Inter-religious Dialogue (IRD) is often looked at critically, or straight-up negatively by Evangelicals. I teach a course called “Dialogue with Asian Faiths” and for me, I take the title seriously. It is about dialogue (two-way) conversation with people of other faiths--- especially the great world religions that have their origin in Asia (which is pretty …
Continue reading Reasons for an Evangelist to Take IRD Seriously
Teaching a class on Dialogue with Asian Religions, a question was brought up by one of the students (one raised as a Christian in a country where Christians are most definitely a minority faith). How does one effectively have dialogue (and possibly evangelizing) with someone who is focused on bad history with other Christians, or …
I decided to make some minor updates to my book, "Dialogue in Diversity: Christians in Conversation with a Multi-faith World" during quarantine. I decided to put the Introduction here. Imagine that you have a toolbox. Maybe you are a carpenter, but in your toolbox you have only one tool — perhaps a hammer. Can you …
I have never been a fan of the Turing Test. Alan Turing (1912-1954) proposed a test for determining whether and artificial intelligence can think "like a human." The test suggests that if a person was communicating with an AI and was unable to distinguish whether or not he was talking to a computer or a …
A presentation of various rules, principles, guidelines, or attitudes that inform effective interreligious or interfaith dialogue.
I had asked my students to create their own rules of interreligious dialogue (IRD). They were allowed to research and borrow from others, but the end result and explanation should be their own. I was quite pleased with the results. Here are a few of the lists (minus the explanations): 1. Converse Despite the Differences …
I teach a class in Inter-religious Dialogue (IRD). Since I am a Missions professor at an Evangelical missionally-minded seminary, I like to challenge the notion that IRD is anti-evangelistic. IRD is not preaching (1-way communication to change someone's mind) or apologetics (2-way communication to change someone's mind). IRD focuses on understanding, but I point out …