¹ See, for example, Clooney, Francis X., “Comparative Theology and Inter-Religious Dialogue,” The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Inter-Religious Dialogue, ed. Cornille, Catherine (West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), 51–63CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In the context of this essay, I will use “interreligious dialogue” in the broad sense of engagement with the religious other, whether through texts or directly through conversation.

² Moyaert, Marianne, “Ricoeur and the Wager of Interreligious Ritual Participation,” International Journal of Philosophy and Theology 78, no. 3 (2017): 174CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³ See Cornille, Catherine, “Interreligious Hospitality and Its Limits,” in Hosting the Stranger: Between Religions, eds. Kearney, Richard and Taylor, James (New York: Continuum, 2011), 41Google Scholar.

⁴ Clooney, “Comparative Theology and Inter-Religious Dialogue,” 54.

⁵ Hedges, Paul, “Comparative Theology and Hermeneutics: A Gadamerian Approach to Interreligious Interpretation,” Religions 7, no. 7 (2016): 6CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁶ See James, William, “The Will to Believe,” in The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (New York: Dover, 1956), 1–31Google Scholar, especially sections 5 and 6.

⁷ The “feedback loop” language is Kuhn's. Indeed, he is dealing with a similar problem in the field of philosophy of science. See Kuhn, Thomas S., “Objectivity, Value Judgment, and Theory Choice,” in Philosophy of Science: The Central Issues, eds. Curd, Martin, Cover, J. A., and Pincock, Christopher (New York: Norton, 2013), 106Google Scholar.

⁸ Indeed, this is a standard criticism of any hermeneutic epistemology. See, for example, Habermas’ discussion of this problem in “A Review of Gadamer's Truth and Method,” in Understanding and Social Inquiry, eds. Dallmayr, Fred R. and McCarthy, Thomas A. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1977), 335–63Google Scholar.

⁹ In relating a personal story about Paul Ricoeur and the inescapable constraints of perspective and context, Richard Kearney comments, “The most important thing I learned from hermeneutic philosophy is that interpretation goes all the way down. … There is no God's-eye view of things available to us.” See Kearney, Richard, Anatheism: Returning to God After God (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), xvGoogle Scholar.

¹⁰ Here I find myself in broad agreement with Catherine Cornille. See her “Meaning and Truth in the Dialogue between Religions,” in The Question of Theological Truth: Philosophical and Interreligious Perspectives, eds. Depoortere, Frederiek and Lambkin, Magdalen (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 137–55Google Scholar.

¹¹ I happily claim Ricoeur's proviso that the philosopher “insofar as he is a professional and responsible thinker … remains a beginner, and his discourse always remains a preparatory discourse.” Ricoeur, Paul, “Religion, Atheism, and Faith,” in The Conflict of Interpretations (London: Continuum), 437Google Scholar.

¹² Ricoeur, Paul, “Philosophy and Religious Language,” Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative, and Imagination (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995), 35Google Scholar, emphasis added.

¹³ Ricoeur, Paul, The Rule of Metaphor: Multidisciplinary Studies of the Creation of Meaning in Language (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000), 70Google Scholar.

¹⁴ Ricoeur, Paul, Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1976), 16Google Scholar.

¹⁵ Ricoeur, Paul, Time and Narrative, vol. 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 78Google Scholar, emphasis in original.

¹⁶ Ricoeur, Paul, “Structure, Word, Event,” in The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur: An Anthology of His Work, eds. Reagan, Charles E. and Stewart, David (Boston: Beacon Press, 1978), 114Google Scholar.

¹⁷ Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory, 21, emphasis added.

¹⁸ Ibid.

¹⁹ Venema, Henry Isaac, Identifying Selfhood: Imagination, Narrative, and Hermeneutics in the Thought of Paul Ricoeur (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000), 81Google Scholar, emphasis added.

²⁰ Ricoeur, Paul, “Naming God,” in Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative, and Imagination, ed. Wallace, Mark I., trans. Pellauer, David (Minneapolis: Fortress Press), 221Google Scholar.

²¹ Appropriation, put simply, is the act of “making something my own.” Ricoeur writes that appropriation is his own translation of the German term Aneignung, which means “to make one's own what was initially ‘alien.’” See Ricoeur, Paul, “Appropriation,” in A Ricoeur Reader: Reflection and Imagination, ed. Valdés, Mario J. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991), 89Google Scholar. For hermeneutic thinkers, the work of appropriation is the struggling against some distance, whether cultural, historic, or otherwise.

²² Valdés, Mario, “Paul Ricoeur and Literary Theory,” in The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur, ed. Hahn, Lewis Edwin (Illinois: Open Court Publishing Company, 1995), 267Google Scholar.

²³ It is clear that Ricoeur himself thought of the metaphor as being the paradigm for understanding nondescriptive language: “I tried to demonstrate in The Rule of Metaphor that language's capacity for reference was not exhausted by descriptive discourse and that poetic works referred to the world in their own specific way, that of metaphorical reference. This thesis covers every nondescriptive use of language, and therefore every poetic text, whether it be lyrical or narrative. It implies that poetic texts, too, speak of the world, even though they may not do so in a descriptive fashion.” Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 1, 80.

²⁴ Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor, 44.

²⁵ Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory, 50.

²⁶ Ricoeur citing Aristotle's Poetics in The Rule of Metaphor, 32.

²⁷ Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor, 6.

²⁸ Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory, 52.

²⁹ Ibid., 50.

³⁰ Ibid., 50, emphasis added.

³¹ Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor, 94. Ricoeur is citing Monroe Beardsley.

³² Ricoeur, Paul, “The Function of Fiction in Shaping Reality,” in A Ricoeur Reader: Reflection and Imagination, ed. Valdés, Mario J. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991), 124Google Scholar.

³³ Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory, 52.

³⁴ Ibid.

³⁵ Ricoeur, “The Function of Fiction in Shaping Reality,” 125.

³⁶ Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory, 52–53.

³⁷ Ricoeur, Paul, “Listening to the Parables of Jesus,” in The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur: An Anthology of His Work, eds. Reagan, Charles E. and Stewart, David (Boston: Beacon Press, 1978), 245Google Scholar.

³⁸ Ricoeur, “Philosophy and Religious Language,” 43.

³⁹ Moyaert, Marianne, In Response to the Religious Other: Ricoeur and the Fragility of Interreligious Encounters (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2014), 175Google Scholar.

⁴⁰ Ricoeur, “Philosophy and Religious Language,” 42.

⁴¹ Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor, 229.

⁴² Ricoeur, “Naming God,” 222.

⁴³ Ricoeur, Paul, “The Language of Faith,” in The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur: An Anthology of His Work, eds. Reagan, Charles E. and Stewart, David (Boston: Beacon Press, 1978), 234Google Scholar.

⁴⁴ Ricoeur, Paul, “The Narrative Function,” in Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences: Essays on Language, Action and Interpretation, ed. Thompson, John G. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 292Google Scholar.

⁴⁵ Ibid., 293.

⁴⁶ Ibid.

⁴⁷ Ibid.

⁴⁸ Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor, 238.

⁴⁹ Ibid., 247–248, emphases in original.

⁵⁰ Ibid., 240.

⁵¹ Ricoeur, “Naming God,” 223.

⁵² van der Heiden, Gert-Jan, The Truth (and Untruth) of Language: Heidegger, Ricoeur and Derrida on Disclosure and Displacement (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2010), 85Google Scholar, quoted by Moyaert in In Response to the Religious Other, 176.

⁵³ The term “epoché” in this sense comes from the work of Edmund Husserl, where it was used to indicate a “bracketing” or a “putting aside” of the natural attitude (common, everyday existence) in order to let the transcendental structures of experience (which are ordinarily transparent) appear. In Ricoeur it takes on the nuance of bracketing the real in order to let “the possible” be.

⁵⁴ Ricoeur, “The Function of Fiction in Shaping Reality,” 128.

⁵⁵ Ricoeur, “Naming God,” 232.

⁵⁶ Ricoeur, “Philosophy and Religious Language,” 35.

⁵⁷ There is an important question to be asked here about whether Ricoeur is equivocating in his use of the word “truth.” Is this remark an innocuous one, or is he subtly attempting to pull the wool over our eyes? I think Ricoeur is merely indicating a likeness between religious discourse and poetic discourse as avenues of revealing the “way things are” (cf. Heidegger's employment of aletheia in Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), 262. Ricoeur may have in mind here the interpretation of Heidegger, which leads to a plurality of “beings,” that is, scientific, artistic, and so on. It seems to me, however, that these are various avenues of disclosing being—each with its own sphere, terminology, methods, certainly, but each nonetheless expresses various modes of specifically human being, which underlies each specific “branch.”

⁵⁸ Hall, W. David, “The Economy of the Gift: Paul Ricoeur's Poetic Redescription of Reality,” Literature and Theology 20, no. 2 (2006): 201CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵⁹ Pellauer, David, “Paul Ricoeur on the Specificity of Religious Language,” The Journal of Religion 61, no. 3 (1981): 268CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁶⁰ I think there is an important sense in which Ricoeur's employment of manifestation in relation to discourse is echoing Heidegger's: “Discourse ‘lets something be seen’ … : that is, it lets us see something from the very thing which the discourse is about. In discourse … , so far as it is genuine, what is said is drawn from what the talk is about, so that discursive communication, in what it says, makes manifest what it is talking about, and thus makes this accessible to the other party. This is the structure of the [logos] as [discourse]. This mode of making manifest in the sense of letting something be seen by pointing it out, does not go with all kinds of ‘discourse’” (Heidegger, Being and Time, 56). It is because discourse is a “letting-something-be-seen” by pointing it out that it can be true or false (Heidegger, Being and Time, 56).

⁶¹ Ricoeur, Paul, “Toward a Hermeneutic of the Idea of Revelation,” Harvard Theological Review 70, no. 1−2 (1977): 25CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁶² Ricoeur, “Philosophy and Religious Language,” 41.

⁶³ Ibid., 45; see also Ricoeur, “Naming God,” 227–28.

⁶⁴ Ricoeur, Paul, “Manifestation and Proclamation,” in Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative, and Imagination (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995), 57Google Scholar.

⁶⁵ Ibid., 61.

⁶⁶ Ricoeur, “Naming God,” 229.

⁶⁷ Ricoeur, Paul, “The Logic of Jesus, the Logic of God,” in Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative, and Imagination (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995), 281Google Scholar. Cf. Ricoeur, “Listening to the Parables of Jesus,” 244.

⁶⁸ See “Naming God” and “The Logic of Jesus, the Logic of God,” in Ricoeur, Figuring the Sacred on pages 229 and 282, respectively, as well as “The Hermeneutics of Symbols,” in Ricoeur, Paul, The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur: An Anthology of His Work, eds. Reagan, Charles E. and Stewart, David (Boston: Beacon Press, 1978), 57Google Scholar.

⁶⁹ I am certainly not implying that Jesus’ view of the neighbor was novel to all Jewish thinkers of the time. But it likely would have been novel to those he is seeking to instruct—in other words, to those who need to learn the lesson.

⁷⁰ Without the continuity between the old and the new and the grounding of one's adoption of the new on what one already knows or believes, the rationality of such an adoption would be undermined. In other words, one's current knowledge or beliefs serve as the basis for evaluation of new ideas.

⁷¹ The word is Ricoeur's. He writes that conversion “means much more than making a new choice, but which implies a shift in the direction of the look, a reversal in the vision, in the imagination, in the heart, before all kinds of good intentions and all kinds of good decisions and good actions” (see “Listening to the Parables of Jesus,” 241). In multiple places Ricoeur claims that extreme sayings like parables are directed more to the reorientation of the imagination than the will (see “The Logic of Jesus, the Logic of God,” 281 and “Listening to the Parables of Jesus,” 245). The reorientation of the imagination first opens one to new possibilities; acting on the basis of the new vision comes second.

⁷² Frequently in interreligious dialogue, the Event is an encounter with the discourse of the other whether through text or speech. But Ricoeur is clear that it may be any number of things. Linking the Event to the moment of “finding something” in Jesus’ parables, Ricoeur comments that this simple phrase “encompasses all the kinds of encounters which make of our life the contrary of an acquisition by skill or by violence, by work or by cunning. Encounter of people, encounter of death, encounter of tragic situations, encounter of joyful events” (see “Listening to the Parables of Jesus,” 240). In all of these cases, “[s]omething happens. Let us be prepared for the newness of what is new” (see “Listening to the Parables of Jesus,” 241).

⁷³ Ricoeur uses the labels “Event,” “Reversal,” and “Decision” (see “Listening to the Parables of Jesus,” 241). The reader may note that there are two levels that mirror one another: Ricoeur offers these labels as naming three paradigmatic moments in the plots of parables themselves, but the thrust of the parable is to accomplish a similar transformation in the hearer.

⁷⁴ Ricoeur, “Listening to the Parables of Jesus,” 241.

⁷⁵ One might link what I'm referring to as confessional discourse to Ricoeur's notion of “attestation,” which, as he says, “belongs to the grammar of ‘I believe-in.’” See Ricoeur, Paul, Oneself as Another (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 21Google Scholar.

⁷⁶ Moyaert, In Response to the Religious Other, 167–68. See too Moyaert's recent remark: “In a way, the text, or better still, the world projected by the text, is powerful and speaks to the reader and potentially challenges her” (Moyaert, “Ricoeur and the Wager of Interreligious Ritual Participation,” 180).

⁷⁷ Taylor, James, “Hospitality as Translation,” in Hosting the Stranger: Between Religions, eds. Kearney, Richard and Taylor, James (New York: Continuum, 2011), 18Google Scholar.

⁷⁸ Ibid., 19.

⁷⁹ At this point, the reader may wonder whether it is truly possible for an outsider to enter into and understand another's worldview. Unfortunately, because I don't have the space to defend it here, I can only briefly assert my own position. I reject the skeptical contention that entering into another's worldview (even partially) is impossible for an outsider. While I think that there may be a depth of understanding that is only possible for the believer (i.e., someone on the “inside”) and is therefore inaccessible immediately to an outside learner, I don't think that this precludes provisionally or partially entering into another's worldview, which can then be made progressively more complete through time, empathy, careful study, practice, and imagination. Entering into another's way of thinking from the outside is not an all or nothing affair—one moves “little by little by approximations” as Ricoeur says. See Ricoeur, Paul, Critique and Conviction (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 169Google Scholar.

⁸⁰ Ricoeur, “Philosophy and Religious Language,” 47.

⁸¹ See Smith, Jonathan Z., Map Is Not Territory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 290–91Google ScholarPubMed.

⁸² Clothey, Fred W., “Toward a Comprehensive Interpretation of Ritual,” Journal of Ritual Studies 2, no. 2 (1988): 152Google Scholar.

⁸³ Ricoeur, “Listening to the Parables of Jesus,” 240.

⁸⁴ Ricoeur, “The Language of Faith,” 237.

⁸⁵ Ricoeur, “Philosophy and Religious Language,” 44. Cf. also see Ricoeur, “Naming God,” 221.

⁸⁶ Ricoeur, “Manifestation and Proclamation,” 66, italics in original.

⁸⁷ Ibid., 51.

⁸⁸ Ricoeur, Paul, “The Bible and the Imagination,” in Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative, and Imagination (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995), 146Google Scholar.

⁸⁹ Niebuhr, H. Richard, The Meaning of Revelation (Kentucky: Westminster John Knox Press, 2006), 50Google Scholar. Niebuhr is citing Alfred North Whitehead.

⁹⁰ Niebuhr, The Meaning of Revelation, 59.

⁹¹ One might also note a point of connection here between this conception of revelation and Ricoeur's writings on narrative. The work of narrative is, according to Ricoeur, to create order and intelligibility from a mere succession of events. In creating a narrative, it is the plot that “transforms the events into a story” (Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 1, 66). Ricoeur writes that he “cannot overemphasize” (ibid.) the kinship between the activity of emplotment and Kant's notion of judgment wherein an intuitive manifold is brought together under a concept. As Leovino Ma. Garcia puts it, “The activity of emplotment (mise-en-intrigue) is a work or composition which takes together a series of events in order to form an organized unity. Emplotment brings about a synthesis of the heterogeneous.” See Garcia, Leovino Ma., “On Paul Ricoeur and the Translation–Interpretation of Cultures,” Thesis Eleven, no. 94 (2008): 79CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁹² Schwartz, Sanford, “Hermeneutics and the Productive Imagination: Paul Ricoeur in the 1970s,” The Journal of Religion 63, no. 3 (1983): 298CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Schwartz is citing T. S. Eliot.

⁹³ Niebuhr, The Meaning of Revelation, 21, emphasis added.

⁹⁴ MacIntyre, Alasdair, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988), 364–65Google Scholar.

⁹⁵ Cf. MacIntyre's remark: “Upon encountering a coherent presentation of one particular tradition of rational enquiry, either in its seminal texts or in some later, perhaps contemporary, restatement of its positions, such a person will often experience a shock of recognition: this is not only, so such a person may say, what I now take to be true but in some measure what I have always taken to be true. What such a person has been presented with is a scheme of overall belief within which many, if not all, of his or her particular established beliefs fall into place, a set of modes of action and of interpretative canons for action which exhibit his or her mode of reasoning about action as intelligible and justifiable in a way or to a degree which has not previously been the case, and the history of a tradition of which the narrated and enacted history of his or her life so forms an intelligible part.” See MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, 394; italics in the original.

⁹⁶ Ricoeur, “Toward a Hermeneutic of the Idea of Revelation,” 33.

⁹⁷ Ricoeur, “Naming God,” 217.

⁹⁸ Niebuhr, The Meaning of Revelation, 74.

⁹⁹ Kearney, Anatheism, 182.

¹⁰⁰ Moyaert, In Response to the Religious Other, 163.

¹⁰¹ Ricoeur, Paul, The Symbolism of Evil (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), 351Google Scholar.

¹⁰² Ricoeur, “The Hermeneutics of Symbols,” 45–46.

¹⁰³ Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil, 355.

¹⁰⁴ Ibid.

¹⁰⁵ Ricoeur, Paul, “Whoever Loses Their Life for My Sake Will Find It,” in Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative, and Imagination (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995), 288Google Scholar. Ricoeur is invoking Eberhard Jüngel.

¹⁰⁶ Ricoeur, Paul, Lectures on Ideology and Utopia, ed. Taylor, George H. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 312Google Scholar, emphasis added.

¹⁰⁷ As a philosopher, I tend to speak primarily in terms of beliefs. However, the problem that leads to learning from another faith need not be a cognitive issue—it could be rooted in any kind of existential concern. Yet the point remains that one doesn't learn—that is, judge the adoption of another's beliefs or practices to be better than what one currently has and adopt them—from a position of neutrality. One engages with the religious other not as a detached mind, but as a whole person with particular questions, problems, interests, and so on.

¹⁰⁸ Knitter, Paul F., Without Buddha I Could Not Be a Christian (London: Oneworld Publications, 2017), 54Google Scholar, emphasis in original.

¹⁰⁹ Ibid., 61.

¹¹⁰ Ibid., 15, emphasis in original.

¹¹¹ Ibid., 71.

¹¹² See Kearney, Richard, The God Who May Be (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 25–29Google Scholar.

¹¹³ Ibid., 25.

¹¹⁴ Ibid., 1.

¹¹⁵ Ibid., 108.

¹¹⁶ Kearney, Anatheism, 181. One might note that Kearney is here picking up on the paradox in Christianity that Ricoeur was so fond of: namely, that he who will save his life will lose it while he who is willing to lose his life will save it. See, for example, Ricoeur, Paul, Living Up to Death (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 45, 49–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹¹⁷ Interestingly, Ricoeur, who defined his Christianity as “A chance transformed into destiny by a continuous choice” (see Ricoeur, Living Up to Death, 62, and Ricoeur, Critique and Conviction, 145), and who talks readily about adherence and commitment, also seemed, toward the end of his life, to be reaching out to other faiths for resources for dealing with beliefs in his own tradition that he finds problematic (like the commitment to individual survival of death and the “juridicizing” view of Jesus’ redemption as sacrifice of one for another before a vengeful God [Living Up to Death, 71]). He comments, “I want to seek in extrabiblical traditions encouragement for another way of speaking” (Living Up to Death, 72). For him, responsible learning from the religious other means “study and a transformation in the depth of the contents of belief” (Living Up to Death, 67). One can only speculate about what fruit Ricoeur's search would have produced had it been able to continue, but there are some inklings in his Living Up to Death. There Ricoeur says he wants to explore the “the implications of confidence in God” (42) while preparing for death, especially in light of his desire to dismantle “the make-believe of survival” (41) and suggests that perhaps Buddhism can help answer this question and serve as a corrective to his views on identity (49). Renouncing a desire for continued existence is, he suggests, part of the preparation for death. Ricoeur was looking for a way to hold together “detachment” as regards his own death with “confidence in God's care” (49). Yet, when he seems able to practice detachment from a desire to continue to exist and simultaneously give himself up to trusting in the care of God, “a hope other than the desire to continue existing arises” (44). And this is tied into the paradox of losing one's life in order to save it (see 45, 49–50).

¹¹⁸ Niebuhr, The Meaning of Revelation, 50.