ABSTRACT
These two inter-related questions, the one hermeneutical, the other more ethical, form the agenda for what follows. The multiple engagements that have formed, and continue to affect, religious communities raise many other questions, especially about truth and reference. And no easy distinction can be drawn between such questions and issues about the meaning and intentionality of religious practice.1 Nevertheless, there is more to the religious significance of religious pluralism – that is to say, its meaning for the faith and practice of religious communities – than the philosophical problematic. Whether or not religions are rooted in a historical relationship which is in some way intrinsic to their self-understanding – Judaism and Christianity, Brahmanical Hinduism and Buddhism, for instance – there is no doubt that in the contemporary world all inter-religious relationships are affected by social, cultural, political – as well as purely historical – factors. When, for example, the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya was demolished, Sikh gurdwaras in London were attacked; when the Pope wrote a book in Rome with slighting reference to Buddhist ‘atheism’, it caused enormous upset in S´ri Lanka. The hideous events of 9/11 and the aftermath of the war in Iraq have left many Muslims in the West nervous and isolated. Religions are neither parochial tribalisms nor isolated totalities. To quote a remark of O’Leary’s: ‘A religious tradition is not a cathedral which contains everything, but a crossroads which is open to everything’.2
