Jeune Street

Tenzin Gyatso (better known as the Dalai Lama) writes today's most popular article in the New York Times:

Tensions are likely to increase as the world becomes more interconnected and cultures, peoples and religions become ever more entwined. The pressure this creates tests more than our tolerance — it demands that we promote peaceful coexistence and understanding across boundaries. Granted, every religion has a sense of exclusivity as part of its core identity. Even so, I believe there is genuine potential for mutual understanding. While preserving faith toward one’s own tradition, one can respect, admire and appreciate other traditions.

The column highlights some constructive ways forward for inter-religious dialogue -- and for discourse in general. To engage in meaningful dialogue, one must begin with the recognition that access to truth is not the exclusive property of one religion. This is an under-appreciated feature of constructive dialogue that is often absent from inter-religious exchanges. Having participated in a number of these, I find they often tend to focus on sharing of traditions or religious practices. Very few venture into the truth-claims of religion, often for fear of theological clashes. It's too bad, because the conversations that everyone else is having tend to lead to the acknowledgment that most major religions focus on similar themes and truths.

This all reminded me of a letter sent from the Baha'i international governing council (the Universal House of Justice) to the world's religious leaders in 2002. It emphasizes that religious leadership has a responsibility to pave the way for more constructive dialogue, which begins with recognizing the truth-claims of other religions:

It is evident that growing numbers of people are coming to realize that the truth underlying all religions is in its essence one. This recognition arises not through a resolution of theological disputes, but as an intuitive awareness born from the ever widening experience of others and from a dawning acceptance of the oneness of the human family itself. Out of the welter of religious doctrines, rituals and legal codes inherited from vanished worlds, there is emerging a sense that spiritual life, like the oneness manifest in diverse nationalities, races and cultures, constitutes one unbounded reality equally accessible to everyone. In order for this diffuse and still tentative perception to consolidate itself and contribute effectively to the building of a peaceful world, it must have the wholehearted confirmation of those to whom, even at this late hour, masses of the earth’s population look for guidance.