Grounding Our Faith in a Pluralist World--With a Little Help from Nagarjuna.(Book review)

GROUNDING OUR FAITH IN A PLURALIST WORLD--WITH A LITTLE HELP FROM NAGARJUNA. By John P. Keenan, with Buster G. Smith, Lansing Davis, and Sydney Copp. Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2009.

A key feature of our contemporary global society is that religious communities find themselves coexisting and inevitably interacting with adherents of other faith traditions on different dimensions of life. In such a context, given the critical situation of our Earth community wounded on many levels, relating to religious Others in constructive and cooperative ways becomes no longer just an academic or theoretical issue, but one upon which hangs the very survival of this Earth, the biosphere or "circle of life" that sustains us in common. Keenan addresses this vital issue in this volume.

In his first chapter, he describes the difference between this "world of many faiths" of our time and that of our ancestors, who lived "primarily in bounded worlds of monocultural assumptions" (p. 1). He describes the task at hand, that is, of reaffirming and reclaiming our faith within our respective traditions, and at the same time being able to respect and relate to those from other religious communities and traditions in a spirit of cooperation toward healing our Earth's woundedness, in part caused precisely by conflicting claims about ultimate reality made by these different religions.

The three "classic" positions (formulated by Alan Race and taken up by many others) vis-a-vis religious Others in the context of the multiplicity of religions are reviewed, and Keenan points out their respective inadequacies for dealing with our contemporary situation. A stance of exclusivism, affirming the absolute validity of one's own faith tradition, dismisses religious Others from theological consideration in a forthright manner, without bothering to understand what they are about or what they stand for. Surely this stance is not a viable way to live in a multifaith society, and needless to say, it easily leads to animosity, conflict, and even …