Religious Traditions
topic
Religious traditions as creative inputs — studied not for their truth claims but for their aesthetic, philosophical, ethical, and practical wisdom — represent some of the most sophisticated and most fully elaborated frameworks for addressing the deepest human questions ever developed, with the artistic traditions, architectural achievements, philosophical developments, ethical frameworks, contemplative practices, and narrative resources of the world's major religious traditions constituting an extraordinary creative inheritance.
Role
Religious traditions are among the richest and most consistently avoided creative input sources for secular creative practitioners — avoided because of the association between engagement and personal belief, when the tradition's creative wealth is equally available to those who engage with it aesthetically, historically, and philosophically. The artist who has seriously studied Buddhist iconography, the writer who has engaged with Sufi poetry, the architect who understands Gothic cathedral structural innovation are all drawing from creative traditions of extraordinary depth.