Interreligious and Intrareligious Dialogue

Between and among persons who identify themselves as members of a collective religious tradition, two important dialogues exist. Within the same tradition, there are waves of change through lineage and interpretation that oscillate around a core experience of beliefs, belongings, and behavior. These dialogues can keep the internal understandings fresh and shared among religious leaders and followers.  That internal dialogue is both challenged and enhanced by then striving to create friendships and promote understandings across difficult differences without causing fear and strife.   

The DI principles provide guidelines for how to think and to behave in order to grow and change in the inter- and intra-religious dialogues. You can read the Dialogue Institute’s Ten Principles of Dialogue HERE and also find links to translations in multiple languages.

These principles live within the context and content of a particular community. When approaching religious communities or civic groupings, dialogue practitioners will establish with the facilitators first, some common understandings about the context and content for each participating group as a foundation for seeing how the principles can work to help create the community trust and accompanying bonds. To learn more, you can read Len Swidler’s

Introduction to Critical Thinking

Critical thinking: Processing, analyzing, and evaluating information that is received and asking questions about it, with the goal of learning.

To begin a dialogue requires the development of critical thinking skills. 

We’ve identified these principles for effective critical thinking:

• Identify your own biases and assumptions 

• Divide complex issues into smaller, more manageable parts

• Understand and define all terms

• Question the methods by which the facts are derived

• Consider alternative interpretations of research evidence

Critical thinking is a skill that allows you to make logical and informed decisions. It can be used to analyze situations, information, and ideas. Good critical thinkers can draw reasonable conclusions from a set of information, and discriminate between useful and less useful details to solve problems or make decisions.

An effective critical thinker:

• Raises questions and problems clearly and precisely

• Gathers, analyzes, and synthesizes relevant information, using it to draw conclusions

• Provides well-reasoned conclusions and solutions that are consistent with relevant criteria, standards, or best practices

• Thoughtfully assesses the implications of different systems of thought

• Takes an active role in developing solutions to complex problems by communicating with others

While there’s no universal standard for what skills are included in the critical thinking process, we’ve identified three important steps to follow to promote critical thinking in any situation:

• Observe and Gather Information

• Analyze and Synthesize

• Reflect and Decide

Observe and Gather Information

Observe and Gather:

• Identify what’s being said

• Distinguish relevant and credible information

Dialogue is just one way to gather information. Critical thinkers gather information from different sources, exploring issues from multiple perspectives. They vet all possible sources of information with an eye on inconsistencies, differences, divergences and contradictions. 

When a statement or claim is made, critical thinkers do their best to clarify and identify what is being said. A frequent source of disagreement in dialogue is that although the dialogue partners are using the same central term or statement, they understand it differently. This is likely due to a difference in perception. 

Perception is the process of taking information from the world around us and forming mental representations of that information, which we then use to guide our actions. It's how we see, understand, and interpret situations. Our perceptions are determined by many factors, including our family, religion and belief systems, culture and ethnicity, age, gender, education, and life experience.

In dialogue, the best way to clarify a term or statement is to repeat back to your partner in dialogue what you believe they are saying, and ask them to either confirm or amend your understanding. By doing so, we explore our dialogue partner’s perception of a situation and can better understand their viewpoint.

Analyze and Synthesize:

• Understand the significance or meaning of the information

• Synthesize the information collected with what you already know

Analysis is the process of re-examining data, searching for significance or meaning, and identifying structural discrepancies. To understand the significance of a statement, a critical thinker must be able to isolate the main claim made and trace it back to the supporting reasons for that claim. Critical thinkers are then able to analyze the data they encounter further by identifying its flaws or inconsistencies and making informed decisions regarding their own beliefs.

When analyzing data, it can be helpful to divide larger arguments or ideas into smaller parts. Almost nothing is truly simple; practically everything is made up of parts, including our thoughts and experiences. Consequently, if we are to understand something, whether an object or an idea, we will need to know what the parts are that make it up and how they are related to each other. When we take time to pause our thinking and challenge the information we observed to get us to this conclusion and what assumptions or experiences have helped us develop this opinion, we are thinking analytically about the situation. 

When analyzing source material it's important to research the author of the pieces you're reading. Ask yourself:

• Who is their research/ writing sponsored by? 

• Who is their target audience? 

• What is their goal of publishing this piece? 

Looking at the dates resources are published are also an important indicator of the piece. While older data is not immediately irrelevant, it may be a clue that there is more updated information that is worth taking a look at.

Asking questions is an essential part of the critical thinking process!

Synthesis is a process that combines multiple sources to form theories, patterns, and develop a fuller understanding of a topic. It's a mindful approach that asks you to look for and identify links between sources. Synthesizing data starts by evaluating your initial analysis and reinterpreting it based on what you already know. Using synthesis, one develops a more complete understanding of the topic or argument.

Reflect and Decide:

• Reconsider your interpretation in view of new analyses, facts, or errors discovered

• Make inferences based on data and information presented

Reflection is the process of re-assessing analytical and argumentative logic in search for possible influences, biases, and prejudices that might have impacted your reasoning.

After gathering information, analyzing it, and reflecting on it, the critical thinker is now in a position to identify problematic areas and isolate inconsistencies. The key is to narrow the broad scope of a statement and deconstruct its structure in such a way that it becomes easier to understand one piece at a time.

We always want to consider alternative interpretations outside of our initial scope of thinking.

We can ask questions such as:

Who is being represented in this instance and who is not? Where is this information coming from and who may benefit from such statements?

The purpose of critical thinking skills are to assist us in making informed decisions based on solid facts and arguments. All of the elements of the critical thinking process work together to help one decide what course of action to take, which arguments to advance, what kind of behavior to change or adopt, and so on.

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