Something new is emerging as the most important topic in religion–interreligious dialogue. Against a background of centuries of religious hostility and the many current religious conflicts, a new movement has sprung up, a movement that calls for a harmonious spirit of open dialogue and exchange between the religious faiths of the world. Following in the tradition of such greats as Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Mother Teresa and the Dalai Lama, interreligious dialogue transcends the boundaries that have kept the world’s religious faiths either isolated or at odds with one another.

The essays collected in this volume are products of the 1985 Assembly of the World’s Religions. Their authors are representative of a vast spectrum of religious and social walks of life–Buddhists, Christians, Hindus, Jews, Muslims, Sikhs, Shintoists; religious and spiritual leaders, scholars, educators, lay men and women. What they share in common is a desire to learn from one another, to achieve a “deepening of religious faith and its consequent virtues as the fruit of interreligious dialogue.” These are reports, not theory, from the new frontier of interreligious dialogue–the experiences, insights, and questions of those who have tried to listen and learn from traditions other than their own.

Table of Contents

Table of Contents

Introduction
Scouting the Frontier
M. Darrol Bryant and Frank Flinn
Part I–Marking the Frontier
1. Interreligious Dialogue: The Spiritual Journey of Our Time
Ewert H. Cousins
2. Swami Vivekananda: A Hindu Model for Interreligious Dialogue
Anantanand Rambachan
3. The Search for the Ultimate Mystery
Thomas Keating
4. Moving the Fence: One Rabbi’s View of Interreligious Dialogue
Rarm Mark Shapiro
5. Current Interreligious Dialogue
A. Durwood Foster
Part II–Journeys to the Frontier
6. My Spiritual Journey Through the Highways and Byways of Interreligious Dialogue
Ignatius Hirudayam
7. A Pilgrimage to One’s Own Roots–A Precondition to Religious Dialogue?
Odette Baumer-Despeigne
8. Interreligious Dialogue: My Pilgrimage of Hope
Albert Nambiaparambil
9. Transformation Through Interreligious Dialogue
Pieter de Jong
10. The Shinto Way to Dialogue
Yoshimine Komori
11. Fences Around God
Avtar Singh
Part III–Resources at the Frontier
12. Islam in Dialogue with People of Faith–Insights from the Islamic Tradition
Badru Dungu Kateregga
13. A Korean Buddhist View on Interreligious Dialogue–Won-Hyo’s Ideal on Peace and Union
Ki-Young Rhi
14. Gandhi’s Experiments in Interreligious Dialogue
K.L. Seshagiri Rao
15. Concerning the Heritage of God-Experience–Its Recovery and Some of Its Fundamental Elements
Swami Devananda
16. Beyond Agreeing to Disagree–A Future Direction in Interfaith Dialogue
James Kodera
17. Jainism–Its Resources for Interreligious Dialogue
Gokul Chandra Jain
18. Towards a Theology of Harmony
Djohan Effendi
Part IV–Issues at the Frontier
19. The Need for Constant Dialogue Among the Leaders of the World’s Religions
Wande Abimbola
20. Dialogue in the School Classroom
W. Owen Cole
21. Buddhist-Christian Dialogue–A Prolegomena
Thubten Losel
22. The What and the How of Dialogue
Paul Mojzes
23. One Heart–Monastic Experience and Interreligious Dialogue
Pascaline Coff
24. Interreligious Meeting–An Approach to World Peace
Tsering Dhondup
25. Postscript
M. Darrol Bryant and Frank K. Flinn
Contributors
Index

M. DARROL BRYANT is Chairman of the Department of Religion and Culture at Renison College, University of Waterloo, Canada. He is co-editor of The Many Faces of Religion and Society (Paragon House, 1985) and God: The Contemporary Discussion (Paragon House, 1982).

FRANK K. FLINN is a consultant in Forensic Religion and has served as an expert witness on questions of church and state. He is editor of Christology (Paragon House, 1989) and co-editor of Religion in the Pacific Era (Paragon House, 1986).