The Ideal in the Worlds Religions: Essays on the Person, Family, Society and Environment Book

	Introduction	1
1	The "Nature" of Religion: Reflections on Nature and Religion	15
2	Measuring the Ideal: Christian Faith and the World's Worldviews	41
3	Religious Pluralism: Can Religions Co-Exist without Violence or Discrimination?	53
4	Paradigm Shift	73
5	Ideals, Pseudo-Ideals and the Evolution of Consciousness	93
6	The Ideal Individual, as Described by All the Prophets	121
7	Selfless Ideals	137
8	The Ideal Human Being in Contemporary Japanese Philosophy and Religion	163
9	The Healing Role of Religion in T. S. Eliot's The Cocktail Party	189
10	The Puritans and the Family: Theological and Social Perspectives	219
11	The Evolving Ideal of the Family in the Catholic Tradition	233
12	Rethinking the Chinese Family: Wandering Ghosts and Eternal Parents	253
13	The Buddhist Theory of Social Action	281
14	From Cane Ridge to Human Community: Indigenous American Christianity, Individual Character Traits and Some Observations on the Dialectic of Religion and Society	295
15	The Ideal Society and Its Realization in the Unification Tradition	313
16	Tradition, Community and Context in Japanese Zen Buddhism and Latin American Roman Catholicism	331
17	Early Buddhism and the Ideal Environment	361
18	Real-izing the Material: Spiritual Feminism and the Resacralization of the Earth	379
19	Religion and Ecology: A Modern Taoist Perspective	397
20	The Ideal Environment: The Modern Myth of Mastery and the Christian Doctrine of Creation	409
	Epilogue	425
	Contributors	432