Please download the entire inaugural issue of the Journal of Inter-Religious Dialogue here. We also invite you to read and discuss individual articles in the sections below.

"Starting the Conversation"

The aim of this article is to present an ongoing research project focusing on art as a holistic, personal and creative arena for inter-religious dialogue and to offer analytical reflections on such a renewed and integrated research agenda. Its findings, from a case study with literature, suggest that creative forms of dialogue can foment a fruitful combination of practical and ethical concerns and theoretical reflections. Empirical examples are given from interviews with two authors engaged in inter-religious dialogue: Jewish novelist Susanne Levin and the Christian playwright and novelist Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt.

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The practice of Scriptural Reasoning (SR) provides a unique resource for interfaith dialogue. This process brings together Muslims, Jews, and Christians to converse about their respective canonical texts (Qur’an, Tanakh, Bible). Treating the Christian Bible as a theater of conflicting values demonstrated by characters allows it to move beyond being a sectarian canon to become a focal point for negotiating religious and ethical diversity.

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In 2002, Gujarat, India experienced a traumatizing episode of communal violence in which Muslims, a religious minority, were actively targeted. It is widely believed that the state government, run and influenced by extreme Hindu Nationalist (Hindutva) groups, is at least partly responsible for this. Although the extent of their logistical involvement is debated, the rhetoric of many Hindutva organizations creates and demonizes a religious other. In contrast to the majority of Hindus and the majority of Indians, leaders of a number of Hindutva elements use language that creates pervasive religious binaries, which are instrumental in the recurrence of violence. The political success of Hindutva groups in Gujarat therefore complicates peace-building efforts, as illustrated by the dynamics of responses by local non-governmental organizations (NGO’s) to the violence.

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For the past four years, I have been representing the Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS) in a variety of dialogue and social action projects with the Muslim community in the U.S. and abroad. These engagements have been conducted on the local, national, and international levels. This essay surveys those efforts and offers some brief assessment of preliminary outcomes. The essay is a personal view, as I have been involved as a participant in every program described here, up to the time of this writing (Dec. 31, 2008).

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Christian faith is not about protecting the “doctrinal purity of Christian theology.” For Koreans, becoming Christian is taking part in the liberating mission of Jesus Christ for their own people in the Korea peninsula, in their own Korean Christian ways. For this reason, revisiting Christian soteriology will provide the foundation for Korean Christians to think rigorously about their Christian faith and ethnic identity. In doing so, a door of inter-religious dialogue can also be opened.

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Buddhist environmentalist Ian Harris holds that “the emergence of eco-religiosity, a specifically religious concern for the environment, has manifest[ed] itself as a significant theme in the major religions of the late twentieth-century” (Harris, 1990). The purpose of this paper is to reveal common ground between Buddhism and Christianity that can promote healthy dialogue and mutual action to address the present ecological crisis. I have found that the Christian version of “eco-religiosity” can be summarized by three terms: 1) relatedness; 2) responsibility; and 3) redemption. After defining and offering support for these terms, I apply them to a number of Buddhist writings and demonstrate how they offer a common language that provides both ontological and material underpinnings for Buddhist and Christian environmental awareness and ethics. In doing so, I demonstrate that at least two ‘major religions’ find themselves engaged in this common and global context of ecological crisis and reach similar, constructive conclusions.

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This article briefly describes the state of Christian theology of religions and inter-religious dialogue, arguing that Jacques Dupuis’s and S. Mark Heim’s Trinitarian approaches would benefit greatly from inhabiting the self-consciousness generated by post-modernity. In particular, understanding absolute claims as constructed within discourse gives rise to humility–surely the best attitude for dialogue with the religious other. In the wake of pluralism’s incoherence, what we need to do is not merely give our inclusivisms a new twist, but re-frame them within post-modernity’s refusal to think in dual categories. When we overcome what seems to be our natural tendency to think in terms of either/or, presence/absence, and value/devalued, we become open to the experience of the religious other on her own terms. She then becomes not other, but neighbor.

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This paper compares elements from the Christian notion of reconciliation and Gandhi’s notion of satyagraha. Both Gandhi’s work toward liberation and self-rule, moksha and swaraj respectively, and reconciliation, or forgiveness and renewed relationship, work against oppression and injustice and toward bringing about the conflict transformation and the desired state of relationships. Both assume a moral agency of the victim and impose a moral duty on the victim. There are also differences, notably as to the possible use of violence: nonviolent action is the basis of satyagraha, but there is no absolute prohibition of physical force or coercion in reconciliation.

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This article explores the theory of communicative action of the philosopher Jurgen Habermas as a way forward for inter-religious dialogue. Communicative action based on the intersubjectivity, rationality and force of argumentative speech stands in contrast to the boundary marking of hermeneutic idealism. Communicative action distinguishes between the particularity of one’s lifeworld and the universality of a system paradigm. Communicative action is seen as a way for inter-religious dialogue to explore the importance of various religious traditions. Whilst arguing that communicative action requires an individual to step outside the solipsism of her own lifeworld, this article also acknowledges the importance of an individual’s particular religious interests.

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