At the time of the book's original publication, the author was known as Ayon Maharaj, was a professor at Ramakrishna Mission Vivekananda University, and was a monk-in-training.

[7] In Infinite Paths, Maharaj argues that "Ramakrishna's spiritual standpoint of vijnana holds the key to understanding his nuanced position on religious diversity".

It will certainly revolutionize, or at the very least raise important questions for, any future studies of the teachings of... Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa.... [the author, now known as] Swami Medhananda is to be commended and thanked for offering the scholarly community such a creative and provocative example of cross-cultural philosophy, with such great potential to advance the philosophical conversation and enhance scholarly appreciation of Sri Ramakrishna.

[1] In The Indian Express, Pratap Bhanu Mehta, Vice-Chancellor of Ashoka University, characterized Infinite Paths as "a pathbreaking work... philosophically astute, textually scrupulous, and [an] imaginatively subtle reconstruction of Ramakrishna Paramhansa's teachings".

In each of these four areas, Maharaj both advances an original interpretive thesis and brings Ramakrishna into a dialogue with comparative philosophy and religious practice.

Maharaj argues that the central tenets of Sri Ramakrishna’s philosophy are the state of vijñāna, the ultimate authority of spiritual experience, the statement that the Infinite Divine Reality is both personal and impersonal, the proclamation that there are two levels of Advaitic realization, the teaching that the vijñānī accepts both the nitya (real) and the līlā (apparent), and the message that various religious paths are "salvifically efficacious paths to realizing God" (44).

[4] The symposium contained separate commentaries by Jonathan C. Gold, Jeffery D. Long, Jonathan B. Edelmann, Michael S. Allen, Benedikt Paul Göcke, Perry Schmidt-Leukel, Francis X. Clooney, Christopher J. Bartley, Amiya P. Sen, Ethan Mills, Arvind Sharma, Julius Lipner, and Michael Williams, followed by a reply[5] by the book's author, Swami Medhananda (formerly known as Ayon Maharaj).

It would make little sense to fault Stump for having a Catholic bias or for failing to criticize Aquinas, since the aim of her book is precisely to defend his theodicy.