Interfaith Dialogue

This book, Trialogue of the Abrahamic Faiths, edited by the late Dr. Ismail Raji al-Faruqi is certain to ‎be hailed as a historical milestone in Muslim-Christian-Jewish dialogue. Perhaps not since the early ‎Middle Ages when the grand courts of Damascus, Baghdad, and Qurtubah (Cordova) witnessed ‎numerous dialogues and debates between the adherents of these three Abrahamic faiths, has there been ‎such a successful effort made by religious scholars to communicate with one another on matters of ‎faith and understanding.‎

This book, readers may note, goes beyond the modern-day ostensible studies in comparative religion, ‎and each of the contributing scholars envinces an appreciation and more-than-cursory knowledge of all ‎the three faiths. The authors take up three major topics: The Other Faiths, The Nation-State as a Form ‎of Social Organization, and The Faith-Community as a Transnational Actor for Justice and Peace. ‎Jewish, Christian, and Muslim contributors offer their respective enlightened views on the subjects ‎discussed.‎

This book, Trialogue of the Abrahamic Faiths, edited by the late Dr. Ismail Raji al-Faruqi is certain to ‎be hailed as a historical milestone in Muslim-Christian-Jewish dialogue. Perhaps not since the early ‎Middle Ages when the grand courts of Damascus, Baghdad, and Qurtubah (Cordova) witnessed ‎numerous dialogues and debates between the adherents of these three Abrahamic faiths, has there been ‎such a successful effort made by religious scholars to communicate with one another on matters of ‎faith and understanding.‎

This book, readers may note, goes beyond the modern-day ostensible studies in comparative religion, ‎and each of the contributing scholars envinces an appreciation and more-than-cursory knowledge of all ‎the three faiths. The authors take up three major topics: The Other Faiths, The Nation-State as a Form ‎of Social Organization, and The Faith-Community as a Transnational Actor for Justice and Peace. ‎Jewish, Christian, and Muslim contributors offer their respective enlightened views on the subjects ‎discussed.‎

The author explores the differences in the ways of knowing God, with a particular focus on the rational proofs of God’s existence as perceived by noteworthy authors from Christian and Hindu traditions. He deepens the study with insights put forth by Raimundo Panikkar in his seminal work on the encounter between both religions. A possible blend of the two traditions is proposed.

Interfaith groups can be fruitfully interpreted through a Durkheimian framework as moral communities gathered on the basis of shared values and ritualistic discourses. The function of the interfaith society is to generate social solidarity through the invocation of their commonly held sacred values in a variety of modalities that can be considered the “denominations” of the interfaith “religion.” One consequence of understanding interfaith communities in this light is that it deprioritizes questions about the social impact or concrete results of interfaith engagement, as interfaith work becomes less about producing results and more about developing meaningful relationships that are not subject to proof or quantification. Rather than a change agent, interfaith dialogue is actually an emergent form of multi-religious moral community, an enactment of European cosmopolitanism which attracts mostly people who already agree with each other about the value of pluralism. This argument is grounded in ethnographic data on interfaith engagement in Rome, Italy.

Humanization is a frequently invoked goal of interfaith dialogue-but what does it mean to dialoguers to be "human," let alone to make each person more human? This article takes a close look at the common discourses of interfaith dialoguers, and how those discourses are translated into action. Drawing on observed vignettes and reflections from ethnographic interviews across geopolitical contexts, the article conceptualizes humanization as a discursive object of the interfaith society that dialoguers invoke to enhance group solidarity and express collective identity in the form of their sacred values. By frequently invoking the concept of humanization, interfaith dialogues signal to each other that they are uniting around a common goal. Specifically, the article investigates normative discourses regarding "humanization" of the religious other and how the practice of exchanging narratives facilitates humanization and the cultivation of empathy. Through this data we can see that "humanization" is a common discursive goal of dialoguers. In Italy, humanization is a matter of disconfirming stereotypes and alleviating ignorance across social divides, whereas in the Middle East humanization intensifies into a commitment to not physically harm the other, who is recognized through the course of intergroup engagement as sharing a common ground of experience and complexity with the other. Dialoguers say humanization can be achieved through non-discursive relational practices such as artistic collaboration, shared silence, humor or cognitive re-framing, but most often through narrative storytelling.

This book, Trialogue of the Abrahamic Faiths, edited by the late Dr. Ismail Raji al-Faruqi is certain to ‎be hailed as a historical milestone in Muslim-Christian-Jewish dialogue. Perhaps not since the early ‎Middle Ages when the grand courts of Damascus, Baghdad, and Qurtubah (Cordova) witnessed ‎numerous dialogues and debates between the adherents of these three Abrahamic faiths, has there been ‎such a successful effort made by religious scholars to communicate with one another on matters of ‎faith and understanding.‎

This book, readers may note, goes beyond the modern-day ostensible studies in comparative religion, ‎and each of the contributing scholars envinces an appreciation and more-than-cursory knowledge of all ‎the three faiths. The authors take up three major topics: The Other Faiths, The Nation-State as a Form ‎of Social Organization, and The Faith-Community as a Transnational Actor for Justice and Peace. ‎Jewish, Christian, and Muslim contributors offer their respective enlightened views on the subjects ‎discussed.‎

Rémi Chéno è un teologo domenicano francese. Le sue opere ora si concentrano maggiormente sulla teologia cristiana delle religioni. Dal 2013 vive al Cairo e si occupa di teologia del dialogo interreligioso, oltre ad essere segretario generale dell'Istituto domenicano di Studi orientali. Questo breve testo si muove proprio nella linea di studi del teologo francese, interessato al campo della teologia delle religioni. In una riflessione per nulla accademica o desiderosa di delineare uno sviluppo di questa branca della teologia in modo scientifico e dettagliato, cerca in modo semplice, chiaro e originale di tracciare una strada nuova partendo da quello che la riflessione teologica ha fin qui tracciato. È importante provare a delineare nuovi sentieri di riflessione e di approfondimento, perché nella condizione sempre più evoluta di una postmodernità mutante anche la teologia deve saper rispondere alle esigenze di questo mondo che cambia, deve essere capace di avere un linguaggio giusto per il tempo in cui vive e per gli ascoltatori a cui vuole rivolgersi, senza mai snaturare il senso profondo del suo credo. Il titolo "Dio al plurale" evidenzia bene la condizione di oggi, quella di un mondo frantumato in cui anche la religione rischia di perdersi e di frantumarsi.

In May 19681, Yves Raguin returned to Paris, the city where he studied as a young man. There he witnessed the boisterous street demonstrations by large crowds of young people. The French missionary was coming from Taiwan, where he was a well-known scholar on Chinese culture and spiritualities.  The Paris youngsters boldly stated that God was dead. Raguin, however, thought that the youth rejected a God different from the one he had come to know better in the East. It is not God who is dead, Raguin thought, but rather the abstraction that they call God. Eastern spiritualities, which seek the divine in the depths of the human, could have helped the youth of Paris to know God from a different point of view. “While travelling through France, I became deeply aware of whom I was, after twenty years in the East. I somewhat understood that Chinese humanism was two thousand years ahead of the West. And I wanted to state that, even if I did not know how”.
Later that year, Raguin began writing The Depth of God, his second book comparing Eastern and Western spiritualities2.  The title was carefully chosen: “I attempted the discovery of the ‘depth of God’ in the depth of man.… In English, ‘the depth of God’ immediately resonates with ‘the death of God’.  In fact, my thought expresses the passage from a humanism in which God seems ‘dead’, to a notion of man which reveals and manifests God in the depth of the human”.
      In his first book, Paths to Contemplation (1968), Raguin had written on ascendant paths toward God. The itinerary described in The Depth of God is the other way around. “The main theme of The Depth of God is that, when man discovers what man is, [he] finds God.... I can describe the process with these words: ‘Who knows man, knows God’.… The Depth of God is like digging a well in the heart of human being”.
      Exploring the way of interiority, Raguin proposes an audacious parallel between the rejection of God in the contemporary West and Buddha’s refusal to submit humans to a God imagined as an external Absolute. “A Buddhist may say that he does not profess any belief in God.…  He does not deny the existence of an Absolute, but he does not want man [to] feel he is subservient to it or related to it. He wants to make man totally master of himself. In a way this is the first known movement of the ‘death of God’”.  For the historical Buddha “to talk or think about God and metaphysical problems is a waste of time and energy”. Raguin suggests that the encounter between Christian faith and Asian religious traditions is possible on the path to interiority. A path that goes beyond the denial of God declared by modernity and leads to the “depth of God”.

1968年5月1，甘易逢回到了他年轻时的学习地巴黎。在那里，他目睹了大批年轻人涌
上街头，举行声势浩大的游行示威。这位法国传教士刚从台湾归来，在台湾，他是研究
中国文化和灵修的著名学者。巴黎青年大胆地宣称上帝已死。然而，甘易逢认为巴黎青
年所摒弃的上帝与他已深入了解的东方的上帝是截然不同的。甘易逢认为，死去的不是
上帝，而是他们称之为上帝的抽象概念。东方的灵修在人的灵魂深处寻求神性，它可以
帮助巴黎青年从另一个角度认识上帝。“在东方待了二十年，回到法国在各地旅行时，
我对自己有了更深刻的认识。我似乎理解了中国的人文主义确乎比西方先进两千年。我
很想把这一领悟明明白白地说清楚，尽管我不知道该从何说起"
In May 19681, Yves Raguin returned to Paris, the city where he studied as a young
man. There he witnessed the boisterous street demonstrations by large crowds of young people. The French missionary was coming from Taiwan, where he was a well-known scholar on Chinese culture and spiritualities. The Paris youngsters boldly stated that God was dead. Raguin, however, thought that the youth rejected a God different from the one he had come to know better in the East. It is not God who is dead, Raguin thought, but rather the abstraction that they call God.
Eastern spiritualities, which seek the divine in the depths of the human, could have helped the youth of Paris to know God from a different point of view. “While travelling through France, I became deeply aware of whom I was, after twenty years in the East. I somewhat understood that Chinese humanism was two thousand years ahead of the West. And I wanted to state that, even if I did not know how”

Stereotypes and hostilities abound when it comes to Christians and Satanists. This prevents mutual understanding, and an exploration of areas where members of these very different religious groups might find agreement. What follows is an edited transcript of a conversation between John Morehead, an Evangelical Christian, and Stephen Bradford Long, a member of The Satanic Temple. The discussion begins with a brief discussion of their backgrounds, before moving to how they understand Jesus and Satan within their respective traditions as outsider figures. This understanding of their central religious figures provides an important aspect to their efforts at multifaith dialogue, working through deep differences for the common good.

https://viewer.joomag.com/cultural-encounters-volume-16-number-1/0685162001617208881

Stereotypes and hostilities abound when it comes to Christians and Satanists. This prevents mutual understanding, and an exploration of areas where members of these very different religious groups might find agreement. What follows is an edited transcript of a conversation between John Morehead, an Evangelical Christian, and Stephen Bradford Long, a member of The Satanic Temple. The discussion begins with a brief discussion of their backgrounds, before moving to how they understand Jesus and Satan within their respective traditions as outsider figures. This understanding of their central religious figures provides an important aspect to their efforts at multifaith dialogue, working through deep differences for the common good.

Diyanet (Turkey's Directorate of Religious Affairs) under the chairmanship of Dr. Mehmet Görmez, published a report on Fethullah Gülen titled "Feton in His Own Words: Organized Abuse of Religion" in 2017. Then, on 8 December 2020 Dr. Görmez in an interview with him, emphasized very seriously that it is wrong to break a person's words from the integrity, to change and dedicate him. In this study, Görmez's discourse was compared with the method he followed in his report on Gülen.