H-Interfaith: The Global Academic Interfaith Space

The article, ‘Interfaith work has failed—we need to move to action’, published two months ago in Church Times, merits careful attention because it identifies a central weakness in contemporary interfaith practice: dialogue remains important, but it has proved insufficient to prevent animosity or sustain peace. Professor Uriel Simonsohn’s argument carries particular significance in the post-7 October context. As founder of the Centre for Religious Studies at the University of Haifa nearly two decades ago, he brings substantial scholarly and institutional experience to this assessment.

In recent years, those engaged in interfaith work have increasingly confronted a difficult question: why has so much dialogue failed to arrest hostility, mistrust, or intensifying division? One plausible answer is that conversation alone is insufficient. When interfaith engagement is confined to formal exchanges, symbolic encounters, or general appeals to harmony, it often leaves unexamined the assumptions and habits that shape social coexistence. If it is to contribute meaningfully to education and peace, it must be embedded in sustained practices of learning, institutional commitment, and everyday culture. From this perspective, interfaith education assumes particular significance.

A central limitation of much traditional interfaith work lies in the assumption that dialogue can, on its own, neutralise animosity. Conversation may create conditions for mutual recognition, but it does not automatically dismantle prejudice, repair historical injuries, or transform entrenched social habits. Too often, interfaith engagement has been treated as a specialised activity for religious leaders or public representatives rather than as a broader educational responsibility shared across institutions and communities. What is required, therefore, is not merely more discussion, but the cultivation of a culture of interfaith respect: a mode of teaching, learning, and practice that prepares individuals and communities to encounter difference with seriousness, discipline, and responsibility.

H-Interfaith, a global academic consortium dedicated to interfaith studies, reorients interfaith engagement from occasional dialogue towards sustained education. It provides a framework within which scholars, educators, students, and wider publics may engage religious diversity through research, teaching, and critical reflection. In practice, this includes publications, seminars, workshops, and collaborative academic initiatives that integrate interfaith learning into regular intellectual life rather than treating it as an episodic event. Education matters here because it is one of the principal sites at which habits of perception are formed and reproduced. By bringing together participants from different backgrounds and faith traditions to examine questions arising in art, history, literature, philosophy, science, theology, and related fields, H-Interfaith helps to challenge stereotypes and reductive assumptions while fostering religious literacy, intellectual humility, and the capacity to engage difference without fear.

Engagement with H-Interfaith is significant for peaceful coexistence because peace depends less on diplomatic language or symbolic gestures than on the formation of character, judgement, and shared civic dispositions. Durable peace requires individuals and institutions to develop the capacity to inhabit disagreement without collapsing into contempt, exclusion, or dehumanisation. Through publications, events, collaborative scholarship, and accessible educational resources, H-Interfaith helps create the intellectual and moral conditions in which respect can be practised rather than merely affirmed. Interfaith scholarship thus emerges not as an abstract exercise, but as a practical resource for peacebuilding.

The conclusion to be drawn is not that interfaith work is futile, but that its underlying model requires reconsideration. Dialogue remains important, but it cannot bear the full weight of peacebuilding unless it is grounded in education, institutional commitment, and practices of lived respect.

H-Interfaith, sponsored by H-Net: Humanities and Social Sciences Online, provides such a framework. Taking interfaith education as a serious academic undertaking helps to move the field beyond symbolic exchange towards more durable forms of intellectual and moral formation. In a period marked by profound division, this is not a marginal contribution, but a necessary one.

Further information on how to join H-Interfaith may be found through its academic network and publicly available resources.