Universalism is the assertion that salvation is available to all people regardless of their particular stripe of belief.  Classically, this involved the assertion that there are many roads to God.  Buddhists, Muslims, atheists, Christians, Hindus - each of these extremely different and directly contradictory religions or systems of belief all ended up at the same point - happiness in eternity with God.   Nobody would be excluded.  No belief could be decreed unfaithful or wrong because God used every avenue of belief (or non-belief) for the salvation of all.

There are huge problems with this, of course.  And orthodox Christianity has firmly rejected this teaching on very solid Biblical grounds.  Yet it tends to resonate with people at a certain level.  Even if it flies in the face of logic and reason and Biblical witness, yet it panders to an unbridled and even undefined sense of love.  We would redefine love so that all would be found in God for eternity, even if that's the farthest thing from what they ever wanted or hoped.  It also makes God a bit harder to hear, if He's going to say completely contradictory and mutually exclusive things and expect that we will interpret these to really all be saying the same thing.  If God goes to all the trouble of revealing himself to us in language, why would He then deliberately contradict himself through language?  To what point or purpose?

However there's a new stream of universalism, and I like how this essay makes the distinction.  This is a Christian universalism where Christ plays the center, redemptive role.  Indeed, all can and perhaps even will be saved according to this new universalism, but only when (after death, generally) the Buddhist or Muslim or atheist or Hindu meets Jesus face to face, recognizes him as their Lord and Savior, and becomes a post-mortem Christian.  Probably a crude rendering of the theology, but essentially accurate.  What we do and say and believe in this life is largely irrelevant because we have the opportunity after death to have the Truth revealed to us and embrace it.  And who, once having seen and known Truth, would reject it?  

I like how this article deals with two of the motivating emotions or lines of thought that often undergird universalist expressions.  It isn't wrong to love others and pray for their salvation.  But that love and those prayers need to be guided and informed by the Scriptures, or else we're just creating our own religion and our own God in our image, which, if I recall, there's expressly a commandment against.  We must reject at every turn the desire to turn ourselves into saviors, decreeing that others are indeed saved even when there is no objective shred of evidence for that, just as we must never take upon ourselves the role of condemning people to hell for similar reasons.  God is God, and we are not, and any  time we wish to take on that role - even if it's to make God seem nicer - we're in fatal territory.