Home in Three Dimensions: Personal Location in Comparative and Transreligious Theologies

Abstract

This article reflects on my experience of what it means to have a “home” as a comparative theologian. As I treat comparative theology and transreligious theology here, both are religiously engaged practices. Comparative theology begins from a religious location and seeks to enrich it with learning that can be shared in that community, while transreligious theology engages with religious input in a “free range” manner, with no presumed outcome. Comparative theologians do not shy away from practice that becomes participation in another tradition, and transreligious theologians do not shy away from conclusions or actions that might place them more on one religious path than another. If to know only one religion is, in important respects, to know none, so too are those not pursuing any particular religious path partially disabled in knowing aspects of all others. Home points to the existential dimension always at play in this kind of scholarship, and this essay illustrates what that dimension looks like in my case. Such examples suggest the complexity nestled in the idea of home, a complexity with its own comparative theological character. If home is meant to indicate a reference point, it is a moving target for all of us. This article is framed around three aspects of that complexity: home as where we come from, where we live, and where we are going.