Clooney is very attentive to contemporary reflection on...

Clooney is very attentive to contemporary reflection on hermeneutics and its application to such textual study, as expounded by such figures as Hans-Georg Gadamer and Roland Barthes.[^25] Clooney’s main model for the theological act is, in fact, as a form of attentive spiritual reading.

Comparative theology is an exercise in which the texts from the two traditions form an expanded narrative and where the theologian learns and is transformed through reading texts from a number of different traditions together.

However, Clooney is also concerned to explore such engagement as an exercise in theological reasoning across traditions about central themes in theology.[^26] Thus, in Theology After Vedanta (1993) Clooney compares texts from one of the most influential of Hindu theological traditions, Advaita Vedanta, with Aquinas’ Summa Theologiae and its commentaries.

He characterises his own work as Indological, comparative and theological.[^27] As ‘Indological,’ such engagement with Hindu texts has to meet the standards of good scholarship and give an accurate account of that Hindu text. As ‘comparative,’ it is concerned to consider carefully the relation between the accounts, being open to dissimilarities as well as similarities.

As ‘theological,’ such work is properly ‘faith seeking understanding,’ in which the theologian is concerned about the truth of what is being studied, about what is being learned about God and the human relationship with God, and about the identity of the faith of the theologian and his and her community after the encounter.[^28] Accordingly, Clooney first undertakes a detailed study of the sacred texts and commentarial traditions of Advaita Vedanta.

He identifies the textual character of the Advaitic tradition and its theology, in which the theological account is built up as a rich text woven from layers of sacred scripture and commentaries and in which religious truth is realised through transformative reading, through study and meditation on scriptural texts as interpreted by the commentaries.