In times of war, conflict or social unrest, interfaith dialogue can seem a waste of resources and energy as the divide of us and them stiffens, reinforced by violent rhetoric and actions on either or every side. And yet, for the fighting to end and some form of just peace (Omer, Appleby, & Little, 2012) to be sutured requires various types of post-conflict dialogue—civic, pragmatic, judicial, economic, societal, legal, intercultural (perhaps interethnic), and for my purposes here, a chastened, but robust interfaith dialogue. While I will clarify my meaning of interfaith dialogue in the next section, of note is that how successful or relevant such a dialogue is in times of war is often dependent on the vibrancy, ascribed value, aims, characteristics, and commitment of the dialogue in times of relative peace and prosperity. Of course, we must also highlight the flimsy line between peace and violence especially for women when considering domestic violence and sporadic acts of destruction and assaults (Sanford, Stefatos, & Salvi, 2016). And despite being the overwhelming victims while still playing an important role in working for peace, women are often not included in peace and justice discussions, as Maryann Cusimano Love cites regarding the overlooked peacebuilding activities of women religious in Iraq (Love 2024, p. 259).

But we also know of dialogues that though strong, fracture the moment conflict erupts or resumes, leading to all kinds of troubling questions on dialogue’s efficacy and how easy individuals involved in dialogue can abruptly return to ideological us/them loyalties. Here I offer no panaceas as the horrors and abuses committed in times of war and unrest often make any kind of partnership and dialogue across divides nauseating and impossible. Sadly, it can seem humans are much more creative and committed to inhumane ways and means of destruction than dialogue; or more accurately, it takes so little time and effort to destroy, while ongoing dialogue, especially amidst uncertainty and destabilization, can require inhuman fortitude and perseverance.

Think of the current (late 2025) legitimate grievances among Israeli and Palestinians in the wake of both Hamas’ October 7^th attack and ongoing fighting and the State of Israel’s (still) unrelenting reprisals against Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank—and against Hama’s various military supporters like Hizbollah. What about, moreover, Russia’s unjust and often genocidal war in Ukraine or the sporadic fighting in Northern Nigeria and the horrors and atrocities in Sudan, just to name a few global hotspots of incivility and unrest, if not genocidal moments or ethnic cleansings?¹ Broadly speaking, each of these wars and the role of religion in contributing to the conflict’s cause, sustainability, or deterrence not only varies, but so, too, are the intersecting identity factors mixed within any religious one. Spotlighting any sole cause for the majority of belligerents is often chimerical. And while religion is often unduly blamed or praised as either the driving force of the clash or the only way to sustain peace, the reality is religious actors, institutions, doctrines, practices, and beliefs are often entangled and compromised across the victim-perpetrator divide. This does not mean there are not genuinely brave and nonviolent practitioners who feel sustained by their practice through their religious identity,² but, the religious also include the indifferent majority, or those most guilty of the violent rhetoric and actions (including the deskiller as Dan Greton has eloquently written about (2019).

In any country, furthermore, there will always be some form of religious minority (even if not official) or those with an atheist or possibly religiously blended position that make either-or statements inaccurate. An interfaith dialogue in Israel/Palestine cannot just operate under broad classifications of “Israelis are mostly Jewish and Palestinians mostly Muslim” without undermining and minimizing, for example, Christian Palestinians or Israeli citizens who are Muslim. In Sudan and in the Ukrainian/Russian war, we would speak more appropriately of intrafaith dialogues among Orthodox Christians—with the Sudanese war involving mostly Muslims, but even these classifications must be nuanced. The same is demanded in Northern Nigeria, often perceived to be a Muslim-Christian divide but enveloped in ethnic, historical, and economic factors.

In this paper, I am concerned with three key questions:

1. Why are the values of humility, compassion, and justice so essential and destabilizing in interfaith dialogues, even in times of peace?

2. Why should teaching interfaith dialogue in times of peace always provide space for the grievances on all sides from past, present (and possibly) future unrest and conflict?

3. How do interfaith dialogue participants in post-conflict settings balance the desire and need for justice with compassion and humility—for one’s self, one’s community, and the community in conflict?

To begin to answer these questions, I first examine the virtues of humility, compassion, and justice and their relationship through interfaith dialogue in periods of relative peace and prosperity. I also highlight the struggles, challenges, and problems that arise in teaching such virtues and reflect on how unaddressed difficulties during times of peace are exacerbated and magnified during and after conflict and unrest (Madigan, 2012, p. 71). Thus, I stress how important it is to lay the groundwork for these virtues ideally before the dialogue becomes challenging, if not impossible, amidst and after conflict—even as extreme conditions show how and why balancing these virtues are needed more than ever. At issue, then, is whether the failure to embody compassion and humility through interfaith dialogue in times of relative peace and prosperity signal the impossibility or meaninglessness of such dialogue when passions are rife, stakes are high, and vulnerability, rage, and hopelessness abound. I argue that fostering these virtues in times of peace—even as they challenge notions of religious stability, truth, and any claims of superiority or innocence—could help guide and sustain dialogues when the situation is the most fragile and suspect—while never forgetting the process for peace must be unrelenting, comprehensive, and resilient.

A case can be made for the pre-eminence of various virtues as the most common are all interrelated and dependent on one another.³ Here, I will accentuate humility, compassion, and justice in post-conflict interfaith dialogue because of their destabilizing and essential roles in times of relative peace and stability. A reasonable query can highlight the need for courage, honesty, gratitude, and so on, and such would not be wrong, but I would contend some of those virtues are presupposed in the ones I am advocating even if certainly complementary to them. Before turning to these virtues, note that my meaning here of interfaith dialogue is wide and broad, entailing all ideological and religious beliefs and identities and recognizing the well-known strands of interfaith dialogue, from the dialogue of life to monastic, institutional, academic/theological, grassroots, social justice forms. Atheists, agnostics, and other so-called non-believers are included here with faith serving as a protean and unfixed category not dependent on any belief in the transcendent (Stedman, 2013). Faith thus is not something opposed to reason or science but closer to a worldview for what ultimately matters to an individual and community and something which nontheistic advocates work towards or seek through their life choices, teaching, doctrine (if applicable) and actions.

Elsewhere, I have contended that humility is a flawed, but essential virtue to hone precisely because of its wounded history.⁴ The virtue of humility, even at its most potent, is broken like all our religious and ideological systems, but also potentially liberative. In my understanding, authentic humility is a balance of love of self, other, and all of creation—and for theists, God. This means neither self-deification nor self-abnegation. Humility is proper assessment and valuation of our individual beauty, dignity, and irreplaceability that is no better nor worse than another human being. This means all of us are as flawed and dependent in some ways as we are gifted and strong in others. Such also applies to all nation states, institutions, religions, philosophies, and ethnic or racial communities—all groups need healing, learning, reconciling, and the awareness to earn a forgiving embrace from another.

This type of humility has drastic, but also potentially freeing effects for those of any faith or ideology: it means believers, participants, and especially leaders, do not have to carry, adumbrate, or embody a mantra of superiority, perfection, or the completion or fulfillment of another system (most common in supersessionist views).⁵ It removes or de-prioritizes religious language inevitably moral compromised by words like final, unique, universal, and chosenness. Instead, the faith acknowledges past and present failures and how all religious systems and its adherents (especially one’s own) have caused or not combatted great harm in the context of colonialism, wars, anti-migration rhetoric, or other forms of environmental, gender, and child abuse. Such a wounded or broken faith, to draw upon the language of an Eliezer Berkovits and Elie Wiesel—or what David Burrell described of my approach as “a fractured faith built upon a fractured theodicy” (2012, x)—is also best placed for authentic, participatory, and honest interfaith dialogue.

Why? Because a humbled, but devoted dialogue participant does not enter the dialogue as if it were a monologue, an intellectual contest to prove one is better or more salvific, or a gameshow to attest one has all the best answers. It is a search for meaning and correcting, sometimes of one’s actions, more often our thoughts and doctrine, a partnership where such can bring more healing to those who most need it, and where more questions result than final or decisive conclusions. True dialogue is a balance of silence, wordless exchanges, and exchanges with words. It is seeking to be taught and also not afraid to teach. Again, a humble Muslim or atheist, for example, still affirms and believes their faith positions make the most sense and are therefore true. Deep down, they may also feel such is the best path for everyone. A religious humility in interfaith dialogue that everyone should be pluralist, “liberal”, or against any form of evangelization or conversion is not a true exercise of humility. Some faiths cannot disassociate conversion or evangelization from their actions in the presence of another outside their belief system; for some, the call to conversion always lingers, even if mostly silent or unobtrusive. Interfaith dialogue cannot be the rarified domain of only so-called liberals and pluralists, but needs wide table fellowship if we take a New Testament idea (Myers, 2008, p. 278).

When I enter various interfaith dialogues (mostly with Jews, Muslims, and atheists), my Christian identity and faith is both strengthened and undermined through such encounters; my Christology reinvigorated as much as it is also doubted and humbled; my ecclesiology both inspired and shattered. But my Christian commitment should never be questioned. And while evangelization and conversion attempts are counterproductive in dialogical contexts, evangelization at some level is always occurring with participation and some form of representation: she is atheist, he is Hindu, they are Jewish-Buddhist, and so on. I am never seeking the actual conversion of the person before me except a type of conversion and purification within both of us to become more knowledgeable, understanding, and open to what both of us are and hope to be. Such healthy or spunky humility, again, does not mean correction and challenge of the other are wrong. Sometimes, it is demanded and required, as I will discuss further below in the context of justice.

Finally, because of the rifeness of power imbalances in all our interactions, humility is particularly needed, making sure those who are too often sidelined or say little feel empowered, while those endowed with various privileges and authority lean more towards silence and listening. All of this is reinforced and guided by compassion towards self, the other, and all of creation.

A dialogue without humility is like wrestling for verbal supremacy to be heard rather than hear; to prove one is right like in a debate instead of nurturing the openness to learn, grow, and be challenged. And a dialogue without compassion? Compassion is the lifeblood of all relations, especially if we acknowledge and root ourselves in both our mutual brokenness and dignity. It spurs the need to seek and be sought by another, especially through encounter and dialogue.

Pairing humility and compassion can seem constituted to be other-focused, which is important, especially for traditions and individuals that historically have been more prone to promote, protect, defend, and reinforce their views and ways of life. But just as true humility doesn’t undercut and ignore our own strengths and values, true compassion is both self—and other-directed. Consider, for example, the ubiquity of the golden or silver rule entailing reciprocity between self and other and to never treat someone in a way we would not want to be treated (Neusner & Chilton, 2008). For Christians, such compassion is reflected in the life of service and discipleship embodied in Jesus’s words “to love one another as I have loved you” (John 13:34), while the Qur’an (39:53) and Tanakh (Psalm 103:8) emphasize that the compassion and mercy of God/Allah is more lasting and plentiful than anger.

In Buddhism, the core of compassion is the belief in interbeing, that all life forms are ultimately one and we have all been part of one another, from the tree and water droplet to the stars, bugs, humans, and fish. There is no separation and so strictly speaking, there is no difference of self and other-directed compassion. Such even extends to those we feel hatred and fear towards. As Thich Nhat Hanh has remarked, “We must encompass those we think of as enemies in understanding and compassion. If we can begin dealing with our inner enemies in an accepting and nonviolent nature, we are truly making cause for a peaceful world” (Forest, 2021, p. 115). For Hanh, the real enemies are not human beings but the “roots of war” like “intolerance, fanaticism, greed, hatred, and ignorance” (Forest, 2021, p. 115). Such begins with rooting out the harms within, or like Jesus asks: “Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye?” (Matt 7:3).

Hanh’s extraordinary compassion that extends even to those who commit horrible crimes will be an idea we will return to further below. But notice that even in peaceful times—which today still mean a polarized and contentious public square and social media landscape—when the other before me is deemed as a threat, obstacle, and danger to my perceived worldview and values, the call to be compassionate is challenging enough. Across the West, political debate has become fraught despite a climate of relative peace within borders as sides refuse to meet or compromise. In the United States, for example, stating you are Republican, or worse to some, a Trump supporter, will automatically pigeonhole and name you in some circles as racist or criminal, while denouncing all or the majority of Trump’s policies can have economic if not social consequences, depending on one’s job, citizen status, and geographical context. There seems very little room for compromise, let alone compassion as the stakes seem too high. Again, this is in a space of relative peace—far removed from the actual battlefields in Pokrovsk in Ukraine or El Fasher in Darfur and South Kordofan in Sudan. Failing to form bridges and spaces for dialogue, no matter how fraught and frustrating, also signals why it can seem impossible when war and violence engulf everything.

To be compassionate in dialogue is to seek what is also best for one’s dialogue partner; in an interfaith context it is to respect and honor what is deemed sacred by the other. As Leonard Swidler in the fourth principle in his Dialogue Decalogue affirms, we must: “compare one’s ideals with their partner’s ideals and their practices with their partner’s practices, not ideals with practices” (Swidler, 1987). This principle involves compassion and humility in practice through dialogue, highlighting both idealism and reality in a fair way for all dialogue partners, neither puffing up nor deflating one another. Going further, compassion for one’s dialogue partner, and especially the beliefs they hold inviolable and sacred, should be protected, as much as possible, especially where such beliefs do not harm anyone else nor the individual or their community. For example, my belief that Jesus is fully God and fully human, while only believed by Christians, neither harms me nor anyone else—especially if I understand Christianity as discipleship and service to the most vulnerable and outcast. Someone not Christian who unrelentingly tries to poke holes in my Christological belief—even if feeling my renouncing Christianity would ultimately be a greater good for me—is a failure of compassion and humility, and so dialogue. Leaving aside how such would shatter my worldview, my spiritual and social life in the Christian community, and family relations—without a corresponding alternative to fill such a created void—no one has full access to know which belief system is entirely true. The same ideas would entail my dialogue with Jews who believe in the chosenness of the Jewish people, Muslims who believe in the final revelation of the Qur’an, and so on. My aim in dialogue, through compassion and humility, is to learn in these encounters and to help me and my dialogue partner to reach the ethical ideals in each of our faith traditions. This does not mean we can’t discuss theological doctrines like Christology—I have argued elsewhere on the value of what Peter Phan calls an interfaith Christology (Phan, 2017, p. 96), but it is always undertaken through humility and compassion.

In atheist-theist dialogue, moreover, the aim is not to make the atheist believe in God or for the atheist to prove theistic belief is misplaced, unethical, or anti-reason, but to help all participants see the viability and meaningfulness in our paths and to partner and encourage one another to continue striving to make this world a more peaceful and just place (Fiala & Admirand, 2021). With the growing number of nones or the religiously unaffiliated in the West, the urgency and need for atheist-theist dialogue is great. In areas where atheists are becoming more dominant in the public square, compassion and humility towards religious believers is essential, if only to teach a way forward in places where atheists are discriminated against or silenced by a religious minority.

As Ed Kessler, moreover, remarks: “Perhaps the most notable shift in the contemporary Jewish-Christian encounter has been that from polemic to dialogue, requiring a genuine hearing of ‘the other’ and taking the other as seriously as one demands to be taken oneself” (Kessler, 2024, p. 12). This hearing of the other and taking their views seriously is an act of compassion and humility. Again, this does not mean one hinders sincere conversion, but more often it is best to encourage a seeker or doubter (which describes us all) to return to their community, enlivened and provoked by the interfaith encounter. Protecting another’s right to their belief and practice is a fundamental act of compassion towards the religious or atheist other. Of course, this doesn’t mean we propup worldviews clearly misguided, pernicious, or wrong.⁶ But the hope is such committed compassion towards the other in times of peace will hopefully become habitual and ingrained, especially in preparing for dark and oppressive moments that can strike like a thief in the night.

But what about justice? Is the above not too yielding to the other? What about the integrity owed to ourselves and our own beliefs? If I really believe Jesus is God Incarnate, how can I protect Islamic views, for example, that only see Jesus as a human prophet, or Jewish views that, at best, state Jesus is a failed but not a false Messiah, in the language of Irving Greenberg, or deny a God at all, as my atheist friends do? How is any of this just, especially in times of so-called peace?

Justice, like forgiveness, is a demanding, protean, and contradictory word, never as simple and straightforward as some may want it to be. It is sometimes defined as seeking what one is owed or due from a previous loss, restoring what had been taken away, violated, or stolen. And where literal restitution is not possible, then justice demands some kind of monetary or symbolic compensation as a sign and gesture to acknowledge the wrong done which had obliterated something or someone in this world. In terms of justice as a virtue, Thomas Aquinas opines: “justice is a habit whereby a man renders to each one his due by a constant and perpetual will” (Aquinas, 2017, II-II, q. 58, a. 1). Like humility and compassion, justice can be taught and inculcated through education and learning so as to become almost second-nature, a crucial development if we hope interfaith dialogue can be meaningful and useful in times of war and crisis.

Justice is usually linked to some kind of judicial and penal system, too. In this world, the courts and perhaps prison or parole—and in many religions, some kind of postmortem place or state of accountability and sometimes punishment. In the Abrahamic faiths, hell or purgatory served this purpose. In the problem of theodicy, believers in God try to stumble through how a loving, omnipotent God can create a world teeming with horrendous evils and various forms of suffering that have ravaged and destroyed so many innocent lives, especially children (see Admirand, 2012). Outside accentuating free will or some kind of soulmaking theodicy, a stopgap solution is to propose there will be both healing accountability in an afterlife God-encounter which may also entail a period of reformation and spiritual and moral cleansing. Unless everyone is ultimately saved as in the belief in universal salvation, some form of hell is often maintained. The Catholic Church adheres to the eternity of the soul and thus the possibility for eternal separation from God (hell). An alternative view suggest the possibility of the annihilation of the soul, deeming it to be more compassionate against eternal suffering without the realistic possibility (or even desire) of atonement.⁷ Ideally, these positions try to take a victim-centered approach, especially as crimes and horrors committed in this world are often not denounced and prosecuted, the perpetrators protected and unencumbered by the blood they shed. Going further, though, especially for pacifists, should not perpetrators be treated with fairness and (even) love—as claims of full innocence and moral failure rarely withstand scrutiny? For theists, how do we honor the tenet that God loves everyone, even the most depraved sinner and mass atrocity perpetrator—an idea repulsive to some victims of horrible crimes?

In many Eastern traditions, moreover, the belief in reincarnation serves as a justice-mechanism as rebirth continues until bad karma is overcome and someone reaches a state of enlightenment, free from harming others and at true peace within oneself. Such can involve thousands of rebirths.

Justice in interfaith dialogue in times of peace follows three salient rules:

1. to uncover, acknowledge, and seek to heal past harms towards the religious other and their community

2. to combat and denounce any present or future instances linked to those past harms, and be vigilant in recognizing and hindering new forms of injustice

3. to seek justice from previous wrongs suffered by one’s own community guided by humility and compassion.

These, of course, are complicated and sometimes painful processes, but failing to face wrongs both as victims and perpetrators inevitably creates the conditions to reopen these old wounds in times of discontent and uncertainty. It is also to allow clear wrongs to go unaddressed and prevent means of healing, restitution, and possible reconciliation. Essential here is to endorse and practice an ethic of memory that listens and seeks out victims of mass injustice and incorporates witness testimony to mass atrocity and suffering within one’s own institutional, communal, and individual spiritual understanding and history. It is not a once-off document that might acknowledge some form of wrongdoing by some members of the community (usually with the caveat that these individuals were not acting in the true spirit of the faith).⁸ Instead, it reenacts and calls to witness these past wrongs to reaffirm a commitment that we are no longer a people who would commit such acts which were wrong then and wrong now.⁹ Such explicit acts of remembering, witness, and testimony are means of reminding ourselves of past moral failures by those in our tradition/group/nation. As Ana Gualberto and Renate Gierus write in the context of gender injustice in Brazil: “Without dialogue and justice, there is no recognition of the need and right to live in a society free from violence, in a society that is anti-racist and anti-sexist, within a secular state” (Gualberto and Gierus, 2023, p. 533).

In this light, it is also important to highlight those instances and cases of heroic or ordinary acts of courage and compassion in the midst of deeply disturbing times or events. However, we should never let what are usually a small group of the righteous,¹⁰ if we adapt the term applied by Jews to Gentiles who saved Jewish lives during the Shoah, to undermine the heavy task of facing what is usually a more pervasive and extensive failure to be righteous among the indifferent majority and the perpetrators.

The hope for more ordinary and heroic acts of righteousness often rests in education.

In his memoir, comparative theologian and Jesuit Frank Clooney writes: “Unless we are willing to learn from our students, we cannot effectively teach them” (2024, 51). The same sense of reciprocity holds above for the interconnecting threads of humility, compassion, and justice and the practice of interfaith dialogue in (relative) peacetime. Crucial to such a practice are education and religious literacy (Ubani 2025). Sadly, comprehensive study and examination of worldviews and global and indigenous religions in formal education is often privatized, under attack, or rendered optional—though there are places where nation states and regional bodies take an active role in advocating the teaching of interfaith dialogue in schools; for example, in Flanders in Belgium. As Leni Franken and Caroline Sägesser write: “The elections of 9 June 2024 brought about a political change in Wallonia and the French Community…The Government Agreement…states that in official secondary education, the weekly hour of Education in Philosophy and Citizenship will in the future include activities devoted to interfaith dialogue and learning about the history of religious currents” (2025, p. 482). This change includes the already extensive teaching of interfaith dialogue in post-primary classrooms. Where I live in Dublin, however, the movement to privatize religions or not offer religious studies as a subject for post-primary students, coupled with a rise in immigration and the number of people from different faiths,¹¹ is a recipe for social and cultural divides. It also contributes to the rise of a Christian ethnonationalism, fuelled not only by the housing and economic crisis, but utter disregard for the Christian obligation, rooted in the Tanakh, to shelter the stranger.¹² Denouncing the mistreatment of so-called illegal immigrants in the United States, moreover, Pope Leo has emphasized compassion and justice: “We have to look for ways of treating people humanely, treating people with the dignity that they have. If people are in the United States illegally, there are ways to treat that. There are courts. There’s a system of justice” (DeRose, 2025).

Teaching the values of humility, compassion, and justice—especially from a victim-centred perspective—is not only pedagogically illuminating for students (drawing upon numerous disciplines from history, literature, and psychology to philosophy and religions) but spiritually cathartic and necessary to inculcate moral and civic virtues, thus strengthening the cohesiveness and dialogical ethos of the public square/sphere (see Pugliese and Hwang, 2017; and Patel, Peace, and Silverman, 2018). Elsewhere, for the same reasons, I argued for why liberation theology should be taught in Catholic secondary schools because it attunes the students to the voices of the poor, oppressed, and outcast and helps them examine political, social, legal, religious, and economic causes of local and state exploitation of the most vulnerable (Admirand, 2018). Now I would argue for its inclusion in all schools—along with similar ethos in other faiths through Engaged Buddhism, Green Islam, Human Rights Discourse in the Talmud, Indigenous reverence and respect for all of creation, and forms of secular humanism committed to dialogue with theists, peace, and social justice.

Again, this is no panacea, as documented by neighbors killing neighbors in places where interfaith and interethnic dialogue and partnership were forged and attempted yet seemed to crumble as the threat level, evidence or allegation of mass crimes spread. Think of Elizabeth Neuffer’s The Key to My Neighbor’s House: Seeking Justice in Bosnia and Rwanda, its title drawn from testimony from a Bosnian Muslim male whose neighbour burned his house down despite their previously having had a friendship and relationship—you don’t give your housekeys to someone you don’t trust (for commentary see Admirand, 2020; and for advocacy of local dialogue initiatives in BiH, see Djolai (2022). I also am haunted by various accounts during the 1994 Rwandan genocide where Hutu extremists not only indiscriminately killed any Tutsi (or Hutus against the genocide) but were particularly vicious to people they had once seemed to be friendly with, like teammates on a soccer team. Witnesses also confirmed there was no genuine attempts seeking forgiveness from any survivors after the genocide (Hatzfeld, 2005, p. 27). These warnings from witness testimonies do not mean interfaith dialogue is ultimately a waste but it reminds us that we should never take peace for granted nor that the ongoing need and role for interfaith and peace education is ever enough.

This paper has sought to argue for why the virtues of humility, compassion, and dialogue are needed in interfaith dialogue and how and why such virtues should be taught in primary and post-primary schools, and I would also add in our various religious and philosophical places of worship, study, and reflection. Part of the argument is that a greater awareness of the fragility, brokenness, and flaws within one’s own faith position and identities can help spur greater appreciation and kindness towards the similarly broken elements in other views. It can also nourish deep respect for others’ gifts or their own struggles towards truth and integrity. Without having all the answers or truth, we need one another. Authentic, or what I call a humbled, pride, seeks a proper balance of acknowledging both weaknesses and strengths, moments to teach and moments to be taught. Guided by compassion towards oneself and one another, humility and compassion fuel the desire for justice and fairness—and dialogue becomes a key method to achieve and embody those virtues. As mentioned, these virtues will inevitably shock and challenge our sense of the universality, rightness, and legitimacy of truth claims within our belief system and history. However, a rich, nuanced, and fair presentation of all faiths through these virtues can aid in steering and supporting believers not only against harsh and discordant religious extremism but towards a faith system more conducive to questions, doubt, and intrafaith and interfaith seeking for social justice and collaboration. Religious commitment can thrive through doubt, questioning, and interfaith dialogue. Can such a platform, though, better sustain people and society to be less susceptible to violent rhetoric dominant by us/them divides and polarized mentalities?

Sadly, hovering over this reflection was the reality of suffering and conflict where dialogues break down, or where the threat of such relationship ruptures seems imminent, even in so-called peacetimes. As a longtime participant in Jewish-Christian dialogue, I witnessed how quickly on the ground situations can change where interfaith dialogue between Christians and Jews before October 7th seemed drastically different than after—and this was in places outside the Middle East where the actual military conflict was not happening. I also have in mind the abrupt moral change in views of state sanctioned torture in the United States after 9/11. Having grown up where such was always deemed wrong, it seemed that overnight a moral view that had been sacrosanct was suddenly rethought and reenvisioned, now able to be justified under certain conditions.¹³ If torture could now be debated as possibly legal by government lawyers, then what couldn’t be overturned?

So many questions endure. Again, what about when actual crimes and violence devastate communities and the other is seen as beyond compromise, dialogue, or basic human rights? What about when the desire for vengeance, retaliation, or pre-emptive strikes for the purpose of shielding loved ones becomes widespread? What role can interfaith dialogue really perform in those contexts? Do any of us honestly think a commitment to humility, compassion, and justice through dialogue would move a Vladmir Putin, Benjamin Netanyahu, or Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo to choose peace in Ukraine, Gaza, and Sudan, respectively?

In the context of the Shoah, Irving Greenberg warned against empty words and phrases in the presence of the burning children of Auschwitz (Greenberg, 1977). And while ultimately advocating praxis, Greenberg’s working principle should cause us to pause and hesitate before forming words in (and hoping) that interfaith dialogue can still play a constructive role to move people away from the violent extremism associated with the leaders mentioned above. Without losing hope and idealism, is it wrong to concede interfaith dialogue has not achieved its lofty aims and has sometimes even been complicit in horrors through a failure to face previous wrongs comprehensively or in alienating certain voices because they raise uncomfortable truths? (for a cutting example, see Azar, 2025). This concession doesn’t mean interfaith dialogue no longer has a value, but it, too, should be chastened and emboldened by both humility and compassion as its practitioners continuing to find a place and way forward towards achieving greater interfaith cooperation and some form of post-conflict reconciliation and basic societal functioning and justice.

Notes

REFERENCES

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