Abstract
While Daniel Soars edited the volume God at Play: Līlā in Hindu and Christian Traditions, he focused on līlā as a concept, without relying on the uniform translation of the word as “play.” As a key concept across Hindu traditions, this volume on līlā makes a significant and authentic contribution to Hindu studies. The contributing authors dialogue among an impressive breadth of the Hindu traditions, including Rāmānuja, Vedānta Deśika, Sākta, Śaivism, and others. S. thus avoids essentializing Hinduism itself, and he discouraged contributing authors from “using Western/Christian categories to understand the Hindu other” (1). Instead, the focus of this volume was to “explore how līlā functions” throughout Hindu traditions, and to “listen for echoes in Chrstian understandings of the gratuitousness of the created order in relation to God” (1). As such, this text is an important contribution to the field of comparative studies in a world of postcolonial awareness and critique, since the concept in question is explicitly fluid, open to interpretation, and engaged across various different perspectives. S.’s compilation provides an insightful, creative, and inspiring way of doing comparative work, and as Michelle Voss notes in the afterword, there are various critical contextual turns throughout the text that helpfully direct its telos toward one of ethics and justice.
In four breathless parts that continually invite the reader into further thought, the text addresses līlā in a theological context, from a pastoral lens, in its aesthetic and dramatic dimensions, and finally in relation to the topic of human playfulness. The range in parts and chapters demonstrates the līlā inherent in the creation of the text itself, where there is no strict set of boundaries or definitions. Thus, the insights into, or echoes from within, Christian traditions range from Greek philosophy, creation, divine will, human freedom, theodicy, human playfulness, to a critique of capitalism and cultures that emphasize work and productivity above all else. This text is recommended especially for those deepening their knowledge of the diversity of Hindu traditions, beginning to study līlā, and comparative scholars across disciplines. Specific to theologians, as S. articulates in his introduction, this reflection on līlā is also a well-timed reminder that “theology is hollow if it remains at a purely conceptual level; it is also meant to help us live well” (13).