Embracing Varieties of Religious Experience

It’s impossible to understand past civilizations without understanding religion. Religion is a major part of the history of civilization, but it’s also the lived experience, the faith and practice, of the great majority of the world’s populations. Why wouldn’t that be important? Also, we’re entering a complicated world order, which is going to be increasingly pluralistic religiously as part of the globalization process and population migrations. We’re trying to educate people to be religiously literate in the best sense of the word, because we’re going to need people who understand how to deal with that greater pluralism, leaders who understand more than one religious tradition, not merely in an algebraic way, in the sense of symbols and equations, but with a deep empathy and understanding of what those traditions are and why they’re lived, dynamic, and life-shaping