Down the centuries interfaith dialogue has been both inspiring and divisive

The Faiths of Others: A History of Interreligious Dialogue
THOMAS ALBERT HOWARD
(YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 376 PP, £25)
Tablet bookshop price £22.50 • Tel 020 7799 4064

If you want a dispassionate view of something, ask an outsider. This would seem to be the logic bringing Thomas Albert Howard to write this first history of interreligious dialogue. Howard is currently professor of history and the humanities at Valparaiso University, Indiana, but he is perhaps not the complete outsider, since previously he had been director of the Center for Faith and Inquiry at Gordon College, Wenham, Massachusetts. He has published books on Religion and the Rise of Historicism (2000), Protestant Theology and the Making of the Modern German University (2006) and God and the Atlantic: America, Europe and the Religious Divide (2011).

In tracing the development of interreligious dialogue, Howard concentrates on three “turning points”. There can be no objection to two of these: Chicago 1893, the World Parliament of Religions; and Rome 1962-1965, the Second Vatican Council – and in particular the declaration Nostra Aetate, promulgated in 1965. I must admit that I had never heard of the British Empire Exhibition held in London in 1924-25 which is taken as the second turning point.

Before examining these turning points in detail, Howard presents “harbingers” of interreligious dialogue, paying special attention to the meeting between St Francis of Assisi and Sultan al-Malik al-Kamil, to Ramon Llull and Nicholas of Cusa and then to the discussions that took place at the court of the Mughal emperor Akbar.