Contemporary debates and discussions about interreligious and intercultural dialogue often suffer from two limitations: they neglect the century-old history of dialogue encounters and they frequently restrict themselves to an exegesis of the major documents emerging from those encounters.

The Talking Dialogue project aims to counterbalance these limitations and seek answers to new questions and place older ones in a new framework of reference in order to generate new information useful to interreligious and intercultural dialogue.

The project examines the major interreligious and intercultural encounters in modern history – from the 1893 Parliament of the World’s Religions, through the 1970 Kyoto World Conference on Religion and Peace, to the Millennium World Peace Summit of Religious and Spiritual Leaders in
2000. By using different and new source materials, Talking Dialogue looks at debates and discussions that were not recorded in official chronicles of these major dialogue encounters.

KAICIID brought together a group of young scholars from around the world to carry out this research. These researchers study interreligious and intercultural dialogue from a variety of theoretical and methodological perspectives. The Talking Dialogue project offers an opportunity to examine the archival material of interreligious and intercultural encounters, official records, interviews and other documents.

The resulting analyses will add new perspectives to our present-day understanding, highlighting best practices and identifying repeated mistakes.

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As part of the KAICIID Talking Dialogue project on the history of interreligious dialogue, we have been working with the students who are part of the project, Eight of them have kindly provided blog entries.

Zachary Wone: “Talking Dialogue”: Detective work at the archives of the World Alliance for International Friendship through the Churches

Minjung Noh: “Talking Dialogue”: Exploring the archives of the Universal Peace Federation

Semiramis Del Carmen Vieira Rodríguez: “Talking Dialogue”: The American Unitarian Association, the world’s oldest international interreligious association, opens its doors to historical research

Maryam Mouzzouri: “Talking Dialogue”: Jenkin Lloyd Jones and the 1893 Parliament of the World’s Religions

Maryam Mouzzouri: “Talking Dialogue”: The birth of worldwide interreligious dialogue in 1893

Maria Bargo: “Talking Dialogue”: a first-hand look through the archives of the Oxford International Interfaith Centre

Janna Ditz: “Talking Dialogue”: Exploring the history behind the 1993 Parliament of the World’s Religions

Sana Saeed: “Talking Dialogue”: Travelling back in time – the 1936 World Congress of Faiths

Verena Kozmann: "Talking Dialogue": Rudolf Otto and the Religioeser Menschheitsbund (1921-1937)