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This chapter explores “true” claims of each of the faiths in religious narrative. It argues that the truth claims of each of the faiths to bear a revealed message can only be evaluated in terms of their ethical and spiritual fruits. All of them must lead their adherents to lead lives of respect for the dignity of all people, reverence for all forms of life, for the earth itself, and for the divine source of all things. While all these “true” faiths will adhere to shared ethical and spiritual standards, their truth claims must be further examined.

Reading Acts as lively political theology in its time necessarily raises questions that directly relate to several crucial contemporary problems. Indeed, the argument is that engaging Acts in this way offers significant resources on which modern thinkers can draw to understand conflicts that arise in light of profoundly different schemes of life. “God,” “tolerance,” “diversity,” “culture,” and “religious violence” are words that explicitly point to issues requiring sustained and refined reflection in the 21st century. After a condensed exposition of the reading of Acts given in Chapters 2 through 4, therefore, this final chapter pursues several critical questions that attend the interrelation between claims to universal truth about God and the politics they produce (e.g., the nature of religious truth, the relation between normative truth claims and tolerance of the religious other, the political significance of polytheism, etc.).

Using beliefs and rumors that emerged during the first days after September 11, this chapter discusses how a culture in crisis uses these tools to make sense out of a disorienting event such as this. Rumor is a truth claim not backed by authoritative information. Whether true or false, it is an expression of a community's collective beliefs. These are especially illustrated in rumors about religious miracles and signs that occurred in the attacks, about groups of Arab Americans who publicly celebrated the event, and about a terrorist who warned his girlfriend about the attack in advance. The chapter analyzes these in terms of the politics of plausibility (the sort of thing Americans are predisposed to believe) and of credibility (the sources that Americans normally trust for reliable information). To flourish in public discourse, a rumor should be both credible and plausible.

The claim that, in the crucified and risen Christ, God is preferentially identified with the victims of the history transforms the preferential option for the poor from an ethical imperative into the privileged locus of all Christian theology. The author argues that the preferential option makes not only ethical but also epistemological and theological claims. The possibility of preferring some viewpoints or of making normative truth-claims is the precondition of an authentic, pluralistic community that affirms the dignity of all peoples. The preferential option forces us to confront the question of truth; Christian praxis is liberating only because it affirms something that is real or true.

Rumors about foreigners, outside our borders or within, can be dangerous, both to the aliens and to ourselves. In an increasingly globalized world, we need good neighbors, even as differences cannot be erased. Five strategies may help us rise above the divisions that rumors perpetuate. We must question easy truth claims, acknowledge the reality of social change, remember the effects of the past, build upon our common strengths, and recognize that unity is a long‐term challenge. The goal of rumor study should not simply be to document rumors, for they always will exist, or to determine their fallacy, for they allege facts only to embody values. Rumors must be taken seriously, even if they are controversial, as they reveal beliefs and values that many people embrace. Objective study of them can help the world live together as a community.

It is commonly assumed that "Darwin" represents the triumph of scientific rationality over scripture and superstition—an assumption combining ignorance of history with a philosophically naïve account of "truth." Before the seventeenth century, it was widely accepted that biblical interpretation and natural philosophy should each articulate the truth about the world in its own way, without the unnatural conflation or harmonizing of their respective stories into a single framework. The harmonistic model arose in the context of geological investigation, which initially appealed to the Genesis creation and flood narratives to interpret the fossil record and later sought to adapt the scriptural narratives to the modern geological discovery that the world is much older than previously thought. In all of this, scriptural narrative is removed from its natural habitat and forced to serve interests quite alien to it. The significance of Darwin is that, in developing his distinctive biological theories, he did not seek to coordinate them with scripture—thereby liberating scripture from science, and science from its own misuse of scripture.

This chapter provides an account of the concept of state, the implications of which should be important for thinking clearly about what happens when nations engage one another in the international arena. It first considers the enterprise of the state by examining a single, ostensibly trivial but nonetheless highly representative example of state activity. Reflecting on this example, it suggests that the state is best understood as what is sometimes called a universe of discourse; and examines, in that context, the process by which implicit truth-claims are problematized and become the subject matter for rational reconstruction. It argues that the model of the state as a universe of discourse is superior in several respects to the traditional model of the state as a kind of organism. It traces out some of the consequences of this claim for the understanding of politics.

Aaron Langenfeld reflects on how the discipline of comparative theology should be related to the normative grounds for religious truth claims to which theology as a whole is committed. Confirming a fundamental characteristic of comparative theology, he proposes that this challenge cannot be met if the question of truth is neglected; rather, it must be preserved as the central focus in concrete comparative work. To justify this proposition, in his Christian-Muslim work on salvation Langenfeld elaborates a fundamental insight regarding the Muslim critique of Christian anthropology, particularly regarding the concept of original sin, which is presumed in the Christian understanding of salvation and redemption. Langenfeld suggests we can see more easily how comparative theology really does proceed like other substantive forms of theology and thus is fairly measured by familiar theological standards, even if breaking new ground interreligiously.

In the first chapter, the author evaluates the various possibilities to engage with the empirical material collected for this book. Due to the shrine’s new accessibility, paired with its recent institutionalization, many formerly disconnected practices and narratives started to meet on a regular basis. Doing fieldwork at the site, together with engaging with a variety of texts and other media, the author was confronted with the question of how to organize all of these voices that uniformly claimed to speak the truth about the shrine and its annexed practices. Chapter 1 elaborates on the theoretical foundations of this work through a concept the author calls “the solidification of tradition.” Utilizing newer anthropological theories of the ontological turn and supplementing them with the political philosophy of post-foundationalism helps the author to produce his own engagement with the various truth-claims encountered during his research.

This chapter reconstructs from Sri Ramakrishna’s teachings a unique and philosophically sophisticated model of religious pluralism. For Sri Ramakrishna, God is infinite, so there are correspondingly infinite ways of approaching and realizing God. Therefore, all religions and spiritual philosophies—both theistic and nontheistic—are salvifically effective paths to one common goal: God-realization, or the direct spiritual experience of God in any of His innumerable aspects or forms. Maharaj then examines Sri Ramakrishna’s response to the thorny problem of conflicting religious truth-claims. Sri Ramakrishna reconciles religious claims about the nature of the ultimate reality by claiming that every religion captures a uniquely real aspect of the impersonal-personal Infinite Reality. Regarding other types of religious truth-claims, Sri Ramakrishna maintains that while every religion errs on some points of doctrine, these errors do not substantially diminish the salvific efficacy of religions. Finally, Maharaj defends Sri Ramakrishna’s doctrine of religious pluralism against numerous objections.

This chapter takes a look at how history and anthropology reveal the contingencies of knowledge-production. This refers to the terms of expertise that produce disciplinary knowledge and evidentiary-based truth claims and the servicing of such truths in the name of cultural and political projects. The chapter skims the preceding chapters and examines the intersection between history and anthropology.

This chapter considers the case of Ma Zhun, a woman who was denied a disabled identification (ID) card by the China Disabled Persons' Federation (CDPF). It explains that Ma Zhun went the Federation's office because she was told by her employer that getting an ID card was her only chance of keeping her job and that her request was denied because she was only missing toes on one foot. The chapter examines the CDPF's formulation of a set of truth claims about what comprises canji as a distinct sphere of alterity and about what constitutes China as a distinct national locality.

Chapter 3, When Cutting Did and Did Not End, examines how it is that the discourse of FGM lives on, despite the demise of cutting. Although cutting is on the wane in Ghana, the discourse of its “intractability” is used to produce suspect citizens and to legitimate punitive rationality and “Zero Tolerance” campaigns and legislation. This chapter shows how social science “evidence” is mobilized to support truth claims that rural communities “resist” anti-cutting campaigns and continue to practice cutting “underground.” It also refracts the endings of cutting through the lens of nostalgia: former circumcisers long for the ancestral benevolence that cutting secured for them, and uncut Ghanaians bemoan the disappearance of the traditional patriarchal values they believe cutting upheld.

The main goal of this chapter is to describe the relationship between Hume’s skepticism and his naturalism, and in doing so demonstrate the way some of his most important recent commentators have misunderstood both. It is not surprising that commentators have gotten things wrong, since both Hume’s skepticism and his naturalism are complex and, more importantly, inconsistent with one another. If one takes seriously the conclusions Hume reaches in those sections of his texts which address skepticism with regard to the senses and reason, it is easy to conclude that he can have no basis either for asserting claims about an independently and continuously existing natural reality or for reasoning out the lines of any naturalistic theory of the world and the humans who inhabit it. In spite of this, Hume does advance truth-claims—claims composing a positive, elaborate, naturalistic theory of the self, the world, and others.