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Troubled by Truth
Biographies in the Presence of Mysteries
Imprint: Wipf and Stock
In this collection of thirteen faith-biographies of literary and religious individuals from Jewish, Muslim, Christian, and Indian beliefs, Kenneth Cragg, widely acknowledged as the premier Western Islamicist in the world, tells these stories in ways that emphasize the importance of religious tolerance and respect for others. All these figures stand "in the presence of mystery" and their stories illuminate that sacred experience.
Kenneth Cragg was a bishop in the Anglican Church and has taught at Oxford University. He has written several important books on the relationship between Christianity and Islam and other faiths.
"Fine enigmatic prose . . . Kenneth Cragg has a way of bringing out the significant in any item that he touches, and to watch him probe for the significant in human lives is a genuinely edifying as well as illuminating experience. I am always moved to a fresh level of consideration by his probings, and that invitation is especially rewarding when the subject is the lives of those who have managed to cross over what are for others quite formidable barriers."
-David Burrell, CSC
Theodore M. Hesburgh Professor in Arts and Letters
University of Notre Dame
"A remarkable and immensely rewarding volume . . . an admirable contribution to the cause of interreligious understanding and cooperation. It is also an unusual book. It is primarily a detailed and well-researched study of the life and thought of thirteen different but equally impressive figures-writers, missionaries, rabbis, and academics, none of them professional theologians or mystics . . . Much more [however] than just a series of religious life studies . . . Through the medium of biography, it explores, in considerable depth and with commendable frankness not only the fascinating avenues of interfaith dialogue, but also some of the problems and difficulties that such a venture inevitably poses for those who take their faith seriously."
-Faith and Freedom
"Not a book for the faint-hearted. For those who seriously want to consider interfaith dialogue and those who are searching for 'truth' in a multifaith environment . . . a scholarly, well-researched, interesting, and challenging work."
-Reform
"Warns against the 'easy idea of allegiance' doing duty for the 'hard idea of truth.'"
-Church Times