Harold Netland traces the emergence of the pluralistic ethos that challenges Christian faith and mission, interacting heavily with philosopher John Hick and providing a framework for developing a comprehensive evangelical theology of religions.

Harold Netland traces the emergence of the pluralistic ethos that challenges Christian faith and mission, interacting heavily with philosopher John Hick and providing a framework for developing a comprehensive evangelical theology of religions.

Harold Netland traces the emergence of the pluralistic ethos that challenges Christian faith and mission, interacting heavily with philosopher John Hick and providing a framework for developing a comprehensive evangelical theology of religions.

A clarion call for interfaith dialogue in the U.S., this “splendid exposition of non-Christian approaches to God . . . encourages an increased religious literacy that . . . will contribute richness and diversity to our national identity” (Publishers Weekly) In this tenth-anniversary edition of Encountering God, religious scholar Diana Eck shows why dialogue with people of other faiths remains crucial in today’s interdependent world—globally, nationally, and even locally. As the director of the Pluralism Project—which seeks to map the new religious diversity of the United States, from Hinduism and Buddhism to Islam—she reveals how her own encounters with other religions have shaped and enlarged her Christian faith toward a bold new Christian pluralism.

How do religious traditions create strangers and neighbors? How do they construct otherness? Or, instead, work to overcome it? In this exciting collection of interdisciplinary essays, scholars and activists from various traditions explore these questions. Through legal and media studies, they reveal how we see religious others. They show that Jewish, Christian, Islamic, and Sikh texts frame others in open-ended ways. Conflict resolution experts and Hindu teachers, they explain, draw on a shared positive psychology. Jewish mystics and Christian contemplatives use powerful tools of compassionate perception. Finally, the authors explain how Christian theology can help teach respectful views of difference. They are not afraid to discuss how religious groups have alienated one another. But, together, they choose to draw positive lessons about future cooperation.

In this major work, two world religion and mission experts present a new relational model for Christians interacting with people of other faiths.

This book explores how religions have changed in a globalized world and how Christianity is unique among them. Harold Netland, an expert in philosophical aspects of religion and pluralism, offers a fresh analysis of religion in today's globalizing world. He challenges misunderstandings of the concept of religion itself and shows how particular religious traditions, such as Buddhism, undergo significant change with modernization and globalization. Netland then responds to issues concerning the plausibility of Christian commitments to Jesus Christ and the unique truth of the Christian gospel in light of religious diversity. The book concludes with basic principles for living as Christ's disciples in religiously diverse contexts.

Christian theologians have for some decades affirmed that they have no monopoly on encounters with God or ultimate reality and that other religions also have access to religious truth and transformation. If that is the case, the time has come for Christians not only to learn about but also from their religious neighbors. Circling the Elephant affirms that the best way to be truly open to the mystery of the infinite is to move away from defensive postures of religious isolationism and self-sufficiency and to move, in vulnerability and openness, toward the mystery of the neighbor. Employing the ancient Indian allegory of the elephant and blind(folded) men, John J. Thatamanil argues for the integration of three often-separated theological projects: theologies of religious diversity (the work of accounting for why there are so many different understandings of the elephant), comparative theology (the venture of walking over to a different side of the elephant), and constructive theology (the endeavor of re-describing the elephant in light of the other two tasks). Circling the Elephant also offers an analysis of why we have fallen short in the past. Interreligious learning has been obstructed by problematic ideas about “religion” and “religions,” Thatamanil argues, while also pointing out the troubling resonances between reified notions of “religion” and “race.” He contests these notions and offers a new theory of the religious that makes interreligious learning both possible and desirable. Christians have much to learn from their religious neighbors, even about such central features of Christian theology as Christ and the Trinity. This book envisions religious diversity as a promise, not a problem, and proposes a new theology of religious diversity that opens the door to robust interreligious learning and Christian transformation through encountering the other.

INSPIRATIONAL