Drawing on almost half a century of immersion in the world's great religions, coupled with an ever-deepening understanding of the philosophy and phenomenology of religion, the author takes a dialogical approach through which religious reality is not seen as external creed and form or as subjective inspiration, but as the meeting in openness, presentness, immediacy, and mutuality with ultimate reality. Religion has to do with the wholeness of human life. The absolute is found, not just in the universal, but in the particular and the unique. When it promotes a dualism in which the spirit has no binding claim upon life and life falls apart into unhallowed fragments, religion becomes the great enemy of humankind.