The Religious Other

One of the biggest challenges for relations between religions is the view of the religious Other. The question touches the roots of our theological views. The Religious Other: Hostility, Hospitality, and the Hope of Human Flourishing explores the views of multiple religious traditions on how to regard otherness. How does one move from hostility to hospitality? How can hospitality be understood not simply as social hospitality but as theological hospitality, making room for the religious Other on theological grounds? What is our vision for the flourishing of the Other, while respecting his otherness? This volume is an exercise in constructive interreligious theology. By including Abrahamic and non-Abrahamic traditions, it approaches these challenges from multiple perspectives, highlighting commonalities in approach and ways in which one tradition might inspire another.

Contributors:
Vincent J. Cornell, Alon Goshen-Gottstein, Richard P. Hayes, Lord Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, Deepak Sarma, Stephen W. Sykes, Dharma Master Hsin Tao, Ashok Vohra

""Religion has been and continues to be a factor that breeds conflict leading to violence among human beings. Can religion also provide human beings with a capacity to work creatively together toward a more humane, peaceful, and ecologically sustainable world? This book offers critical and constructive essays by scholars of five major religious traditions that examine the seeds of hostility toward religious Others and seek to highlight those elements that ground attitudes of hospitality and loving kindness toward Others in a way that would lead to harmonious coexistence and cooperation in our world today.""
--Ruben L. F. Habito, Southern Methodist University

""Alon Goshen-Gottstein has put together a beautiful and useful volume. The essays here offer an appreciative view into the rooms of different religious traditions and illuminate the corridors that connect them. Highly recommended for anyone seeking the theological resources to be an interfaith leader.""
--Eboo Patel, Interfaith Youth Core

ALON GOSHEN-GOTTSTEIN is founder and director of the Elijah Interfaith Institute. A noted scholar of Jewish studies, he has held academic posts at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv University and has served as director of the Center for the Study of Rabbinic Thought, Beit Morasha College, Jerusalem.