With the Best of Intentions: Interreligious Missteps and Mistakes

BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF PROJECT: A vital contribution to the expanding field of interfaith studies and to local and national interfaith efforts, accessible for a general audience but appropriate for the classroom, With the Best of Intentions: Interreligious Missteps and Mistakes is a compelling collection of personal essays on the interfaith encounter. Interfaith/interreligious efforts are intended to build bridges of understanding: perhaps because of this particular focus, scholars and practitioners rarely address the misunderstandings that emerge in the context of interfaith activity. What happens when our attempts at engaging in, or crafting, transformative interreligious encounters fail--and what might we learn from this? This volume is an invitation to reflect upon interfaith mistakes, disappointments, and conundrums, with the goal of identifying fault lines, exploring means for repair, and finding new insights. With the Best of Intentions takes a disruptive and engaging approach, offering a practical introduction to the skills and capacities needed for interfaith literacy. It includes 25-30 personal essays related to interfaith relations, featuring diverse voices from a range of religious communities; these essays are framed by opening and closing integrative chapters by the editors.