Encountering God: A Spiritual Journey from Bozeman to Benares.

Diana Eck's book is quite simply wonderful. A professor of comparative religion and Indian Studies at Harvard, she is also a committed Methodist who has been long active in ecumenical affairs, most conspicuously with the World Council of Churches. Her book on the dialogue between the world's religions is set in the context of a narrative describing her own Christian upbringing in Bozeman, Montana, and her long-time residence-in the holy city of Benares, India (about which city she has written a wonderful book), as a student of Hindu culture, languages, and religious practice.

Eck is a practitioner of what my own university's theologian John Dunne has called "passing over"--a sympathetic move by which one enters into the experience of others finally to return to one' s own tradition enriched. She is no simple New Age syncretist; Eck is unapologetically a Christian but one who believes in pluralism. By pluralism, Eck writes in a fine chapter, she means not relativism but a commitment to one's tradition with a firm willingness to learn from others and to accept particularity while engaged in deep interreligious dialogue. Eck shows how well such dialogue works in the chapters where she considers how the classic doctrines of God, Christ, and Holy Spirit get enlarged by a consideration of Hindu modes of thinking about the nature of divinity, the place of the avatar, and the dynamic element in creation itself.

The need for such comparative study is patent as anyone who pays attention to the shifting demographics of this country knows. Hindus, Buddhist, Jains, and Muslims are increasingly coming to this country, and bringing with them religious ideas that are "foreign" to most Americans. Some estimate that there will be more Muslims than Jews in the U.S. within a generation. Members of other Asian religions already outnumber Episcopalians and Presbyterians in some parts of the United States (e.g., New York).

Eck ends her book with the image of the New City and the river of life described by John in the Book of Revelation. That new city is now being built, and that river now flows in this country. Eck's splendid book is a guide to its mysteries and to its promises. Jargon-free and wearing her erudition lightly, she possesses a crisp prose style that makes her study accessible to any intelligent reader. It is a profoundly ecumenical work. I highly recommend it.