In the Company of Friends: Exploring Faith and Understanding with Buddhists and Christians

John Ross Carter

Aug 2012 · State University of New York Press

About this ebook

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 Theravāda and Jōdo Shinshū (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, saṃvega, 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.

About the author

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 Theravāda 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 Theravāda Tradition.