Interreligious Dialogue

In times of secular advancement, religious organisations began with widespread creation of common ground for a defence of religious and spiritual values worldwide. Ecumenism and interreligious dialogue became a norm for almost every denomination and world religion, focused on theological discussions, forms of unity, religious diplomacy and religious peacebuilding and humanitarian aid. Religious institutions act as an important societal stakeholder and clergy enjoys authority and legitimacy in an overwhelming number of countries. This comes as an important addition to peacebuilding efforts in post-conflict societies, particularly if those societies are multi-ethnic and multi-religious. Such cases can be seen in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Syria, India, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Thailand, and many other places in the world where religion is being misused for political and nationalistic goals. Empirical research of such activities should also focus on spoilers in those processes. Spoilers are persons or institutions who believe that peace emerging from negotiations or dialogue threatens their power, worldview and interests, while violence, negative peace, status quo or lack of initiatives are used to undermine achievements of peacebuilding. In a religious sense, many spoilers think of ecumenical and interreligious tendencies as a betrayal of key values or disadvantage of their position in society. Spoilers may seem very interested in peace processes, they may be part of interreligious councils and play a role in various initiatives, but are insincere in their commitments, have various strategies and tactics to avoid true reconciliation and may have been positioned from their respective institutions. This paper is a result of in-depth research of interreligious peacebuilding initiatives in the Bosnia and Herzegovina and suggests ways to discover spoilers and challenges local communities face with them in the process.

Violence and extremism are of the most important topics in current research on religion and interreligious studies. The New World Order and the global peace, justice and ethics, cannot be understood without accounting for the role of religion and religious organizations and among the topics dealing with religion is the matter of violence done by the excuse of religion’s orders. There is increasing research looking at and beyond religious causes of violence, as well as a hope that religion could offer genuinely effective tools to control violence. The question of control of violence is discussed in relation to the spheres of ethics (regulation of affect), theology (legitimacy of violence), and government (integration via religion). It is shown not only that religion offers possibilities for controlling violence, but also that control of violence via religion. This paper emphasizes on one of the important Islamic proofs narrated from Prophet Muhammad (S), called “The Promise of Muhammad to the Christians till the end of the World” and the impact of interreligious and intercultural role on peace and conflict resolution, as well as the role of global ethics. Sublime morality is also one point noted here as the resolution for war and conflict.

honor of William Wainwright, this article takes up his interest in interreligious dialogue. It pursues two goals simultaneously: One is to provide a better model for understanding philosophy of religion. Terrence Tilley claims that there is the standard model which is mistaken in that it takes arguing for religious beliefs to be equivalent to justifying commitment to a religion. He promotes a practical model , which has its ancestry in the writings of Michel de Montaigne and Blaise Pascal. This model begins with the lived practices of religion and justifies its intellectual content as explanation for the rightness of this way of life. Wainwright’s work fits into the practical model, but Tilley provides a description and a stronger basis for it. The second goal is to provide much more adequate epistemological resources than those used by the standard model, with contributions from Catholic modernist theologian George Tyrrell, recent philosopher of science Imre Lakatos, and Alasdair MacIntyre, who became interested in evaluating traditions, in science, in moral reasoning, and finally what he came to call large-scale traditions. The problem he needed to overcome is the fact that such traditions carry their own, often different, concepts of reasoning. The possibility of fruitful rational conversation between religions is illustrated here by an account of dialogue between Christianity and Shi’ia Islam, as exemplified in David Burrell’s ability to use conversation with Islamic thought to clarify for Christians their own doctrines of the Trinity, the mediation of Christ, and original sin.  

In some contexts, philosophical debate can be rancorous even when the volume is kept low. In other contexts, certain stripes of “evangelical apologetics” can be equally adversarial and inimical in tone. In the name of preserving a professional, if not an irenic spirit, some unspoken ground rules have been adopted for interreligious dialogue. First is the demand to avoid all appearance of circular reasoning, which is to say avoid making any rhetorical moves that depend upon metaphysical presuppositions about the reality of God. Second, it is understood that (supposedly) unimportant theologically-laden details are to be left off until the (supposedly) prior task of establishing God’s reality is achieved. Such ground rules put philosophical theologians at a distinct disadvantage in interreligious dialogue as they sideline the very voices that have the highest stake in the conversation. William Wainwright offers the concept of “passional reason” as a way to counter the ground rules. Wainwright has shown that charges of circularity and subjectivism fail in the cases of such thinkers as Jonathan Edwards, John Henry Newman, and William James. Read in one way, Wainwright’s work may be taken as a strategic defense that prevents antagonists from excluding religious voices from philosophical conversation. I argue that there is an even more fruitful way to read Wainwright. Simply put, Wainwright’s recapture and rehabilitation of “passional reason” for philosophy of religion simultaneously opens the door for more constructive approaches to interreligious dialogue than an agonistic-styled philosophical debate can allow.