Drawn by invitation from a number of countries, a group of scholars undertakes to explore the means by which the very attempt to grasp religions leads to a repeated process of internal reinterpretation and, often, transformation. Essays on interpretation in religion in general are followed by essays that probe various hermeneutical aspects of ancient Egyptian religion, Hinduism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The range of these essays is impressive -- from semiosis, problems of translation, and the pragmatic assignment of meaning, to prayer, divine commands, the invisibility ascribed to...

Myths and Fictions -- the third in a series of books on comparative philosophy and religion -- is a collection of original essays, none previously published, on the theory and the actuality of myths and fictions in the different cultures of the world. Through all the essays there runs the question of the relation of literal truth to truth conceived in other ways or dimensions. Taken as a whole, the book makes a serious attempt to get beyond the confines of any single culture and enter into the mythical imagination of the ancient Hindus, Chinese, Hebrews and Christians, and by this act...

At the end of the millennium, the dominant philosophical mood is relativistic. Ideals, opinions, and values are rarely judged in absolute or universal terms. Instead, subjective views are juxtaposed and assessed in relation to one another and none is accepted finally in and for itself but characterized in relation to its whole environment.
In this collection of essays, philosophers of widely divergent views and emphases try to assess the tension between relativism and absolutism in the general domains of philosophy and religion. In the closing section of the book, an extensive article...