Encountering the Religious \u27Other\u27: Limitations of Confining \u27Religious\u27 Conversation in Interreligious Dialogue in Denver

We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. -Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (1963). Technology, the Internet, and the ability to communicate with one another instantaneously in any place on the globe, at any point in time have made Dr. King\u27s remarks increasingly evident in the 21st century. We now have the unprecedented ability to communicate with people of all groups, all over the world, but are lacking the proper tools for understanding them. The interreligious dialogue movement has strived to utilize religion as one tool, but its biases have limited its success. Authentic dialogue can only be achieved by moving towards a broader definition of `religion,\u27 beyond the Protestant Christian paradigm in order to come to a place where one may authentically understand, the `other\u27. This paper illustrates this by combining scholarly research with case studies of three interreligious dialogue programs in the Denver area