Jess Navarette, speaking at Harvard’s
Bhakti Yoga conference in 2025, defined comparative theology as “the study of
religious faith, practice, and experience, especially the study of God and of
God’s relation to the world.” Because the capitalized word, “God,” is used and
usually identified with the deity of the three Abrahamic religions, Judaism, Christianity,
and Islam, Navarette undoubtedly used the term as a general placeholder for divinity,
whether in the form of a deity or impersonal, as in brahman in Hinduism.
This begs the questions: what is divinity and could a definition apply to every
religion? Answers to these questions can be fruitfully informed by what Navarette
calls “interreligious learning” in theology, which in turn is not exclusively applicable
to Christianity. Rather than presuming that I have answers, I want to explore
how such learning can be fruitful in advancing knowledge of religion as an
arguably sui generis domain.
The full essay is at "Interreligious Learning."
