God's Other Children: Personal Encounters with Faith, Love, and Holiness in Sacred India

Lecture by Bradley Malkovsky

Tuesday, October 28, 2014, 4:15 p.m.
Quad 264, Saint John's University

Drawing from his recently published God's Other Children: Personal Encounters with Faith, Love, and Holiness in Sacred India, theologian Bradley Malkovsky will explain how years of first-hand encounters with Hindus, Buddhists, and Muslims in India caused him to develop a more expansive understanding of God's gracious presence and activity outside his own Catholic tradition. With a great many images accompanying his presentation, he will give special attention to questions raised through interfaith experience about the universal significance of Christ.

Bradley Malkovsky is associate professor of comparative religion at the University of Notre Dame. In his teaching there he focuses on doctrinal and spiritual issues in the relationship of Christianity with Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam. He earned his master's and doctoral degrees from the University of Tübingen in Germany and he has studied Sanskrit and Hindu thought at the University of Poona in Pune, India. Specializing in the field of Hindu-Christian dialogue, he has been the editor of the Journal of Hindu-Christian Studies for thirteen years. Among his own writings are The Role of Divine Grace in the Soteriology of Samkaracarya (2001) and God's Other Children: Personal Encounters with Faith, Love, and Holiness in Sacred India (2013), for which he won the Huston Smith Publishing Prize. Huston Smith, one of the world's preeminent scholars of comparative religion, called God's Other Children "the most interesting and inspiring book that I have read in a very long time." Commenting on the same book, the renowned Hindu scholar Anantanand Rambachan said that "Malkovsky takes us on a journey that illumines both heart and mind as he invites our own reflection on the significance of our encounters with people of other faiths." Prominent Jesuit scholar of Hinduism Francis X. Clooney said that "Malkovsky has written a classic for our time, a testimony matching our best efforts to keep the faith and celebrate the diversity around us."

Sponsored by the Jay Phillips Center for Interfaith Learning in collaboration with the CSB/SJU Department of Theology