What a dreadful book this could have been.

First of all, a book on interreligious friendship might have fallen into the trap of so much of what passes as “interreligious dialogue” in scholarly prose: long on the conditions for the possibility of authentic friendship across boundaries of religious difference, short on actual friendships. Second, this book might have erred in an equal and opposite way, by simply enumerating and classifying such friendships, without any reflection of real consequence—the Red Fish, Blue Fish of interreligious friendship, we might say.

The present volume does not entirely escape either trap. The essay I contributed skates rather too close to the edge of pure theory, for example, and Francis X. Clooney's essay is perhaps too indulgent in its enumerations. On the whole, however, the essays in this collection strike a skilled balance, revealing how interreligious friendships can bring out significant issues in interreligious relations more generally, without thereby losing their particular, sacred, and wholly contingent character as ordinary human friendships.

First and foremost, many of the essays reveal how friendship can profoundly disrupt one's view of religious others…as well as how it can leave such views more or less intact. SimonMary Asese Aihiokhai's essay, for example, bears the subtitle “A Path to Conversion.” In it, he narrates what he calls “the event,” his successive attempts to confront, to convert, and eventually to befriend the elderly traditional priestess of a small village in his native Nigeria. As their relationship deepens, Aihiokhai realizes that he, rather than his friend, “was the one worshipping a false god in my effort to reduce the priestess's religion to idolatry” (193). By the end, he arrives at a place where he advocates “collaborative worship” across religious boundaries (195). The friendship, in this case, provokes a complete change of theological perspective.

Not so, it would seem, for John C. Cavadini. Reflecting on his friendship with the late Rabbi Michael Signer, Cavadini relates a series of moments when he experienced Signer's empathetic identification with Catholic tradition: the Notre Dame fight song on the rabbi's cell phone; the free sharing of Christmas gifts, but never Christmas cards; Cavadini's own profound feeling of being “un-rejected … not in spite of, but in a way that also included my religious faith” (24); and Signer's seamless fluency in Catholic grammars of liturgy, sacraments, and monastic life. “It wasn't his language,” writes Cavadini, “but he knew the language and could translate it in love” (25). Cavadini is clearly moved by this empathy, but it does not appear that he is changed—at least, not with respect to the theological status of Judaism or any particular question of religious diversity. Instead, he is turned back to the Incarnation, to the mystery of solidarity it embodies, and to the personal cost of giving oneself thoroughly to another, as revealed in the person of his Jewish friend. Rabbi Signer is the host, and Cavadini the guest, in a context that nevertheless remains serenely and unalterably Catholic.

Second, the essays in this volume explore the various ways that friendships—even interreligious friendships—interact in complex ways with other human relationships. Rita George-Tvrtković's essay, entitled “Ties That Bind,” describes how her mother-in-law, as a Bosnian Muslim, helps create “a household environment that I would call ‘hospitable’ to faith” (78). This hospitality is embodied above all in the sharing of fasting practices and the habitual, “everyday” elements of their respective traditions (79). In “Toddlers and Tea,” by contrast, Tracy Sayuki Tiemeier and Mugdha Yeolekar reflect together on their very self-conscious attempts, as friends, colleagues, and parents of young children, to foster interreligious openness in the complex world of preschool, playdates, and childhood preoccupations with the fairy world.

George-Tvrtković's and Tiemeier and Yeolekar's descriptions of these familial relationships, and their interreligious character, are valuable in themselves. Both essays, however, also ask how these particular narratives might illumine aspects of all interreligious relationships. Reflecting on the Hindu notion of divine lila, Tiemeier and Yeolekar offer an initial theology of interreligious play, celebrating the purposeless joy of children discovering new cultures and religions as a reflection of God, the divine self. For George-Tvrtković, the notion of “spiritual kinship” suggests a useful metaphor for those moments when interreligious conversation invariably becomes difficult, perhaps even joyless. “Friendships fade,” she writes, “but family is forever. … Might this be a useful metaphor for the best kind of interfaith relationship: one that endures over time, through it all?” (82). Play and kinship—each reveals a distinct ideal of interreligious relations, and each emerges from the lived context of actual such relationships, which makes both that much more persuasive.

Third, several of these essays raise questions about whether interreligious friendship is distinct from other kinds of friendship. That is, does religious difference touch the nature and character of friendship itself?

As in the previous two points, so also here we find multiple approaches to this question. For a number of the volume's authors—perhaps most—the answer seems to be that friendship is friendship is friendship. When Francis X. Clooney surveys the many Hindu teachers, students, and colleagues whom he has encountered throughout his career as a comparativist, or when Peter Phan movingly describes the support he received from the Buddhist scholar Nguyen Tu Cuong at a difficult time, it is the friendships qua friendship that emerge in sharpest relief. Similarly, Marianne Farina and Masarrat Khan reflect on their thirty-year friendship using shared categories of “God's love,” “concern and care for others,” and interreligious friendship itself as an “infused moral virtue” (69–70). Although Islam and Christianity may provide distinct resources for cultivating mutual love, love as such represents a firm “common ground” (70).

The case is very different in Karen Enriquez's essay, “With New Eyes to See.” Reflecting on her Buddhist teacher, John Makransky, Enriquez relates a number of his distinct, even unsettling mannerisms: asking her to reflect on their moment of mutual recognition when they meet in passing in the quad, staring at students in silence when they ask questions, implying that Enriquez might come to see herself as “part of his Buddha field” (150). These experiences, she suggests, were “moments of training me, of teaching me and his other students to develop pure perception, which becomes the basis of true universal compassion in the world” (141). As Enriquez describes this relationship, she also develops what might be called a Buddhist philosophy of interreligious friendship, grounded on pure perception, universal compassion, and the dawning recognition of the Buddha-nature in every sentient being. She reflects that “strangers are just friends that we do not yet recognize, because they are still too far to be seen and heard; and, sometimes, I am too busy to know them” (140). The “new eyes” of Enriquez’ essay thus seem to represent not merely a new perspective on her Buddhist friend and mentor; they represent a new, distinctively Buddhist approach to such friendship itself.

Finally, these essays reveal something important about Nostra Aetate. The title of the volume is Interreligious Friendship after “Nostra Aetate,” apparently suggesting that such friendships are one result of the Second Vatican Council's declaration. In his introduction, however, James Fredericks describes the various Jewish-Catholic and Muslim-Catholic friendships that informed and ultimately sustained the declaration, positioning Nostra Aetate less as cause than as effect. Elena Procario-Foley, for her part, reflects on its paradoxical consequences in the life and death of her good friend, a survivor of the Shoah. She writes:

This brief summary beautifully reveals the dramatic effect of the conciliar document. But it also well captures the distinctive character of “our times,” the times that give Nostra Aetate its Latin title. “In our times” (nostra aetate), not only can Catholics, Jews, and myriad others become friends—which has no doubt happened before—but such friendships have emerged as sources of genuine transformation. Interreligious Friendship after “Nostra Aetate” gives us a privileged glimpse into some of these friendships, as well as the transformations they can provoke in our understandings of ourselves, of religious others, and indeed of the distinctive privilege and demands that such friendships invariably entail.