The Work of Discovery: Interreligious Dialogue as Life-Long Learning

Abstract

ly defined, religion and education collide. But placed in relation to the idea of development, the educational and the religious achieve a working relationship. Education needs a religious impulse, or else its concern to put things in order closes off further development and thereby undoes the meaning of education. Religion needs educational restraint and challenge so that its impulse to transcend the world does not lose touch with the world to be transcended. Otherwise, religious activities are not a going beyond but a gone beyond, leaving us with a sphere called religion which no longer transforms our lives together.17 In Moran’s terms, religion is not an object of study, not even a source of “spiritual values,” but a catalyst for learning. When the personal pursuit of values and truth comes up against other persons’ analogous pursuits, the field of endeavour subtly changes. As persons of faith we may speak in different religious idioms and exhibit very different assumptions about what makes for ultimate significance, but, at the interpersonal level, we work at a task which is shared: to bring a wealth of inherited wisdom to bear upon this encounter. The question is: how this challenge of “sharing in difference” may not just be pursued with integrity but also enhance rather than undermine the sense of self, or—to put it another way—how an encounter with the other can build up faith rather than destroy it. Four important principles emerged from the Faiths Together project. Firstly, and most obviously, inter-religious learning does not come about through