New Ventures into the Field of Interreligious Dialogue

Abstract

Books Reviewed: Catherine Cornille, ed., The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Inter-Religious Dialogue. Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons, 2013; Daniel S. Brown, Jr., ed., A Communication Perspective on Interfaith Dialogue: Living within the Abrahamic Traditions. Plymouth, UK: Lexington Books, 2013; Daniel S. Brown, Jr., ed., Interfaith Dialogue in Practice: Christian, Muslim, Jew. Kansas City, MO: Rockhurst University Press, 2013. These three volumes represent fifty individual contributions to the topic of interreligious dialogue. In this essay I will concentrate on providing a flavor of the approach taken in each volume and, where possible, on those contributions which relate closely to the study of Islam and Muslims. I will discuss the three titles in the order they have been cited above and then offer a short conclusion. The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Inter-Religious Dialogue represents a useful introduction to both the theoretical and the practical issues raised by interreligious dialogue as well including a number of case studies of interreligious dialogue. Ten chapters comprise the focal topics of part 1 and seventeen chapters comprise the case studies of part 2. The topics covered by the chapters are quite wide ranging and show a good deal of originality in that they do not feature widely in the extant interreligious dialogue literature. For example, in part 1 there is a chapter on art and interreligious dialogue and another on interreligious worship; and in part 2, of the various possible religion combinations, there are chapters on Shinto-Buddhist dialogue and Confucian-Jewish dialogue. All of the chapters of part 2 give some space to outlining the history of the interreligious relations which they discuss and all (with one exception) are acknowledged to be written from one side of a relationship rather than the other. Turning to some of the chapters of the volume we can begin by noting Leonard Swidler’s history of interreligious dialogue in chapter 1. Swidler charts the rise of interreligious dialogue and the increasing awareness of its need, postulating that we are now facing a significant new era in human ...