It has been a pleasure to read this volume, which features many authors I know either personally or through their work, and from whom I have learned a good deal. The interreligious friendships disclosed in these essays communicate what Reid Locklin named in his own contribution as intimacy. Fredericks and Tiemeier's volume makes a real contribution to the field and may be the first of its kind.

My remarks focus on a theme I see in several of the volume's friendships, which is a variation on the virtue of the particular in comparative theology: the particularity of “witness” or “testimony.” I do not mean simply the particularity of concrete religious traditions and texts but rather the particular complex of human subjectivities and the ineffable dignity signified therein. This witness or testimony challenges me as a theologian to attend theologically to human subjects both as the site of interreligious dialogue, friendship, and joy and as vivid scenes of loss, grief, and ambivalence. Lacking subjectivity, religions undergo none of this. The volume exemplifies the fatal blow that has been dealt to abstract or essentialized comparative work in favor of the truism that it is not religions that dialogue, but people, each of whom is an entire world unto himself or herself. This volume's authors and friends alike reconstitute theological reflection by communicating the rich, complex, and utterly unique density of discrete human experience and encounter.

The reader will notice in several essays a particular kind of particularity: ambivalence in religious identity, even a kind of brokenness to which my attention turned as these became signs acquainting me and perhaps other readers with analogous forms of ambivalence and perhaps brokenness commonly observed in religious identity.

Let me contextualize this remark in Nostra Aetate, §1, which speaks optimistically of humankind now being drawn closer together, about ties between people becoming stronger, about the church's task of promoting unity, love, and fellowship among people today. Several theological ground rules around oneness are established: that humanity is one; that all persons have a shared origin in the one God in whom, likewise, they share a telos or end as their final cause; and that in the interim the saving design or providence of the one God extends to all persons. A theological foundation of solidarity constitutes the ground on which rests all else that Nostra Aetate articulates, including the well-known language in §2 according to which other religions often reflect a ray of that Truth that enlightens all people, and in §4 on the spiritual patrimony common to Jews and Christians. Personal experiences of dialogue may become the “growing end” of the declaration's reverence, which is distinct from a nebulous reverence of truth and goodness in abstracto. Instead, §1 directs us to consider the content of that which is to be revered, in concreto, as the truth and goodness of solidarity realized in concrete divine actions of reconciliation of broken persons and communities. Comparative theology in this key attunes and responds to human suffering so that, according to the metaphor of Johann Baptist Metz, we “face the world” to encounter it as it is, to theologize in its face and therapeutically address persons who suffer denigration as well as those who denigrate.Footnote ¹⁰ A comparative theology that has drunk deeply from the well of political theology stands as an earthen corrective to theological programs that do not address particular persons, communities, and histories redemptively.

On this point I was gratified to learn recently that a drafter of Nostra Aetate named John Osterreicher (d. April 18, 1993, Yom ha-Shoah) preached anti-Nazi sermons by radio from France into Germany during the Shoah. An uncompromising critic of Nazism and of Pius XII, Fr. Osterreicher was himself born a Jew and converted as a very young man to Catholicism and sought ordination shortly thereafter. His own thinking on Jewish people evolved from the necessity of their conversion to a much softer postwar view in which, eventually, he rethought his own identity and came to embrace his own Jewishness precisely as a Catholic, priest, drafter of Nostra Aetate, and former missionary to the Jews who no longer regarded mission necessary. In one of those sermons radioed into Nazi Germany from France, Osterreicher spoke these words:

Osterreicher's appropriation of the divine promise in Isaiah captures and deepens the impact of several of the personalities we encounter in Interreligious Friendship after “Nostra Aetate.”

Consider Michael Signer (d. 2009) as remembered by John Cavadini. Signer was Cavadini's Jewish colleague and friend, and a great figure in Jewish-Christian dialogue until his untimely death. Signer is presented as deeply committed to his own Jewish tradition while also palpably committed to the community and Holy Cross mission at the University of Notre Dame and to significant facets of the Catholic intellectual tradition, yet Cavadini notes this commitment was not without cost. His own felt sense of isolation at Notre Dame, as a Jew, had the hidden benefit of evoking a deeper gratitude for what his forebears had done to transmit Jewish faith and life to him. Yet, there persisted an unresolved tension that not even his unquestioned contributions to Jewish-Christian dialogue could assuage. He experienced a kind of reconciliation of Jewish identity and his adopted Catholic university community, but not all the way through, despite his overwhelming academic credentials as a scholar of Jewish-Christian dialogue.

Consider Elena Procario-Foley's good friend Bill, an improbable child Holocaust survivor. This was for me one of the more complex essays in the volume, with an unexpected presentation of religious identity that left me equally haunted and touched. For Procario-Foley, Bill's face concretized the number 6 million; because of her experience with him, she says, “6 million became comprehensible, small, and personal.…Bill turned 6 million into one” (34–35). Her ambivalence surfaces in the realization that the Catholic sisters who rescued and cared for Bill during the Shoah viewed him to be in great danger not only from the Nazis but also from his Jewishness, a sentiment that he grew to internalize over time and that became evident in his own childhood prayer: “Jesus forgive me for the sin of being born Jewish.” Bill the Jewish boy lived, and he lived as a fervent Catholic. The reader is left with thick ambivalence and lament.

Consider Rasoul, Brad Malkovsky's Iranian and Shiite friend and colleague, who like Bill possessed a wonderful talent for the spiritual virtue of equanimity in deeply troubled times. While Bill was able to resist monocausal explanations of the Shoah and of the guilty, so too did Rasoul, who stands as a beacon of insight for all who endure sectarian divisions and hatreds. Rasoul was seriously wounded in a sarin gas attack during the Iran-Iraq War, yet harbors no ill will toward Iraqis or any specific men in the Iraqi military who fought him, whom he refers to as “my Iraqi brothers” in words hauntingly resonant of Dr. Martin Luther King's naming of white racist pastors as his sick white brothers. For Rasoul the Iranian, his “Iraqi brothers” were merely following orders and were deserving of forgiveness (89). He says, “At a bare minimum, enemies need to keep talking to each other, to be reminded of their common humanity that comes from God” (89). As a Shiite, he calls the Sunnis “my Sunni brothers and sisters.” Rasoul shares with Malkovsky that “it is the extremists in both groups that are not Muslims” (89). Relying on a compelling Sufi perspective, Rasoul revels in the esoteric possibilities of religious commitment or, simply, the experience of love and its reconciling features. A line from the Persian Rumi informs Rasoul: “The Sect of lovers is distinct from all others / Lovers have a religion and a faith all their own” (92). Malkovsky thinks we can appreciate and learn from this instantiation of Islam—Persian, Shiite, Sufi—to rescue us from fixation on the external or exoteric boundary markers of fidelity, where hatreds divide and blood spills.

This volume leaves me with some concluding questions. A volume presenting such density of human experience generates serious questions for its readers and especially for practitioners of comparative theology. To what degree do we hold §§1, 4, and 5 of Nostra Aetate as normative for interreligious reflection in a Catholic key? Do these texts on solidarity and redemptive possibility drive the agenda of interreligious scholarship in precisely these directions? To state the question somewhat more aggressively, might this volume pose a “fundamental option” to comparative theology by asking whether it responds meaningfully to Irving Greenberg's well-known criterion, namely, that in the unfathomable wake of the Shoah no theological statement should be tendered that would not be credible in the presence of burning children? Here I am intending a political theology twist on a recent claim by Paul Knitter that comparative theology fails its own job description if it persists as “business-as-usual theology.”Footnote ¹²

My reading of the volume poses a second question, to the magisterium of the church. Several essays point with fairness and compassion to experiences of dialogue frustrated or burdened by the inheritance of Roman Catholic identity even as Nostra Aetate fundamentally enabled productive encounter to occur. They do this through story and memory, not through conceptual critique. The critique is that much stronger on that account. We might ask to what extent and by what means the institution stands in need of specific human subjectivities currently sidelined: especially the multireligious, multicultural, or multiracial, in whose personal subjectivity genuinely new possibility presents itself not only to individuals but through them to the communion of the church. Can the church learn from its own members who are, in Tiemeier's crucial observation, “between” and in some sense beyond conventional identities?

These questions for comparative theologians and magisterium alike welcome the possibility of genuine learning from the concrete relationships and dialogues reported in this volume. If John Osterreicher was correct in his radio preaching into Nazi Germany that the Holy One creates all persons with an inestimable dignity simultaneously unique and equal, then this normative framework makes demands upon all, to which all can be responsible in the particularity of their own lived experiences. The friendships reported in this volume give reason to hope for a future in which such transformational human encounter is more ubiquitous than exceptional.