The Peacebuilding Potential of Interfaith Dialogue

The Ikeda Center’s 2025 slate of programs got off to an auspicious start when 12 students from Soka University of America (SUA) traveled to Boston for a three-day series of events exploring the challenge and promise of interfaith dialogue. The students were participants in a Learning Cluster led by Professor Tetsushi Ogata that studies human betterment through the practice of religion. On their first day, they attended a panel discussion, hosted by the Center and moderated by Dr. Ogata, on the topic of interfaith exchange and peacebuilding. On day two, the SUA students visited Boston College for exchanges with Dr. Joshua Snyder’s students in the Faith, Peace, and Justice program, and on day three they participated in an exchange on religion, differences, and the power of dialogue organized by Mosaic: Interfaith Youth Action. This article by Mitch Bogen reports on the day one panel discussion. 

Introduction: Religion and World Peace

Center Executive Director Kevin Maher offered welcoming remarks, saying that he was looking forward to “a meaningful and timely discussion” and thanking the featured scholars for “taking time from your demanding schedules to be here.” He also thanked the contingent from SUA “for traveling to Boston to be with us this week.” Offering some background, Maher noted that this is the second time the Ikeda Center has hosted an SUA Learning Cluster for learning and dialogue, with the first occasion taking place one year ago. Now, said Maher, it is gratifying to collaborate once again,” as both our institutions share a common founder and a shared mission to promote peace and dialogue.”

That founder is the late Daisaku Ikeda, who, said Maher, “dedicated his life to engaging in interfaith exchanges, firmly believing that such dialogue—spanning both religious and cultural boundaries—helps us not only understand and appreciate our differences but also enables us to work together to resolve conflicts.” He then quoted from Ikeda’s writing to focus and inspire the day’s discussion and dialogue:

Of course, each religion is unique and different….But all of these differing religious teachings contain, in some form, insights and truths for enabling human beings to attain happiness. By learning from those respective insights and truths, while recognizing their mutual differences, all religions can improve their capacity for fulfilling their essential role in guiding people to happiness.
 

It is my sincere hope that all the religions of the world will continue to follow this path of dialogue….[and] while demonstrating their unique value, join together as religions dedicated to the welfare of humanity and become a major force for world peace.”

With that, Maher turned the floor over to Professor Ogata, who is Managing Director of the Soka Institute for Global Solutions and Visiting Assistant Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies at SUA. First, he shared some background on the activities of the Learning Cluster. For example, in the week prior to coming to Boston, they visited 10 different places of worship in Southern California – ranging from Roman Catholic to Eastern Orthodox, Chinese Buddhist, Vietnamese Caodai and many more – helping students gain direct experience of what religious pluralism looks like and means in actual practice in the United States. 

After introductions from the students, who shared briefly about their own personal experiences growing up with or practicing diverse religions including Christianity, Buddhism, and Islam, as well as atheism, Ogata said he would have three main questions for the panelists, who were: 

• Deina Abdelkader, Associate Professor in the Political Science Department at of the University of Massachusetts Lowell, where she directs the Peace and Conflict Studies program
• Daniel Aldrich, Professor of Political Science and Director of the Security and Resilience Studies program at Northeastern University
• Mamfatou Baldeh, doctoral student in the Human Development, Learning and Teaching concentration at the Harvard Graduate School of Education
• Andrea Bartoli, President of the Sant’Egidio Foundation for Peace and Dialogue, and Executive Adviser of the Soka Institute for Global Solutions at Soka University of America
• Joshua Snyder, Associate Professor of the Practice in Theological Ethics and Director of the Faith, Peace, and Justice Minor at Boston College

The three prompts introduced by Ogata were to discuss: First, your personal background, especially how you were introduced to religion and how you would describe your spiritual quest. Second, how you explain the problems in society from a religious point of view. And, third, how you identify a path to overcoming these problems, again, from a religious point of view. 

Personal Journeys

Dr. Bartoli opened the responses to the first prompt, saying “I encountered my religion in my mother’s womb. She was a [Catholic Christian] believer. And she was certainly speaking with me. I think I was speaking with her even if I was not speaking.” Describing his own path as dialogical, he shared his values by addressing the gathering: “So my invitation is for you to take your life seriously now. To say, there is something in my life that is seeking to dialogue with life as life is.” And he shared a poem he composed which also expressed his worldview: “Encountering Life / The Love of Others Calls / Come and Be.”

Her own spiritual journey was formalized at age 15, said Dr. Abdelkader, when she performed Hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca which is a requirement of Islam. Saying no coercion was necessary, she observed that in accepting Islam she simply “followed my father’s footsteps.” Then after the Oslo Accords of 1993 and 1995 brought hope for a resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, she “professionally started my quest to understand the deep connections between Islam and governance.” And, calling herself “a strong believer in coexistence,” she said she puts up “a Christmas tree in my house, and when Ramadan comes around, I also put Ramadan decorations around my house.”

Dr. Joshua Snyder said he “grew up as a cradle Catholic.” Crucially, though, “while my mother was a practicing Catholic, my father explored various other Christian denominations. So from an early age, even though I didn’t know it, I was engaged in ecumenical dialogue.” His faith took “its mature form” when he was in college at St. Peter’s University in New Jersey. There he began to commit to “faith that does justice.” Most of all he seeks “to live a life of authenticity.” And a big part of what he calls his “discipleship” is “to work with amazing college students every day, [and] journey with them on their exploration of their own faith, and their quest for truth.”

Raised in Judaism, Dr. Daniel Aldrich has long been interested in religious pluralism. In college he “met a rabbi who lived a life of outreach and activism,” and this inspired him to become the interfaith coordinator for Hillel at Chapel Hill. But his “faith and professional life came together” through tragedy when his house in New Orleans was destroyed by Hurricane Katrina. “That shock, plus what happened afterwards, really pushed my work. So both my professional work and my personal work now are about disaster recovery, disaster resilience.” In his work, he has encountered Soka Gakkai members in Sendai in northern Japan, where he has regularly brought his students to visit and learn in the aftermath of the Fukushima tsunami. Noting how much his students gain from contact with other cultures, he likewise hoped that this encounter would be joyful for the SUA students.

Mamfatou Baldeh opened by saying what an “honor” it was to be with everyone today, adding that what she could contribute to the discussion is her experience, if not any answers. She said that her West African immigrant parents held “Islam as a source of morals and traditions, more than a kind of a faith system or a system of values.” And for her, it was mostly “an identity marker.” Islam began to mean more to her when she moved away from family and community to go to college. “It forced me to think about what I actually wanted to choose for myself. And I needed a system of values, and that’s what brought me back to my faith in a deeper way.” Now she is “very much in a place of exploration, and trying to answer those questions about what [Islam] means for me and trying to live authentically in my faith.” In short, she sees herself as being on a “journey.”

Diagnosing our Problems

Next, Ogata invited the panelists to discuss how they employ a religious or spiritual lens to view the nature of our social problems, especially those that are “deep-rooted.” The panelists proceeded in reverse order from the first round of comments.

Speaking first, Baldeh recalled how she felt she really started to live fully when she “started questioning some of the things that I had just taken for granted or taken as a true answer.” In her view, a major problem socially is that too few people question the “systems” we are born into and live with. One example is the way we live in an economic system that vales “competition” above all. The reason this is so important is that if “you don’t take the time to consider what your value system actually is … you can get swept away.” Lack of investigation keeps people not only from knowing themselves but also from fully imagining possible new directions or forms for society. Certainly factors such as power and identity add complexity to our task of creating solutions collectively, but it must be done, she said.

The starting point for Dr. Aldrich is with not enough people recognizing the truth of what Jews call bechira, meaning that “free choice is the pivot of the world. Each one of us, every moment, has a choice.” This is important because some of the “worst things we can do to each other” have been helped along by people who failed to ask themselves: Do I take that order? Do I do that thing I’ve been asked to do without thinking about it? The other main problem from a religious perspective is that too many religious people only focus on bonding within their groups and ignore the importance of promoting bridging with other religions and groups. The truth is that “bonding ties brings great benefits, but are incredibly dangerous” when this bonding is undertaken at the expense of others.

Dr. Snyder opened by considering the question of whether religion is especially prone to violence. In his view, it is no more susceptible than any ideology is to encouraging “adherents” to make “radical claims about reality” and “devote themselves in very fanatical ways to all sorts of things.” What religion can do is either “inhibit or disinhibit” violence, he said. Specifically, “happy, healthy people, who are inherently inclined towards peacemaking, will often focus on their sacred texts and spiritual practices that encourage peace.” On the other hand, “those who are bitter, angry, fearful, or prone to self-righteous indignation might be attracted to those texts within their tradition that sanction violence.” Another problem is what he described as “failure to bother to love. We see our neighbor, not as our brother or sister, but as a source of competition and a threat… . We suffer from a lack of moral imagination.”

For Dr. Abdelkader, the most fundamental problem is psychological “splitting and projecting.” All of us, she said, have what might be called good and bad sides, or healthy and unhealthy sides. Unfortunately, there is the tendency among humans to “project everything that is bad on somebody outside of us, which is when exactly the dehumanization process begins. This is when the clock starts of creating an enemy.” As for religious violence, including that of terrorist groups such as ISIS who claim Islam as their inspiration, what is actually happening is that these groups first have political objectives and what they then do is “hijack” or take religious texts out of context and use them to justify their own already-existing desire for violence. 

Dr. Bartoli continued this thread, asking whether when, for example, a Christian kills another Christian, “is Christianity killing people?” He offered his own answer, saying “I don’t think that religion kills anybody. I think that humans do kill humans, and I think it’s a responsibility for each of us to decide what you want to do with your life.” And far too many of us, he said, look for reasons in religions to justify our own desire to eliminate those we consider incorrect or impure or some other negative quality. The religion of peace, he said, the one expressed by Tolstoy, Gandhi, and King, is the one that acknowledges “one life, one humanity, one history.” “We exist as human beings,” he added, saying that, as human beings we can choose to “bring about a life that is true for everybody.”

Paths Forward

Dr. Abdelkader sees education as the most fundamental factor in reducing religious violence. First of all, there is a need for more education among adherents of Islam about their own history and sacred texts. There simply is too much “misinformation” among the “extremists” who constitute the minority of the faith, she said. Correspondingly, there is a need for education about the true nature of Islam among those who might lapse into a form of Islamophobia by reacting only to the violent actions of those extremists. It is also important for Muslims to understand that the “bigger,” most crucial jihad means not fighting others but “following the edicts and rules in our daily lives of the faith itself.”

Among Catholic teachings most crucial for the creation of a world of peace and dignity, said Dr. Snyder, is the “theology of creation,” which means God creates humanity in the imago dei, the image and likeness of God. Thus, all humans “have an inherent value and worth that is not predicated on any functional capability of us as human, but simply by the fact that we are creatures, created in the divine.” The implication of this, he added, is that “the goods of creation are intended to be used and enjoyed by all human beings, not a select few.” Another key principle is that of “brotherhood,” which calls us to act in “solidarity” with those “who live on the margins of society.” Ultimately, he believes the religions “ought to trust one another and build common projects that promote the common good.”

For Dr. Aldrich, the first principle in creating a better world is to really “examine” our lives and the impact we are having on the world. And in so doing we are obligated to recognize deficits we have caused in the world. Perhaps we have taken from others their money, their dignity, their space, he said. So from a Jewish perspective, our task is to “find the holes that we’ve caused and to make them whole again.” Another important thing to consider is the need to create “social infrastructure,” which includes those “spaces and places in our lives that build connections and trust.” In fact, he added, “right now we are sitting in one.” In a country where a blue voter likely doesn’t know a red one, or a red one a blue one, we need places, he said, where “people who think differently” than one another can interact. 

Mamfatou Baldeh said that, for her, Islam is “a religion of truth seeking.” More than something that is just taken on faith, it is “a practice of habits” and of “consciousness and reflection.” This experience informs her “prognosis” for society, which has three aspects. The first is for as many of us as possible to “actively choose imagination versus acceptance and complacency,” thus envisioning “a different world or a different situation that might be better for more people.” Next, is “choosing to be in dialogue and in community as opposed to thinking mostly of [one’s] self and personal journey.” This complicates things in a good way, “pushing against what we’ve always known.” Finally, for religious believers, it is good to go back to “the essence of faith,” using that as a spur to “thinking, reflecting, [and] being conscious and active” in one’s religious practice.

Put in simplest terms, said Dr. Bartoli, the answer to the problem of religious violence is for each faith adherent to reject violence and killing, and “just don’t do it.” And if we say that “religions seem to possess inherently the duality of peace potential and violent potential,” it is also true that  “people have agency” and it is up to them to realize the potential for peace. Furthermore, our agency is not just to avoid doing harm, but also to understand that we possess the “freedom to do the good that is possible and to invite that good from others” that is “in front of” us all. And also, one should “be attentive to life within you and outside you in the life of others,” and to recognize this as a “call” to love. He also noted that within his religion of Catholicism there is a tradition of making martyrs of those who have been killed by followers of other religions. But equally important, he said, should be an acknowledgement of those that Catholics themselves have killed.

Wrapping Up: The Importance of Education

For the final discussion, Dr. Ogata asked the panelists to reflect on some of the ideas that stood out for them during the preceding discussion. Of the topics that were touched upon, the nature of effective peacebuilding education emerged as the main throughline. For example, Baldeh observed in the ethnic studies courses she has participated in, there is a powerful guiding principle, expressed with a play on words, that she thinks everyone can benefit from. It goes: No history, no self. Know history, know self. “Understanding where you are coming from, and where your ideas are coming from is a big part of identity formation,” she said. Dr. Aldrich said he would like to see “less fear of and more engagement with religion” in our schools. Given that the United States is a country where religion plays a major role, it makes sense to treat religion as part of the “diversity of thought” that is discussed and debated in schools, he said. For Dr. Snyder, we would do well to consider bringing back civics education, which is “about moral formation and citizenship,” adding “I think a really pivotal place [for] trying to engage virtue formation is in the classroom.” Dr. Abdelkader observed that as a model for free inquiry and free expression, the American university system of tenure for faculty has been quite successful. On this same topic, Dr. Bartoli noted that the United States has been more open than many countries in its tolerance for difficult conversations. Finally, Baldeh said that her own parents never had the opportunity to engage in the kind of questioning and critiquing of religion and society that she has. And such dialogues are vital. “But I want to recognize,” she said, “that there are obstacles and there are a lot of folks who don’t get to have those conversations. Those of us who do are, I think, in a very privileged position.”

Thanking the panelists for sharing their life stories, experiences, and insights, Dr. Ogata then asked the students to gather into small groups for dialogue on the ideas that most resonated with them during the panel discussion. Then, upon completion of the small group session, he invited all involved to carry the conversation to the West Coast, extending an open invitation to visit him and his students at Soka University of America.