About Religions as Maps of Reality
This book is written for a general readership – e.g. people in media, politics, the military, and NPR and BBC listeners. Unpacking the phrase ‘maps of reality,’ which psychologist M. Scott Peck coined but did nothing with, I highlight a number of features that religions share with travel maps, especially those that help us locate meaning, value and purpose in our life-journeys, for us personally and within the distinct cultures that surround us.
The metaphor of ‘maps of reality’ does not capture everything found in religions, but it does provide a
practical, versatile, and readily understood model for clarifying religious expressions and differences. This book aims to explain what religions do for their believers, why religions have not disappeared as secularists have forecast for over a century now, and how they continue to influence our societies, politics, public policies, and cultural as well as personal ways of life.
About the Author
CHRISTOPHER P. PARR has been a professor of religious studies for over thirty years, teaching courses in Asian religions, religion and the arts and literature, religion and political conflicts, goddess and pagan traditions, and select courses in world religions. His research interests, including sacred places in many traditions, and the history of Buddhism's expansion to the West, have taken him to Japan, China, Thailand, New Zealand
and widely across the United States and Europe. He has also been a music and band manager, a music and art critic, an occasional participant in music, performance and art spaces, and he is a published poet. He has now retired from teaching to concentrate on writing books, some based on the ideas in this forthcoming study.
© Christopher Parr 2025
'You Are Here' -- How religions mirror maps of reality
Whenever you enter any town in Holland along a main route, you very soon come to a large glassed-in free-standing map of the town. It is clearly marked ‘Stadskaart,’ meaning City-map. It gives you an easy-to-read layout of the whole place, the town as a whole, its roads and alleys, its canals and market squares, and all the main destinations in that town. For the map to be helpful to visitors on whichever route they are approaching the town, there is a crucial detail included on the map: a prominent plastic circle that says around the top in Dutch, ‘U bent hier’ and around the bottom in English, ‘You are here.’ If you know where you are standing while looking at the Stadskaart, you can figure out on the map where you want to go, and how to get there from where you are.
Religious maps of reality have, by analogy, the same feature. Where are you on the map, as a human being, as a creature in creation (however that is thought of)?
That is a very natural question and it must have an answer, which brings us to the second Aspect of maps of reality: locating ourselves, as people, within the whole. Not only do religious maps of reality provide a schema for understanding the layout of all of life, namely the structure of the universe and everything in it. They also explain where human beings, ourselves, fit into this overall structure. They tell us where people belong in relation to everything else, and what conditions or possibilities help determine where our lives are headed and by what routes or means we might get there. From one point on the map, signified by the phrase ‘You Are Here,’ we can see where we as humans might be going. We can orient ourselves from that point, in relation to the meaning, purpose and value of our lives presented in the overall picture, as any given religious map defines them.