James Fredericks has argued for the recognition of interreligious friendship as a theological virtue, at least in part as a corrective to our human propensity to fear others and thus to see them as a threat and demonize them as terrorists, ridicule them as superstitious, or dismiss them as heathens.Footnote ¹ In his essay, “Interreligious Friendship: A New Theological Virtue,” he reflects on friendship, rooted in philia and not agape, as a virtue, discusses how interreligious friendships could be seen as examples of human excellence, and ends with reflections on the limits of such friendships.

Interreligious Friendship after “Nostra Aetate” Footnote ² is not another book or essay collection that focuses on theoretical or theological reflections on the concept of interreligious friendship. In fact, as the editors James Fredericks and Tracy Sayuki Tiemeier emphasized many times in e-mails (and here I actually quote from those e-mails), “We are NOT interested in a theoretical essay on the notion or the phenomenon of interreligious friendships in general.” Rather, “tell us the story of your friendship. Tell us how this friendship has blessed and challenged you as a believer and as a theologian.” This book is a collection of personal stories of interreligious friendships that have transformed and challenged the authors of the essays as theologians and as people of faith, as only friendship and an encounter with the other can.

The collection comes fifty years after the publication of Nostra Aetate, a groundbreaking document in the relationship between the Catholic Church and believers of other traditions. In its final statement, Paul VI writes that “this sacred synod ardently implores the Christian faithful to ‘maintain good fellowship among the nations' (1 Peter 2:12), and, if possible, to live for their part in peace with all men, so that they may truly be sons of the Father who is in heaven.”Footnote ³ This call for “good fellowship among the nations” and for promoting unity and love has become a part of the basis for many interreligious friendships in the decades since the document. Even before Vatican II, however, as James Fredericks shows in his introduction to the book, interreligious friendships made Nostra Aetate a reality, and, as he observes, “Without a doubt, the Declaration would never have come into being were it not for the friendships that inspired, nourished, and sustained those who labored on this council document” (1).

The stories collected in Interreligious Friendship after “Nostra Aetate” are reflections by Catholics about their friendships with Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, and African indigenous believers; sometimes they are even cowritten with their friends. They are stories of friendship in various forms. Many of the authors and their friends are colleagues and mentors who became dialogue partners while challenging each other's perspective on their traditions and theological reflections. Others bonded over the task of parenting toddlers while another reflected on her relationship with her mother-in-law. Included are friendships both with those still living and with those who have passed, friendships that were long lasting and others that were short. Yet as varied as these stories of friendships are, they reveal the same experience of being transformed by the other, or, as Fredericks has argued about interreligious friendship as a virtue, “They show us a valuable truth for today. We cannot love and remain unchanged.”Footnote ⁴

These stories demonstrate and enflesh Fredericks' arguments about interreligious friendship as a virtue. First, as he argues, such friendships help us “resist the tendency to reduce religious forms of life to textuality” and to understand and encounter religions “as they are realized in the lives of real believers.”Footnote ⁵ As John Cavadini notes in his essay, “It was not, first and foremost, ‘Judaism’ and ‘Christianity.’ It was before that, Michael and John” (23); or as Rita George-Tvrtković explains in her essay, “My mother-in-law is a Muslim, but her ‘Muslimness’ is conveyed in ways that are not normative for Muslims elsewhere in the world, but which are entirely common for Bosnia” (76).

Moreover, as many of the authors attest, there were many challenging conversations to be had. These included confrontation of the Catholic Church's own history. Mary C. Boys provides an example of this experience in her description of her friendship with Sara, with whom she traveled to Auschwitz, where she became preoccupied with “the failure of the churches” and “acutely conscious” of [her] membership in a church complicit in the Holocaust” (17). Such conversations require the cultivation of skills that allow one to enter the world of another, to find new ways to interpret one's tradition and to respect differences with the other. They require that one be able to listen and to know when silence is just as, if not more, important than speaking. At the same time, these conversations require that the other remain “other.” “Friendships that are lasting never lose sight of the stranger within the friend”;Footnote ⁶ that is, one cannot reduce the religious other to oneself or to similarities with oneself. This was Fredericks' own experience of his friendship with Masao Abe, in which their “strangeness to one another [was] the bond that [held their] friendship together” (159).

These stories, read together, weave a rich tapestry of the blessing and grace of interreligious friendship and, I would argue, offer a new vision of church in a religiously diverse world. They are stories of how we come to know ourselves and others in a deep way, how faith and one's religious identity can be deepened, challenged, sustained, and maintained in the midst of diversity. As Mary Margaret Funk describes in her conclusion to the volume,

Pope Francis' 2014 World Day of Peace speech focused on fraternity as “an essential human quality, for we are all relational beings. A lively awareness of our relatedness helps us to look upon and treat each person as a true sister or brother; without fraternity it is impossible to build a just society and a solid and lasting peace.”Footnote ⁷ This speech reminded me of George-Tvrtković's suggestion that “we should begin with kinship—with our most fundamental connection as children of God—and then work on friendship from there” (82). In the end, the stories in this book show where interreligious friendship and spiritual kinship meet, providing a powerful witness to the transformative possibilities of the encounter with the religious other in a world where such encounters may still be seen as a vice and not a virtue.