Exploration of Religious Traditions through the Lens of Entropy

Abstract

In this article, I start by asking whether the entropy metaphor could shed a kind of integrative light on the diversity of religious traditions – This will lead to new questions, one of which is whether something so vast as a religious tradition can meaningfully be reduced  to a set of principles (i.e., ordered) in the first place.  Does the very attempt to order what is inherently not subject to order increase the amount disorder in the universe? Is order with respect to matters of the spirit hopelessly caught up with human subjectivity?  Finally, are such questions, no matter how challenging, the spark to new levels of creativity, to ecumenical visions of order that can scarcely yet be imagined?