In the Company of Friends

John Ross Carter

Description

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.
Foreword by Charles Hallisey
Acknowledgments
Introductory Note
List of Abbreviations

Part I: The Quest for Religious Understanding with the Therāda, Jōdo Shinshū 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

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 23 août 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438442815
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 4 Mo

Extrait

IN THE COMPANY OF FRIENDS

Exploring Faith and Understanding
with Buddhists and Christians
JOHN ROSS CARTER
Published by
STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK PRESS, ALBANY
© 2012 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Carter, John Ross.
In the company of friends : exploring faith and understanding with
Buddhists and Christians / John Ross Carter.
p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
ISBN 978-1-4384-4279-2 (hardcover: alk. paper)
1. Christianity and other religions—Buddhism. 2. Buddhism—Relations—Christianity. I. Title.
BR128.B8C37 2012
261.2'43—dc23
2011033669
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To Sandra
With Whom I Have Walked Along The Way In The Company Of Friends
Foreword
That Other Practice that Guides Our Understanding
Matthew's biography of Jesus in the New Testament recounts an exchange between Jesus and his disciples: “Now when Jesus came into the district of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, ‘Who do people say that the Son of Man is?’ And they said, ‘Some say John the Baptist, but others Elijah, and still others Jeremiah or one of the prophets.’ He said to them, ‘But who do you say that I am?’” (Matthew 16:13–16). This familiar incident has been emblematic in Christian piety and theology across the centuries, a paradigm for many that truth—or better, Truth—is best understood as a quality of personal living, something that is best understood when spoken in the first person. By extension, this evocative incident can also be made paradigmatic for some of the basic challenges that inevitably engage every student of humanity's many and diverse religious traditions, and especially about what might be entailed when one gives answers to questions about other persons with respect to who they are and what they say. Another obvious challenge evoked by extension from the incident is about whether our answers to questions about other persons with respect to who they are and how they see the world are best given somehow in the first person, but if this is so, how can this be done in the public discourse expected in scholarship? Another challenge evoked by extension from the incident is the need for a student of particular religious traditions and communities to cultivate scholarly skills of imagination and empathy that can aid him or her in taking the measure—from the inside, as it were—of the qualities of personal living found in different religious communities. And yet another challenge evoked by extension from the incident is the need for students of religion themselves to learn a lesson from one aspect of this account, but an aspect that is actually a common theme in many religious traditions: that what are the most important things for a person to know are also very easy to get wrong. Being mindful of the ease with which important things are misperceived and thus misunderstood is, of course, a primary scholarly virtue, and not only for those engaged in the study of human religiousness. It is also a virtue too that remains effective and generative best when exercised in disciplined self-consciousness among others.
That it is easy to get important things wrong—whether by overlooking them, misperceiving them, or misunderstanding them—may be a sad feature of human life, but it is still a commonplace that is worth pausing over and reconsidering again and again and especially by students of religion. That it is easy to get important things wrong is not only true for what is preserved in the heritages of religious communities. It is also easy to get important things wrong about religious persons themselves in how we see them and in what we say about them.
We should also remember, by a second-order extension, that it is just as easy to get important things wrong when we read works of scholarly interpretation about religious traditions and religious persons. In contributing a foreword to this second collection of John Ross Carter's essays, I would like to mark a small amount of my respect for and gratitude to my teacher by taking up just one of the issues that I find especially instructive in his work for all students of human religiousness, but it is an issue in our activities of understanding that I think is all too easy to overlook, misperceive, or misunderstand: Why it is that scholarship about humans is properly pursued in the company of friends , as the title of this collection has it? 2
That many commonly refer to academic fields and specializations as “disciplines” is a still-useful reminder that our desire to interpret and to understand humans properly leads us to engage in certain practices of knowing that are self-consciously learned and equally self-consciously employed. Just as commonly, in discussions about “hermeneutics” and “methodology,” in which we reflect on these practices of ours, we bring them to our collective consciousness in order to refine them and to get better at employing them, but, as is also well known now, such discussions, as valuable and necessary as they may be, can become ends in their own right and distract our attention from other important concerns about the formation of a scholar and the place of a scholar in his or her larger moral and political context. 3 In other words, our concern to employ publicly techniques of interpretation in our practices of knowing is necessary to the activity of understanding, but learning these techniques or methods is not sufficient to account for the formation of a competent scholar, and much less is their employment sufficient to account for the activity of understanding itself. In this collection of essays, John Ross Carter makes a case by example that a capacity for friendship is also necessary to the formation of a competent scholar and that engaging in the company of friends in practices of interpretation and knowing is also key to the activity of understanding. In making his case, Carter also gives us insight into friendship as an aspect of the activity of understanding itself, an aspect that we have not given in our scholarly lives—unfortunately, for each and all of us—the collective self-reflection and self-conscious personal cultivation that it deserves. In the Company of Friends is thus hardly a sentimental but otherwise vacuous title for essays that appeared originally in scattered publications but which are now brought together mainly for ease of others' access. Rather, the title should be taken as an aphorism that participates itself in a deeply challenging vision of the activity of understanding in which we engage as students of the human in general and students of religion in particular. What I want to emphasize here might best be conveyed with a paraphrase of what Paul Ricoeur said about the aphorism that guides his The Symbolism of Evil —“the symbol gives rise to thought”: the notion of In the Company of Friends , which enchants me, says two things: friendship gives; but what it gives is occasion for thought, something to think about. 4

THE ACTIVITY OF UNDERSTANDING ON THE MODEL OF FRIENDSHIP
We can begin to consider friendship as something to think about in the life of a student of human religiousness, as a conative practice that is constitutive of the activity of understanding itself, by taking up what might appear to be an aside in one of the essays included in this collection. It comes late in the book, in chapter 17 , “Buddhists and Baptists: In Conversation into our Common Future,” 5 the chapter being an essay that was originally published in Sri Lanka in a festschrift for the great Sinhala scholar of Theravāda Buddhism, O. H. de A. Wijesekera. Because the essay was originally presented as a memorial oration in honor of Professor Wijesekera and subsequently published separately in Sri Lanka, we might be disposed, as readers, to be momentarily touched by the warmth of the personal memories that Carter includes in his essay, since the inclusion of personal memories is a feature of the peculiar academic genre of a memorial oration to honor a scholar, but to leave the passage aside then. While it would be completely understandable were we to do so, if we did, I think we would miss something quite important. To try to attend to what Carter is saying to us in this “aside” is in the vein with which I began this foreword: what is important is all too easy to get wrong. I want to suggest that this “aside” be read paradigmatically, and that we take Carter's memories of studying with Wijesekera as a frame within which all of the essays collected here should be read and understood. In that respect, this passage is an instance of what Thomas Aquinas called manuductio , an example that can take us by the hand and lead , in a manner analogous to the way that a friend takes us by the hand and leads in the activity of knowing. It should be no surprise, then, that Carter's memories of studying with Wijesekera are, in the end, about friendship.
Indeed, Carter gives to us quite something important-that-is-easy-to-get-wrong even when he prepares us for this passage with what might be taken as a few atmospheric details about the occasions when he met Professor Wijesekera as a student at Wijesekera's home “on High Level Road just south of the Nugegoda intersection and north of the Gangodawila junction.” 6 As Carter says earlier in this chapter, “this paper arises from particularity ” 7 and there is someth