton, and May 2024, Le Moyne College. 

His personal website can be found here.