John Ross Carter - In the Company of Friends: Exploring Faith and Understanding With Buddhists and Christians

IN THE COMPANY OF FRIENDS

Exploring Faith and Understanding

with Buddhists and Christians

JOHN ROSS CARTER

Published by

STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK PRESS, ALBANY

2012 State University of New York

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Carter, John Ross.

In the company of friends : exploring faith and understanding with

Buddhists and Christians / John Ross Carter.

p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.

ISBN 978-1-4384-4279-2 (hardcover: alk. paper)

1. Christianity and other religionsBuddhism. 2. BuddhismRelationsChristianity. I. Title.

BR128.B8C37 2012

261.2'43dc23

2011033669

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To Sandra

With Whom I Have Walked Along The Way In The Company Of Friends

Foreword

That Other Practice that Guides Our Understanding

Matthew's biography of Jesus in the New Testament recounts an exchange between Jesus and his disciples: Now when Jesus came into the district of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, Who do people say that the Son of Man is? And they said, Some say John the Baptist, but others Elijah, and still others Jeremiah or one of the prophets. He said to them, But who do you say that I am? (Matthew 16:1316). This familiar incident has been emblematic in Christian piety and theology across the centuries, a paradigm for many that truthor better, Truthis best understood as a quality of personal living, something that is best understood when spoken in the first person. By extension, this evocative incident can also be made paradigmatic for some of the basic challenges that inevitably engage every student of humanity's many and diverse religious traditions, and especially about what might be entailed when one gives answers to questions about other persons with respect to who they are and what they say. Another obvious challenge evoked by extension from the incident is about whether our answers to questions about other persons with respect to who they are and how they see the world are best given somehow in the first person, but if this is so, how can this be done in the public discourse expected in scholarship? Another challenge evoked by extension from the incident is the need for a student of particular religious traditions and communities to cultivate scholarly skills of imagination and empathy that can aid him or her in taking the measurefrom the inside, as it wereof the qualities of personal living found in different religious communities. And yet another challenge evoked by extension from the incident is the need for students of religion themselves to learn a lesson from one aspect of this account, but an aspect that is actually a common theme in many religious traditions: that what are the most important things for a person to know are also very easy to get wrong. Being mindful of the ease with which important things are misperceived and thus misunderstood is, of course, a primary scholarly virtue, and not only for those engaged in the study of human religiousness. It is also a virtue too that remains effective and generative best when exercised in disciplined self-consciousness among others.

That it is easy to get important things wrongwhether by overlooking them, misperceiving them, or misunderstanding themmay be a sad feature of human life, but it is still a commonplace that is worth pausing over and reconsidering again and again and especially by students of religion. That it is easy to get important things wrong is not only true for what is preserved in the heritages of religious communities. It is also easy to get important things wrong about religious persons themselves in how we see them and in what we say about them.

We should also remember, by a second-order extension, that it is just as easy to get important things wrong when we read works of scholarly interpretation about religious traditions and religious persons. In contributing a foreword to this second collection of John Ross Carter's essays, I would like to mark a small amount of my respect for and gratitude to my teacher by taking up just one of the issues that I find especially instructive in his work for all students of human religiousness, but it is an issue in our activities of understanding that I think is all too easy to overlook, misperceive, or misunderstand: Why it is that scholarship about humans is properly pursued in the company of friends, as the title of this collection has it?

That many commonly refer to academic fields and specializations as disciplines is a still-useful reminder that our desire to interpret and to understand humans properly leads us to engage in certain practices of knowing that are self-consciously learned and equally self-consciously employed. Just as commonly, in discussions about hermeneutics and methodology, in which we reflect on these practices of ours, we bring them to our collective consciousness in order to refine them and to get better at employing them, but, as is also well known now, such discussions, as valuable and necessary as they may be, can become ends in their own right and distract our attention from other important concerns about the formation of a scholar and the place of a scholar in his or her larger moral and political context.