SHARED WISDOM

DIALOGUE FOR MUTUAL LEARNING should be to solve problematic issues, not to aggravate them. The feeling at work behind a dialogue should be one of reconciliation, not rivalry. DIALOGUE FOR MUTUAL LEARNING The purpose of authentic inter-religious dialogue is neither to discover any supposed complete uniformity among religions nor to establish any claim of the supposed superiority of one religion over other religions. On the contrary, inter-religious dialogue is important for mutual learning. It is often thought that inter-religious dialogue’s main or sole purpose is to establish harmony among religious groups. Inter-religious dialogue for this purpose has been going on for a long time. Perhaps the earliest such dialogue was held in Chicago in 1893. In this dialogue, people from all the major religions were present. However, despite many such exercises, harmony among different religious groups remains a distant dream. The question is, why did these exercises not succeed? According to my understanding, two major inter-religious dialogue models exist. The first model was based on the concept of uniformity. According to this concept, all religions are the same, and there is an essential uniformity in all religions, which needs to be discovered, highlighted, and promoted through inter-religious dialogue. According to this way of thinking, achieving uniformity among