Amba offers a sneak preview of a book she’s writing, tentatively entitled OUTSIDE: Spiritual Nomads and the Way Beyond Religion. She discusses the practical and spiritual advantages of being an outsider of any particular religious tradition while using the tools of religion and modern science to construct faith anew.

Amba tries to straddle a middle ground between denying religion and professing loyalty to a specific tradition. The advantage to this approach is obvious:

When you swear exclusive allegiance to no one tradition, their multiplicity is… a vast resource: the record of over 10,000 years of research, a grand reference library for the study of reality.

But there’s a contradiction here. As Amba notes earlier in her post,

When you live inside a tradition… you agree to view life through its window — an outlook, a way of framing reality, carefully preserved through time.

This point can’t be easily dismissed. Judaism, for example, commands the believer to view the world through a rabbinic lense. Christianity, the lense of the Gospels and Islam, that of the Koran. To step outside, as Amba recommends, is to deny all of them.

Amba suggests that every religious tradition could be a “vital tributary” in the search for “insight and direction as we find our way through a radically reconfigured reality”. But this is impossible. One cannot deny the basic tenent of a particular religious tradition while simultaneously claiming to incorporate it into a new one. And Amba admits to denying religion’s central claim, which is looking at the world through the eyes of prophets (whomever you believe the genuine prophets to be).

Responding to Amba’s post, Seth makes an important observation:

The truly pious are also open enough to be able to explore the world through their own traditions for their entire lives, without running into limits beyond which they may not look. The truly pious don’t fear knowledge.

In “Jerusalem and Athens”, Leo Strauss offers a model of someone standing in Jerusalem, looking outward at Athens (the city representative of philosophy and modernity), studying it, learning from it, and using its methods to illuminate those aspects of his own city that lend themselves to such analysis. Not only is this a legitimate approach but one championed by the giants of Jewish tradition themselves. Amba, though, calls on us to leave Jerusalem and look at both cities from the outside. Leaving Jerusalem, in this model, is denying Judaism. Once having denied it, you have neither the right nor the ability to eat the fruit its wisdom. “Etz hayyim hi lemahazikim bah,” the Torah is a tree of life, not to anybody, but to those to hold onto it. That is, those who keep it.