New Ventures into the Field of Interreligious Dialogue

Abstract

Books Reviewed: Catherine Cornille, ed., The Wiley-Blackwell Companionto 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: LexingtonBooks, 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 interreligiousdialogue. In this essay I will concentrate on providing a flavor ofthe approach taken in each volume and, where possible, on those contributionswhich relate closely to the study of Islam and Muslims. I will discuss the threetitles in the order they have been cited above and then offer a short conclusion.The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Inter-Religious Dialogue represents auseful introduction to both the theoretical and the practical issues raised by interreligiousdialogue as well including a number of case studies of interreligiousdialogue. Ten chapters comprise the focal topics of part 1 and seventeen chapterscomprise the case studies of part 2. The topics covered by the chapters arequite wide ranging and show a good deal of originality in that they do not featurewidely in the extant interreligious dialogue literature. For example, in part1 there is a chapter on art and interreligious dialogue and another on interreligiousworship; 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 interreligiousrelations which they discuss and all (with one exception) are acknowledgedto 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 notingLeonard Swidler’s history of interreligious dialogue in chapter 1. Swidlercharts the rise of interreligious dialogue and the increasing awareness of itsneed, postulating that we are now facing a significant new era in human ...