Women and Interfaith Dialogue (religion 295)

The word dialogue implies a personal encounter, a meeting face to face, where the aim is not to change the other partner in the dialogue, but to risk being changed through the process. For women, the main point of dialogue is to build relationships or to conserve them. "Dialogue among women are more life-oriented; they come out of actual experiences, and they are more clearly oriented to bringing about concrete changes in perception and practice at the very basic level of the lives of people." Women's dialogical practice is an alternative to the traditional men's approach. Most men approach their religious tradition primarily with an intellectual, theological, and doctrinaire commitment. Women's religious positions, however, are not as strict as men's. They initiate discussion, reflection, dialogue, and different opinions. It accentuates the diversity of life styles, types of thinking, tolerance and freedom in expressing individuals' ambitions, and it distinguishes the unique character of personalities. There are discernible differences between men and women in their approach to and practice of dialogue; however, these generalizations are not made to stereotype all men as exclusively intellectual and dogmatic and all women as experiential and instinctive. This is not an attempt to idealize women and the dialogue among them; it is only to emphasize the distinctive features that characterize dialogue among women, and introduce some of the conflicts and obstacles that arise.

The first unique characteristic of dialogue is the ability of a group of women from all different religious traditions to bond. Women develop interfaith understanding through their relationships with other women. Women tend to know the person first and her faith second. It is through such intentional relationship building that women relate to each other best. In experiencing the other, women also come to know themselves better. They are able to confirm their own faith, convert to another tradition, or become educated about another religious community that exists. As a result, interfaith dialogue enables women to understand each other, other faiths, and their own traditions. In a meeting of men, such a diverse group might have become rather controversial.

The second factor is women's flexible approach in representing their traditions. In religious dialogue women tend to make contributions based on the content of their religion in scripture and tradition without being defensive or obstinate. In general, women seem to have a more tolerant understanding of religion, while most men approach their religious tradition as a responsibility that has become part of their understanding of life and reality.

The third feature is women's readiness to share their experiences and stories, both from their personal lives and from their community's spiritual journey. Only in the telling of stories can persons discover the points of commonality and distinction among themselves. It is this sharing of experiences and storytelling that is one of the surest means women discover connections among themselves. It is even possible that women from different cultures and religions find that they have more in common than with women from their faith tradition. Men, however, rarely share their personal background, much less the spiritual struggles and experiences that had shaped them.

The experiences women share most often are those that concern their social situations, which in many societies are heavily influenced by religious factors, and not always for the benefit of women. It seems that in most religions there are dimensions that ignore or suppress women in many different ways. When women from different traditions and religions meet, they can share their own experiences about being a woman inside their tradition, both the difficult and the empowering parts. Women have a lot of common experiences of being women living in a religious tradition. Some experiences they share because they are women living in the same society. But their stories and traditions also differ, and they often have different views about what it means to be a woman. Nonetheless, during discussions between women, they share solutions to the problems they face stemming from their status as women belonging to a certain society and religious tradition. In most cultures, men are not oppressed for being men and there is no need to discuss the role religion plays in their oppression or in their liberation.

The necessity for liberation and equality, however, has not been felt with the same urgency by all women in different religious traditions. Conflicts sometimes emerge between Western women and women from other regions of the world. The non-Western women have often felt that others have sought to impose feminist solutions to religious inequality that do not correspond to their situation. There are also conflicts between traditionalist and progressive women from the same religion, in which some defend tradition while others criticize it. Sometimes women agree more with women of different faiths than they do with women who share their religion. In a dialogue there is an expectation of boundaries and limitations, and at some point it is expected that different women will have different views, different experiences, and different faiths.

In addition, there are other internal conflicts that challenge interfaith dialogue among women, the major one being the lack of equal participation of women. The three factors that contribute to the unequal involvement of women in interfaith dialogue are the lack of access women have to religious education, to representation, and to communication.

Women from all religious traditions are aware of the pattern of keeping women on the sidelines of interfaith dialogue. This situation emerges with the first obstacle: education. For a long time women had very limited access to religious education in most faiths. This exclusionism is portrayed in the film Yentl , which depicts a young Jewish woman, played by Barbara Streisand, who disguises herself as a man to study the Torah. Also, in Germany, women have only been allowed to study the Catholic theology since the 1940's. This barring from religious education accounts for the fact that women have developed their own religious traditions in different faiths, which are not always in accordance with the official doctrine. For example, in Africa women have started several independent churches and in North America many communities have reintroduced worship of the pre-Christian Great Goddess. These spiritual practices have been looked down upon and ignored until recently and it is now that women want to share them with each other. In this way, women's knowledge and religious creativity have been substantially widened.

The second obstacle is representation, which is reliant on the first. Those who have no access to religious education cannot represent the tradition. Thus, dialogue has suffered from a lack of involvement by women and the absence of women's concerns in the issues focused on by dialogue.

Inter-religious dialogue practiced and promoted in many parts of the world is strongly marked by the absence of women. Nor have feminist writers on religion, paid much attention to the new developments in inter-religious activities, personnel and publications from a critical gender perspective, it is evident that, apart from a few, rare exceptions, feminism remains the missing dimension of dialogue.

The fact that women are excluded from being representatives of their religious traditions explains why there is a very unequal participation of women in interfaith dialogue. This exclusivity transpires in all major world religions, that is to say in Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, and Islam where you find predominantly male rabbis, gurus, lamas, etc. Of course, there are always exceptions, but today they are still rare.

The third obstacle is the problem of communication for women in interfaith dialogue. Even if women take part in interfaith dialogue they are often ignored or not taken seriously. Oftentimes, in groups composed of men and women there is a structure of communication developed by men and for men. This structure is marked by confrontation, which attempts to establish a hierarchy between participants. In these male dominated dialogues women are forced to use a structure of communication that is foreign to them and they receive little recognition.

It is partly due to these obstacles that women belonging to different religions have sought to come together. Through sharing and discussions, they discover similarities and differences in their respective positions as women and as believers. They discover together the many ways of being part of a religious tradition and of leading a spiritual life. All forms of interfaith dialogue are important in order to understand how values are transmitted in different religious traditions, in order to learn from each other and attempt to formulate a way to be committed to one's religious traditions in a religiously plural world. We all share certain common experiences, like birth, death, joy and pain. People of faith also share a search for answers to certain existential questions. These questions can be both an excellent introduction to interfaith dialogue as well as an honest departure point for interfaith differences.

Works Cited

Ariarajah, S. Wesley. Not Without My Neighbor . Geneva: WCC Publications, 1999.

Coward, Harold. Pluralism: Challenge to World Religions . New York: Orbis Books, 1985.

Gross, Rita. Feminism & Religion . Boston: Beacon Press, 1996.

Lochhead, David. The Dialogical Imperative . New York: Orbis Books, 1988.

Mollenkott, Virginia. Women of Faith in Dialogue . New York: Crossroad, 1987.

O'Neill, Maura. Women Speaking, Women Listening . New York: Orbis Books, 1990.

Swidler, Leonard et. al. Death or Dialogue? London: SCM Press, 1990.

S. Wesley Ariarajah, Not Without My Neighbor . Geneva: WCC Publications, 1999, 67-68.

S. Wesley Ariarajah, Not Without My Neighbor . Geneva: WCC Publications, 1999, 60-61.