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118 Who Owns the Truth? The Question of the“Other” in Postdenominational Judaism and Christianity (and Islam) in the Next Fifty Years Steven Leonard Jacobs Introduction: The Future Is Unpredictable Despite . . . For almost three decades (1974–2000), I labored full-time “in the vineyards of the Lord,” serving primarily rabbinically in Jewish congregations in Birmingham, Mobile, and Huntsville, Alabama, and Dallas, Texas, including academic postings in those communities as well. Since 2001, I have been a fulltime member of the University of Alabama faculty and part-time rabbi of a small congregation in Tuscaloosa . In all of these viable centers of modern American liberal Jewish life, I repeatedly reminded those whom I had been privileged to serve that, in my studies in those congregations, I kept not one but three crystal balls—to remind me that none of them worked! That is to say, for Jews, especially for American Jews (and for Christians and Muslims as well), the future will not be what we wish it to be, but, rather, will be determined largely by our actions today as well as our responses to tomorrow’s events, which are themselves equally unpredictable. Questions of diminishing or increasing Jewish numbers not only in this country but worldwide, diminishing or increasing Jewish religiosity here and abroad, the shape and context of Jewish-Christian relations in this country and Jewish-Muslim/Arab relations in the Middle East and elsewhere and their impact upon Jews locally and globally, the phenomenon of Islam’s world growth increasingly surpassing Christianity most especially on the African continent, the heretofore little-perceived and only recently addressed rise of the fundamentalisms in all three faith communities as all three conflictually struggle with modernity and postmodernity, the increasingly lessening impact of white Western Christianity and its sad and tragic history of colonialism and triumphalist supercessionism politically and religiously are all arenas worthy of exploration and exposition.1 Looming largest, however, is a question so significant in its implications for both the present and the future that it undergirds the rest, and to which our responses may very well determine the next fifty years, most particularly in this country. And this is the question of “Who Owns the Truth: The Question of the ‘Other,’” of which I am more and more convinced will be viewed as postdenominational Judaism and Christianity in the years to come. If one manner of characterizing post–World War II America is, increasingly with hindsight, an age of interreligious and intrareligious dialogue, then these next fifty years will take us to the very heart of the matter, to a question that has been lurking at the periphery of all of the dialogues and dialogical encounters that have been taking place betwixt and among these faith communities: that of the subjective or objective truth of the claims made by each of them, claims oft-times directly contrary and opposite to those made by the very persons with Who Owns the Truth? 119 whom we have been willing to engage in the dialogue, as well as the claim to ownership of such truth. How, increasingly, we will relate to the person of the “other”—to use a term comfortable to both the late French Jewish philosopher Emanuel Levinas (1906–95) and German Roman Catholic theologian Johannes Baptist Metz—will ultimately prove the hallmark of these next five decades. Before turning to the question itself directly, what exactly can we say with regard to contemporary thinking about the future of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam? Like so much of contemporary intellectual life and discourse , do the vast resources available to us on the Internet embodied on the World Wide Web, itself most assuredly changing the very face of our conversations, have anything of significance and import to say to us regarding what we may comfortably call “the future of religion”? In addition, are there other texts and resources pointing us toward our headlong rush into that future? The World Future Society, the World Network of Religious Futurists, Signs, Wonders, and Others Begun in 1966, the World Future Society is, according to its Web site (http://www.wfs.org), “an association of people interested in how the social and technological developments are shaping the future.” Comprised of more than 30,000 people in more than eighty countries, it “strives to serve as a neutral clearing house for ideas about the future.” Its bimonthly publication The Futurist publishes articles and reports dealing with (1) significant social and technological trends and informed forecasts about...

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