A flourishing contemporary interfaith movement has prompted new scholarship on interfaith relations, yet most historical studies focus narrowly on a particular region or encounter between two religions. Thomas Albert Howard's The Faith of Others addresses this gap by examining the roots of the wider interfaith movement. A welcome addition to literature on interfaith work, Howard's book contains four chapters: the first considers harbingers of dialogue outside the modern West, and the rest focus on interfaith dialogue movements within Europe and North America. By exploring the historical circumstances and after-effects of three key gatherings in Chicago, London and Rome between the 1890s and 1960s, Howard provides a history of ‘organized, formal interfaith discursive practices’ in the modern West (p. 15).
The Introduction explains this Western focus, noting that although interfaith dialogue is not only a Western phenomenon, it has been ‘advanced almost extensively within the social and intellectual ambit of “Christendom”’ (p. 7). It also addresses Eurocentric concepts of ‘religion’, theologies of religion, approaches to modern pluralism, critiques of Orientalism and the complex intersections of religion and violence. Chapter 1, ‘Harbingers’, surveys premodern antecedents to the interfaith movement: the ideas of a few Jews, of Christians who wrote about Jews and Greeks, and of those Christians who later engaged with Islam. Howard recognises Ramon Llull and Nicolas of Cusa as forerunners to today's interfaith advocates and then turns to Akbar, the sixteenth-century Muslim Mughal emperor in India. As other's have documented, Akbar hosted interreligious conversations in his court and proposed a new religion combining the best aspects of all faiths. Howard's attention to this pluralistic Asian context suggests possibilities for researching other non-Western approaches that are beyond the limits of this book.
Chapter 2, ‘Chicago’, covers the 1893 World's Parliament of Religions. This launching point for the interfaith movement must be addressed in any history of interreligious dialogue, and it has been featured in previous studies. Howard surveys the precursors that made this meeting possible: Enlightenment principles, romanticism and idealism, and the ‘science of religion’. He then describes the liberal Protestants (and several American Catholics, Jews and Unitarians) who carried out the Parliament. To avoid conflicts, they prohibited discussion after each lecture, but the meeting's inclusivist outlook paved the way for theological pluralism and ‘copycat’ initiatives in the twentieth century. Perhaps the most valuable aspect of the chapter is its attention to Asian delegates (like Swami Vivekananda, Soyen Shaku and Anagarika Dharmapala), who spoke about their faiths while critiquing colonialism and Western missions.
The third chapter, ‘London’, covers the lesser known World Congress of Faiths that Sir Francis Younghusband orchestrated in 1936. Howard's examination of precursor gatherings and organisations makes apparent the interreligious realities of British imperialism and the close ties between British and American Protestant leaders. The chapter draws from Younghusband's personal papers and highlights the World Congress's impact as an ongoing society and its incorporation of discussion following each lecture. Howard's summaries of the addresses – by Muslim and Baha‘i delegates like Yusuf Ali and Shoghi Effendi, for example – reveal the prevailing tropes that interfaith advocates had to confront for years to come.
The final chapter, ‘Rome’, examines the Second Vatican Council (1962–5), focusing on Nostra aetate (In our time) as a sign of the Catholic Church's transformed, inclusivist outlook toward other religions. Despite expansive Catholic missions, the chapter gives little attention to missionary encounters in Asia and Africa as precursors to Nostra aetate. Howard does address the influence of Catholic theologians like Karl Rahner, Jean Daniélou, Henri de Lubac and Jules Isaac. Documenting the responses from Jewish, Muslim, Arab Christian and other non-Catholics while Nostra aetate was being drafted, Howard shows that the final declaration came to fruition through a process of interfaith dialogue. The chapter ends with later Catholic initiatives, including Pope John Paul Il's interfaith World Day of Prayer at Assisi in 1986. The Conclusion covers Protestant activities after Vatican II, like the World Council of Churches dialogues. Then it assesses the limitations of the contemporary dialogue movement, such as its elite Western and academic character. Howard hopes interfaith dialogue will be revitalised through approaches that draw on art, music, contemplation and other innovative practices.
Howard's book is an excellent starting point for understanding the interfaith movement's development in the West. With its focus on formal dialogue and major gatherings in Chicago, London and Rome, however, the coverage of dialogue on the peripheries of Western power and among ordinary people, women and non-Western Christians is minimal. Each chapter integrates Asian or Middle Eastern voices to some extent, but once the book turns to the modern interfaith movement, it only addresses Christian-initiated dialogue. Howard notes that women ‘have been marginal in many interfaith gatherings, becoming more prominent only in recent years’ (p. 247). The book exemplifies this reality, as it names the few female participants in Chicago and London, while women are absent in the coverage of Vatican II. More attention is needed to women's interfaith activities in arenas like foreign missions fields where they were in the majority. For a look beyond male-dominated, institutional efforts for dialogue, this book might be read alongside Jeannine Hill Fletcher's Motherhood as Metaphor: Engendering Interreligious Dialogue (2013). Considering Howard's repeated argument about the limits of Edward Said's theories for describing Western interfaith work and the book's cursory engagement with the nuances of Said's critique, Orientalism (1978) might be another appropriate companion text.
The Faiths of Others would work well as an introductory text for students of interfaith dialogue, and its plentiful references to individuals, organisations and source materials also make it a basic resource for scholars of interfaith relations. Howard's greatest contribution is in elucidating the key historical currents that carried the interfaith movement in the West forward during its first century of life.
