Interreligious Dialogue

In 1955, after years of intensive seminary study in various Orthodox Jewish congregations, I began to feel the need for a wider range of experience. Up to this point, my entire religious education had taken place within the Jewish world, and it was beginning to feel somewhat narrow.

My studies of Islam and Islamism have brought me to realize that classical and contemporary Islam have tremendous love within.

This kind of interfaith work might be compared to throwing a small stone into a pond: there is usually not a big splash but the ripples slowly proceed everywhere, bringing their important message.

During times of stress, America sometimes chokes on its pluralism. I believe such a time is upon us.

We have shared many issues in our work together, and perhaps the most basic is simply: What keeps us from an authentic interfaith dialogue that can help us meet our shared economic, social, and environmental issues together?

We will leave here with faces, stories, echoes of laugher, tales of struggle that automatically humanize and make complex the conflicts we face on a daily basis.

My Zen colleagues may object that it is a stretch to call Zen meditation "prayer," or to describe it as a method "to reach our divine nature." But we must never stop trying to find common ground.

Maybe this Sept. 11 can be what Eboo Patel has been calling "our Tahrir moment," enabling us to take the baggage from 9/11 and transcend it into wisdom for the American future.

We need to develop the patience and motivation to learn our differences. Awareness leads to real dialogue, and dialogue leads to friendship.

"I am giving myself as fully as possible to their practices, beliefs, rituals and culture. ... I have to digest material in 30 days that would take a normal devotee a lifetime."

Can we all come together to make this value a reality in the pluralistic mosaic of America? Can each one of us become agents of change that Dr. King and Mahatma Gandhi propagated?

We know religion has the power to do good. We know religion also has the power to inspire acts of terrorism and evil. We know something else. Religious affiliation in our world today is growing.

Religious faith has a major part to play in shaping the values which guide the modern world. It can and should be a force for progress. I also think that understanding our increasingly globalized world today requires an understanding of religion and people of religious faith.

What do Muslims and Mormons have in common? It turns out both want to take over the world. But when they are not too busy doing that, they tell jokes -- together.

By Anto Akkara Religion News Service/ENInews NAGPUR, India (RNS/ENInews) Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams deplored attempts by European gov...

By G. Jeffery MacDonald Religion News Service CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (RNS) Harvard University scholar Robert Putnam has earned a reputation as an expert on...

for those closest to the ongoing interreligious movement, tolerance just won't suffice. Real intercultural harmony demands exposure, as well as respect, mutuality, and, ultimately, engagement.

Religion is a core part of the social media landscape, with Facebook fanpages and Twitter profiles creating what some might consider to be virtual churches, synagogues, and mosques within the broader online panorama.

The most important translation of our holy texts is the translation into daily life -- in acts of kindness, generosity, courage, humility, justice, self-control, respect, reverence, fidelity, and compassion.

We are imagining this package as a ready response kit that fortifies people of goodwill with religiously grounded knowledge helpful in standing firm when acts of religious hatred are looming.

Scriptural Reasoning is the communal reading of sacred scriptures in small groups -- opening our sacred texts to others for conversation from the heart, modeling a fellowship that sees difference as rich and illuminating.

I continue to be fascinated by the controversy and commentaries connected to the National Day of Prayer! What is most striking is the more extreme the view, the less knowledge there is about the designated "adversary."

The squabbles between fundamentalists and the New Atheists are tragic because left-leaning religious communities and progressive atheists cannot find each other, thus failing to make common cause on a shared vision of ecological and social justice.

International religious heavyweights Karen Armstrong, Huston Smith and Rabbi David Rosen converged on Dearborn, Michigan, for three days of work with grassroots activists to combat bigotry.

We believe that if we can educate religious leaders and scholars across religious boundaries on our campus, we will better prepare them for today's multifaith realities.