The Inside Story: A Narrative Approach to Religious Understanding and Truth

This book explores what is meant by claims of religious understanding and truth. It argues that at the end of the twentieth century we are undergoing a revolution in our thinking about ourselves and our place in nature, and that the worldview pervading modern culture is dissolving because it has marginalized and hindered authentic religious understanding and practice. It has spiritually degraded and destroyed the natural environment upon which it depends.

The book describes how this situation developed, and proposes an alternative postmodern, narrative concept of religious understanding that may help us to transcend these spiritual and ecological problems. This model of religious truth explores a new cosmological story that has emerged over the past twenty-five years. It is a story that will enrich and deepen our spiritual experience while helping us cope with possibly the most disastrous and dangerous consequence of modernity—the present worldwide ecological crisis.

Paul Brockelman is Professor of Philosophy and Religious Studies at the University of New Hampshire.