LAUSR

“Interrogating Rebirth: Hindu-Christian Debates and Their Contemporary Relevance” was a panel at the Dharma Association of North America (DANAM) meeting in conjunction with the American Academy of Religion Annual Meeting in November 2016. The panel contained four papers, by Nalini Bhushan, Gerald Larson, Jeffery Long, and Bradley Malkovsky, which in their finalized form appear in the current issue of Religions. I was the respondent to the panel. The panel aimed at putting forth relevant and substantial materials regarding multiple births as a teaching and lived practice of Hindu tradition, and, in many of the essays, as a plausible and relevant doctrine still workable in the 21st century. As such, it succeeded in raising many of the right issues. Well before the panel occurred, I had had a conversation with Jonathan Edelmann, one of the contributors to this thematic issue of Religions, on the state of theology and Hindu theology in academe, and the need for scholars to take up and analyze issues of faith in terms of scripture, history, culture, reasoned argumentation, and ethical ramifications, lived and theorized. While the temptation today is to treat matters of faith as personal, even private, and hardly to be debated, we thought that we should be able to discuss the matter, even debate it. After all, what would be more worrisome than to find (as we fear may be the case) that it is almost impossible to have a sustained conversation or intelligent argument on the topic today? The impression may be given that no religious position is open to reasonable scrutiny, because none is reasoned. But it takes hard work to show that this is not the case, that as all traditions have believed, reasoning can be a valuable tool and ally in advancing the understanding of religious beliefs in a tradition, and across the boundaries of traditions. We wanted, then, to show that with all these factors in mind, we could move forward a conversation in an academic setting that would take seriously theology across religious borders. We thought—as I recall our informal conversation—that the topic of “one birth, many births”—a double theme, since it cannot be just the latter that is interrogated—seemed an ideal topic for academic consideration, because it relates to intimate matters of death and life, is relevant to how humans see the meaning of life, tests the limits of reasoned argumentation on a difficult and subtle matter—and is, to be sure, the site of ancient and long-running controversies across religious boundaries. I was happy then to see the 2016 panel take shape and to be asked to be respondent to it. I am all the more happy to see this journal issue take shape, enriched by the papers of the original authors and now with ten more papers, and to have it come out so very well. Together, these fourteen papers constitute a promissory in favor of future discussions we may now better undertake, know more, and better, about why the topic is important. Like my response at the DANAM panel, what follows is however simply a reflection on several of the issues arising in or across the essays. (Full disclosure: Although I have been studying Hinduism for over forty years, I am a practicing Catholic, a Catholic priest, and a Jesuit. I am a one-birth believer, but not because I have been overwhelmingly convinced by the Christian apologetic arguments, nor because I disrespect toward