Piety and Responsibility: Patterns of Unity in Karl Rahner, Karl Barth, and Vedanta Desika (Routledge New Critical Thinking in Religion, Theology and Biblical Studies)

This book analyzes the writings of Karl Rahner, Karl Barth, and Vedanta Desika to disclose how each construes "piety" and "responsibility" as integral to each other. Each theologian expresses a fundamental unity of love of God and love of neighbour. Sheveland explores this unity in ecumenical and interreligious frameworks, showing how these authors privilege theology as practice, enactment, or simply as ethical. He uses the Renaissance genre of musical polyphony as a methodological tool by which to explore the aesthetic quality and the similarity-in-difference of the theological voices being compared. Polyphony's application to comparative theology includes the avoidance of caricature, domestication, and antagonism. In place of these is offered a fundamentally aesthetic paradigm by which to hear theological voices in terms of their unity-in-distinction.

Dr. John Sheveland is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Gonzaga University. He received a Master of Arts in Religion from Yale Divinity School and a Ph.D. in Systematic and Comparative Theology from Boston College. At Gonzaga University he teaches courses in Christian Theology, Interreligious Dialogue, and World Religions. His research interests include Christian-Hindu and Christian-Buddhist Comparative Theology, Comparative theological anthropology, and theological responses to religious violence. He is a member of the American Academy of Religion, the College Theology Society, and the Catholic Theological Society of America, and has contributed scholarly articles to journals such as Studies in Interreligious Dialogue, Louvain Studies, The Way, Expository Times, and to several edited books.