This panel explores themes of befriending and interreligious friendship. John Thompson examines an early Buddhist text that discusses the place of spiritual friendship. He highlights hermeneutical issues that arise when ancient texts offer timeless advice yet have unsettling implications for contemporary contexts. Wemimo Jaiyesimi explores the meaning of interreligious friendships, acknowledging the challenges of difference along with the potential for the diverse religious identities of friends to be integral to their friendship. Lindsay Simmonds draws attention to the potential for cross-border friendships to promote peace as she explores the relational experiences of various women peacebuilders in the Israel-Palestine region.
In the Sigālovāda Sutta the Buddha portrays an individual as living within a network of relationships, with friendship having a decisive role. Many Buddhists consider this sutta to offer timeless advice for establishing a just economic and social order, even claiming that it provides a strong counter to the hyper-individualism of consumerist society. Yet this text is puzzling at points with some unsettling implications when read in a 21st century global and religiously pluralistic context. It thus requires careful “hermeneutic triangulation” for those of us interested in interreligious friendship in the present day.
One of the greatest challenges to interreligious friendship is difference (Goshen-Gottstein, 2018, p. xxxvi). Simply stated, the challenge lies in how we might account for interreligious friendship in the face of the deep orientational differences that exist between the friends. This paper seeks to overcome this challenge by arguing for an account of friendship not predicated on agreement between friends. It does this by first, offering an understanding of interreligious friendship, and second, explicating the influential accounts of Aristotle and Augustine that posits friendship as only possible when there is agreement between friends. Finally, in dialogue with the work of Janet Martin Soskice and Jürgen Moltmann, the paper argues that differences, even religious differences, do not foreclose the possibility of friendship because humanity’s difference from the triune God does not close off the possibility of human friendship with the divine.
This paper examines the political implications of friendship between women of different national, ethnic and religious identities within the Israel-Palestine region; it explores the personal experiences of friendship of faithful women peacebuilders as a navigational tool for peacebuilding. The analysis is framed both within the context of UN resolution 1325 (31/10/00), (https://www.un.org/womenwatch/osagi/wps/), and within the context of faith. Friendship, and its intimacies, demands that women of faith collaborate with their whole selves. They do not leave parts of themselves at the door of their shared meeting spaces; to the contrary – they bring the violence enacted upon them; they bring their personal losses and grief; they bring their own involvement in oppression; they bring their fear and their hate and their exhaustion and their anger. Consequently, the stuff of friendship, is, arguably, the antithesis of ‘symbolic gesturing’, relating to the most profound, complex and weighty political issues.