C. Cornille

The author begins by acknowledging both familiarity and perplexity: "The idea of dialogue between religions has become as familiar as it is perplexing." She explores the qualities that must be present in a religious tradition in order to make dialogue possible. She identifies five conditions required for interreligious dialogue, all of which challenge traditional religious self-understanding.

These five "essential conditions" are a series of Virtues: Humility, Commitment, Interconnection, Empathy, and Hospitality. Carefully stepping through the teachings, even as gateways, she finds little opening for dialogue. Using Christianity as a salient example, only if "God" replaces Christianity as such, is dialogue possible.

She guides us almost navigationally through the considerable literature, backed up by Bibliography, Notes and Index.

She concludes: "Rather than a matter of possibility or impossibility, the capacity for dialogue is thus itself a process, involving, indeed calling for, continuous critical self-examination and a creative retrieval of resources that may open the tradition to the religious other and to growth in the truth."… (més)