Alan Race

Recorded during UK Inter Faith Week, this joint IARF British Chapter and World Congress of Faiths event features theologian Alan Race exploring how religious experience can inform interreligious dialogue and a pluralist understanding of religious diversity. Drawing on Iris Murdoch, John Hick, mystical traditions and examples from Jewish-Jain, Buddhist-Christian and monastic dialogue, Race asks how very different accounts of transcendence can be taken seriously without collapsing their differences into a false unity.

At the centre of the talk is a three-level model of dialogue: learning about the other, learning with the other, and learning through the other. Race argues that sustained dialogue can move beyond tolerance and parallel coexistence toward mutual accountability, transformation and a deeper theology of religious pluralism. The discussion also touches on religious violence and nationalism, neuroscience and mystical experience, social conditioning, and the relationship between religious freedom, reconciliation and pluralism.