The Comparative Religious Ideas Project is a groundbreaking three-year collaboration among well-known scholars of world religious traditions as well as philosophers, historians, sociologists of religion, and theologians who view religion in more general terms. These resulting three volumes offer an exciting look at important comparisons among major world religions and develop and test a theory of comparison employing the collaborative method.
The idea of ultimacy as a comparative category that cuts across major religious traditions and cultures is discussed in Ultimate Realities, a multi-authored collaborative work. In this light, Chinese religion, Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are examined by distinguished specialist historians. Two senses of ultimacy emerged in the Cross-Cultural Comparative Religious Ideas Project from which this volume came. One is the ultimacy of ontological matters such as God, the Dao, or Brahman. The other is the anthropological ultimacy of religious quests such as the Buddhist journey to enlightenment which does not stress any ontological ultimate, and indeed in some forms considers ontological ultimates to be problematic.