Page History

...

• Therefore, "the religious life," in the same generic sense, is the way of understanding onese1f and leading one's life that is explicitly mediated by the images/ symbols, concepts/ terms of this, that, or the other specific religion. This means that the religious life, in the generic sense, is always an explicitly authorized life. And this it is because
• To live the religious life, then, as a 1ife life explicitly authorized by a specific religion, is to make or imply a distinctive double claim for what one thinks, says, Clnd does in so living: not only
• This claim, however, is like all other claims to validity made or implied by life-praxis in that it is one thing to make or imply it, something else again to do so validly. Consequently, to live the religious life at an, particularly in the pluralized social-cultural circumstances in which more and more people live in a "globalizing-globalized" world, is to anticipate having somehow to make good on the claim, sooner or later, that one makes or implies in so living. it belongs to religion generic any, and thus to each religion specifical1y, to lay claim to decisive authority-to claim to be the authorized re-presentation of the answer to our existential question. Because, from its stand point, the self-understanding/ understanding of existence that it represents is uniquely realistic, being uniquely appropriate to, or authorized by, the very structure of ultimate reality itself, its re-presentations of this understanding have decisive authority for the understanding of human existence. (1) that it is, in turn, appropriate to whatever this religion takes to be the explicit primal source of its authority, but also (2) that it is credible to any woman or man as re-presenting the truth about her or his own existence as a human being.

...