Religious truth / edited by Robert Cummings Neville ; foreword by Jonathan Z. Smith.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Neville, Robert C.

Series:

Comparative religious ideas project

The comparative religious ideas project

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Truth--Religious aspects.

Truth.

Religions.

Physical Description:

xxiv, 339 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm.

Place of Publication:

Albany : State University of New York Press, [2001]

Summary:

The Comparative Religious Ideas Project is a groundbreaking three-year collaboration among well-known scholars of world religious traditions as well as philosophers, historians, sociologists of religion, and theologians who view religion in more general terms. These resulting three volumes offer an exciting look at important comparisons among major world religions and develop and test a theory of comparison employing the collaborative method.

This multifaceted study compares how six traditions interpret religious truth, and how it has come to be illustrated so diversely in the Chinese religion, Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Philosophical essays integrate the comparisons, ask what religious truth might be in terms of a contemporary defensible theory, and reflect on what all this shows for the nature of religion and its study.

Contents:

1 Truth in Chinese Religion / Livia Kohn, James Miller 7

1.2 The Nature of Truth 11

1.3 Expressions of Truth 19

1.4 Cultivation and Embodiment of Truth 28

2 From Truth to Religious Truth in Hindu Philosophical Theology / Francis X. Clooney, S.J., Hugh Nicholson 43

2.1 How They Forged a Conversation on Religious Truth in Ancient India 43

2.2 Ordinary Truth 44

2.3 Ordinary Truth as Right Knowing: pramana, prameya, prama 45

2.4 Religious Truth 46

2.5 Nyaya: God Is Like a Potmaker 47

2.6 Mimamsa: No Need for a World-Maker 50

2.7 Knowing the God of Scripture in Visistadvaita Vedanta 53

2.8 Advaita Vedanta and the Scriptural Origins of Empirical Truth 55

2.9 The Hindu Debate about Truth 57

2.10 Public Discourse and Its Sectarian Roots 59

3 "With Great Noise and Mighty Whirlpools the Ganges Flowed Backwards": Buddhist Approaches to Truth / Malcolm David Eckel, John J. Thatamanil 65

3.2 Embodied Truth-in-Practice 66

3.3 Epistemological Truth 69

3.4 Scriptural and Revelatory Truth 76

4 "To Practice Together Truth and Humility, Justice and Law, Love of Merciful Kindness and Modest Behavior" / Anthony J. Saldarini, Joseph Kanofsky 83

4.2 The Biblical Tradition 86

4.3 The Dead Sea Scrolls 88

4.4 The Talmud 93

4.5 Saadia Gaon and Philosophical Truth 94

4.6 The Response to Modernity 97

5 Patristic Prama and Pramana: Augustine and the Quest for Truth / Paula Fredriksen 109

5.2 The One, the Many, and the Problem of Evil 110

5.3 Mani and Plato 111

5.4 The Knower, Knowing, and the Known 115

5.5 Some Comparisons 119

6 The Taxonomy of Truth in the Islamic Religious Doctrine and Tradition / S. Nomanul Haq 127

6.2 Explication of the Notion of Sidq 128

6.3 Abu Hamid al-Ghazali's Hierarchy of Sidq 131

6.4 The Ontological Equivalence of Truth and Reality: al-Haqq and al-Haqiqa 135

6.5 The Epistemological Question 137

6.6 The Functional Approach: Fiqh and Shara'a Recalled 138

6.7 The Rational-Mystical Approach: The Ghazalian Synthesis 139

6.8 Essential Reality of the Truth 140

7 Religious Truth in the Six Traditions: A Summary / Robert Cummings Neville, Wesley J. Wildman 145

7.1 Religious Truth: Our Categories and Their Justification 145

7.2 Religious Truth as an Epistemological Problem 149

7.3 Religious Truth as Expressed in Sacred Texts and Objects 154

7.4 Religious Truth as Cultivation and Embodiment 159

7.5 Religious Truth as Opposed to Error, Deceit, and Failure 162

8 A Contemporary Understanding of Religious Truth / Robert Cummings Neville, Wesley J. Wildman 171

8.1 Truths in Religion 171

8.2 Truth in Interpretation 176

8.3 Truth in Reference 182

8.4 Truth in Achieved Meaning 187

8.5 Truth in Transformation 191

9 On the Nature of Religion: Lessons We Have Learned / Wesley J. Wildman, Robert Cummings Neville 203

9.1 Remarks on Our Experience of Studying Religion 204

9.2 Remarks on Our Construction of Theories of Aspects of Religion 208

9.3 Remarks on the Relation between Comparison and Theory Building 211

9.4 Conjectures on Comparison and Theories of Religion 213

10 Director's Conclusions / Robert Cummings Neville 219

Appendix A On the Process of the Project During the Third Year / Wesley J. Wildman 227.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

0791447774

0791447782

OCLC:

43487212