ABSTRACT
What happens when religious people meet? Courtesy, disengagement, companionship, curiosity, translation, assimilation, dialogue, proselytization, prayer, comprehension, conversion, syncretism, multiple participation, secularization, toleration, persecution, conflict, war: these are just a few possibilities. But what should happen when religious people meet? This is a question concerning religious and moral authority, a question that religious people may find answered for them by their existing traditions and authorities. Yet they may find many answers. For each strategy encountered in practice in the histories of religions may have received some degree of authoritative legitimation from within relevant traditions. Then the plurality of authoritative approaches - plurality within each tradition - yields responsibility to religious people to select the most appropriate response from within their traditions, according to the principles and practices which seem most fundamental to them. Again, the diversity of effective fundamental principles and practices within a tradition indicates that there is a diversity of modes of conceiving and acknowledging the fundamental, the ultimate, within any religious tradition. Thus traditions contain a diversity of religions, and the problem of encounter between religions takes place within traditions themselves - and perhaps, if people respond to more than one fundamental principle, within people themselves.
