From irony to inclusion

Abstract

Our conception of interfaith dialogue that connotes deliberate recognition and sympathetic articulation of the beliefs and practices of other faiths was first adumbrated in poems, aphorisms, and stories in the course of the last seven centuries. True to the fragmentary and disparate fashion in which these early indications have appeared, I will present four historically and culturally specific attempts to account for religious diversity. The authors discussed here were not theologians in the specific sense of the term but believers and practitioners of their faiths, and thinkers in their respective cultural traditions. As they have explored the problem of multiplicity of beliefs and diversity of sacred traditions without intending to convert to other religions, condemn other creeds, or abandon all religion, I designate them as the harbingers of interfaith dialogue long before our contemporaries envisioned a ―la point vierge‖[1] among diverse spiritual traditions.