L’arcobaleno delle religioni

The essay The Rainbow of Religions and Its Problems presents and shortly discusses some of the most relevant conceptions of religious pluralism proposed in the last decades by the theologically inspired philosopher John Hick, the mystic-speculative thinker Raimon Panikkar, the philosophically inspired theologian John B. Cobb Jr., and the historian-comparativist Wilfred Cantwell Smith. Af-ter an introduction elucidating the issue in the light of the various aspects and meanings of the rainbow metaphor (appreciated especially by Panikkar) the paper mainly concentrates on Smith’s efforts to support historically the thesis of the neces-sary distinction of personal faith both from belief-systems and cumulative tradi-tions in order to show how the new awareness of the irreducible differences in all these spheres could and should lead to a mutual recognition among all believers and the gradual formation of a global community of the humankind.