On Being in the Middle: Inter-religious Dialogue and Network Centrality

ABSTRACT

It is often maintained that participants in inter-religious dialogue will benefit from increased access to other perspectives that deepens understanding of their own tradition and the traditions of others, but this is rarely examined empirically and with attention to bringing the human sciences into conversation with theological thinking about dialogue. Drawing on theory and methods from social network analysis, this research conceptualized inter-religious dialogue as a communication network and investigated the impact of differences in access to communication flows on dialogue participants. Interviews with those most connected (hubs) and those least connected (outliers) showed differences in the characterization of dialogue experiences, relationships to the ‘home’ community, and the ability to recognize similarities and differences and to engage in perspective-taking. Hubs were more freely able to migrate into the experiences and practices of the dialogue partner’s tradition, while being rooted in their home tradition. This research highlights the importance of the network perspective for studying dialogue as a relational and community practice and offers a description of the unique experiences and capacities of network hubs situated in the ‘middle’. It also underscores the way in which theological and human scientific analyses can interact in a complementary and enriching way.

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to the Calgary chapter of the Canadian Council for Christians and Jews (CCCJ) and the participants who generously offered their time for this research during the summer of 2007. The authors also thank those who offered comments on previous versions of this article, including Douglas Shantz, Mike Higton, and the anonymous reviewers of the Journal of Contemporary Religion.

Notes

1. There are, of course, differences among interfaith initiatives, dialogue groups, and interfaith education, but common among these is the view that dialogue or contact between religions should be encouraged rather than discouraged.

2. Gordon Allport’s intergroup contact hypothesis, for example, identified the conditions under which contact between groups would decrease prejudice: equal status between the groups in the situation; common goals; intergroup cooperation; and the support of authorities, law or custom. For a review of this research, see Thomas Pettigrew and Linda Tropp.

3. There are some exceptions (Abu-Nimer; Van Hoven; Garfinkel; Charaniya, West and Nadira), but none of these focus on dialogue from a network perspective.

4. Barnes’s more recent work on inter-religious learning is equally worthy of social scientific treatment, but requires drawing on a different body of social scientific theory that is beyond the scope of this present investigation.

5. Theorists of dialogue and theologians commonly reject specifying goals or potential ‘outcomes’ of dialogue beforehand. Psychologist Kenneth Gergen’s vision of ‘transformative dialogue’, for example, rejects specifying outcomes for dialogue a priori, on the grounds that it may disable participants from generating “more mutually congenial realities” drawn from tradition (see also physicist David Bohm’s view of dialogue). Our research picks up where theorists and theologians leave off, focusing on the practice of dialogue within a specific dialogue community.

6. In statistics, the term ‘outlier’ refers to a data point that differs substantially from the main trend of the data. We intend a different meaning for ‘outlier’. In a social network, we intend an ‘outlier’ to signify a person’s position within a network that is less connected (or less ‘central’) compared to others in the network (those who are disconnected from a network are usually termed ‘isolates’ in network analysis).

7. As we did not employ sampling methods or statistical analyses to the population and as our research was based on data from a whole network, we did not examine the ‘representativeness’ of the data set.

8. See Canadian Council for Christians and Jews-Alberta Region. Calgary, 2013. Available at: http://www.cccj-ab.org/, access date: 22 February 2013.

9. This ranking method buffered against a possible self-report bias, introduced by the outdegree measure, whereby people could report higher levels of dialogue than their peers reciprocated.

10. The themes of openness and commitment are longstanding topics in inter-religious dialogue (e.g. Lipner; Macquarrie; Dupuis; Cornille).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ryan J. Williams

Dr Ryan Williams is a research associate in the Faculty of Divinity at the University of Cambridge. Dr Tinu Ruparell is Head and Associate Professor of Philosophy of Religion in the Religious Studies Department at the University of Calgary, Canada. He has co-edited Encountering Religion (Blackwell) and Christian Thought in the 21st Century (Wipf and Stock) and is the author of Dialogue and Hybridity (SUNY Press). CORRESPONDENCE: Dr Ryan J. Williams, Faculty of Divinity, University of Cambridge, Cambridge CB3 9BS, UK.