Grounding Our Faith in a Pluralist World: With a Little Help from Nagarjuna - Paperback

by John P. Keenan (Author), Sydney Copp (Author), Lansing Davis (Author)

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.

Author Biography

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).