I received an advance copy of a new book called Interactive Faith: The Essential Interreligious Community-Building Handbook, edited by Bud Heckman and Rori Picker Neiss. The book has eight chapters divided into three parts. The first part is called “creating interreligious community through dialog,” the second part, “living interreligious dialogue through service and advocacy,” and the third part, “interfaith resources.” While not quite a “handbook” in the true sense of the word, it is a powerful resource for anyone involved with or looking to become involved with interfaith activities. The book is meant as a companion to How to Be a Perfect Stranger: The Essential Religious Etiquette Handbook, which is also published by Skylight Paths. Each chapter is written by an expert in the field and contains case studies and best practices for doing interfaith work. It will be available in August 2008.
The editors make a distinction between terms that often seem interchangeable: interreligious, intrafaith, interfaith, multifaith, and multireligious. For example, interreligious dialog implies a gathering whose main purpose is religious, whether it’s worship or faith sharing, while multireligious dialog is simply the gathering of people from a variety of faiths for a shared purpose, not necessarily religious.
Reading the book reminded me of one of those “mountain top” experiences of my life. The world envisioned and helping to be formed by the interfaith movement is one where differences are of supreme value and life’s highest goal is to come to a better understanding of “the other.” At the same time, a guiding principle of the movement is that one cannot appreciate other traditions until one has deeply experienced one’s own. The process is similar to the experience many have of learning grammar. For some reason, it’s easier to learn grammar by studying a foreign language than by diagramming sentences in one’s native tongue. For a Christian, dialoging with a Jew or a Buddhist can lead to deep insights on Christ and the Christian path. And it goes without saying that interreligious dialog is even more urgently needed since 9/11.
Interactive Faith
contains a nice blend of the theoretical and the practical. Readers will learn
to avoid some of the mistakes made by the experts and also ways to begin a
program in one’s parish or neighborhood. The last section of the book provides
an excellent summary of the beliefs and practices of dozen major religions (the
Sikh religion is not a branch of Islam, as I had originally thought!), and a
list of organizations and websites that can help get you started.
Enter your comments below
