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Religious Particularity, Religious Metaphor, and Religious Truth: Listening to Tom Shaffer

I have met Tom Shaffer no more than two or three times in my life. Nonetheless, we have for several years been carrying on a conversation that has been of central and growing importance to me and to my work. He has spoken to me through his writing, about professional responsibility, about teaching, and about religion and law. Except for the ways in which he has influenced my teaching, I have responded mostly in my head. It is a unique opportunity to be able to acknowledge to him and others the gift of his work; I am proud to participate in this collective appreciation. I am grateful too for the chance to engage in this forum with some of what his writings have said to me. To select, for a brief reflection, from a bibliography of Shafferiana that extends well up into the three-digit range is a daunting task. I have chosen two themes that have special salience for me: first, he celebrates the “particularity” of specific religious communities, while linking Judaism and Christianity to a common “Hebraic tradition”; second, he calls on those attracted to the use of “religious metaphors” to be clear about what beliefs underlie that use. I have found the first liberating and affirming, and the second profoundly challenging.