Winner of the 2014 Frederick J. Streng Award presented by the Society for Buddhist-Christian Studies

In this work of Buddhist-Christian reflection, John Ross Carter explores two basic aspects of human religiousness: faith and the activity of understanding. Carter's perspective is unique, putting people and their experiences at the center of inquiry into religiousness. His model and method grows out of friendship, challenging the so-called objective approach to the study of religion that privileges patterns, concepts, and abstraction.

Carter considers the traditions he knows best, the Protestant Christianity he was born into and the Theravada and Jodo Shinshu (Pure Land) traditions of the Sri Lankan and Japanese friends among whom he has lived, studied, and worked. His rich, wide-ranging accounts of religious experience include discussions of transcendence, reason, sävega, shinjin, the inconceivable, and whether lives oriented toward faith will survive in a global context with increased pressures for individualism and secularism. Ultimately, Carter proposes that the endeavor of interreligious understanding is itself a religious quest.

John Ross Carter is Professor of the Study of the Great Religions of the World, Professor of Philosophy and Religion, and Director of Chapel House at Colgate University. He is the author of On Understanding Buddhists: Essays on the Theravada Tradition in Sri Lanka, also published by SUNY Press, and the editor of On Living Life Well: Echoes of the Words of the Buddha from the Theravada Tradition.

Foreword by Charles Hallisey
Acknowledgments
Introductory Note
List of Abbreviations

Part I: The Quest for Religious Understanding with the Therada, Jodo Shinshu Buddhists, and Christians

1. On Understanding Religious Men and Women
2. Truth and History in Interreligious Understanding: A Preliminary Inquiry
3. Interreligious as a Religious Quest

Part II: The Dynamics of Faith and Beyond: Personally and in an Ever-Expanding Community

4. Samvega and the Incipient Phase of Faith
5. Shinjin: More than "Faith"?
6. Celebrating Our Faith
7. Colloquia in Faith

Part III: Converging Affirmations from Different Perspectives

8. "Relying Upon" or "Taking Refuge" as a Genuinely Human Activity
9. Love and Compassion as Given
10. Toward an Understanding of What Is Inconceivable
11. Arising of Salvific Realization as Buddhists and Christians Have Affirmed
12. Relationality in Religious Awareness

Part IV: Building from Our Past into Our Common Future

13. From Controversy to Understanding: More than a Century of Progress
14. Religion and the Imperatives for Development
15. Getting First Things First: Some Reflections on a Response to Venerable Ananda Maitreya
16. Translational Theology: An Expression of the Faith of Christians in a Religiously Plural World
17. Buddhists and Baptists: In Conversation into Our Common Future

Part V: The Challenge of Our Future

18. Will There Be Faith on Earth?

Notes
A Bibliographic Note on the Context of Origin and Subsequent Versions of the Chapters in this Volume
Bibliography