Neo-Perennialism in Science and Religion: Evaluating Knight’s Religious Pluralism

Recent years have seen renewed interest in perennialism, understood either mini-malistically as the thesis of some commonalities in mystical experience across reli-gious traditions, or more expansively as a thesis about the mystical unity of religious traditions - a form of religious pluralism. The Eastern Orthodox theologian and sci-ence-and-religion scholar Christopher Knight has provided one expansive defence of neo-perennialism. Knight argues that perennialism finds support in both the Chris-tian apophatic tradition and the refined understanding of divine action developed in the science-theology dialogue. Knight develops an ambitious model in which mysticality is built into nature from the beginning, and human religious imagination thus connects to the transcendent, despite being natural and contextual. This article presents a constructive and critical evaluation of Knight's research program, consid-ering the model's internal tensions, problems with competing models in the theol-ogy of evolution, and competing models in the theology of religions.