Readers familiar with Rita Gross' work will recognize her easy-to-read style and characteristic clarity in her latest work on religious diversity. Aspects of Gross' hybrid identity—scholar-practitioner, Buddhist-feminist, university professor-dharma teacher—coalesce as she brings years of study, religious practice, dialogue, and habitation in multiple worlds to bear in this wide-reaching volume. The book articulates a Buddhist response to the questions of religious pluralism and theologies of religion. By and large, Gross rejects the Christian premises of these questions, which in her view stem from exclusive truth claims that should be abandoned. As she explains, religious diversity is natural and inevitable, and historically, claims to have the “one true faith” have not promoted human flourishing. She draws on Buddhism as she lays out an alternative approach to religious diversity that does not see the diversity itself as a problem.
Gross traces her engagement with issues of religious diversity to negative experiences as a teen in an exclusivist Lutheran church. The bad taste of that encounter (and others like it) lingers still for Gross, and she makes clear that the logic of exclusive truth claims simply does not compute for her. The alternative vision she puts forward entails bracketing questions of truth, learning to live with uncertainty, letting go of proselytizing, and (much like John Hick) gauging the worth of a religion by ethical criteria. In a very Buddhist manner, she recommends individuals first engage in introspection to examine what their own influences, motivations, and shortcomings might be before jumping into challenges posed by religious others.
Gross' Buddhist prescription for flourishing amid pluralism hinges on moving “beyond the duality of self and other” to cut off at the root the us/them dichotomies feeding unwholesome relationships among practitioners of diverse religions. Unmasking this duality leads to insight, which in turn promotes compassion. Cultivating both insight and compassion (potentially through the Buddhist meditation and mind training she details) will lead to healthy relationships motivated by mutual understanding, not a mission to convert the other.
Her delivery of this vision offers crystal-clear explanations of foundational Buddhist concepts, including teachings that are sometimes difficult to grasp, like no-self, skillful methods, and interdependence. She also spells out a straightforward approach to teaching world religions that exposes students to facts in a neutral, accurate, and empathetic manner and allows learners to see themselves in the “comparative mirror,” which pushes them to reflect back on their own perspectives and worldviews.
Along with these strengths, a few drawbacks bear mentioning. First, at times Gross meanders between scholarly argument and personal opinion. She does not disguise these opinions as anything more than her own beliefs, but still, a number of her assertions seemed overly generalized or simplified and left me wanting more evidence to support them. Second, and related to the first point, Gross pushes beyond the boundaries of her immense expertise in sections focused on religious liberty and church-state issues. These chapters do not reflect the same level of insight and sophistication as the remainder of the book. Third, the book contains redundancies that may grow tiresome for cover-to-cover readers. For example, the same quote is used three times in the same chapter as though the point is being made anew each time. Elsewhere, another quote is deployed to make the same point in multiple chapters. The benefit (and presumably the source) of this repetition is that each chapter can serve as a stand-alone essay for readers interested in taking up only particular portions of the book at a time.
While the arguments Gross makes are not entirely new, the application of these Buddhist insights to religious diversity, and the clarity with which she articulates them, make this book a worthwhile pursuit for scholars and graduate students interested in religious pluralism, theologies of religion, or comparative theology as well as for those who teach Buddhism or world religions.
