By Victor Edwin
New Delhi: An international webinar on “Transforming Interreligious Relations” on November 21 stressed moral and spiritual conversion as the need of the hour.
The main resource person was Leo Lefebure, professor of Theology at Georgetown University, Washington DC.
The webinar was jointly organized by Jesuits Among Muslims in Asia and the Delhi-based Islamic Studies Association.
Lefebure’s talk was based on his recent book: Transforming Interreligious Relations: Catholic Responses to Religious Pluralism in the United States published by Orbis Books, Maryknoll, New York.
At the outset, Lefebure pointed out that the Christians in the US have interpreted religious diversity in many contradictory ways. Conflicts between religious groups lead to harsh judgments against one another, but that should not prevent one from recognizing the emergence and development of alternative perspectives that sought to accept religious differences in the US, he noted.
Lefebure began by explaining how long heritage of intolerance and animosity towards other faith traditions got transformed in the light of the Second Vatican Council teachings. The changes in immigration laws in the 1960s had helped the American society to become more ethnically, culturally, and religiously diverse; and all major urban areas today are home to many religious traditions.
He then focused on the dynamics of Jewish-Christian relationships in the United States. In the wake of the Second World War and the horrors of the Shoah, Leferbure noted that many Christians went through a reassessment of their tradition’s usual negative views of Jews and Judaism. Through numerous encounters, dialogues, and academic explorations, Christians and Jews in the United States came to know each other in new ways, he remarked.
He also turned his attention towards Christian-Muslim relations in the United States, which he said, pose not only hard challenges but promising opportunities. Christians and Muslims hold complex histories of conflict and coexistence, he remarked.
While relationships between Christians and Muslims were already developing in some organized Muslim-Christian dialogues in the final decades of the twentieth century, he pointed out that after the attacks of September 11, 2001, there was markedly increased attention to Muslim-Christian relationships. Though in many settings, Christians and Muslims enjoy cordial, respectful relationships, he did not hide his disappointment that for many Christians the current international context of conflict and violence reinforces traditionally negative views of Muslims and Islam.
In his final remarks, Lefebure emphasized that in order to heal the wounds of interreligious conflicts, we must undergo a collective moral and spiritual conversion to learn to see life and the richness of diversity in a new way.
An international audience, from Washington to Manila listened to the American professor and interacted with him in a Q & A session after his lecture. The webinar was moderated by Ravi Nandan Singh of the Delhi University.