Photo from the website http://dialoguetoday.org/

I am a Catholic theologian and interreligious dialogue is my thing, so many people ask me what the Roman Catholic Church’s position is on interreligious dialogue… as if it had ONE position on this nebulous issue. I try to keep informed of current trends in this area, and one new twist almost escaped my attention until I was “fact checking” for a recent lecture: the US Bishops have once again done a 180 degree turn on the issue of Jewish-Christian dialogue, and I counld not be happier. Let me explain.

Back in 2001, Walter Cardinal Kasper, the President of the Catholic Church’s “Pontifical Commission for the Religious Relations with the Jews” gave a very forward-looking speech in which he declared that while the Catholic Church in fact has no evangelization program aimed at converting Jews, it should not, because the Jews already dwell in a salvific covenant…

church-and-mosque-in-sweden http://www.tukler.com/bildhtml_en/1847-12.html

Looking at all the catholic news recently, there was one a few months ago that perhaps should have received some more attention. A very high level meeting occurred in April between the Vatican and a delegation from Iran. The outcome of the meeting was a joint communiqué issued in which there were a number of items that the participants agreed on. And they committed to keep meeting, with the next meeting scheduled in Tehran within two years. The full communiqué is available here.

Here are the first three items they agreed on:

1. Faith and reason are both gifts of God to mankind.

2. Faith and reason do not contradict each other, but faith might in some cases be above reason, but never against it.

3. Faith and reason are intrinsically non-violent. Neither reason nor faith should be used for violence; unfortunately, both of them have been sometimes misused to perpetrate violence. In…

“People, even more than things, have to be restored, renewed, revived, reclaimed, and redeemed; never throw out anyone.”
~Audrey Hepburn~

This election season has given rise to language that has been especially vitriol. And I am not taking about the conversation between the candidates, but between groups of neighbors, colleagues, church members, friends, family and acquaintances.

The presidential candidates during the most recent debate noted the heated climate, each candidate arguing whether their leadership in their respective parties has been enough to bring about civil dialogue amongst their supporters. 

Yesterday, while eating my bagel at The St. Louis Bread Company, I overheard the conversation between two men. I won’t say who they are supporting for U.S president — that is beside the point I am making here –  but they called those who were against their chosen candidate racist and hate mongers. Since the country is nearly divided on the issues and presidential candidates, I wondered if these men realized that they just wrote-off…

Since Tim Townsend’s May 10 “Keep the Faith” column and Pamela Dolan’s post following the Archbishop of Sudan’s visit to St. Louis, I have been thinking about the role language plays in religion, particularly in the Christian tradition.

This past Sunday, as we celebrated the festival of Pentecost, four readers stood before our congregation reading the account from the Acts of the Apostles. And when they came to the moment when the disciples started speaking in other languages, they each began reciting the passage in different languages. It was a powerful moment, a dramatic cacophony to simulate the event of Pentecost.

“And at this sound the crowd gathered and was bewildered, because each one heard them speaking in the native language of each.” (Acts 2:6)

The celebration of Pentecost reverberates with the meaning of history. It represents the dramatic reversal of the tower of Babel, that ancient account of the origins of language. There,…

I have to say that for me, the most exciting thing about this blog is that it is interreligious and somewhat intercultural. I find discussions with people who think and believe very differently than I do to be the most interesting and enlightening discussions I have. I have so much to learn from them; they say things that I have never considered before and challenge me to explain or rethink my own beliefs. I have to find and answer to why we don’t believe that, or at least why I don’t.

When I have a religious discussion with someone whose faith is very different from my own, there isn’t an expectation or a pressure to come to an agreement. I can easily say, “Of course we disagree on this. I’m Catholic, and we see things differently.” This is very freeing. I am free to simply listen and try to understand their…