ABERNETHY: On Perspectives this week, we look at America's new religious diversity. What does it mean for your own faith to respect the teachings of others?We hear the opinions from many believers, perhaps the controversial opinions of Diana Eck, professor of comparative religion at Harvard University and the editor of a new CD-ROM called ON COMMON GROUND. It's a video, text, and sound library of 15 American religions. Click on the Sikh faith, and you get movies and essays about it. Or you're in Cedar Rapids and want to find a mosque, click again, and there it is. I asked Diana Eck how she first became aware of the country's new religious mix.
Professor DIANA ECK (Harvard University): It really started in my teaching. I teach world religions, and suddenly about 1990, my classes started to fill up with Muslim and Buddhist and Hindu and Sikh students who had grown up as Muslims in Providence or Hindus in Cincinnati, and I realized that the religious landscape of the U.S. had changed -- all of this as a result of the new immigration after the 1965 Immigration Act. So I started studying it.
ABERNETHY: You're a lifelong Christian, a United Methodist, but you have said, "If you know just one religion, you know no religion." What do you mean by that?
Prof. ECK: Well, you know, in a sense, that's true. I've found that to be true myself. I grew up in Montana as a Methodist. I ended up traveling to India in my college years and discovering a multitude of ways in which God is imaged and named. And it helped me understand Christianity, my own faith better.ABERNETHY: How?
Prof. ECK: Well, I can give a lot of examples, but one of the things that has been very powerful for me is that the sense that God is present not only in, you might say, in light and life, but in death and in darkness as well. In some of the Hindu images of the divine, they have God carrying a skull in one hand or maybe a necklace of skulls, like the goddess Kali. A lot of people are very off-put by that. To me, it's a tremendous comfort. It's a comfort that I also see in the gospel of Christ accompanying us in our suffering. But when my brother died and my father died, the idea that -- that God is present, you might say, not only in the flowers on our altar but in the skulls as well, that's an important realization. It's really at the heart of Christianity. But somehow, I discovered this more deeply by following my Hindu brothers and sisters into Hindu temples.
Prof. ECK: Well, some people do feel it as a threat, but you know, the experience of people who have come into deep dialogue with those of other faiths is that it more deeply enriches one's sense of one's self. There's a wonderful story in the novel of Chaim Potok, a Jewish novelist, a rabbi who traveled in Japan during the Korean War. He stopped at a Buddhist shrine and saw a man who was praying with his eyes so -- so deeply closed and deep contemplation. The rabbi turns to his friend and says, "Do you think our God is listening?" And the friend says, "I don't know, I never thought about it." And the rabbi says, "If not, why not? And if so, then what are we all about?" And that really is our question. If the one we call God, who created Heaven and Earth, is not listening to the prayers of this man, so deeply at prayer, what do we mean when we say "God"? And if God is listening, then what do we mean when we say "we"?
