Introduction

Last fall we wrote to several past graduates, students, and colleagues of Leonard Swidler, nearly all of whom have had a relationship with the Religion Department of Temple University, to seek contributions for a Festschrift in honor of his fifty-plus years of teaching and writing in the areas of Catholic thought and intra-Christian and interreligious dialogue. While envisioning this Festschrift as honoring Len’s legacy, we asked the contributors to look to the future in order to expand and update his work from their present positions within and outside of academia.

The responses more than met our hopes for this collection, which falls into three overlapping areas. First are several essays of a more theoretical nature that situate the Swidler oeuvre within the broad area of religious studies. Second are several essays that point to applications of his work, either directly or indirectly, in specific areas of study. Third are a handful of essays on specific geographic areas, emblematic of Len’s global concerns and emphases. Finally, we include an abbreviated curriculum vitae, including selected writings in the many areas to which Len’s fertile mind has applied itself over many decades of service to the fields of religion, justice, peace, gender equality, and global ethics—all in a spirit of dialogue.

The first section begins with a recent Swidler essay that encapsulates his recent thinking on dialogue today. As with so many of his writings, there are frequent references to the Latin or Greek or Hebrew or other origin of the terms he uses, as well as words and phrases he coins to express his ideas. A brief research proposal follows, written by a current graduate student who is working in the area of the global ethic. Next, two close associates at the Dialogue Institute seek to identify the next steps in his “cosmic dance of dialogue.” The next three essays in this first section—by a longtime faculty colleague and Associate Editor of this journal, a long-ago graduate of Temple who teaches in the Midwest, and a colleague at a Philadelphia-area Catholic college—refer specifically to Swidler’s role as a pioneer in dialogue, justice, and peace, including his intra-Catholic and interreligious work.

The second section includes essays by a variety of former Swidler students, indicative of the wide variety of those who have passed through the Religion Department at Temple, including a number who came originally as German exchange students. These include an essay on peace education based on Buddhist principles and another comparing Zen enlightenment with Orthodox Christian Hesychasm. Two essays then deal with environmental and ecological issues, one out of the perspective of indigenous peoples, and the other from a Christian lectionary perspective. An essay on Śańkara’s thought in conversation with Islam in the seventeenth century notes the broad variety of Swidler’s interreligious interests. A rethinking of three familiar Lucan parables by a Jewish rabbi is representative of the work Swidler has done over the years in post-Holocaust Germany to bring Christians and Jews together and to defuse the more egregious antisemetic words in the Oberammergau Passion Play. The last four essays in this second section concern a reading of Gaudium et spes half a century after Vatican II launched Swidler into his Catholic Church reform efforts and the founding of this journal; the creation of a multi-faith and multidisciplinary community of discourse; a discussion of friendship and risking theological security in place of the long enmity between Judaism and Christianity; and reflections on relational ethics across disciplines and cultures.

The third section, representing geographic applications, begins with an essay on interreligious dialogue of Islamic communities in Croatia and Serbia by a recent Ph.D. graduate, who also worked with the Dialogue Institute while at Temple. An Evangelical Christian who is currently working in Romania spells out Swidler’s influence on his own interreligious work and on the work of academics in that nation. Next, one of our German students, now teaching in the U.S. South, collaborated with one of his own students to make...