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 Paul Chaffee
Like so much else in this contemporary culture, the ‘interfaith movement’ is at a watershed moment. For the past quarter-century, spontaneously, globally, thousands of groups have gathered to promote interfaith harmony.
by Kay Lindahl
As a Christian who has been engaged in the interfaith movement for over 25 years, I found myself intrigued by The INTRAfaith Conversation: How Do Christians Talk Among Ourselves About INTERfaith Matters? (2016). Susan Strouse’s book explores the importance of intrafaith conversations as a path to deeper and more meaningful interfaith conversations.
Chris Stedman’s Faitheist is a fine, compelling book written by a deeply faithful person, who by his own admission is more interested in building something than in tearing something down. His faithfulness is not to a set of religious beliefs but to a search to understand and honor his unique humanity and the unique humanity of others in ways that contribute positively to life on Earth.
Count me a team-member of the interspiritual movement. I am in sympathy with the goals of The Coming Interspiritual Age by Kurt Johnson and David Robert Ord, a grand, ambitious work with an optimistic vision of future global unity. Kurt Johnson’s mental scope on display here is astonishing. A polymath, he was for thirty years a distinguished scientist at the Museum of Natural History, penned an award-winning New York Times best seller about Vladimir Nabokov and butterflies, and regularly contributes to Wikipedia, all attesting to the breadth of his discussion of how humanity came to its current crises of religious conflict and spiritual dis-ease. Johnson and Ord’s ability to weave facts into sweeping historical narrative lends strength to their conclusions.
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.”
Is there any hope for real change in the human condition? Kurt Johnson and David Ord certainly think so, and I am grateful to them for The Coming Interspiritual Age and its optimism. But I wonder…
Seasoned workers in the interfaith vineyard rarely deviate when asked what has been most valuable in their interreligious journey – “It’s the relationships” comes back again and again. My Neighbor’s Faith – Stories of Interreligious Encounter, Growth, and Transformation (Orbis), published this month, takes us into those deep interfaith relationships with 53 religious leaders, teachers, theologians, community leaders, and activists. We’ve heard many of these voices before in their public, academic, or professional roles. In My Neighbor’s Faith, though, we get to hear their personal stories of encountering ‘the other’ and finding their lives transformed.
