Journal for Interreligious Studies

The Journal of Interreligious Studies (JIRS) is a forum for academic, social, and timely issues affecting religious communities around the world. Published online, it is designed to increase both the quality and frequency of interchanges among religious groups and their leaders and scholars. By fostering conversation, the Journal hopes to increase religious and interreligious literacy, and address the issues surrounding interreligious relations, dialogue, theology, and communication. It is a publication of the Boston University School of Theology, Hebrew College and, Hartford Seminary. For regular updates, we invite you to follow the Journal on Facebook. 
Download Issue 30 Here

Serving a Wounded World in Interreligious Solidarity

A Christian Call to Reflection and Action During COVID-19 and Beyond Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue World Council of Churches
​The COVID-19 pandemic has had an impact on the global community with unavoidable immediacy and with little preparedness on our part. It has dramatically altered everyone’s daily life, and powerfully exposed the vulnerability that all humans share. Alongside the millions who have been infected physically, many more have been affected psychologically, economically, politically and religiously; all have been deprived of public worship. People have struggled to cope with death and grief, especially with the inability to be with their loved ones at their deathbeds, and perform their last rites and funerals in a dignified manner. The lock down has brought the world economy to its knees, and global hunger could double due to this catastrophe. It has also contributed to an increase in domestic violence. The requirements of physical and social distancing have meant isolation for many people. Despair, anxiety and insecurity have come to dominate human lives. The coronavirus has affected all – rich and poor, the elderly and children, persons in cities and villages, farmers and industrialists, workers and students.  Download to read more...
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Mindful Anti-Racism Fall Course

Dialogue Between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam: It's Joys and Challenges

A moral theologian in the Anglican tradition, Dr Lucinda Allen Mosher is Faculty Associate in Interfaith Studies at Hartford Seminary, where she teaches courses on America’s religious diversity, comparative theology, chaplaincy in multifaith contexts, and Christian-Muslim relations.

Dehumanizing and Demonizing Language and How to Confront It

​France’s ‘hip’ female rabbi draws Muslims, Christians and Jews in a time of crisis

Religious News Services (accessed June 30, 2020)
RNS) — On Tuesday nights at 8:30 p.m., tens of thousands of people throughout France — believers and non-believers, Jews, Muslims and Christians — log on to Facebook to hear the nation’s foremost female rabbi discuss the intersection of racism and anti-Semitism and help them make sense of a modern plague.
“We are in a moment of extreme vulnerability when life and death hold hands,” said Rabbi Delphine Horvilleur, known for her original interpretations of Biblical texts, psychoanalytic thought, art and poetry. “Some people will use this moment to create a bubble of protection, to close borders and embrace ideologies of contamination that demonize people. But what is the meaning of my life if confinement makes me blind to the other?”
Horvilleur, 45, who has been called a rock star in a leather jacket, is a former model who has appeared on the cover of French Elle. The wild curls framing her face have been compared to the sidelocks of Hasidic Jews. She finds the descriptions amusing insofar as they counter stereotypes and help her reach audiences across cultures.
“I’m trying to create bridges between worlds that have stopped talking to each other,” she said. “I’m trying to create links between words and worlds.”
Horvilleur is also known as the rare public intellectual who has brought faith into the conversation in a country committed to laicité, or secularism. And though she is also one of the few progressive rabbis in France’s overwhelmingly Orthodox Jewish community, she has become a leader of a growing movement of Jews from all denominations. Less an activist who urges congregants to take to the streets to protest injustice, she is a purveyor of ideas and a presenter of possibilities in the tradition of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre.

Coronaspection

 Elijah Institute’s “Coronaspection” initiative makes a contribution to this need by bringing together premier religious voices from around the world to engage in introspection in light of the Corona crisis. “Coronaspection” was created from interviews conducted with over 30 major faith leaders, as well as from some messages made by others for this project. In addition to the full interview, you can also watch shorter clips derived from them, gems of wisdom that appear on the leader’s personal page. Several composite clips draw multiple voices together on chosen topics. In addition to clicking on the image of each of the leaders above, you can also enter the project through the several gateways below.

We recommend watching the videos (especially full interviews) on Youtube itself (by pressing inside the video on “Youtube”, at bottom right). This will provide you with more information on each video, table of contents and useful links. For project credits and gratitude, press here. Pinpoint different faith traditions here.

Empty Spaces in a Pandemic

Interfaith Prayer with the Islamic Masumeen of Hopkinton toward the Close of Ramadan

Holy Envy


The tensions of our time are well-known. But there are stories that are not being told, because they are not violent and not shouting to be heard. One of them is that all over this country, synagogues and mosques, Muslims and Jews, have been coming to know one another. There is friendship. There are initiatives that are patiently, and at human scale, planting the seeds for new realities across generational time. As part of the Civil Conversations Project, a live conversation at the Union for Reform Judaism’s General Assembly in Boston between Imam Abdullah Antepli and Rabbi Sarah Bassin.
ON BEING with Krista Tippet