Trading Faith

This is the third book reviewed in this issue written either by a theologian or priest who is seeking to expand the relevance of Christianity in our time. David Hart is unusual in being an Anglican priest living and working in South India, who is also India secretary for the World Congress of Faiths. His concern is what he calls global religion in an age of rapid change and his approach is to focus on three teachers, two of whom had an Advaitic perspective - Shankara and Henri Le Saux (Abhishiktananda); the third is the Sufi Ibn Arabi. The narrative leads to the title of the book, trading faith, by which the author means that religious conversation is part of the give-and-take of human cultural exchange. He locates this within his own biography, a formative part of which was spent in Oxford with its ancient rituals of scholarship and drinking sherry. As Bede Griffiths wrote, the spiritual journey is a journey to the centre which involves finding and being true to one's self; then perhaps discovering that one level of the self is an illusion…