For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. John 3:16 It is always possible to critique one religious tradition from the perspective of another. For Buddhism, the first of the modern, axial religions, Christianity's emphasis on sacrifice and its related fetishism of suffering seem atavistic holdovers from the Jewish tradition. (Buddhism has its own atavisms, of course.) But the tradition to which I aspire, exemplified by such figures as Aldous Huxley, Huston Smith, and above all Thomas Merton, suggests that the salient features of each tradition illuminate features that are less conspicuously present in others. The Perennialism of the liberationist period of the 1960s and 1970s was not a religious practice, though some ill-advisedly attempted to make it into one. You cannot invent a religious practice, it must develop organically over time and within a culture. Perennialism is, rather, a perspective on inter-faith dialogue which emphasizes commonalities and seeks to make of differences not grounds for conflict but pathways to better understanding, not only of one tradition by another, but by each tradition of itself. Like all the projects of that era, it partly succeeded but also partly failed. Its positive legacy is mostly taken for granted, like the positive legacy of sexual liberation. That sectarian violence among Christians has become rare is no small thing, and Christianity's mission of violent conversion of non-Western peoples has been largely abandoned. But its failures are more glaring, most of all the war between Christian and Islamic fundamentalisms (which, ironically, have much in common, including their hostility to feminism and TG). hugzu ;-p |