With the Best of Intentions: Interreligious Missteps and Mistakes

Overview

A vital contribution to the expanding field of interfaith studies and to local and national interfaith efforts, accessible for a general audience but appropriate for the classroom, With the Best of Intentions is a compelling collection of personal essays on the interfaith encounter. Such efforts are intended to build bridges of understanding: perhaps because of this focus, scholars and practitioners rarely address the misunderstandings that emerge. What happens when our attempts at engaging in, or crafting, transformative interreligious encounters fail—and what might we learn from this? This volume is an invitation to reflect on interfaith mistakes, disappointments, and conundrums, with the goal of identifying fault lines, exploring means for repair, and finding new insights. 

Lucinda Mosher is faculty associate in chaplaincy and interreligious studies at Hartford International University for Religion and Peace. She is also co-director of HIU’s Master of Arts in chaplaincy program, senior scholar for executive and professional education, and an affiliate of the Macdonald Center for the Study of Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations. Dr. Mosher has authored, edited, and coedited many books including Deep Understanding for Divisive Times.

Elinor (Ellie) Pierce is the research director for the Pluralism Project at Harvard University and author of Pluralism in Practice: Case Studies of Leadership in a Religiously Diverse America.

Or N. Rose is founding director of the Betty Ann Greenbaum Miller Center for Interreligious Learning & Leadership of Hebrew College. Rabbi Rose has taught for the Bronfman Youth Fellowships, The Wexner Graduate Fellowship, Me’ah, and in many other academic, religious, and civic contexts throughout North America and Israel. He is coeditor of the award-winning anthology, My Neighbor’s Faith: Stories of Interreligious Encounter, Growth, and Transformation (Orbis).