Editorial for Special Issue “The Global Urgency of Interreligious Studies”

This issue of Religions serves as a modest invitation to consider a big claim, namely, that if we want to address the most pressing challenges of the 21st century, interreligious collaboration is required.

On the one hand, this claim simply points to the relevance of religious identities and interreligious realities in the world. While the realities and effects of secularization also demand our attention and analysis, the ongoing relevance of religion is reiterated by the authors of The World’s Religions in Figures (Johnson et al. 2013), the most comprehensive and up-to-date analysis of global religious realities:

For many, the most surprising finding of the tables and graphs in this [analysis] will be the projected continued resiliency of world religions into the future. In the mid-twentieth century the demise of religion was a near-accepted fact inside and outside the academic community. Several decades on, however, the strongest evidence shows that the global trend of religious resurgence is likely to continue into the near and, perhaps, distant future.

(p. 111)

Sociologist Christian Smith highlights the broader implications of this: “Anyone who wants to understand the world today has got to understand religion” (Smith 2017, p. 1).

On the other hand, the claim being promoted in this issue is not merely that religion is a relevant ingredient for understanding our world, but that it contains the power to change the world, for better or worse. The “better or worse” framing is the language of my book Better Religion: A Primer for Interreligious Peacebuilding (Barton 2022, pp. xi–xiv). In other words, while religions often fuel humanity’s worst instincts and become entangled in many of history’s devastating hostilities—thus making things “worse”—they also contain distinct and powerful capacities for disrupting hostility through prophetic intervention, peacebuilding, and constructive collaboration. In fact, as noted in my introductory letter to this collection, one of the assumptions being challenged here is that of “secular myopia”, which wrongly assumes that the most significant threats of the 21st century—including environmental degradation, the resurgence of “illiberal” authoritarianism, heightened social and ethnic hostilities across the globe, technological disruptions, threats associated with nuclear energy, and bio-pandemics, etc.—can be effectively diagnosed and addressed without significant engagements with religion. Again, not only does such a secular assumption fail to adequately address the challenges that religion presents in the world today, but it also overlooks the powerful resources religion offers in the pursuit of sustainable solutions.

Behind all such discussions are issues about the relationship between religion, peace, and violence, and they can be framed with the following question: Is the presence of religion in the world a poison or a gift? Critics of religion have been known to deliver sweeping condemnations of religion in general, as memorably captured in the late Christopher Hitchens’ claim that “religion poisons everything” (Hitchens 2007). However, research clearly demonstrates that the dynamics between religion, violence, and peace are multidimensional and multidirectional. The same religions that are used to inspire and justify violence have also inspired and motivated heroic peacemaking, a dual reality that is indicative of what Scott Appleby describes as the “ambivalence of the sacred” (Appleby 1999). In the book, Religion Matters (Prothero 2020), Stephen Prothero summarizes the point:

Critics who claim that religious people have perpetrated many of the world’s greatest horrors are, in my view, correct. Also correct are defenders of religion who claim that religious people have been some of the world’s greatest peacemakers. Put these two facts together and what do you get? A world in which religion matters.

(p. 7)

But beyond acknowledging religion’s ambivalence and complex historical record, theologian Miroslav Volf also asserts that religions offer the world an “indispensable gift” through their visions of human flourishing and moral frameworks for peace (Volf 2017, pp. 76–79, 186–90). Like others, Volf acknowledges that religions often “malfunction” with disastrous consequences, and when this happens, “the gift turns into poison” (p. 76). But Volf insists that the most powerful antidotes to religious poison are found in religions themselves, which means that the gifts they offer are key for addressing global problems: “Religions are a global problem requiring sustained attention. But religions aren’t just a problem. They are also an indispensable part of the solution” (p. 13).

For all such reasons, this volume posits the value and even urgency of interreligious reflection and collaboration. By implication, it also promotes the importance of the burgeoning field of Interreligious Studies (IRS), which not only pursues understanding across traditions but addresses the many contextual and social issues that emerge when religiously different people interact. As such, by emphasizing both the critical and pragmatic purposes of IRS, this Special Issue of Religions follows the lead of scholars like Mikva (2020) who asks, as highlighted in the issue’s introductory letter, how IRS might inform and be informed by specific issues of our day such as ecological crises. Analogously, this volume contains several contributions in which scholars from different disciplines and contexts pursue religious and interreligious issues as diverse as the following: The restorative potential of “faith-unit” programs in US prisons (Hallett and Johnson); peace-generating resources in Hinduism and other religions to address climates of violence and Hindu nationalism in India (Riddle); the impact and agency of diverse spiritual leadership in the fraught contexts of Israel/Palestine (Munayer); reflections on how to better address ecological issues by considering human/non-human interactions in “phenomenological and interreligious perspective” (Kiem); and the theory and practice of Jewish divorce mediation as an example of “intrareligious peacekeeping” (Nissel—with regard to this article, it is important to note that Professor Nissel submitted it based on an understanding that this special edition would not include any discussions of the State of Israel, a detail that was unintentionally overlooked during an extended editorial process. Apologies for this oversight were offered to Professor Nissel who graciously allowed her important article to remain).

Individually, these contributions represent a starting point, a modest invitation to explore contentious and often overwhelmingly complex issues by considering them through the lens of interreligious (and intrareligious) interactions. As such, they represent merely a few starting drops in an ocean of analogous explorations that can and must take place across religious traditions when addressing our era’s biggest questions. Moreover, these invitations represent scholarship that emerges at the intersections of reflection and activism. Such scholarship represents an aspiring characteristic of the field of IRS. While such aspirations emerge within confusing and sometimes harsh realities, they are pursued in hope and with the desire to inform and mobilize powerful and sustainable change-making efforts for the sake of a world in desperate need.