Learned Ignorance: Intellectual Humility among Jews, Christians and Muslims

Constructive interreligious dialogue is only a recent phenomenon. Until the nineteenth century, most dialogue among believers was carried on as a debate aimed either to disprove the claims of the other, or to convert the other to one's own tradition. At the end of the nineteenth century, Protestant Christian missionaries of different denominations had created such a cacophony amongst themselves in the mission fields that they decided that it would be best if they could begin to overcome their own differences instead of confusing and even scandalizing the people whom they were trying to convert. By the middle of the twentieth century, the horrors of the Holocaust compelled Christians, especially mainline Protestants and Catholics, to enter into a serious dialogue with Jews, one of the consequences of which was the removal of claims by Christians to have replaced Judaism, and revising text books that communicated that message to Christian believers.Now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, many branches of Christianity, not least the Catholic Church, are engaged in a world-wide constructive dialogue with Muslims, made all the more necessary by the terrorist attacks of September 11. In these new conversations, Muslim religious leaders took an important initiative when they sent their document,''A Common Word Between Us,'' to all Christians in the West. It is an extraordinary document, for it makes a theological argument (various Christians in the West, including officials at the Vatican, have claimed that a ''theological conversation'' with Muslims is not possible) based on texts drawn from the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament and the Qur'an, that Jewish, Christian, and Muslim believers share the God-given obligation to love God and each other in peace and justice. The Institute for Advanced Catholic Studies brought together an international group of sixteen Jewish, Catholic, and Muslim scholars to carry on an important theological exploration of the theme of ''learned ignorance.''

Table of Contents:
1. Preface James L. Heft 2. Introduction James L. Heft Part I: Learned Ignorance and Interreligious Dialogue 3. Some Requisites for Interfaith Dialogue David B. Burrell 4. Learned Ignorance and Faithful Interpretation of the Qur'an in Nicholas of Cusa Pim Valkenberg 5. ''Seeing the Sounds'': Intellectual Humility and the Process of Dialogue Michael Signer 6. Finding Common Ground: ''Mutual Knowing,'' Moderation, and the Fostering of Religious Pluralism Asma Afsaruddin Part II: Must Particularity Be Exclusive? 7. Humble Infallibility James L. Heft 8. Chosenness and the Exclusivity of Truth: What does it Mean to be ''Chosen''? Reuven Firestone 9. The Belief in the Incarnation of God: Source or Religious Humility or Cause of Theological Pride? Oliver-Thomas Venard 10. Supernatural Israel: Obstacles to Theological Humility in Jewish Tradition Shira L. Lander 11. Arrogance and Humility: a Quranic Perspective Afra Jalabi Part III: Violence, Apologies and Conflict 12. After Augustine: Humility and the Search for God in Historical Memory Elizabeth Groppe 13. Apology, Regret and Intellectual Humility: An Interreligious Consideration Michael B. McGarry 14. Islamic Theological Perspectives on Intellectual Humility and the Conditioning of Interfaith Dialogue Mustafa Abu-sway Part IV: Religious Pluralism 15. A Meditation on Intellectual Humility: A Fusion of Epistemic Ignorance and Covenantal Certainty Stanislaw Krajewski 16. Saving Dominus Jesus Daniel Madigan 17. Between Tradition and Reform: The Pre-modern Sufism and the Iranian Reform Movement Omid Safi 18. Epilogue: The Purpose of Interreligious Dialogue James L. Heft, Reuven Firestone, and Omid Safi Index

About the Author :
James L. Heft, S. M., is Chairman of the Board of Trustees, Institute for Advanced Catholic Studies. He is also a member of the Society of Mary (Marianists). In 2006, he became the Alton Brooks Professor of Religion. Along with three other leaders in Catholic higher education, he founded in 1996 Catholic Education: A Journal of Inquiry and Practice. He has published and edited twelve books and written over 160 articles and book chapters. Reuven Firestone is professor of Medieval Jewish and Islamic Studies, Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in Los Angeles and founding co-director of the Center for Muslim-Jewish Engagement. His published works include Jihad: The Origin of Holy War in Islam, Children of Abraham: An Introduction to Judaism for Muslims, and Jews, Christians, Muslims in Dialogue: A Practical Handbook. Omid Safi is the Chair for the Study of Islam at the American Academy of Religion. A leading Muslim public intellectual in America, he is a professor of Religious Studies at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, US. He is the author of The Politics of Knowledge Premodern Islam and Memories of Muhammad: Why the Prophet Matters.

Review :
"This explicitly theological and exceptionally engaging collection of scholarly essays represents trilateral dialogue in its most refined yet attractively challenging form. Here Jewish, Christian and Muslim authors address core mysteries of their faiths that bear consequentially on the whole 'Abrahamic' monotheistic tradition. Their compelling unity of purpose is to unravel, by thinking pluralistically to the limits of knowledge beyond specific questions, that condition of wonderment and intellectual humility before ineffable truth."--John Borelli, Georgetown University "The book is an outcome...that brought together an international group of 16 Jewish, Catholic an Muslim scholoars to carry on an important theological exploration of the theme of ''learned ignornace"--Islamic Horizons "Overall, this is a very valuable addition to the growing body of interreligious literature."--Catholic Library World