Grounding Our Faith in a Pluralist World

by John P Keenan, Sydney Copp, Lansing Davis

Overview

This book draws upon the Mahayana philosophy developed within Buddhism, employing it as a means to empty our usual alternatives for viewing the world's many religions--whether exclusivism, inclusivism, or pluralism. The aim is to free people from clinging to intellectual positions, enabling them gently but committedly to affirm their vernacular tradition as it is practiced on the ground. It critiques the above three options, and introduces the Mahayana philosophy of emptiness and dependent arising, along with its distinction between ultimate truth and conventional truth. It then applies this philosophy to an urgent question that bedevils modern people: how to practice one's chosen faith in the awareness of many other honored and attractive paths, both elegant and efficacious.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781498251693
Publisher:	Wipf & Stock Publishers
Publication date:	01/01/2009
Pages:	136
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.38(d)

About the Author

John P. Keenan is Rector of St. Mark's Episcopal Church, Newport, Vermont, and Professor Emeritus of Religion at Middlebury College. He was trained at St. Charles Borromeo Seminary in Philadelphia and in the Buddhist Studies Program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of The Meaning of Christ: A Mahayana Theology (1989), The Gospel of Mark: a Mahayana Reading (1995), and The Wisdom of James: Parallels with Mahayana Buddhism (2005).

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments vii

Preface ix

1 A World of Many Faiths

When faith meets faith 1

Exclusivism: possessing the true picture 6

Inclusivism: possessing the complete picture 8

How do we get beyond inclusivism? 14

Whose revelation? Whose scripture? 17

Pluralism: the picture gallery 21

The trouble with pluralism 27

2 Toward a Workable Philosophy of Religions

If not pluralism, what? 31

Going to ground and learning the vernacular 35

Developing new apologetics 39

3 The Useful Philosophies of Mahayana Buddhism

The distinction between Buddhist doctrine and Mahayana philosophy 46

The development of Mahayana philosophy 49

The Middle Path of Madhyamika

The philosophy of emptiness 52

Emptiness as dependent arising 56

Two truths-ultimate and conventional 62

The truth of faith liberated from the absolute 67

Yogacara's Analysis of the Mind of Faith

Nagging questions about emptiness 72

Practitioners of introspection 74

Becoming conscious of consciousness 78

The mind as the very model of dependent arising 81

Three patterns of thinking 83

Contemplating the truth of scripture and doctrine 87

4 Grounding our Faith in a Pluralist World

Apologetics from the ground 91

Culturally sensitive hermeneutics 93

Truth and convention 96

The emptiness and dependent arising of traditions 100

Interfaith conversation in a Mahayana mode 103

Wrapping up (a non-conclusion) 109

Bibliography 117