NEW HAVEN, Conn. (RNS) — Following up on a public exchange of letters last year about the need for Christian and Muslim understanding, leaders and scholars representing both faiths have begun the task of trying to make their calls more “concrete.”
One of the “practical outcomes” of a four-day (July 28-31) meeting at Yale University was to call for Christian and Muslim clerics to speak publicly during a designated week each year in praise of the other's tradition.
Asked at the conclusion of the meeting how this might be implemented, Ibrahim Kalin, the director of the Foundation for Political, Economic and Social Research in Ankara, Turkey, suggested the idea could be taken to the United Nations.
Such a proposal might strike outsiders as limited, but theologians and religious leaders here said it represents a small but necessary step toward reducing tensions in a post-9/11 world.
“I see a dark and dangerous storm of Christian-Muslim tensions menacing the world in which we all live,” Miroslav Volf, the founder and director of Yale's Center for Faith & Culture, said on July 29. “Not since the Crusades have relations between these two faiths, which comprise more than half of humanity, been lower than they are today.”
However, Volf and others said the dialogue that started last fall with a letter from Islamic leaders, entitled “A Common Word Between Us,” and its response from hundreds of Christian leaders, represents a promising turning point and start of fledgling dialogue.
“Religious leaders don't make policy, but they do have influence,” Kalin said.
The meeting at Yale and subsequent meetings planned through 2009 are now part of a process with the “Common Word” imprimatur.