The Importance of Conversation for Healthy Interfaith Relations

07 Jun The Importance of Conversation for Healthy Interfaith Relations

In my seven year stay in Cambridge University while I was completing my PhD there I was involved in forums for dialogue between different disciplines between the humanities and social sciences. The lessons learnt from that experience were that people become comfortable in their own terminologies and concepts that help them move the debate forward in their own disciplines. While these same concepts and terminologies become hurdles for outsiders to access these debates. It was learnt that conversation across people from different disciplines over similar thematic interests helps to translate the boundary making concepts into simpler terms. When researchers would be forced to communicate with researchers from outside their discipline they would attempt to communicate their research in language that would be understandable to others.

These lessons can also be applied to theologians from different religious traditions. By being forced to communicate their boundary-making concepts that are so integral to their group identity theologians would be forced to simplify their religious categories so that theologians from other religions can understand them. Command over language of communication and its nuances are essential for making this communication fruitful. Language is such an essential equalizer while also boundary maker.

Reflecting on these aspects of language will help those involved in dialogue to reach fruitful results. After all if understanding is reached then the other becomes less distant. The aim should not however be radical equalization.

Rather, the aim of such communication should be to understand religious traditions in the context of their own concepts, vocabularies and the historical development of categories used by the practitioners of the religious tradition.

The importance of conversation can be recognized only after it takes place. The way researchers of different disciplines became more aware of the debates in disciplines other than their own, similarly theologians may benefit much from learning about the historical development of conversations in other religious traditions. In today’s interconnected world this should be essential knowledge for a practicing theologian so that she is able to communicate an empathic understanding of other religions in her own religions categories to her congregation. There is hope that recognizing the importance of conversation can help us achieve a world with better understanding of others and avoid historically established prejudice.

As in the case of interdisciplinary experience where centers for interdisciplinary research played an important role in hosting interdisciplinary conversation, so in the case of interfaith dialogue there are needed centers of interfaith activity that can host such interfaith conversations. DICID can play such an important and necessary role in today’s world and help reduce prejudice that people hold about each other’s religions. This work has to involve theologians as well as ordinary believers. Though the impact of a changed attitude of a theologian can have much deeper impact on society compared to changed attitude of an ordinary believer.

Adeel Khan