Michael Barnes, SJ, is a Jesuit of the British Province, and a theologian and leading expert in the theology and practice of interreligious dialogue. He was for thirty years a professor at the late lamented Heythrop College in London, and for some years the guiding spirit behind the De Nobili Centre for Dialogue in the religiously and culturally diverse Southall section of West London. He is a prominent figure in the work of understanding the Jesuit tradition of interreligious learning, a tradition that reaches back to St. Francis Xavier, an original companion of St. Ignatius Loyola and the first Jesuit to travel to the East. In his preface Barnes tells us that Waiting on Grace is the third of a quartet, preceded by Theology and the Dialogue of Religions (2002) and Interreligious Learning: Dialogue, Spirituality and the Christian Imagination (2011), with an anticipated fourth volume about Jesus the Torah-observant Jew, the “returning other” who is “never to be suppressed by violence or homogenized into a system” (viii).

Well versed in the theological and practical realities of Hindu and Buddhist traditions, in Waiting on Grace Barnes shows us that he has meditated deeply too on our continuing indebtedness to Judaism as tradition and living community. Barnes locates dialogue in the life of the church as a community called to witness in a pluralistic world (chapter 1), shows how Nostra Aetate is itself an event of dialogue performing the openness of which it speaks (chapter 2), and highlights the essential claim of Nostra Aetate that the Christian community subsists in dialogue with the Jewish community from which it arose (chapter 3). Dialogue needs to be steeped in empathy and compassion, virtues essential to learning (chapter 4). Indebted to Edith Stein and Abraham Heschel, he then reflects on the essential role of the prophet who is “a reminder of God” (chapter 5). Further reflections on prophecy and kerygma, indebted to Raimon Panikkar, aim to purify and deepen interreligious practice by a profound sense of empathy and human interrelatedness in the face of divine mystery (chapter 6) and to sustain faith in living connection with tradition even while honestly facing up to the inescapable realities of pluralism today (chapter 7). Barnes in the end elaborates “waiting on grace,” in conversation with Simone Weil's famed collection of reflections, Attente de Dieu. He asks us to consider how we are to live amid our current uncertainties; waiting for God is a way of life that does not predict in advance all the particularities of how God shall speak and we shall hear in the future. In the end, he offers not a theology of religions but the more important practical and spiritual disposition to “look to the way the Spirit of Christ is active in all religious communities as revealing the mystery of Christ—the mystery of what God is already doing in the world.” This allows to people of all faiths and none “the same possibility it holds out to the Church itself: to be touched and formed by the grace of God after the manner of Jesus's own obedience to the Father” (236). For this to occur, Barnes tells us, we must seek to understand more deeply how the story of Christ meshes “with other stories and different perspectives, both the secular and religions, on the human condition” (236).

There is a vast quantity of information and insight packed into these pages, but one of Barnes’ gifts as a writer is that he writes in an always accessible fashion and invites the reader to echo his insights by turning to their own religious and interreligious experiences. He manages to be deeply faithful to tradition and quietly radical at the same time. This erudite and profound book is a lasting contribution of interreligious dialogue, comparative theology, and an authentic reception of Vatican II in the ongoing life of the church in the twenty-first century. It will profitably be read alongside Barnes’ more recent, autobiographical Ignatian Spirituality & Interreligious Dialogue: Reading Love's Mystery (2021).