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Document Details : Title: A Tree with Many Branches Subtitle: Abrahamic Approaches to Interreligious Dialogue Author(s): WELLS, Adam Y. Journal: Studies in Interreligious Dialogue Volume: 27 Issue: 1 Date: 2017 Pages: 25-44 DOI: 10.2143/SID.27.1.3275090 Abstract : While dialogue is critically necessary in the modern world, it raises a host of epistemological, theological, and metaphysical problems. If a religious practitioner regards her tradition as absolutely true, must she then regard other traditions as false or derivative, either wholly or in part? Is genuine dialogue actually possible, or is it just a show of conciliation and unity against a backdrop of irreconcilable differences? The first section of this essay surveys four modern models of interreligious dialogue: exclusivism, inclusivism, pluralism, and particularism. None of them will prove satisfactory. The second section sketches out an interreligious approach to truth by spinning together three conceptual threads: truth (ἀλήθεια) in the Gospel of John, love in Hasdai Crescas’s Or Adonai, and imagination in the work of Muhyi al-Din Ibn al-‘Arabi. It will be argued that interreligious truth is not a matter of resolving contradictory truth claims; rather, it is a hermeneutical process involving imaginative encounters across traditions. |
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