by Marium Mohiuddin
“You have to come and help me right now!” he said. All I could think was “it’s 4 a.m., and there’s no way I can sneak out.” My parents would kill me. Despite being a senior in college...
by Sparrow Etter Carlson
I write this now with my hand on my heart, and here it will remain. For what follows is about the precious people within our midst who are treated as ex-humans in our society and...
by Mohammed Jibriel
I recently learned about the concept of moral injury, which describes the profound psychological, behavioral, social, and spiritual distress that...
by Zack Ritter
“All 40,000 Palestinians killed in Gaza are terrorists,” she said as we were eating cookies, standing around the flickering flames at Shabbat services. I was...
by Richard Reoch
The Buddha was no stranger to genocide. His own people, the Sakyas, were the victims of mass slaughter. One of the final acts of his life, recounted in the opening verses of the Mahaparinirvana Sutra, was to refuse a request to give his blessing to an act of genocide.
by Henry Karlson
Interfaith dialogue is a constant element of any religious faith. Such dialogue, however, tends not to be on the level of the dogmatic teachings of the different faiths but on practical matters, such as questions concerning the morality or immorality of particular actions or on the way communities as a whole understand shared historical experiences.
by Isabella Price
On December 25, Christians around the world will gather to celebrate Jesus’ birth with joyful carols, special liturgies, festive meals and gifts…Yet, what are the origins of Christmas and how…
In this freewheeling book, Kurt Johnson and David Robert Ord attempt a truly daunting task: to tell the story — one that reaches back fourteen billion years — of what they call “the planet’s emerging unity consciousness,”1 or, in terms of their mentor Wayne Teasdale, the emerging Interspiritual Age. The authors define interspirituality as “the sharing of ultimate experiences across traditions,” “a more universal experience of the world’s religions, emphasizing shared experiences of heart and unity consciousness.” Fundamentally, however, interspirituality turns out to be monistic: “the entire religious experience of our species,” they write, “has been a single experience.”
Some Jain friends at the 1993 Parliament of World Religions gave me a booklet with the title We Were There As Well. Too easily the starring role of Swami Vivekananda has obscured the significant contribution that other Asian participants made a hundred years earlier at the 1893 World Parliament of Religions, participants who deserve to be remembered.
This month TIO invited five remarkable women, interfaith leaders representing different faiths, to answer the question, “What do Women Bring to the Interfaith Table?” Three of their responses tell us stories – the other two approach the issue more on its own terms. But the result is a rounded, insightful discussion helping explain why women are more engaged as interfaith leaders than ever before.
TIO: Thank you for taking the time to speak with me, Professor Cobb. I’m particularly interested in talking about one of your recent books.
John Cobb:Which one?
TIO: The Dialogue Comes of Age: Christian Encounters with Other Traditions.
Cobb: I thought you might be referring to it.
TIO: One of the things that struck me was how it focused on dialogue between religious communities as a collective. Could you tell me more about that?
