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Williams Hall, Herbert A. Roemmele '53 Global Commons

 

Plenary Address

INTERFAITH DIALOGUE PAST AND PRESENT: 

CHALLENGES FOR THE FUTURE 

 

DR. SUSANNAH HESCHEL 

THE 2021 ALICE ECKARDT VISITING SCHOLAR IN RESIDENCE

 

Heschel’s lecture will examine the history of the interfaith dialogue that began to develop in late eighteenth-century Germany. It will focus on the history of Christian-Jewish relations in the modern era, with attention to Islam and Buddhism, religions that played only a minimal role in the actual dialogue, but important roles in the imagination of the participants. The lecture will place interfaith dialogue in the context of the rise of European imperialism and argue that Christian supersessionism is a form of theological colonialism. Heschel will look at three key moments of the twentieth century: Ernst Troeltsch’s 1915 attack on Hermann Cohen; Protestant efforts to dejudaize Christianity during the Third Reich; and the revolutionary Catholic affirmation of other religions, Nostra Aetate, issued during the Second Vatican Council. Heschel will examine those events as responses to European political decolonization and ask how they might illuminate the rise in recent years of radical right-wing, neo-Nazi and fascist, white supremacist movements. Finally, the lecture will ask what we should place on the agenda of twenty-first century interfaith dialogue – if we want it to continue.
 

SUSANNAH HESCHEL is the Eli M. Black Distinguished Professor of Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College. Her scholarship focuses on Jewish and Protestant thought during the 19th and 20th centuries, including the history of biblical scholarship, Jewish scholarship on Islam, and the history of anti-Semitism.