Introduction to Topical Issue “Recognizing Encounters with Ultimacy across Religious Boundaries”

What is it about?

While traditions give quite different accounts of ultimacy, they do report encounters, experiences, and epiphanies that are taken to be of the ultimate and that provide evidence for the nature and availability of the ultimate. Otherwise, it would not be obvious what claim they had to be revelatory or disclosive of the ultimate. Tradition and religious authorities can be appealed to but they derive their validity from the revelations and enlightenments. Epistemically, religions do not just float on air or the stilts of social convention. When the theologian steps beyond the boundaries of received beliefs, the question of marks of ultimacy becomes even more acute. Even the pluralist must ask which religions, and which texts, practices, and inconic figures from those religions, bear the marks of ultimacy. The student of comparative religion need not ask that question, but the theologian must.

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