Interfaith
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One of the most troubling things about reading Clark Williamson’s A Guest in the House of Israel is realizing that anti-Judaism isn’t just some anomalous bug of Christianity that can easily be tossed out. It’s more or less a constitutive feature of the patristic-medieval-Reformation-modern Christian consensus. As Christianity gradually emerged as a separate religion, the Read more
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The claim that Jews lost the covenant because they were not worthy of it is simply works-righteousness. Works-righteousness takes a gift provided by the free and unconditional grace of God and turns it into a condition apart from which God is not free to be gracious. Works-righteousness has nothing to do with an entirely different Read more
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William Saletan has a good round-up and rebuttal of the campaign on the Right to prevent the construction of a Muslim community center and mosque in lower Manhattan, not far from the World Trade Center site. Maybe I’m naive, but it’s actually kind of shocking to hear high-profile pols like Gingrinch and Palin all but Read more
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In the previous post I mentioned Aldous Huxley’s embrace of the “perennial philosophy” and his influence on the scholar of religion Huston Smith. Smith’s work had a big influence on me during my undergraduate years. When I was a callow 20-year-old atheist, Smith’s writings, as well as a series of interviews he did with Bill Read more
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In an earlier post I mentioned that our church was hosting a gathering of the “Network of Spiritual Progressives” this past weekend. As part of that event, Rabbi Michael Lerner–one of the chief movers of the network and the publisher of Tikkun magazine–preached at our church this Sunday. Ironically, perhaps, this passage from Galatians was Read more
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Kristin Johnston Largen, a professor of theology at the Lutheran seminary at Gettysburg, has written a stimulating little book: What Christians Can Learn from Buddhism: Rethinking Salvation. In it she offers a summary of the key points of what Christianity and Buddhism mean by salvation and reflects on how Buddhist notions of salvation can shed Read more
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Theologian Paul Griffiths has an interesting post about how Christians should think about Muslims, but then ends with this: I hope, that is, that we Christians will increasingly choose to see Muslims as allies and affines against the deadening and bloody weight of late-capitalist democracy. It would be better, I think, for the Church to Read more
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Christopher has a post on universalism that pretty closely approximates my own view. In short: we believe salvation is through Christ, but we don’t know how far that salvation extends. We can hope–but not know–that it extends to everyone. One other point I’d add is that Christians usually presume we’re on the “inside,” and the Read more
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Another thought occurred to me about John Hick’s pluralism hypothesis: that it risks introducing a moralistic distortion into religion. Since, for Hick, religion is primarily a practical rather than a cognitive enterprise (because the Real in itself eludes our cognitive abilities), the criteria by which he judges religion are primarily moral ones. Religions are vehicles Read more
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Thinking a bit more about John Hick’s pluralism, spurred on by some of the excellent comments on the last post, it does seem that my original worry about Hick’s position could be stated in a stronger form. My question was whether it’s necessary to believe in a tradition in a non-pluralist way (i.e., to believe Read more
A Thinking Reed 