Toward a Dialogue of the Heels?

Abstract

AbstractFollowing its assembly in Busan in 2013, the World Council of Churches (WCC) adopted the framework of a Pilgrimage of Justice and Peace (PJP) for its programmatic engagement. This article explores how themes and concerns relating to justice shaped the programmatic engagement of the WCC’s Office of Interreligious Dialogue and Cooperation. To this end, it analyzes the three dimensions of the WCC’s interreligious work: bilateral dialogues, resourcing churches, and interreligious collaboration. Showing how the PJP’s orientation toward learning from the margins also significantly influenced the justice‐orientation of the WCC’s interreligious engagement, the article proposes a new model of interreligious dialogue called the “dialogue of the heels” to complement the existing models of interreligious engagement of dialogue of the head, the heart, the hands and the holy. This dialogue of the heels has a dual attention: to the experiences of injustice and to the agency for justice of marginalized communities. It thus can offer a necessary corrective to interreligious dialogue, which has long been accused of being elitist and estranged from liberative engagement.